league of legends

Asymmetry and Holistic Design

Over the years, I’ve had some trouble expressing my point of view about pre-game asymmetric choices (characters, factions, etc) in games. Back in 2013 I wrote “Debunking Asymmetry“, which was my most clumsy attempt, and which awarded me over 100 comments, from notable game designers like Naomi Clark, Raph Koster, Greg Costikyan, Jon Schafer and …

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Why it’s important that we push back on Auto Chess being a “genre”

Another title of this article could be, “what it says about videogames that we consider Auto Chess to be a genre“. Because of course, the way language works is that if enough people say a word means X, that’s simply what that word means. But it’s worth noting that if we’re calling Auto Chess (and …

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Interview with James Lantz, designer of Invisible, Inc.

Today I interviewed James Lantz, game designer at Klei. Among numerous other games, he was for me most notably a designer on Invisible Inc., a really interesting X-Com-ish tactical strategy game, and Mercury, a small indie Rogue-like game that really boiled down how Rogue-likes really work in the smartest way I’ve ever seen. (By the …

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Push the Lane!

I’ve been working on this game since late 2015. It started as an abstract dragging-stuff mobile game like Threes, then become more of a single player turn-based League of Legends, and now has become a strategy/tactics game that doesn’t resemble anything in particular. Here’s a rundown. Theme It’s an American Gladiators or Nickelodeon’s Guts! type …

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