PreMortem.Games

MARCH 20, 2023

The debut game Dredge from New Zealand-based indie studio Black Salt Games oozes atmosphere and manages to combine multiple genres into one haunting adventure. Also, it makes working on the game extra interesting, because we’re trying to create a unique mixture of components that players haven’t seen before.

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Playtesting Prototyping Mechanics Games 104

Brand Game Development

SEPTEMBER 24, 2019

This week while working on my current board game design, a lot of things have come into focus. Now it’s time to start tweaking board game rules. This is where board game design often becomes very tricky. Need help on your board game? Join my community of over 2,000 game developers, artists, and passionate creators.

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Balance Games Communications Mechanics 130

PreMortem.Games

MAY 24, 2023

White Star Studio, a small and ambitious game development studio based in Shenzen, China, has captured the essence of ancient China in their game Thriving City. When the team first decided to make a sim management style game, they quickly settled on a city building sim. “We But it took some tweaking to get the right balance.

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Studios Balance Content Playtesting 104

PreMortem.Games

MAY 19, 2023

Wikkl Works , a Netherlands-based game studio, is working hard on the climbing game New Heights. By using photogrammetry the game offers real life locations like famous rock faces or even well known landmarks. Then we got the idea to scan real world cliffs and mountains into the game using photogrammetry.

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Indy Studios Dev Playtesting 104

Big Games

DECEMBER 5, 2023

Game development isn’t as smooth and glamorous as many newbies imagine. Yet, those professionals in mobile game development services know how to tackle these challenges. But the chaos and the desire to create visually stunning and immersive games fuels their determination. Every aspect of the game undergoes examination.

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Brand Game Development

MARCH 29, 2021

From time to time, I see board game creators on social media who have been working on the same design day-in, day-out for years on end. The first are people making a board game as a labor of love, who know they’re taking their sweet time on it, and they’re OK with it. Need help on your board game?

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Game Design Game Designer Games Playtesting 130

iXie gaming

SEPTEMBER 8, 2023

Getting started with your first NFT game development venture can be interesting. But is the NFT game development market worth entering? The global play-to-earn (P2E) NFT games market is predicted to reach $3.6 So, yes – NFT game development is worth it. But what are NFT games? But what are NFT games?

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Game Analytics

FEBRUARY 14, 2023

It’s about allowing players to lose themselves in more than just a game, but a new world. This goal is always top-of-mind for Schell Games. In this interview, we spoke to Schell Games’ Vice President of Product, Charlie Amis, to learn their story. This isn’t as true or a high priority in PC and console games.

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PreMortem.Games

SEPTEMBER 28, 2023

When Jonathan Barbosa Dijkstra lost his job, just before the pandemic hit, he decided to give his dream of making a game by himself a proper go. I would love to be part of a small team where you’ve got your peers and still have a big impact on the game.” For me, and for others I’m sure, making your own games is ‘the dream’.

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Brand Game Development

OCTOBER 23, 2017

I’ve talked about the benefits and challenges of working alone in the board game industry. Yet I’m a bit of an odd beast in the board game development world since most people prefer to work in teams. Need help on your board game? Join my community of over 2,000 game developers, artists, and passionate creators.

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Prototyping Playtesting Games Game Design 130

Keith Burgun

SEPTEMBER 6, 2022

In any case, this game started out in late 2021 as a sequel to Dragon Bridge, my first card game. Over the last 10-11 months, and over 100 different numbered versions of the game, the game has evolved into… really, its own thing, and that’s why the title no longer reflects its Dragon Bridge origins.

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AWS Games

JULY 26, 2022

Session-based multiplayer games are a popular form of online game, as they provide players with a quick, engaging experience that they can jump into at any time. However, building a scalable and reliable session-based online multiplayer game is not easy, since there are many components that need to be developed.

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Build Console Code Games 64

Sirlin

OCTOBER 20, 2015

Codex is a new take on customizable card games. Though you might as well wait until next week because there will be a balance update within a week. Finally, we discuss what Geiger's moves will be in the Fantasy Strike fighting game. Here's a rundown of what I've been doing over on my Patreon lately.

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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.

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Keith Burgun

JANUARY 4, 2023

Back in September, I introduced people to my upcoming card game, Spellstorm. Let me quickly explain how the game worked in broad strokes, and then I can explain the main problem. ” A lot of the basic MOVE/BUMP dynamics were inherited from my 2019 card game, Dragon Bridge. What Spellstorm Was. The Problems.

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Mechanics Game Design Game Designer Playtesting 52

Rindoku

OCTOBER 7, 2016

Showing your game to strangers for the first time can be a little nerve wracking. What we learned about the game. The feedback about the game was better than we could have hoped. People liked the game but there was also useful feedback (and observation) of where we can improve. Color me excited! In no particular order: 1.

