Brand Game Development

OCTOBER 23, 2017

Yet I’m a bit of an odd beast in the board game development world since most people prefer to work in teams. Join my community of over 2,000 game developers, artists, and passionate creators. Along with handling all the business, Ben has playtested and helped develop our designs. That’s how I do things.

Prototyping 130

Prototyping Playtesting Games Game Design 130

Brand Game Development

DECEMBER 8, 2017

Dev Diary posts are made to teach game development through specific examples from my latest project: Highways & Byways. This method may not be appropriate for every developer, every team, or every game, but it is one I like. This method may not be appropriate for every developer, every team, or every game, but it is one I like.

Point and Click 130

Point and Click Dev Games Prototyping 130

Brand Game Development

NOVEMBER 20, 2017

Board game development is a very individual process. Every single developer has different methods for creating their games. This article is the third of a 19-part suite on board game design and development. Join my community of over 2,000 game developers, artists, and passionate creators. What are game mechanics?

Mechanics 130

Mechanics Games Game Design Game Designer 130

Keith Burgun

JANUARY 4, 2023

For month after month, I tried fixing them with different supporting mechanisms, different ways that cards were obtained, different ways damage was dealt, and a lot more, but nothing really fixed the fundamental problem. Once I realized that we were going to have to ditch the core mechanism, that kind of meant something like starting over.

Mechanics 52

Mechanics Game Design Game Designer Playtesting 52

Designer Notes

AUGUST 2, 2021

None of these systems were any fun and weren’t intended to be so; they were mechanics put in place to keep the players from ruining the game for themselves by founding too many cities just because it was simply the most effective strategy.

Tile 52

Tile Build Mechanics Prototyping 52

Radiator Blog

MARCH 16, 2023

Last month, game industry documentary makers 2 Player Productions debuted a massive 32-part YouTube game dev doc series Double Fine PsychOdyssey , chronicling the development of Psychonauts 2 from its earliest glimmers of pre-production in 2015 to its final release in 2021. The most epic public post-mortem ever.

Art 59

Art Concepts Dev Studios 59

PreMortem.Games

NOVEMBER 15, 2023

German indie developer Vivid Storm Interactive is a three person team that started when they launched a Kickstarter campaign for Ascent of Ashes in 2021. Studio owner and Lead Developer Max Hermann originally developed the idea for the game in the time when he was still a computer science student and active in the RimWorld modding scene.

Dev 115

Dev Development Prototyping Feature 115

PreMortem.Games

MARCH 1, 2024

As we were prototyping there was still a feeling the game needed more action. A large majority of the art was created from scratch, but Hartley admits having used a few asset packs to help speed up development. “I ” “For just two developers I think we took on too much work”, shares Hartley. But that’s not all.

Studios 104

Studios Prototyping Visual Scripting Art 104

Brand Game Development

NOVEMBER 27, 2017

Board game development is a very individual process. Every single developer has different methods for creating their games. This article is the fourth of a 19-part suite on board game design and development. Join my community of over 2,000 game developers, artists, and passionate creators. How do you test game mechanics?

Mechanics 130

Mechanics Games Balance Development 130

Mnenad

JANUARY 14, 2020

I was very excited a year ago as one of my New Year’s resolution of 2019 was to publish my first game that year and it already happened on Januar the 18th (because I’ve developed Countryball Potato Mayhem from August 2018 on).   So I remember exactly how my first prototype looked like.

Bug 52

Bug Communications Mobile Mobile 52

Grid Sage Games

MARCH 10, 2022

A decade of development into a huge project is almost unavoidably going to accumulate some amount of cruft. I must say this has been an exciting time, having the opportunity to revisit everything to iron out as many kinks as possible, in many places adding new build possibilities or even whole new mechanics.

Balance 52

Balance Mechanics Beta Prototyping 52

Brand Game Development

DECEMBER 11, 2017

Board game development is a very individual process. Every single developer has different methods for creating their games. This article is the sixth of a 19-part suite on board game design and development. Join my community of over 2,000 game developers, artists, and passionate creators. Short-term mechanic testing.

