Game Design Resources and Notes 2022

Game design in general

In praise of messy design – Different types of design that’s opposite to elegant. 

• Shaggy – Multigenere, ex Nier: Automata. 
• Baggy – Lots of things to pick from, ex Zelda: Breath of the Wild, GTA. 
• Craggy – Depth, ex Dwarf Fortress.

Multiplayer complexity scale – Multiplayer alternatives that are easier to implement compared to real time MMOs. 

Invisible Choices GMTK – No need to show menus in games when the game uses other inputs for actions, make the choice the same way as you play the game.

• Hiding options – You can hide options for the player, which they can figure out on their own.
• Harder action to choose – Some options can be harder to perform, all options are equal in a menu.
• Drawbacks, Cost and non verbs – It can be costly to implement multiple times and you might want the player to choose between things that don’t require player verbs.
• Mix with GUI Menus – It’s possible to also use menus for some options.
• Unintentional – Sometimes players might not notice that they made a choice.

Prestige mechanics – In idle games.

IF self training material – List by Emily Short for interactive fiction.

What does your narrative system need to do? – Response of actions visible to the player, juicy narrative segments. Lots of links to other articles. 

Always Stacks – Generally, when someone asks about a gameplay element “does it stack?” it’s usually way more exciting if the answer is “yes.” New heuristics? Always stacks!

Power of abstraction in games – A few glitchy games, feel like a bootleg game. Polish usually means one thing from an industry perspective, what we are used to seeing in games, but these games have intentional effects, that’s different from that, and is also a type of polish. feminine view of the world how you are thought to be passive and reflective of the world, vs traditional masculinity, manipulating systems, which is normally seen in games. 

Armored Core (PSX) – 

• Pitty system – The game has a pity system, if you get in too much debt the game will restart and you gain extra starting bonuses. 
• Stats screen – It’s a little messy when you move between the shop and build menu, you wish it was just an excel sheet that dumps all the stats. 
• Mission variation – Great variation between missions, which also requires different builds. 
• Negative total income – You can beat a mission and still have a negative total income because of the repair costs, ammunition or collateral destruction. Which creates a negative feedback loop.
• Hidden weapons – There’s multiple hidden weapons which are overpowered. 
• Challenging mirror matches – You meet other armored core mechs which are very strong compared to the player, a few missions you only try to survive within the time limit.

How to design tutorials – Show stuff, let the player try to do it, present a challenge which require it, combine multiple actions, present the tutorial the same way as the rest of the story, do it in the game world, not in a dedicated tutorial area, so its hidden and feels like playing the game. 

Timers in games – Some people get stressed by time limits, which reduces working memory and our ability to focus, and get easily distracted. aka get more negative feeling and thoughts and harder to dismiss them, just because a timer is present

Design posts from unexplored 2 – I read the first one about traps, very good with a table that lists different parameters for trap triggers and hazards, as well as examples about traps and distractions, and other things, to use them in interesting setups. 

Temtem and stamina – You can use a move without enough stamina, but that costs health instead and the monster has to rest the next turn. Some attacks require the monster to be active X turns before they can use it, and need to wait again to reuse it. Synergies between the other active monster types on your side. 

All Dark Souls boss fights – 

Different types – melee / ranged, small / large, single / multiple. melee are faster and up front, require blocking or rolling, ranged are usually magic or fire attacks, harder to block, side step or roll. large boss fights are slower, slower attacks and movement, more about finding safe spots in positioning. 

Secret strategies – Some boss fights have secret strategies to make them easier, ex plunging attacks, find a pendant that can be used to block a specific attack, destroy tails of dragons to remove that attack and gain a pickup, pull an optional lever to make the boss area larger.

Goldilocks system from Rogue legacy 2 – If you finish a run and have some gold but not enough to buy anything, but almost can, they give you enough gold to be able to buy something. To make you feel like there’s always some progress. resilience (?) system, when you pick up reliques you lose resilience, if you have less than 100% you get a lower max health. When you equip items, if you have fewer items you get more resilience. It’s to not encourage players to always pick up everything in a run before they try to beat a boss, you can still pick up a lot, but it’s a little more fluid how much is the best amount. 

