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Toys and the Adult Mind
I’ve been thinking about this idea for awhile now that toys have inherently way less intellectual value for adults than puzzles, contests and especially games do. One friend of mine made a point that...
View ArticleSome 2014 News!
Hello! If you’re reading this – hey, thanks for reading my blog! I appreciate it. I’m sorry that I haven’t been writing more articles, but as you may or may not know, the reason for that is primarily...
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Anti-Design Philosophies, Part 1: Quantity Design
This article is also published on Gamasutra. There are a few philosophical positions on game development that are, I would say, “anti-design”. In this short series, I will go through a few of them....
View ArticleWeekly Design Problems Complete List
Here is the complete list of Weekly Design Problems on the reddit/r/gamedesign subreddit (which I moderate). Note that I haven’t had time to do one every single week since it started, although most...
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Auro is out!
Hey – remember that game Auro that I’ve been working on since… God, 2010? It came out the other day, on Android. I’ll be writing a big article about its game design and why it’s so special soon. I am...
View ArticleSite Redesign
Over the last few weeks I’ve been working on redesigning my site, for a few reasons. One, I finished my second book – Clockwork Game Design – and I am changing the visual design of this site to reflect...
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Why Elegance Matters: The Lifecycle of Games
Editor’s Note: Hello all! Since I’m done with my book and Auro‘s finally out, I can get back to writing game design articles, and I’ve currently got a few in the pipeline. Today, however, I have a...
View ArticleNew Interview
I did an interview with a site called nerdbacon.com recently – read it here.
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Randomness and Game Design
For thousands of years, we’ve relied on randomness of various kinds to help our interactive systems work. While there will always be a place for randomness of all sorts in some kinds of interactive...
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The past and future of Empire
I wanted to write a quick post about Empire, which I haven’t really been able to focus on recently, due to finishing my book and all the madness about getting Auro out. This is a little bit like a...
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Violence, Part 1: Glorification
I am very happy that we seem to be having a bit of a cultural awakening when it comes to the portrayal of women in video games. In general, the degree to which the “Bikini Warrior” character design is...
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I’m launching a Patreon campaign!
I’m launching a Patreon campaign to support my article writing and possibly help me create other game-design-related media. With my second book, Clockwork Game Design finished (it will be out March of...
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Violence, Part 2: Game Design Ramifications
In Part 1, I discussed the cultural and messaging problems involved with portraying the glorification of violence. In this part, I’ll be discussing the mechanical ruleset issues that tend to arise as a...
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Clockwork Game Design is now available for pre-order!
For the last year or so, I’ve been working hard on a book called Clockwork Game Design. It details a clear, useful design pattern for building elegant strategy games. How does it differ from my first...
View ArticleIntroducing my new video series: 3 Minute Game Design
I’ve started a new video series called 3 Minute Game Design. I created a YouTube channel for it, and have posted the first entry in the series. Episode 1 discusses some fundamental ideas like...
View Article3 Minute Game Design – Episode 2: The Forms
Somehow I was able to put everything off for a couple of days and churn out this second episode of my new game design video series, 3 Minute Game Design. Let me know what you think.
View Article3 Minute Game Design – Episode 3: How Games Work
Here’s Episode 3: How Games Work. I’ve also written a new article for Gamasutra covering my experience at Practice 2014.
View Article3 Minute Game Design – Episode 4: Elegance and Depth
Here’s another episode of 3 Minute Game Design! This one deals with the ideas of elegance and depth in game design. As a side note, I’ve also begun cleaning up some of my older articles. To support...
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Uncapped Look-Ahead and the Information Horizon
I write a lot about how bad output randomness is for games, but today I want to write about a problem common in many deterministic games – specifically ones that lack hidden information. Why doesn’t...
View ArticleAuro’s out on iOS! (Finally!)
The game I’ve been designing for four years now, Auro, is finally out on iOS! Grab it here. Also, just a reminder, it’s also out on Android. Because of the release, the article writing / 3MGD is a bit...
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