Video credits (25¢) : Directed and animated by @ericpowerup http://ericpowerup.net Piano, synths, production by @John Mark Nelson // Lyrics and vocals by…
If Danny Wiessner’s The World Is Saved is gaming’s anthem, then Mixtape for the Milky Way’s Video Games is its dark reprise.
Our industry is obsessed with complexity, with brutal consequences in employee wellbeing and product quality. It's time to start talking about this unhealthy obsession.
Andreas Papathanasis calls for recognition of the fact that in game design, simple isn’t bad and complex isn’t good. Thoughtlessly chasing complexity in game design makes games less legible, less accessible, and less approachable while increasing development cost.
During GamesIndustry.biz Live: Academy, Mike Bithell explored six lessons he's learned during his career that can help aspiring developers get a successful start in games
Mike Bithell shares several important lessons he’s learned in his game development career that could also function easily as general life and career advice.
We are back with a new episode of Gaming For A Non-Gamer. This time I had my wife jump into the immersive world of Virtual Reality.
In the latest episode of YouTuber Razbuten’s series in which he watches his non-gamer wife play video games, the focus is on VR.
For me, the major takeaway is that because VR games don’t have decades of convention to lean on, they need to be much more intuitive and approachable than other games. As a result, while they’re roughly as approachable as other games for experienced players, for new players they are far more approachable… once you get over the hurdle of the expensive equipment required and the somewhat stigmatized and antisocial nature of the headset.
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.