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Point and Click Dev Demo Playtesting 52

Deconstructor of Fun

MAY 23, 2023

At that point, Second Dinner revealed that their first project just so happens to be a licensed Marvel IP, which the team has been working on for six months already and is currently beginning to playtest. Fastforward to September of 2022 and the game, Marvel Snap, is finally out globally after a considerable amount of time in soft launch.

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Grid Sage Games

MARCH 10, 2022

Cogmind began its life as a 7DRL , and a portion of items designed back when the game was overall a very different environment didn’t evolve at the same pace. Beta 11 added six new artifacts though, with even cooler (but balanced :P) effects, so that makes up for it ;). That would be bad :P. Alien Artifacts.

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Balance Mechanics Beta Prototyping 52

Deconstructor of Fun

MARCH 14, 2023

Last week in Istanbul, Google and Deconstructor of Fun brought together a thousand-strong group of high-level mobile game execs to talk about the future of the business. His data and insights were based on US data as a proxy for the western market, and focused on platform privacy, or the “Apple global mobile game recession”.

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Brand Game Development

JUNE 20, 2019

In fact, I’ve even said: “ don’t build a board game, build a business.” Need help on your board game? Join my community of over 2,000 game developers, artists, and passionate creators. Allow me to introduce you to Jeff Beck of Grandpa Beck’s Games. Check it out and see what you think!

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Sirlin

FEBRUARY 25, 2016

They are now able to exist in our time, which shifts the balance of power in the realm significantly. While the purple faction has a variety of strategies, they excel at late game power. Another thing that goes hand-in-hand with late-game control decks is that they want card draw. They’ll have to deal with it again next turn.

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Radiator Blog

FEBRUARY 4, 2024

Taught By Thirst is a new Mesoamerican themed single player Quake map that I made for Remix Jam , a 3 week community level design event where we all adapted multiplayer maps from other games for Quake. Like a lot of Counter-Strike Source, it often feels more like a game engine tech demo rather than something for humans to play.

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AWS Games

NOVEMBER 22, 2022

One simple number to keep in mind is 6 months: this is how long it took one game studio to build the same infrastructure on AWS that they could have achieved with Flaneer in a day. AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) and AWS NICE DCV to let you stream your software in the best conditions, up to 4 screens in 4K! Why is it cool?

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Animation Animation Studios Render 59

Designer Notes

SEPTEMBER 7, 2023

I gave a talk on games and meaning at GDC 2023, which is now available on YouTube: However, I fully scripted the talk ahead of time, so I decided it would be worth taking the time to post the slides online, in three parts to have mercy on your browser. What does this mean for video games? So, why am I talking about DIPS?

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Grid Sage Games

OCTOBER 2, 2022

I was really unsure any of this would work at all, since internally it’s quite complex and therefore hard to gauge what outcomes are possible and whether they’d really fit into Cogmind, which has a pretty strong focus on design balance. The first iteration simply averaged together the stats of all the input items.

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Engine Engineering Mechanics Balance 52

Grid Sage Games

JULY 17, 2022

In the time since Garrisons were added, however, a combination of relevant changes to the game started putting pressure on their original design: Many more full branch maps were added, along with factions, each with their own enticing reasons to visit them compared to the weaker incentives for entering a Garrison.

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Deconstructor of Fun

OCTOBER 17, 2022

Written by Enrico D'Angelo Enrico was VP of Product at Activision Publishing running the Free to Play game portfolio and is currently a VP of Product at Roblox. The game was developed by Raven, one of the historical CoD mainline studios, and Activision Shanghai, a local team assembled for the project.

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Grid Sage Games

NOVEMBER 16, 2023

Cogmind generally has fewer such direct escape options, but teleport mechanics are out there, if an advanced tech not usually available until the late game. As a general concept teleportation technology exists in quite a few varieties throughout the world of Cogmind, though the player only has access to some of them. Come one, come all!

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Brand Game Development

JULY 22, 2019

Perfect board game pacing is one of the most underrated aspects of board game design. Somewhere between overwhelm and ennui, there lies a middle ground where a game is perfectly paced. A great board game feels challenging and interesting throughout. Need help on your board game? But how do you do that?

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Tile Games Playtesting Balance 130

Brand Game Development

JULY 15, 2019

One of the hallmarks of good board game design is being able to create hard choices. Let’s talk about how you can create hard choices in your board game. He, after all, created the pattern building game that we call Tasty Humans , so it makes for a great case study! Need help on your board game?

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Radiator Blog

JUNE 30, 2022

Zugzwang by Robert Yang This post details my process and intent for making my new release Zugzwang (pronounced in German like /ts'OOK-ts'VAHng/ ) a tactical sex dungeon roguelike cum ritual game. SPOILER ALERT: This post spoils what happens in the game. So this game too is set in a dungeon -- a divine sex maze dungeon.

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