I’ve been reading a lot about storytelling recently. Besides rereading “Characters and Viewpoint” by Orson Scott Card, the most recent ones I’ve read have been the “Save the Cat” books, by Blake Snyder (great reads, if you’re at all interested in screenwriting). Snyder proposes a very analytical breakdown of the plots in movies. He has…
Category: Game Design
Idea: A Pen-And-Paper RPG Meta-System
My gaming group is quite odd, as it turns out. It’s HUGE. When we get everyone, we have 11-13 people. This is great, but most games are made for 4-8 people. They tend to bog down when you get up above 8, and most pen-and-paper RPG designers aren’t trying to solve the problem of having too…
Image: Data visualization – Art or Data Structure?
I was working on a coding project and I had a need to visualize a Data Structure I was making. One of the iterations ended up with this image. I thought it was so cool, I saved it. It looks like a neat Modern Art painting.
Oblivion Exploration Analysis
I’m really slammed at the moment, so I though I’d post some excerpts from some analysis I did a while back on the exploration in Oblivion. Note: I didn’t remove all spoilers or grammar errors, but I got a bunch of em. Summary One of the coolest things about Oblivion is how “free form” the…
A cool article. Gamasutra – Behavioral Game Design.
I’ve been doing some research on reward systems in games for work. I found this article a long time ago, but it’s one I always keep coming back to, so I figured I’d post it here: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3085/behavioral_game_design.php The article is called “Behavioral Game Design.” The author breaks down rewards into various categories and shows how…
Day One DLC
Capcom Releases 5$ Multiplayer DLC for RE5 Capcom released a multiplayer mode as Downloadable Content for the recently released Resident Evil 5, and of course the intertubes are aflame with hate. Although I have no problems with it personally, I can understand the argument against it — by releasing the multiplayer patch so soon after…
Designing FPS Multiplayer Maps – Part 2
Wow, it’s been a month. Things have been crazy at work lately, but they’re settling down a little now. As a result, I can finally put up the rest of the update I started more than 60 days ago (wow). What is not Fun in Multiplayer Incredibly long view distances This was covered a bit…
Designing FPS Multiplayer Maps – Part 1
An Overview: What is Fun About FPS Multiplayer? Choices Sid Meyer once said that “a game is a series of interesting choices” and nowhere in game design is this more true than Multiplayer Design. In a single player game, the designer has access to design tools to help guide the player, like linear progression, or…
Beating Design Block (Level Design)
Every so often every person in a creative occupation gets stuck. It’s a common enough frustration, and one that I’ve felt the pain of on many occasions. Since I’ve been giving the problem a lot of thought recently, I thought I’d post some techniques I use to get past it. While this may not be…
Stealing Game Design… Properly (Part 2a)
Note from Mike in 2012: I wrote this article and its companion more than 4 years ago. In that time, my game design philosophy has evolved and changed quite a bit. While I think there are still good nuggets to pull out of these articles, I just want to say that they’re no longer as…