Radiator Blog

MAY 5, 2021

and my notes are obviously going to spoil some of the game's structure, but all these spoilers are pretty vague and anyway I don't name any names. This is a business model I've always wondered about -- make a big complicated game, but then earn revenue from selling ads on the wiki for your own game? Anyway, here's my notes.

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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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Designer Notes

AUGUST 31, 2021

The game, a historical 4X set in classical antiquity, released on July 1, 2021, and is available for purchase here. The first Civilization game was like a game design thunderbolt, sent from the heavens and marking everything it touched.

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Grid Sage Games

SEPTEMBER 15, 2022

Overall Rogue doesn’t really have many different item characteristics to modify or games systems to interact with, which is a primary limiting factor in the extent of randomization a game can support. Brogue’s trippy colors come from impactful terrain features like water, lava, and gases.

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Radiator Blog

AUGUST 12, 2022

Modern Quake tools have much better lighting controls than 25 years ago, including alpha masked texture-based shadows and some nice ambient light configs, but it's still pretty primitive by today's standards and I had to iterate a lot to balance the shadowing vs. the self-illumination for a natural look.

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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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Grid Sage Games

NOVEMBER 28, 2022

Here we’re primarily talking about the player revisiting earlier floors on their journey, rather than backtracking within a single map (though I’ll cover that topic a bit separately at the end), and our discussion focuses on roguelikes of the dungeon delving variety, since open world games generally allow backtracking by default.

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Deconstructor of Fun

JUNE 3, 2019

This was the date that the social games giant had acquired a relatively unknown Finnish developer, Small Giant. The reason for this acquisition was the success of Small Giant’s hit game, Empires & Puzzles. Especially the last twelve months the game has been thriving, raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue per day.

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Deconstructor of Fun

MAY 15, 2022

This post is written by the fantastic Game Bakery substack team of Chase, Zixuan, Haiyin, Caitou, Fish, Amy, Chow, Jing, Wanzi and edited by Caitou, Rob. When we talk about MMO, many may relegate this game category to “old-school” or “niche.” Amazon Games has finally made its name after the tough launch of New World.

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Game Design Advice

JUNE 5, 2016

Last month I attended a conference on computational modeling in games in Banff. The question, in a nutshell – can we discover a well-defined property of game systems that corresponds, roughly, to what designers and players mean by “depth”? We are only looking at the very focused domain of game-as-problem.

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Radiator Blog

JULY 6, 2021

all drawings by Eleanor Davis "We Dwell in Possibility" (WeDIP) is a new queer gardening simulation game about planting bodies and ideas, and watching them grow into a kinetic landscape. The game should take about 5-10 minutes to play. I made a browser game? Does this game represent a shift or break from my existing work?

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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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Radiator Blog

DECEMBER 12, 2022

SPOILER WARNING: This post spoils what happens in my new game That Lonesome Valley. It's mostly "safe for work" even if the actual game is not. That Lonesome Valley is a short gay cowboy romance game about walking, sheepherding, and kissing. My sex games are often romantic, but they're not romances.

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