The key to future employment in games dev is diversifying your skill set
Game Developer
MARCH 20, 2024
Game design professor Jeremy Bond shares how to prepare your students for the uncertain game industry future.
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Game Developer
MARCH 20, 2024
Game design professor Jeremy Bond shares how to prepare your students for the uncertain game industry future.
Game Wisdom
MARCH 19, 2024
Understanding Difficulty in Game Design Josh Bycer josh@game-wisdom.com width="560" height="314" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" Continuing our discussion from soulslikes, for this key to games podcast episode, we’re talking about what it means to understand and breakdown difficulty.…
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Game Developer
MARCH 13, 2023
For anyone with an interest in game design, Polaris' developer summit has different articles covering various aspects of design development.
Game Developer
APRIL 10, 2023
With his Alice: Asylum pitch rejected by Electronic Arts, game designer American McGee is leaving the game industry entirely behind.
Brand Game Development
FEBRUARY 22, 2021
If you’re a long-time reader of this site, you likely know that my passion is helping people create their first board game. After all, that’s what the Start to Finish: Publish and Sell Your First Board Game series is all about. Click here to check out The Board Game Design Course.
GamesIndustry.biz
MARCH 27, 2024
AEGIS calls this the first developer union contract at a major US games firm. It will provide various protections for the union unit across company divisions, including game design, translation, and marketing. Read more
Brand Game Development
JULY 13, 2020
Certainly, board game designers can learn a lot from well-designed escape rooms. Exit Games by Kosmos are the closest we can get to the authentic in-person experience right now. Exit Games by Kosmos are the closest we can get to the authentic in-person experience right now. Need help on your board game?
Game Wisdom
MAY 25, 2023
The Clash of Choices in Game Design Josh Bycer josh@game-wisdom.com One of the many balancing acts of game design is the act of creating cool, interesting, unique, abilities for the player to use, and then balancing said abilities within the scope and design of your game.
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?
Brand Game Development
DECEMBER 17, 2018
Creating board games takes an enormous amount of time and effort. The simple fact is that there are a lot of distinct tasks that have to be handled to turn a game from an idea into reality. This is why I urge each new board game designer to share the workload , delegating tasks to a team instead of doing them all alone.
GamesIndustry.biz
OCTOBER 25, 2023
Sign up for the GI Daily here to get the biggest news straight to your inbox Among the presentations in last month's Game Devs of Color Expo was Achimostawinan Games' talk on Growing Indigenous Worlds in Games, which explored the themes of reappropriation and combating stereotypes of creative works for Indigenous people.
Brand Game Development
JUNE 29, 2020
A couple of months ago, I asked the readers of this blog to send in answers to the question “ what confuses you most about board game development ?” ” I got a lot of responses, and two of them were about knowing when to pivot during a game design project. Need help on your board game? Save your old work.
Ask a Game Dev
NOVEMBER 30, 2023
Getting a promotion in the game industry usually requires the designer to take two steps. This means taking on more difficult responsibilities and tasks, the sort that the mid or senior level devs are doing. In my experience, most promotions in a game design career don't happen internally.
Brand Game Development
MARCH 9, 2020
Monopoly: it’s one of the oldest board games in the store. It’s one of the top 10 best-selling board games. It’s also a terrible board game. When board gamers need a game to mercilessly mock , they look no further than Monopoly. Need help on your board game? Monopoly has a staggeringly low 4.4
Brand Game Development
NOVEMBER 25, 2019
Need help on your board game? Join my community of over 2,000 game developers, artists, and passionate creators. Escape Rooms will make you a better board game designer. With this in mind, here are six reasons I believe that Escape Rooms will make you a better board game designer.
GamesIndustry.biz
APRIL 9, 2024
Each year, the organisers of London Games Festival showcase the work of Black, Asian, and underrepresented games professionals working in the UK through the Ensemble initiative. Read more
Brand Game Development
JANUARY 14, 2019
Santorini is a fantastic board game that came out about two years ago. In its heart, it’s an abstract strategy game that could have come from antiquity. It has been given the modern board game polish, though, with adorably cutesy art of Greek gods, and an incredibly photogenic set of stackable plastic components.
