Brand Game Development

OCTOBER 27, 2017

Dev Diary posts are made to teach game development through specific examples from my latest project: Highways & Byways. Click here. Last Saturday and Sunday, I attended my first board gaming convention – Protospiel in Atlanta. Prototype of a beach volleyball game by Julio Nazario.

Prototyping 130

Prototyping Dev Point and Click Mechanics 130

Brand Game Development

DECEMBER 22, 2017

Dev Diary posts are made to teach game development through specific examples from my latest project: Highways & Byways. Click here. I even blind play-tested it at a game design convention. Need help on your board game? Join my community of over 2,000 game developers, artists, and passionate creators.

Point and Click 130

Point and Click Dev Games Mechanics 130

Brand Game Development

DECEMBER 11, 2017

Board game development is a very individual process. Every single developer has different methods for creating their games. This article is the sixth of a 19-part suite on board game design and development. Need help on your board game? Click this picture for some backstory! Short-term mechanic testing.

Mechanics 130

Mechanics Concepts Writing Games 130

Designer Notes

MARCH 31, 2023

Welcome to My Elephant in the Room: An Old World Design Postmortem. Here are the games that I’ve worked on. Spoiler alert: Civilization 3 and 4 are going to come up a lot in the presentation… I also do a podcast where I interview game designers about why they make games, so check it out if you have time for 4-hour interviews.

Tile 98

Tile Point and Click AI Mechanics 98

Designer Notes

AUGUST 10, 2021

The game, a historical 4X set in classical antiquity, released on July 1, 2021, and is available for purchase here. The big change that always gets mentioned when going from Civ 4 to Civ 5 is one-unit-per-tile (1UPT), which is interesting as 1UPT is purely a mechanical – as opposed to thematic – change.

Tile 40

Tile Point and Click AI Mechanics 40

Interesting Choices

FEBRUARY 25, 2015

I've been fascinated by board games that revolve around drafting for years now, and in early 2011 I wrote a post on the pillars that make these games click. I've created an online prototype for playtesting that has seen almost 2000 games completed with at least a dozen players clocking in at over 100 games apiece.

Build 40

Build Tile Point and Click Games 40

Deconstructor of Fun

NOVEMBER 10, 2020

I think a lot of the time when you end up fundraising, you typically fundraise off the back of an initial product idea or initial, hey, there's an opportunity to make a combine a match-3 and the RPG and the MMO category into that, you know, wild new type of game that. It's a hybrid game. They get to a prototype level.

Games 52

Games Point and Click Engine Engineering 52