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 …
Okay, I have two objectives here: 1). To talk about the effects of longer arcs, both in storytelling and in game design, and 2). To talk about what an amazing show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is. Actually, this was the main thing, really. But I did connect some stuff that I observed from this show into a …
Larger-arc contextualization, and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Read More »
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking over the last few years about short arcs and long arcs in strategy game design. “Short arcs” would be referring to local, short term operations – so in a tactical game, this might mean “defeating THIS unit” or “making sure that unit doesn’t reach this area”, etc. Longer …
I’ve been thinking about computer RPGs a lot recently, and trying to play a bunch. There’s a quality that I’ve always loved about especially older computer RPGs: you really felt this sense of ambition behind them. You could sort of feel that there was someone who was super excited, who kept asking the question, “what …
Today’s show has two main topics: how do we prioritize what to do as solo devs working on large projects? And secondly, we discuss Dark Souls and the other Fromsoft games. Today’s guest is Peter “Nomorebirds” Siecienski, who some might know as the winner of our Push the Lane Fan Art Contest, or as a …
CGD Podcast: Solo-dev priorities, and Dark Souls with Pete Siecienski Read More »
I think that game design theory often has the issue of “seeming cool” while not being terribly practically useful, or only having very narrow utility. Of all of the game design theory I’ve worked on before, this thing here has been by far the most useful. I’ve used it countless times on just about every …
“The Triangle” tool for your game design purposes Read More »