Kingdoms and Castles – GDC Postmortem –

• Test market fit – Test the market fit before going into full development. 
• Spend time innovating the core of the game, for everything else lean into existing metaphors. Because it takes too much time iterating and building tutorials for things that aren’t essential for the game. 
• Game design tactics and strategies – Tactic: our skill tree needs 3 more skills. Strategy: does the game need skill trees at all. 
• Call to action – When a game gets videos on youtube it’s good to have ways for players to act on and stay connected with the game, newsletters, steam wishlist, join late alpha through kickstarter, discord. 
• Idea channel – On Discord, have an idea channel. Don’t reply, you don’t need to have arguments why something makes sense or not.

Zen and the art of game design

Make games instead of listening to game analysis videos

Prototype new things, skip the genre convention stuff

The Trap of adding combat

Sakurai, that was then, this is now – How old games are in the past. It’s a missed opportunity to not play current games since the moment is fleeting. Expand your horizon.

Indie after collage – Don’t do it, emotional draining.

Edumnd macmillan, indie dos and don’ts retrospective

Why game companies stopped making games

So you want to be a game professor? – If you want to teach, just teach, find opportunities to do so. It’s not like teaching medecine when you need a license to do it. Upload a course online, show some kids how to make games in the library. Offer to make guest lectures or workshops in game education or game clubs. Or just upload your content online.

Will Wright, Proxi and the future of the game industry (2019) – He starts off by saying that he doesn’t follow the game industry that closely now, and was hoping they would tell him about the future. Then goes on talking about their app, players can recreate memories and an AI can use it to change a landscape and ask questions with mini games. How we share photos online, but what we really want to share is memories. You don’t have photos of every memory, how can you set up a format to share that?

Jenova Chen: ‘Am I Asking Too Much?’ – Will everyone play games and love games in the future? The game industry is growing, but it feels stagnant, are grown ups playing any games? More games are released each year, but still, he is playing less memorable games. There’s lots of players, but games aren’t considered mainstream. “It’s a waste of time”, how can we make games that’s not a waste of time? Can we make grown ups feel wonder and other emotions? “Am I asking too much?” 

Innovation in games – Gimmicks, be yourself it will be unique. Rapid prototyping is good because you are not afraid of throwing out the trash. A game idea can’t just be good, it has to be special because you spend so much time making it. Make 100 ideas, one of the saddest things is a person with the best ideas inside spending all their time working on the same game. You need to have a grand idea to know if you deviate from it. Following an idea, you made something, but you understand it differently, so you need to start over to make something that you understand after you started following that idea. Hard to make innovations in big teams, have cascading effects, can’t write a design document and schedule it and expect it to work that way.

Playtesting / UX

Death Loop and UX – An interesting example how UX research can be used to make a game less confusing. Grid of locations and time of the day. “Unboarding” the player with all of the mystery, instead of onboarding them. Players didn’t understand the time loop, how to break it, how to kill the targets etc. aka they didn’t get what was special about the game. Instead of demystifying everything in the prologue, they added an introduction chapter to add payoff to the mystery.

How many users for usability tests? – Usually 5, and if more is needed make multiple different tests instead.

Paper prototyping

• Realtime – Use a metronome to get a sense for real time pacing. use a rubber band to simulate aiming. 
• Small changes – Make few changes between tests, since small details can have large effects.
• Prototype milestones – Write down changes between versions. 
• No stones unturned – When you are done, look back at what changed between versions, is there some part that hasn’t been tested enough yet? If you tested each part it’s a sign that you left no stones unturned.

Playtesting for indie developers – It’s important to find the right player to playtest with. Suggest looking for normal players, and do some screening with what kinds of games they played earlier. Offer 10 dollars, and ask them to record the gameplay or if you can watch it live. Picking the wrong type of player makes the results irrelevant in the steps afterwards.

Patton and Schell, FFWWDD – Questions for playtesting, frustration moment, not bad but frustrating, and moment to be specific. 

