super jump 2022-04-01 21:32 Defining Free to Play Ethics Coining the term “Player Friendly Design”A major reason for wanting to write “Game Design Deep Dive: F2P” was to explore the idea of video game ethics. There have been several attempts at trying to define an...
super jump 2022-03-24 23:32 How Online Culture Has Given Rise to the Toxic Nerd When fandom, video games, and entitlement combineThis is a bit different from the kinds of posts I like to write about, but it’s something that has been in the back of my head for years now, especially after doing...
super jump 2022-03-12 00:32 Pushing “Push Forward” Combat With Gameplay How Doom Eternal redefined FPS gameplayDoom Eternal is one of my favorite games of the last decade, yet for many of you reading this, it may be on your list of worst games of the 2010s. The polarizing nature of the...
super jump 2022-02-26 05:32 Grapple Dog Review Swing through the world with this cool dogGrapple Dog was one of the demo games I checked out during the Steam Summer Festival. Now with it released, I had a chance to play more of it. While the game may not offer much...
super jump 2022-02-24 00:32 Examining Modern Mobile Game Design Games that show mobile design has grown upAs part of the research I did for my upcoming book “Game Design Deep Dive F2P”, it meant playing a lot of mobile games. In this article, I’m going to talk about some of...
super jump 2022-01-21 21:03 My Top 10 Games of 2021 Deck builders, roguelikes, and spiders, oh my2021 was a year where I think I’ve played more indie games than ever before. This also made it very hard to pick my personal favorite 10 games. For the first time with...
super jump 2019-09-12 21:24 Accessible vs Playable Why conflating the two concepts is not advancing our understanding of eitherThe dust has settled — to some extent — on a major furore that swept the internet over recent months: the whole question of adding...
super jump 2019-07-18 17:26 Are Games Ready for Sex? A safe for work talk about sex in video gamesThe video game industry has explored many topics over the years, with some developers truly turning the medium into a new form of artistic expression. But, like any art...
super jump 2019-06-30 16:29 Game Design Lessons from JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure What the iconic franchise can teach us about asymmetric designExplaining the lore — and the fan appeal — behind JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure (JJBA) here feels like a Herculean task. Also, there have been many...
super jump 2019-05-14 08:52 How Boss Design Has Evolved A discussion on two major boss design philosophiesBoss battles have come a very long way since the olden days, where you’d drop Bowser into a pit of lava in the original Super Mario Bros. As game design has evolved,...
super jump 2019-04-25 17:32 Devil May Cry 5 Review Devil May Cry 5 brings style without substanceCapcom has been on something of a franchise-revival kick lately. Resident Evil 7 and especially Resident Evil 2 are still relatively fresh in people’s minds — now,...
super jump 2019-04-20 07:38 The Critical Core Gameplay Loop Design lessons learned from BioWare’s Anthem experienceRecently, Kotaku published a major exposé regarding the six-plus years of development on BioWare’s Anthem. One of the industry’s most celebrated studios has...
super jump 2019-03-30 16:08 Revisiting Resident Evil 2 Casting a critical eye on the much-beloved remakeCapcom’s Resident Evil 7 was critically praised for revitalizing the aging horror franchise, but it also left people wondering where the series could possibly go next....
super jump 2019-03-24 08:42 The Two Schools of Game Design “Mechanical” versus “reactionary” gameplayOver the years, with my work at Game-Wisdom, and through studying for the books I’ve written on game design, I have covered a lot of ground in terms of game design...
super jump 2019-03-05 14:47 Remembering Advance Wars 30 years of dramatic strategy designIntelligent Systems has been one of Nintendo’s secret weapons when it comes to innovative and underrated franchises. Despite being over 30 years old, the company’s best...
super jump 2019-02-25 15:22 Asymmetrical Game Design How to find the balanceWhen it comes to delivering unique multiplayer experiences, asymmetrical game design is both one of the best and one of the worst approaches. To be more specific: it can be difficult to figure...
super jump 2019-02-17 13:13 The Horrific Appeal of Mr.X How to design an alpha antagonistCapcom’s masterful remake of Resident Evil 2 has already become a celebrated hit among both fans and newcomers of the legendary survival-horror franchise. One character that really...
super jump 2019-02-07 13:59 When Player Choice Goes Wrong Exploring the Assassin’s Creed Odyssey backlash from a game design perspectiveYou may have heard about the recent controversy surrounding Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. Specifically, the game attracted significant...
super jump 2019-01-31 17:00 Vision Soft Reset Review Groundhog Day-VaniaIt may seem unassuming from the screenshots, but Vision Soft Reset is one of the freshest takes on Metroidvania design I’ve ever seen: it combines speed-running with technical challenge, and even a...
super jump 2019-01-20 16:00 The Zelda-Rogue Design Trap Combining Zelda and Rogue-like elements isn’t a game design panaceaProcedural and random generation are the cornerstones of rogue-like design; we’ve seen numerous rogue-like games push these elements further than...
super jump 2019-01-03 19:33 Game Design and Bandersnatch What the Black Mirror experiment says about choice in game designLast year might have been a crazy one, but one final — and rather significant — surprise hit us at the end of 2018: a new, and very ambitious...
super jump 2018-12-10 18:01 Designing a Soulslike Differentiating the successes from the failuresI was playing through the newly-released Darksiders 3 recently and it occurred to me: developers continue to try to replicate From Software’s Dark Souls formula (in...
super jump 2018-11-27 16:57 The Risk of Embracing Realism Why the pursuit of realism can hinder playabilityCreating more realistic experiences in video games has been a never-ending quest for developers since the Atari days. And, over this past decade, we have seen numerous...
super jump 2018-11-20 20:59 The Pros and Cons of Safe Video Games Designing outside the boxRecently, I played through Yooka-Laylee. It is a game that was pitched, designed, and executed as a throwback to ’90s 3D platforming classics. Although the game wasn’t bad, it felt...
super jump 2018-11-06 14:01 Worlds Bigger Than Games Why great world-building improves video gamesThis past week saw BlizzCon descend on Anaheim, California. Blizzard’s fans came from far and wide to celebrate the company’s major franchises and — they...
