Designer Notes

SEPTEMBER 6, 2023

Hi everyone, I’m Soren Johnson, and welcome to You Have No Idea How Hard It Is To Run A Sweatshop Here are the published games that I’ve worked on over my career, some of which I will touch on over the next hour. Or on a game with 1 winner and 99 losers. Or on a turn-based game that plays by itself.

Mechanics 79

Mechanics Game Design Game Designer Build 79

Radiator Blog

OCTOBER 13, 2022

The high visual polish and stellar production values adorn a solid but predictable gameplay loop: you fight through dungeons with random rooms / enemies, collect resources, and bring them back to your hub to build up your village and its inhabitants. The cult of the game industry is most powerful of all.

Indy 52

Indy Film Games Puzzle 52

The Bottom Feeder

OCTOBER 18, 2023

At some point in the last several decades of video games, everything became a role-playing game. Turns out, if your game design is a little lacking, all you need to do is spackle on a bit of "Make bars fill up to make numbers get bigger to make bars fill up." The trick is making sure the fighting part is engaging.

Games 75

Games Fantasy Fighting Art 75

Grid Sage Games

NOVEMBER 28, 2022

Being able to backtrack is generally going to be more realistic in the RPG sense--of course your character should be able to go back and pick up that item they left behind, or fight that enemy that scared you away before. In a game setting, though, this can be quite an annoyance from a design perspective (harder to balance!)

Point and Click 52

Point and Click Mechanics Open World Feature 52

Grid Sage Games

MARCH 10, 2022

So I reimagined them yet again, taking into account their unique targeting mechanics and what that means when fighting other bots. This is a pretty good example of the heavy influence interface limitations can have on game design. The biggest change there was simply yet more significant damage buffs. Trap Extractor demo.

Balance 52

Balance Mechanics Beta Prototyping 52

Deconstructor of Fun

MAY 15, 2022

Lost Ark outshines other MMO games because each element mentioned above is polished to the next level. Balancing relies heavily on gear, maps are crowded with question marks, Boss fights feature repetitive mechanisms. Though, all of these foibles could be found in other games as well. The grand scene).

Cutscenes 52

Cutscenes Art Content Mechanics 52

Grid Sage Games

JULY 17, 2022

Rampant terrain destruction is awesome, by the way ;). and not be compatible with many of the encounters anyway, since knowing which direction the player will enter from is often an important part of their design. I wrote about this factor in my recent article on game design philosophy. hacking attempts unsuccessful?),

Beta 52

Beta Content Balance Mechanics 52