Design dive #41 Usability – Frictionless experience, Exploring inputs, Player journey, Bad friction, Curf, Software context, In-person playtesting, Tutorial steps, Actions, Understanding and goals, Bouncing arrows, Interaction loops, Analytics, Personas, Implement changes between playtests

Tom Francis, on prototyping 

• Gamemaker faster than Unity – Gamemaker is around 8 times faster than Unity, to build stuff. Gamemaker lets you write sloppy code, so it’s a little worse for long projects, but Unity allows that to some degree as well. 
• Looks for ideas that are easy to expand – What he is looking for in prototypes is less about having a great idea, but about having an environment that allows you to build cool stuff quickly. Big ideas are good, one liner, easier to market, when you can tell people what it is and get them excited quickly. It’s a good thing, but not necessary. 3 things, an interesting idea, makes it special from other games, but also makes the game easy to make. It’s still hard to make games, but to make it easier to make.

Player Segmentation

• MTG personas – They are very easy to understand, con: they are not based on data, so it’s unclear if it’s actually connected to the real world players.
• Sonar looks different in movies compared to in real life – You need to be an expert to read sonar, same with data.
• Met the persona – Bring examples of people from your personas into the building so designers can talk to them.
• Destiny encourage switching game modes – They tried to design destiny so players wanted to play a mix of the different game modes, since players can play the game longer when they mix up the gameplay instead of focusing on one mode all the time and then stop playing when they grew tired of it.
• Game mode “omnivores” – They noticed from Halo that players that played multiple game modes would play the game longer, so in destiny they tried to motivate players to be “omnivores”, which succeeded to the degree when time spent on gameplay modes no longer are a strong indicator of player segmentations.

Epic games lawsuit about dark patterns – The store in Fortnite had a dark pattern when it was easy to buy things by mistake with no confirmation button and automatically saved credit card number. The risk goes up significantly when for children. Banks allow you to make a chargeback if a purchasing mistake has been made, but if it was done Epic would lock the account. Incentivising kids to lie if they made a mistake to not lose all skins and progress. They also acknowledge that even if the game has a high age rating, it is played by younger players. An extra setting was added to turn off voice chat by default. To reduce the toxicity exposed towards kids. Here’s Epic games’ reply of how they changed the game.

Action Platformer

George Fan Different enemy design

GMTK Interactive platform tutorial – You get to try different parameters for platformers and tweak them until it’s what you prefer. Also with controller code for unity.

Videos of enemies – 1 second of every Hollow Knight enemy,  Bestiary for Castlevania 1, Hollow Knight enemy tier list, Hollow Knight boss tier list

Build a bad guy workshop – Lists a number of attributes for enemies that you can mix and match. Why not make your own lists?

big 20, nes challenge – Beat 20 games in around 4h, but most are not to the end, more like 75% of the levels.

Hollow Knight Level design process – 

• Blockout – White box the whole world with pickups. 
• Make enemies – Spent 1 month building all enemies, as simple as possible. Make them general so they can work in different themes. 
• Place enemies – Spent 1 week placing all enemies and secret pickups. 
• Art pass – Going through each level doing art passes. (the timeline sounds very tight imho)

Castlevania retrospective – Long video, but pretty detailed considering the number of games they cover, aka all! 

Tips for building 2d platformers

Rain World AI – Enemies are simulated even if the player isn’t there. They can attack each other, you encounter dynamic encounters where enemy behaviors clash. Procedural animation. Player-like characters with a reputation system, each individual varies how aggressive or helpful they are towards the player.

Procedural animation in rain world

Spreadsheet with resources – Subtab with platform games.

Castlevania maps – Metroidvania like maps for all castlevania games, also the early ones without in game maps. Video with heat maps and item unlock order. 

Demo platform games – Alphabeta gamer

Extraordinarily hard games – Playlist, mostly NES games. Also Debunking the difficulty where he goes into detail how to use strategies to reduce the difficulty in games that gained a reputation of being extremely hard. 

