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Solo dev Jonathan Barbosa Dijkstra “Learning new skills is a great motivator”

PreMortem.Games

All this before there’s ever any playtesting done. It usually starts with a ‘think pad’, which is basically just a google doc where I write down anything to do with a specific game concept. I played around with a few ideas and one of them was a simple cube rolling puzzle game. So I made a shift in puzzle design to negate that.

Dev 104
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10 Elements of Good Game Design

Brand Game Development

On the other hand, playing Tasty Humans has short turns, which helps the game stay snappy even though it’s a brain-burny puzzle game. If you hate the game you’re playtesting, do something different. Don’t just playtest it and refine the mechanics. The mere threat is usually enough to keep the game going.

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Results of the Godot Jam - June 2018

Mircosoft Game Dev

After three days of intensive game development and two weeks of playtesting and rating (over 3,500 ratings!), This cute and well-designed pixel art puzzle game snatched the 1 st position in the Gameplay and Graphics and Sound categories, and 2 nd position in the Theme interpretation category ( Overall rating: 4.088).

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Friday Questions #3

Grumpy Gamer

When I write, music is helpful. Lancelot's Hangover: After beta testing, what do you do if you realize a series of puzzles doesn't work. Do you cut off the whole series of the puzzles (meaning wasting time/art/effort)? Do you keep most art and animations but rebuild the whole series of puzzle in a different way?

Puzzle 52
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Istanbul Gaming Summit 2023

Deconstructor of Fun

Kudos to Neil Long of Mobilegamer.biz for joining the event and writing the notes. Running through the market by genre, Kress noted that King has done quite well, but other genres had suffered badly, with strategy, RPG, match puzzle, and casino games all down double digits. Shooters got creamed”, too, he said – down 33%.

Games 59
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Learn How To Use Data to Build and Grow Hit Games - Part 1

Deconstructor of Fun

During the writing of this post, we connected with the folks behind Geeklab and they agreed to offer a free month to their service for all of our readers. Not to mention that the playtests on Playtestcloud usually lasted for more than the required 30 minutes. That’s how confident they (and we) are in their platform.

Data 52
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Garrisons 2.0

Grid Sage Games

In playtesting so far this (among other benefits we’ll get to later) is already clearly tempting players who would otherwise always prefer regular branches over infiltrating a Garrison. I wrote about this factor in my recent article on game design philosophy.

Beta 52