Mechanics 130

Mechanics Concepts Writing Games 130

Designer Notes

MARCH 31, 2023

It somehow even won a Grammy award, for Baby Yetu, by my college roommate Christopher Tin, which was definitely not even on the radar when we developed the game. So, before I explain why I made Old World, let’s talk a little about what the game is and how it was developed. Here are some screen’s from the game’s prototyping phase.

Tile 98

Tile Point and Click AI Mechanics 98

Deconstructor of Fun

MARCH 14, 2023

Diversify revenue model Cilingir urged game-makers with games skewed heavily toward either ad or IAP-based monetisation to balance their revenue mix. Peak Games boss Inonu said that Apple should help developers more by clarifying its privacy policies further and that Google’s approach seemed to be better thought out.

Games 59

Games Cross platform Mobile Mobile 59

Deconstructor of Fun

JANUARY 21, 2021

Facebook Gaming helps developers and publishers to build, grow, and monetize their games. By all accounts this genre is matured to a point where it could use a massive innovation to both the progression mechanics and social gameplay. Access all of our previous predictions. Signup for the newsletter. Apply for our Slack group.

Mobile 52

Mobile Mobile Cross platform Puzzle 52

Designer Notes

AUGUST 10, 2021

The big change that always gets mentioned when going from Civ 4 to Civ 5 is one-unit-per-tile (1UPT), which is interesting as 1UPT is purely a mechanical – as opposed to thematic – change. 1UPT, on the other hand, helps balance some of the extremities of the Orders system by making it more difficult to kill a unit via stacking.

Tile 40

Tile Point and Click AI Mechanics 40

Designer Notes

OCTOBER 14, 2021

Truthfully, no one has ever done this well, and during development I often reminded myself of the old joke about how you don’t need to be fast to avoid getting eaten by a bear – you just need to be faster than the person next to you. The hardest part of a 4X to design is the ending. Thus, Paradox grand strategy games follow this model.)

AI 40

AI Simulation Mechanics Mobile Gaming 40

Deconstructor of Fun

OCTOBER 17, 2022

History Most people in the western hemisphere may not be familiar with Call of Duty: Online (CoDO), a project kicked off in 2010 and announced in 2012 as a partnership between Activision and Tencent, with Activision in charge of development and Tencent as the Chinese publisher of record.

Content 52

Content FPS Mobile Mobile 52

Radiator Blog

JULY 6, 2021

My first prototype were sim-heavy, based on basic cellular automata , a technique popularized by Conway's Game of Life (1970) where cells (or anything, really) live or die based on crowding, However this felt too fiddly, with small shapes that changed too quickly. There's something interesting between these two notions of simulation.

Simulation 52

Simulation Art AI Internet 52

Deconstructor of Fun

NOVEMBER 10, 2020

So this is this tough balance between being really super fast and building something really small and iterative and getting data soon and deciding what to do. They get to a prototype level. You're dictating that everything below them is going to be mediocre at best in your company. But even then, it's really interesting.

Games 52

Games Point and Click Engine Engineering 52

Deconstructor of Fun

MARCH 22, 2021

Our partner ironSource builds technologies that help game developers take their games to the next level. Royal Match Royal Match is a perfect example of finding success through improvements - not step-change innovation - cherry-picking the strongest mechanics from the best games to create a new top game.

Puzzle 69

Puzzle Mobile Mobile Mechanics 69

Brand Game Development

JULY 22, 2019

So often, when we’re balancing our designs , it’s because we’re trying to nail down board game pacing. Join my community of over 2,000 game developers, artists, and passionate creators. In each of the design diaries that I have written so far, I have focused on a specific game mechanic or isolated portion of the game.

Tile 130

Tile Games Playtesting Balance 130

Radiator Blog

JUNE 30, 2022

I first prototyped it back in 2019, but I didn't really know how to finish it. Originally this was prototyped as "Saugzwang" and I made it for the 7 Day Broughlike Jam back in 2019. For balance purposes, I limit the number of voyeurs in the maze, otherwise it can enter a deadlock where there's only voyeurs but no one for them to watch.

Code 52

Code Educational Education Prototyping 52