200 metroidvania tier list – A few games I haven’t played that sounds interesting: cat maze, mortal manor, unworthy (souls like b/w, crow sworn devs), after death (castlevania like), guacamelee 2, messenger, another metroid 2 remake, samus returns remake. Timespinner, death’s gambit, robot named fight (roguelike). redo (horror survival)

Metroidvanias released in 2021

Board games

Board game mechanics playlist

10 board game mechanics for childrens games – Randomness, memory, toy-like components, dexterity, take that, logic and deduction, story telling, junior edition. age classification, parental taste.

Super hot card game postmortem

I cut, you choose

Average number of words on cards in mtg sets – They did an initiative to lower the word count on commons in M10, but it has been going up lately. 

Booster pack size – TCG design channel, booster pack sizes and proportions of card rarity. 

Print and play games on itch

Board games and UX

Chess variants

Can AI help us reimagine chess? – AI that tries different combinations of chess variants, like:

• Pawns have the option of moving two squares on any turn 
• Pawns can move backwards (except from their starting square).
• Pawns can also move sideways by one square.
• It’s possible to capture your own pieces.

Conclusion: most of the tested variants have the same or larger depth compared to original chess.

Dukes game – Like chess but also shows the movement pattern on top of the pieces. 

Tick Tack Check – Like chess but on a 4×4 grid, with 4 pieces each and the goal is to place 4 in a row. You place them and can’t move them until you place 3 pieces. When a piece is taken the pieces are returned to the owner so they can place it again.

Shuuro – Chess variant, army composition, deployment, random placement of impassable terrain, knights can stand on them. 

Fool, chess variants – Fool, moves like the opponent’s last piece. Move like a tower forward, but a bishop backwards.

Fairy chess, A bunch of chess variant pieces.

Talks with long notes

Fullbright Studio: Gone Home – Link to full notes

• Narrative DLC, 
• we can’t do combat, 
• The work is to connect the dots not the walking and clicking, 
• Character narration when you click on objects as a unscheduled reward, 
• Loop back and light up rooms you visit, 
• Playing with the player’s expectations of a horror game.

Anatomy of a successful gif –

• Different types of gifs – Show mechanics, just cool, funny, bug gif, joke cultural reference / event season. 
• Assets gifs – Store page shows menus, levels, items, adds movement instead of just a screenshot. 
• Main gifs – Like trailers, but short. 5s. 
• Make gifs that people love, that has the potential to be shared. 
• Software – On screen gif capture program ex gifcam. yotube video to gif, gify.com. record videos and edit in video softwares. 
• First frame – Start with something eye-catching, since some sites don’t autoplay gifs. 
• Split up trailers – Recycle a trailer into multiple gifs, 1 trailer into 10 gifs.
• Compression tweaking – EXGIF.com different sliders to compress the gif. 
• In-game gif generator – Games where people can create stuff and make funny things happen, include a gif generator. 
• Twitter – Videos on twitter will auto loop if they are shorter than 6.5s. 
• Imgur – Underrated platform for posting gifs, formate, mini blogpost 5 gifs, 1 sentence to each, end with a goodbye. 
• Reddit – Reddit personal headlines (I have been working on this game for 5 years). 
• Email – Gifs in emails. 
• Kickstarter – Few watch the video, a lot more see the gifs.

