I love patch notes. I believe that most other game designers love patch notes too, but if you’re someone who doesn’t care about patch notes, you probably will be confused by all this. For awhile there’s been this idea floating around that Riot, the developers of League of Legends, have been issuing arguably-unnecessary balance changes …
I don’t want update patches. I want UPGRADE patches. Read More »
Been thinking a lot about output randomness and what it means in games. My overall opinion on output randomness has not really changed much, but I think from the process of working on Gem Wizards Tactics, which does have some light output randomness, I have come to some new conclusions about when and why it’s …
Hi everyone! Today’s episode goes into some depth about emergent complexity: what is it, what isn’t it, why would we want it, and how do we get more of it? We talk about specific examples in games like 4X strategy games, and most importantly (because I’m making one), squad tactics games. I want to say …
Been thinking about cooperative games for awhile, largely as a result of many of my recent thoughts on competitive games and the way that they inherently “socially rank” their players. There’s something about that that bothers me more and more over the years, both for political and personal reasons, many of which I’ve talked about …
Why “quarterbacking” isn’t a problem in cooperative games Read More »
On a recent podcast episode, Brett “BrickroadDX” Lowey and I discussed the property of “playfulness” in strategy game design, and a lot of conversation over on my stream and Discord have taken place since then. I thought it would be good to first lay out my cleanest explanation for the term, and then indicate the …
Today I spoke with Elizabeth Hargrave. After playing her game Wingspan and reading some interviews with her, I thought she’d be a great person to have on to talk about some of the stuff I’ve been exploring in terms of strategy games and their relationship to violence, both mechanically and thematically speaking. She had a …
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