Links to articles or videos made by other fine folks that we found interesting.
For better or worse, much of the games market is moving to games-as-a-service. Once upon a time, this was known as the MMO business model, because all MMOs were games-as-a-service, and virtually no…
Raph Koster catalogs the major ways to drive player retention with their associated pros and cons. As Raph notes, retention is key to any games-as-a-service model regardless of how (or indeed whether) it monetizes - it just means a game that players want to keep playing.
By shutting down the Wii Store Channel and not letting users download old games, Nintendo is once again showing that in the modern digital era, you don't actually own the things you buy.
This isn’t a new problem, but the Wii Shop closure shines perhaps the brightest light yet on how anti-preservation many digital storefronts are.
How games provide feedback …and how they’re lacking.
Jamie Madigan points out that while games are mostly great at providing performance feedback, they almost totally fail in providing coaching. This is a really hard problem since suggesting process improvements requires expertise and insight, as illustrated in the example of WoWAnalyzer, a tool for coaching World of Warcraft players that required a ton of work to put together.
"Your store page is not irrelevant, but it’s a bit irrelevant," says Compulsion's Sam Abbott. "If people have an idea in their mind of what your game is, that’s what they’re buying. It’s not the fine print."
While the article is mainly about the changing role of early access in game development and marketing over the past few years, to me the most interesting (and slightly terrifying) part is the way We Happy Few struggled with expectation management. Early trailers created a lot of interest, but also resulted in expectations that were not completely accurate. Once fans get an idea of what a game is going to be, it’s hard to change minds without disappointing them.
A selection of tips and tricks for Level Design development.
A compilation of ten tips for designing game levels, clearly explained and with illustrative example screenshots.
Organised by our Educational Partner, Norwich University of the Arts, Stuart Ashen joined us at the Gaming Festival in 2017 to talk about Hareraiser and expl...
In this 2017 Norwich Gaming Festival talk, Stuart Ashen tells the amazing story of Hareraiser, a 1984 computer game (of sorts). I wasn’t expecting much based on the hyperbolic video title, but the events surrounding this game are actually layered with intrigue and Ashen’s expert storytelling makes the thirty-six minutes fly by. In the end, I am persuaded - Hareraiser is quite possibly the worst game ever published and sold, but not for any of the reasons you likely expect.
In this 2018 GDC session, developer Zach Gage explains how to make games desirable to someone looking over a player's shoulder on the subway, sitting next to...
Zach Gage takes a look at how to make games so readable that someone looking over your shoulder on the subway as you play on your phone can tell what’s going on and get excited to download the game themselves. The key is the principle of The Three Reads, an approach which ensures that useful information is prominent at the right time and in the right order - first the core of the experience that draws people in, then the key details that convey the high-level rules, then the contextual information that conveys less-central rules.
Honestly, I had such low expectations for this, but it completely blew me away. It's such an amazing experience, and its greatness is only unveiled through c...
While I haven’t yet played Detroit: Become Human myself, I’m always excited when someone talks sense about David Cage. Here, Skill Up takes a fair look at Quantic Dream’s latest, acknowledging its flaws but illuminating how it’s the most successful realization yet of Cage’s vision for what games can be.
868-Hack solves the problem of clumsy difficulty options by putting the player directly in control of the difficulty themselves.
Tom Francis looks at player-driven risk/reward tradeoffs (which he calls “betting on yourself”) in roguelike 868-HACK, explaining their advantages over traditional difficulty modes and designer-driven difficulty spikes.
One way that game developers can limit player options is by implementing one-way, irreversible events.
One of my golden rules of game design is “Never punish the player for exploring.” Bart Stewart takes a look at one way this happens with what he terms “irreversible events” in RPGs. He mostly doesn’t like them, and neither do I.