Friendship Mechanics –

• Games as a tool to bring happiness to the world – They started out making elegant games with evergreen gameplay. They made a MMO and realized that people are actually kind of important. What would it be like making games for the full spectrum of different people? Think of games as a tool to bring happiness to the world, a tool that can make people’s lives better. 
• Dehumanizing scripts – Interact through this thin channel of communication, where a lot of nuances are lost and a lot of miscommunication happens. Dehumanizing scripts, take away the ability to interact as a human. In match based systems, you are never going to see them again, of course I’m going to swear at them, cause why not? 
• Issue with social media – It makes people into numbers for viral marketing. Some people make friends on social media, while others are left on the wayside, because of the poor implementations of the systems. 
• Proximity – Bump into people repeated. 
• Density – Not too barren, not too crowded.
• Why not just play with the friends you already have? – Most of the time you aren’t going to have anyone you know online at that time. Friendship rarely transfers to a new context due to logistics: the friends aren’t going to be there. The design problem is to allow players to interact with strangers. 
• Matches vs Drop in/out – Matchmaking systems require a high player count, mega hit scale, to lock players away into small rooms, which cause low repeated interaction. Suggests drop in and out at any time. Ex Slither.io. Different ways to shrink and expand rooms to even out density, and make it fit the theme of the world, instead of just kicking the player from the server. 
• Premature disclosure of information – You need to have built a level of trust before you want to disclose information, if you do it before it can lead to stereotypical reaction. Ex Overwatch voice chat, you can’t hide your gender when talking. Revealing that you are female has a negative impact, guys send marriage proposals etc. She didn’t want to give away that information, but the game forced her into it. Ends up turning off chat completely and misses the opportunity to gain trust and learn more about the other person. Suggests that it’s a bad idea to include their real name, voice chat, real world location etc in games. Suggests that you build the social system from the beginning. It’s really hard to retrofit. Mentions League of Legends that improved their social system a lot. 
• Friendship mechanics as the core pillar – Build games with the core pillar of helping players to find new friends.

Designing social play for Sky –

• Slower paths, breathing rooms, secrets – Linear and goal oriented levels engaged less social play, so they added slower parts to give players breathing rooms and time to interact. they also added forks and secret places to explore.
• Hold hands – hold hands so one player can control both, as a way to guide the other player. 
• Social play -> cosmetics instead of killing monsters -> looting – wanted a way to show appreciation, a gifting mechanic. added cosmetics to be able to distinguish players from each other, you met a friend and share a moment. but you can’t really tell them apart from the other players. gifts can be used to get costumes. instead of killing monsters to get better loot, it’s social interactions with people to get diversified costumes. 
• Focus on social play – unlocking chat after an hour of play with a different player. it’s easy to confuse doing something together as being social. which activities feel social to do. common coop gameplay is killing monsters or stepping on switches. does not require you to think of the other player. at best leads to a muted feeling, or inconvenience if one of the players mess up. 
• No forced social play – They have double switch doors in the game, but they are all optional, so you can play alone, and then if you find a door you can try to convince other players with emotes to come and open it. They didn’t want to force interactions with other players, and avoid quests like joining a guild or daily quest to send a gift. you can refuse to accept a gift, a way to show investments from both parts.

Ultima Online Post-Mortem – 

• Object simulation – From the outset they were thinking of the game as a vast simulation. abstract property down to a 1 meter scale, you could build anything you wanted, craft anything you wanted, there wouldn’t be much static data. everything could be customized. We didn’t know what was impossible. 
• Promise the Moon – They made their own website without marketing knowing. They promised a huge list of features. Let’s make a true fantasy world where everything is alive, simulated. Where ever single thing persists. Remember when you could drop things on the ground? True consequence, the living virtues were real now, we wouldn’t give you quests now, You had the experience and know how to act righteously. A game where combat crafting and roleplaying was equally important. They promised the moon and it turned out people liked the promises. 50K sales of a beta demo disc for 5$.
• Bounty list / high score – They had big problems with player killing. They remade the system 7 times. The bounty list became like a high score list instead. 
• Reselling environment decoration – Objects would reset when the server rests, players could collect them. You could pick up water, put it into your bucket and fish from it! Candelabras, trees etc. These became rare objects because players always picked them up immediately on server spawns. Then sell them on ebay, gold farming. Free to play was born because we forgot to lock down the candelabra! 
• Death of Lord British – Lord British, everyone had to rebuild their characters when the server wiped, he forgot to check the invulnerability tag once, and walked through a wall of fire and died. And then ran with it, he decided to let the character stay dead. They realized that the game wasn’t about constructing a static world but giving the players the space to construct their own stories.

