How System Era overcame creative paralysis to fix Astroneer's crafting system

System Era designer Aaron Biddlecom and gameplay programmer Elijah O'Rear explain how they mined their own game design to invigorate Astroneer's "flat" crafting system.

A short but interesting look at a change to Astroneer’s crafting system, illustrating the value of having multiple perspectives and challenging your assumptions when making design decisions (as well as the importance of ensuring that the complexity in a design is coming from the right place).

Zedd & Jasmine Thompson - Funny (Minecraft Music Video | Beat Synchronized!)

After playing Beat Saber in VR, I wondered if I could create a similar rhythm game in Minecraft by hitting flowers with corresponding color swords. Now I've ...

Not only is this an entertaining video of Beat Saber-inspired gameplay in Minecraft, you can actually download the custom world and play it yourself (full instructions in video description on YouTube).

I just love when games enable this kind of shareable creative expression and interactive intertextuality.

The Other Kind of MMO: The Materazzi Problem - Twenty Sided

Shortly after I joined Goonswarm, they relocated to a different region of space in the north called “Deklein,” and more specifically the station in the VFK-IV system, which for years to come would be the de facto capital of Goon country. Almost immediately after moving they fought a war. Earlier in this series I promised not only a bunch of long, rambling stories but a bunch of long, rambling stories that contain potential game design lessons. Goonswarm’s war against another alliance called “Goodfellas” is one such story: it illustrates something I’m going to call the “Materazzi Problem.”

This is an entry in the middle of a series of essays about the author’s experience with EVE Online, but it contains a fascinating insight I’m actually ashamed I never figured out myself.

The reason competitive online game communities are so frequently toxic isn’t just due to lack of consequences or some kind of repressed negativity being inherent to competitive gamers. It’s because in many of these environments, toxicity is a competitive advantage. Hassling your opponents can distract them, provoke them into actions that backfire against them, or even make them concede just to get away from you. Getting comfortable with constant insults and offensive language makes you immune to these weapons and more able to use them, so toxicity will often spill into non-competitive places like forums and prevail even among friends and allies.

Such games thus actively encourage toxic behavior by default. This will mean more wins for the toxic players, but will drive away others, which is a trend worth fighting.

Analysis: Every Day's Not The Same 'Art Game'

Gamasutra news director Leigh Alexander looks at Molleindustria's Every Day The Same Dream and how it is -- and isn't -- like other "art games", to great success on all fronts.

The debate over games as art is long since settled, but it’s interesting to revisit - a lot of quality analysis came out of discussion of the successes and failures of so-called “art games”. Here, Leigh Alexander takes a look at the briefly-influential Every Day The Same Dream and how it serves to illustrate that what makes games art is not what they say but how they say it, using interactivity to provide experiences impossible in other media.

The writeup also contains a bonus link to a contemporaneous article by Emily Short discussing two other “art games” of the time, Home and The Graveyard.

Most games are bizarrely bad at making their stories accessible. All too often it’s easy to miss lines of dialog or parts of cutscenes with little ability to rewind or replay them. Alex Driml discusses several examples of clever ways particular games have solved these problems.

P.T., Gaming History and the Self-Serving Crusades

DISCLAIMER: This wasn’t an easy article to write, and it’s definitely not a pleasant article to read. But sometimes we must go through…

Felipe Pepe takes a heartbreaking look at the apathy-driven lack of preservation of games, content, and wisdom.

Updated August 15, 2021: Ironically, Felipe Pepe has since deleted this article from Medium. However, it was cross-posted to Gamasutra and is still available there.

What makes a good RPG dungeon?

A look at 10 great video game dungeons

Good dungeon design isn’t universal - it depends on what verbs are available to the player, what the UI is like, and what the game’s core loops involve. Here, Felipe Pepe illustrates this by taking a look at several great dungeons and what makes them great in their respective contexts.

Game Design Dirty Little Secrets – GD Keys

Three years ago, the designer Jennifer Scheurle started a very interesting Twitter thread on “brilliant mechanics in games that are hidden from the player to get across a certain feeling“. In this thread, she invited designers to share the design secrets they have used, which should not be seen by the players in order to trigger specific behaviors, feelings, or reactions while experiencing their games.

Many games deliberately mislead players in subtle ways to create a better experience. This write-up takes a close look at several examples and discusses why they work. Some key takeaways are (1) the perception of fairness is more important than actual fairness (2) fail states break flow.

The chicanery of Penguin Cretins

Valve maintains its signature silence as wayward developers code-swap games on Steam, leaving users frustrated and confused

This story starts with a game in Steam’s Early Access being completely replaced by a different game, but it opens a lot of questions about the nature of ownership and fair dealing in an age of digital delivery, automatic updates, and games as a service. When it’s commonplace for games to change after they’ve already been paid for, where is the line? Aside from the preservation question, how do you allow games to grow and improve while stopping bad faith consumer-exploiting changes?

Frankly, I expected this to be more of a problem - ads were being patched into high-profile games over a decade ago. I can only assume that nobody’s wanted to risk triggering consumer rights investigations and legislation here, so the steps taken have been pretty small.

What Casual Games Are Like For Someone Who Doesn't Play Games

Go to https://BuyRaycon.com/razbuten for 15% off your order! Brought to you by Raycon. In this episode of Gaming For A Non-Gamer, I finally had my wife try o...

In the latest episode of YouTuber Razbuten’s series in which he watches his non-gamer wife play various games, the focus is on so-called “casual” life sim games.

Many of the lessons and takeaways echo those that have come before (intuitive theming, low pressure, good tutorials, recoverable failure states, and optional co-op features all help new players learn, cheats/modes that let players focus on what they enjoy are good, etc.) but a couple new ones stood out to me. First, that sandbox games can be downright unapproachable if you don’t already have basic familiarity with what you can do and what kind of goals make sense, so early-game directed progression can be vital for new players. Second, that being part of a shared culture moment can be a powerful draw even if it’s not the kind of culture you normally take part in.