Game Wisdom
FEBRUARY 13, 2023
Learning About Game Design in the Classroom Josh Bycer josh@game-wisdom.com width="560" height="314" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" For this perceptive podcast, I’m talking with Jeremy Yanofsky who hosts the Engage Show to discuss what does teaching game design and using games in the classroom look like today.
PreMortem.Games
APRIL 19, 2024
Final Factory blends factory building and spaceship design with RTS-style troop commanding and classic bullet-hell gameplay. Pretty impressive for a largely solo-developed game. “At At this stage the game is more like a cross between Factorio and Cosmoteer ”, explains Ryding.
Brand Game Development
FEBRUARY 17, 2020
When I was a neophyte game developer, I found an excellent article by Wizards of the Coast, creators of Magic: the Gathering , called Ten Things Every Game Needs. This two-part article was so influential in my initial design of War Co. This two-part article was so influential in my initial design of War Co. Constraints.
Brand Game Development
SEPTEMBER 16, 2019
Leder Games really nailed it when they came out with their board game Root in 2018. It’s broken into and remained within the Board Game Geek top 50. Need help on your board game? Need help on your board game? Join my community of over 2,000 game developers, artists, and passionate creators.
Brand Game Development
JANUARY 28, 2019
Sagrada is one of my recent favorite board games. It is fundamentally a pretty simple game, but it has a lot of really endearing qualities. It’s ultimately a puzzle game, but a very attractive one with some subtle elements that arise from it being a nearly perfect information game where players draw from the same draft pool.
Ask a Game Dev
FEBRUARY 28, 2024
Is doing game design professionally what you really want, or would doing game design as an amateur hobbyist be enough? Remember, getting an entry-level job in the game industry isn't the end of the road but the beginning. I'll tell you now that I never went to school for game design.
Brand Game Development
SEPTEMBER 3, 2019
Twilight Struggle has been considered one of the best board games of all time. It’s been on the Board Game Geek Top 10 for as long as I can remember and for a while was the #1 game. No matter how you feel about it, there is a lot that new board game designers can learn from it. Need help on your board game?
Brand Game Development
JANUARY 27, 2020
It has since remained a hot game on Board Game Geek and a perennial favorite in Pangea Games board game giveaways! So with that in mind, what can we learn from this award-winning board game with a silly name? Need help on your board game? Unfortunately, push-your-luck games can quickly become obnoxious.
Brand Game Development
JANUARY 21, 2019
It’s time to talk about Pandemic – one of the greatest games ever made. Pandemic is an evergreen game with a multitude of variants and legacy games. It’s also the first cooperative game for a lot of gamers. Need help on your board game? Can you hear that coughing? You know what I’ve noticed?
Brand Game Development
JANUARY 7, 2019
In 1995, the game formerly known as Settlers of Catan was nothing more than the obscure creation of designer Klaus Teuber. The board game market as we know it today did not exist yet. Catan was the first major hobby board game to come into existence. Need help on your board game? Need help on your board game?
Brand Game Development
NOVEMBER 11, 2019
In March of 2019, Paladins of the West Kingdom by Garphill Games raised nearly a million New Zealand dollars (around $600,000 USD) on Kickstarter. Ever since then, Paladins of the West Kingdom has been on the Board Game Geek Hotness list nearly every time I’ve checked. Need help on your board game?
Brand Game Development
OCTOBER 28, 2019
Last year, Everdell by Starling Games raised nearly half a million dollars on Kickstarter. It has remained a popular board game since, regularly topping out the Board Game Geek Hotness and showing up multiple times as a giveaway prize in Pangea contests. Everdell is a worker placement, tableau-building board game.
Brand Game Development
FEBRUARY 4, 2019
I am pleased to say that it is an absolutely fantastic game that’s worth purchasing. I consider this to really valuable for learning game design simply because there is so much going on. Need help on your board game? Join my community of over 2,000 game developers, artists, and passionate creators.
