The Bottom Feeder

SEPTEMBER 7, 2023

In my last post about Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (Z:TotK for short), a very popular game, I suggested that people would be interested in thoughtful criticism of slightly older games, once the dust has settled and people had the chance to calmly reflect about them. Most people don't actually care about deep dives into game design.

Cutscenes 81

Cutscenes Terrain Games Puzzle 81

Mnenad

JULY 8, 2018

I used GenoTerra to research and reflect about the design process using procedural generation in the creation of base shapes that the designer/s in a studio can use to create a more coherent game world. Using such techniques can cause problems in the coherence of the worlds that adversely affect the game experience.

Prototyping 52

Prototyping Terrain Open World Rigging 52

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.

Point and Click 52

Point and Click Mechanics Open World Feature 52

Grid Sage Games

JULY 17, 2022

The amount of content variety offered by the original Garrison design was more suited to a lower visitation rate, not the “I’m going to play almost my entire run inside these things” which it had become for some people. Sample Garrison content list from Beta 11. It’d sure be nice to resolve that!

Beta 52

Beta Content Balance Mechanics 52