Brand Game Development

APRIL 21, 2017

Dev Diary posts are made to teach game development through specific examples from my latest project: Highways & Byways. With this mini-failure in mind as an example, what can game devs learn about spotting and dropping bad mechanics? It upset the whole drafting balance. Key Takeaways for Game Devs. Click here.

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Mechanics Dev Game Developer Game Development 130

Brand Game Development

NOVEMBER 18, 2016

You play as members of the CDC fighting four pandemics, each of which are constantly threatening to wipe whole metropolitan areas off the map. There’s a lot of factors to balance, and communicating with your team for long enough to coordinate actions is critical. That alone is enough to make it special, but it’s no one-trick pony.

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Fighting Balance Communications Concepts 130

Deconstructor of Fun

OCTOBER 10, 2021

Fighting Power Creep with Scarcity As the Lead Designer on Legendary: Game of Heroes , I invested a lot of time on our first few hundred heroes. As a Lead Designer for LEGENDARY I invested a lot of time on creating and balancing our first few hundred heroes. Fighting Purchase Regret with Ownership.

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Asset Games Fighting Mobile 52

Brand Game Development

FEBRUARY 24, 2017

In it, you romp around an 8-bit world, fighting monsters and building anything your heart desires. I think there’s a few takeaways: To give people a sense of autonomy, balance your game to where multiple strategies are viable ways of winning. Minecraft and its unexpected rise were like something out of a movie.

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PreMortem.Games

NOVEMBER 15, 2023

“RimWorld is balanced around sitting on a single map, with everything easily accessible. This also meant we had less dev time to fix bugs or optimize performance. The post Ascent of Ashes dev switches to Godot halfway development “Not as chaotic as Unity” appeared first on PreMortem Games.

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Dev Development Prototyping Feature 118

Rindoku

OCTOBER 7, 2016

After months of toiling in a secluded attic, the last weeks of which were particularly grueling, we finally took Second Hand to its first public showings: first to Dev-Play in Bucharest and shortly thereafter to Clujotronic in our very own Cluj. It was scary, thrilling, amazing and… we won the Dev-Play Indie Pitch! Color me excited!

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Point and Click Dev Demo Playtesting 52

Ask a Game Dev

JULY 12, 2023

As you might expect, numerical balance values like 10% higher stun duration, 8% less HP, or an extra 5% critical hit rate are often built to be easy to change because we expect to have a lot of things in the game that can change them. Fighting games, for example, tend to make animation changes regularly because of the way they are built.

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Animation Animation Balance Fighting 52

Radiator Blog

MAY 5, 2021

WE SHOULD ALL DO THIS / STEAL THIS: Dev-owned wiki. The dev team "SureAI" operates the official Endreal strategy guide and lore wiki. It's not uncommon to walk between towns and fight like 6 different packs of wolves. this is better to sell" and this tips that balance too much toward the latter. Anyway, here's my notes.

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Grid Sage Games

MARCH 10, 2022

Some roguelikes don’t strive for balance, but maintaining balance has always been important to me for Cogmind, since it fits better with my vision for this type of game, heavy on tough, complex, and consequential decision-making at multiple strategic and tactical levels. Alien Artifacts. Exiles Prototypes.

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Brand Game Development

NOVEMBER 20, 2017

Melee – a unique fighting game that got a new lease on life as people exploited glitches and created a new form of completion. In a game I co-designed with Matt Greenleaf, which is currently unpublished, I had come up with a mechanic that was whenever a player made a move, the game state would either go to imbalance or balance.

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Mechanics Games Game Design Game Designer 130

Radiator Blog

NOVEMBER 10, 2021

Perfect for pretending to have played Deathloop if you find yourself talking to a game dev. Not that you should ever talk to a game dev. This fighting game health mechanic is too fussy and unreliable for a busy shooter. I think the intention is to make you scrounge around for ammo during a fight and/or swap weapons more often.

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Fighting NPC Puzzle AI 52

Tom Francis

NOVEMBER 9, 2022

All your good pieces are trapped behind a wall of bad pieces, so you both have to spend a bunch of turns moving the bad pieces out of the way so the good pieces can fight. The pawn is a shitshow of clumsy balance changes. The early game is slow and boring.

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Concepts Game Design Game Designer Tile 100

Grid Sage Games

NOVEMBER 28, 2022

Being able to backtrack is generally going to be more realistic in the RPG sense--of course your character should be able to go back and pick up that item they left behind, or fight that enemy that scared you away before. In a game setting, though, this can be quite an annoyance from a design perspective (harder to balance!)

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Point and Click Mechanics Open World Feature 52

Deconstructor of Fun

APRIL 2, 2022

Mobile gaming megatrends Eric Seufert, Mobile Dev Memo. For example, keep it simple for an older player of a casual puzzle game versus a hardcore gamer who understands managing resources and more complex systems Game economists must be careful to balance monetization techniques without blocking the fun.

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Mobile Mobile Balance Mobile Gaming 52

Keith Burgun

JANUARY 27, 2023

I mean, you spend a LOT of time fighting in this game. One last thing about the combat: it is very poorly balanced. There’s several systems of collectible quest kind of things where you find an icon on the map, do a boring, easy fight, rinse and repeat. It’s a horrible items system and it drags everything down.

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Writing Fantasy Fighting Cutscenes 52

Grid Sage Games

JULY 17, 2022

The above samples show encounters added to a variety of Garrison layouts, highlighted with a dev visualization overlay. Of course this change comes with significant balance repercussions, which we’ll cover when we get to discussing that topic further below. Garrison encounter distribution samples, color-coded by category.

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Beta Content Balance Mechanics 52

Deconstructor of Fun

FEBRUARY 12, 2024

This is a balance play to ensure players are completing the pass at a speed necessary to maximize player attention while reducing economic inflation from free pass rewards. While players are getting more quests more often, they are also seeing an increase in XP required to get to the next tier of the pass.

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Mechanics Content Feature Mobile 59

Deconstructor of Fun

SEPTEMBER 19, 2022

And because of the RNG nature of puzzle games it's also why you don't see a lot of puzzle games with many content creators or dev videos. After a successful Boss fight, the player was shipped off to the next island. UA is probably one of the biggest drivers of puzzle games as puzzle games tend to be more PVE/single player experiences.

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Brand Game Development

NOVEMBER 23, 2020

As you and your fellow monsters toss around the village king, you attract a steady buffet of adventurers who try – poorly – to put up a fight! No downtime, renewed fun in each game and perfect balance regardless of the number of players. You are a fantasy monster trying to sate your insatiable appetite.

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Tile Point and Click Games Art 130

Radiator Blog

DECEMBER 12, 2022

A homophobic English farmboy is forced to work with a hunky Romanian farmhand, and so inevitable muddy fight sex and simmering romance ensues. Balancing the weight of each system was difficult. When we idolize crisp clean superflat pixel art today, it's actually a new aesthetic invented by indie game devs from the late 2000s.

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