Value chains in games / how to make it fun to pick up sticks 

• – Hard to playtest a life sim with short prototypes (5s-5 min). required progression, crafting, decoration and dalies. 
• – “long chains of rote economic activity to reach their actual final goal”. 
• – endogenous (self-contained) value networks, value chains, and faucet-and-drain economy. 
• – Value chain text format, 1.[Name] ( – [Resource] & – PlayerTime)| + [Output],2. etc ends with self expression. 
• – Token, source, pools, transforms, sinks from Machinations / the book game mechanics: advanced game design. 
• “value chains focus on a simplified cartoon economy known as a faucet-and-drain economy, defined by strong sources and strong sinks, limited object lifespans and limited circulation of goods. ” 
• – Beginning, source, middle transforms, end sinks. 
• – Constant demand, fewer unexpected feedback loops, easier to explain than real world economics, easier to balance (+/- source or +/- sink). Real world economics have high extraction and production costs of material and goods. Circular. supply chains, storage in warehouses, transportation costs, environmental effects. 
• – Any extra costs can be added as an intentional choice. 

Starcraft 2 e-sport talk

• Minimum number of units – for an e-sport game, 12-15 per race. Dawn of War and Supreme Commander had 60 and 150+ units over 4 races. Starcraft 2 has 45. Confusing to view, hard to scout and make predictions. The feeling when you see what they build and counter it in the next encounter. Want to avoid overlapping units. still get a lot of choices with limited unit pool. 
• Unit differentiation, movers and shooters, extreme stat difference, AoE, size shapes. 
• Upgrade change the relationship – Make upgrades that change the relationships in the game, instead of making the unit stronger at the same role. banelings counter marines, marines with stim pack counter banelings. Unless banelings also get 2 upgrades. 
• degrees of success – How micromanagement and using terrain like choke points vs surrounding enemies can be used to get a spectrum of different performances with the same units, as a skill expression. They tried a number of units, but did not end up working in e-sports, they included them in the campaign instead. Tension curve of a single player mission is different. The enemy is strong at the start, the player grows, eventually the player gets strong enough and can  go and mop up the enemies. Outbreak mission, day night, switches between up and down. Practice league of new players, rocks are blocking paths into the base. 
• Question about CoD prestige – reset your progress, start out fresh, something like that in starcraft leagues? 