Brand Game Development
OCTOBER 14, 2019
A couple of years ago, Dinosaur Island was a massively successful game. Even now, two years later, the game’s name has enough cultural cachet to lead to the most popular board game giveaway Pangea has ever sponsored. Need help on your board game? Take one good look at this game. Let’s be clear.
Brand Game Development
JANUARY 13, 2020
That is by no means a small amount to raise, but what’s interesting is that Spirit Island has remained on the Board Game Geek Hotness list off and on for almost three years. Clearly, there is much more to this game than what immediately meets the eye. Need help on your board game? You’re next, agriculture games!).
PreMortem.Games
AUGUST 30, 2023
With the discussions over the use of AI in game development raging on, Jussi-Petteri Kemppainen , Lead VFX Artist at Mainframe Industries and founder of Dinosaurs Are Better , spends his spare time to see what all the fuss really is about. AI affects game design The project’s trajectory shifted with the integration of AI tools. .
Ask a Game Dev
DECEMBER 22, 2023
You are correct in that it is possible to transfer that body of knowledge over to the other gaming industry that is casino machines. Beyond that, here are some other roles that game design skills could transfer to. Tabletop, board, or card game design. It's still game design, just not in video games.
PreMortem.Games
AUGUST 9, 2023
As if developing a game by yourself wasn’t daunting enough, Pat Naoum decided to completely handpaint his debut game The Master’s Pupil. But the end is here, the game is out now on steam. Every man and his dog has made an indie game but no one has painted a game yet. A point of interest in the indie game sea.”
Ask a Game Dev
FEBRUARY 26, 2024
The big problem with manual saves is that players can potentially save in a situation where the game is in an unwinnable state (e.g. One major guiding principle in game design is "make it easy to do things right and hard to do things wrong". save before the player is about to die).
DameDev.tv
SEPTEMBER 15, 2022
Industry veterans Rick Davidson & Tim Ruswick* take a deep dive into games that require low brain power, the design of them and what makes them work. Not all games require your full brain power. In depth strategy games such as XCOM require a lot of attention and planning which can be tiring for your brain.
Brand Game Development
MARCH 31, 2017
Need help on your board game? Join my community of over 2,000 game developers, artists, and passionate creators. Naturally, this game is nowhere remotely close to completion. Also, the game doesn’t have a defined win condition yet. Also, the game doesn’t have a defined win condition yet.
PreMortem.Games
FEBRUARY 13, 2023
As if developing a game by yourself wasn’t daunting enough, Pat Naoum decided to completely handpaint his debut game The Master’s Pupil. But the end is near, the game will release on steam sometime in the foreseeable future. Every man and his dog has made an indie game but no one has painted a game yet.
Brand Game Development
MARCH 16, 2018
Dev Diary posts are made to teach game development through specific examples from my latest project: Highways & Byways. Need help on your board game? Join my community of over 2,000 game developers, artists, and passionate creators. You need to make a great game. Just here for Highway s & Byways updates?
DameDev.tv
DECEMBER 12, 2022
Do you ever wonder how you can get better at game development? If so, keep reading for some great tips and watch the Livecast for all 12 ways to get better at game development. Rick has more than 14 years experience in the game dev industry, working on IP's that include Mario, Transformers, Captain America and Mortal Kombat.
Grumpy Gamer
JANUARY 16, 2018
In my relentless pursuit of ditching shithole social media and re-powering my RSS feeds, last week I asked for readers favorite Programming Blogs, this week I'd like to ask for favorite Game Dev blogs. game design aspect of the month. Zen of Design. Currently, I follow: Fortress of Doors. INTELLIGENT ARTIFICE.
Ask a Game Dev
DECEMBER 15, 2023
Evaluating items is a skill that we game designers must cultivate in players so they can distinguish good items from bad. This is another element of cultivating player skill through intentional design. Short questions: Ask a Game Dev on Twitter Long questions: Ask a Game Dev on Tumblr Frequent Questions: The FAQ
Ask a Game Dev
NOVEMBER 9, 2023
Generally, dying and resetting in game releases all of the tension that's been built up to that point in the player. The specific game design determines how we want players to deal with losing. The determining factor of how the game handles it is how quickly the player gets right back into things.
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