If you haven’t played Artifact, you should give it a try, I think. Not because it’s good necessarily, although I do think it’s probably the best CCG (collectible card game) I’ve ever played. I could talk about the bad kinds of randomness in the game (pro card player Reyand basically describes the difference between variable … Continue reading "Artifact and the Game-Complexity Overton Window"
Read MoreCategory: Game Design
Four design lessons which were really obvious to everyone but me
I’ve been playing a lot more videogames recently. Over the past ten years, I developed a very specific set of criteria and tastes that made up a paradigm of game design. All of this lead me to search within an extremely narrow (and increasingly narrow over time) space for new games to play—Eurogames in particular, … Continue reading "Four design lessons which were really obvious to everyone but me"
Read MoreEscape the Omnochronom! now available on itch.io!
You can purchase the Early Access version of Escape the Omnochronom! now on itch.io! Tell your friends! Technically speaking, I started working on the project that eventually became Escape the Omnochronom! back in 2015, although it has had at least four different names since that time. Someday I’ll have to run you all through the … Continue reading "Escape the Omnochronom! now available on itch.io!"
Read MoreThree types of bad randomness, and one good one
A few years ago, I wrote an article about randomness in games. It was far from my first time taking a stab at the subject, but it is the most recent big, singular effort at describing the relationship between randomness and game design, as I see it. In this article, I’m going to talk a … Continue reading "Three types of bad randomness, and one good one"
Read MoreAgainst Tactics and the Connect-Four CCG
How did you become a game designer? What was the path you took, going all the way back to your childhood, that lead you to want to design games? I expect that most of us can at least loosely define some “stages” of our game-design-development, and while we all have our differences, I think it’s … Continue reading "Against Tactics and the Connect-Four CCG"
Read MoreDesigning Strategy: Rushdown, Economy, and Defense
Hey everyone! Today I have a good-old-fashioned formalist-ish game design article. It’s been a little while since I’ve really done one of those, unless it was attached to Push the Lane. This article is also a little bit different than a lot of my other work because I usually talk about rulesets: what the actual … Continue reading "Designing Strategy: Rushdown, Economy, and Defense"
Read More