In his latest design feature, Activision and former Insomniac designer Mike Stout breaks down the boss battle into eight different beats, and runs two notable ones -- The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time's Ganon and Portal's GladOS -- through a thorough analysis to illuminate their designs.
Game designer Mike Stout discusses how to build effective boss battles: make them mastery tests and structured stories in their own right.
Former Insomniac designer Mike Stout takes shares a useful rubric for judging the depth of play mechanics, including checks for redundant ones, in this in-depth design article, which contains examples from the Ratchet & Clank series.
Game designer Mike Stout discusses how to build game mechanics with enough depth to stay interesting: tie them to varied and meaningful use of skills.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Games stories are getting increasingly intricate, and are often a core selling point of a game. Yet games don't usually provide players with tools needed to follow a story. What problems get in the way of narrative accessibility and how do we solve them?
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.
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.
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.
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.