Offworld Trading Company – 

• The RTS genre underexplored – RTS games: high APM, fog of war, short matches, combat. There’s examples of games with: no micro, no fog of war, long matches. But none without combat. RTS is underexplored. 
• The marketplace from AoE 2 – The core gameplay is inspired by the marketplace in Age of Empires 2. Buy and sell, prices affect all players. The buy cost is x2 compared to the sell, he changed that, now you can make profit by trading material and wait for the market to change. 
• Resource transformation chart – 13 resources. Ex railroad, resource transformation Chart. Transformations give 2 products, ex 1 byproduct. It adds nuance. adaptive gameplay, it’s not like a RPG when the player gets to decide in isolation, you need to adapt based on the situation. 
• Random starting prices on items with color – He tried to have the starting price all random but it was a high cognitive load on the player at the start of the game. Instead these are a base price and some prices are halves and others doubles. These are color coded with red and green. 
• Meme moment – There’s random auctions that offer resource tiles or black markets items. There’s a tournament moment that became a meme. Both players need iron because it was really overpriced at that time. A random auction with iron tile pops up. The player that gets it wins. Usually you bid up to 20k, max 60k. They bid 180k, 400k is usually enough to end the game. the player that won got so much in depth and his market value collapsed, and the other player could buy his company and end the game. None of them had been in that situation before. You need to figure it out on the fly. 
• Blackmarket – boosting or disrupting one-use effects. Opponents’ choices have a high impact on the game. 
• HQ/Races – What if you choose your headquarters/race after the game begins? When you are working in a genre sometimes you are not aware of the baggage you are inheriting. HQ, change the dynamic of the market. “Vanilla” robots – consume fuel instead of life support. scavengers, carbon instead of steel. Scientists – can put buildings directly on a resource tile, instead of having a pump on water and sending the water to the building. Special buildings, leach resources from a tile next to it. hacker array, creates a signal that there’s a resource shortage, but players can’t tell if it’s real or not. also the building has a hologram so you don’t know if anyone has it. Situations when there’s two shortages close after each other, was it real or not? Signal to the player to take action. Blackmarket, when someone buys a resource it goes up for everyone, but it never goes down in that match. If you know that the prices goes up you know that a player is up to something. 
• Combat – They reintroduced combat through the black market, don’t wanting it to dominate. More like a side mechanic only. Spy, reveal holograms. Goon squad, block black market effect, reveal who did it to everyone, and give you the item they used. you can’t place that many, but the threat is constant. 
• You buy out other players – You can buy parts of their stocks, and gain money from them, multiple players can do that. If someone buys 60% they are out of the game, and an AI continues to control them. You can play aggressively to buy someone out, or turtle to buy your own stocks, or put it all into the business to expand the production. 
• They let the player play single-player games while waiting in the ranked queue. 
• Starting positions, the price goes down until someone picks it. 
• Early Access – They had new features as toggleable options in Early Access. They organized official tournaments with the new version, and people wanted to practice with it. If you want to participate in the tournament you have to stream, that’s how some of our players became Twitch streamers. High price in early access, but what they got was what he calls high quality players. They put time into the game and are nice to work with. AE is better with fewer players. AE players automatically got upgraded to the deluxe edition when the game launched. 
• Price tells a story – why they made the game, price tells a story, there’s always a reason why something has that price, demand, government policy, cultural factor. Find out why something costs, instead of just complaining about it. 
• well it depends, lists factors for adaptive gameplay. always give people the information they need when they need them, ex build an iron mine, there’s lines going to the iron and other material. 
• What is the future of RTS – he feels done with them, have played them so much, but still want the feeling when a few friends gets together over the lunch plays a short game, there’s some back and forth and then you can talk about it afterwards. that rts asks too much of the players, control multiple units spread all over the map, and macro and at the same time you try to get into the head of your opponents. MOBASs are just the micro, you have just one unity and can focus on that. Offworld is just the macro. 
• Blog post – http://www.designer-notes.com/?p=1147 OTC Designer Notes #16: HQ Types.

Jackbox Games – 

• A game at the movie theater – They tried to make their first app for movie theaters to use before movies. Turns out movie theaters want to show commercials before the movie instead of paying game developers to entertain their audience. How to design for 100 people with a phone and a shared large screen? 
• The party pack – They had one game and wanted to sell a game at a higher price point on consoles. They made a game collection, 5 games for 25$, 5$ each. It’s weird and it’s a game, if you can call it a game, that became kind of a punch line at jackbox games. The party pack was a useful format because it allowed them to make multiple different games instead of just releasing sequels to the same trivia game. People ask all of the time, why don’t you release these games individually. It’s hard for people to buy into new game ideas. You need to market and explain each individual game. It’s easier to give new games a try if you already have them in the box. 
• Worst and best at the same time – People find their niche, each game was declared the best and the worst by different reviewers. 
• Discarded prototypes – 5-10 games for each game that makes it into production. Some interesting examples at the end of different prototype versions.

God of War (2018) – 

• Combat variation – Combat a mix of: traditional arena scenario, wide linear scenario, special rule scenario and boss battle. 
• Narrative – cinematics no cut, slower sections with banter, environmental storytelling, character animation. 
• Exploration – large wide linear space, no locked camera compared to earlier games, camera is genre, where you place the camera affects which type of game you are making. Bonus puzzles, optional fights, connects to games hub world. 
• Metrics – 1,2,3 meters. 3 meter edges are used as a breaking point between exploration and combat, etc. 
• Introduce abilities – Each level has a theme and unlocks a new ability, that ability can then be used to enhance the theme. How will the new mechanic work with combat, exploration and narrative? Good examples of prototyping for shock arrows (blows up the terrain and creates a path forward). Formate gives the player a clear exploration break. 3 / 4 of a level uses the newest item, boss fight, get a new item and tutorial area, exploration, new level with the new item. 
• Hub vs Open world – Difference between hub and open world. A specific layout, spoke wheel, ex Shadow of the colossus. 
• Skill gates – Better to fail multiple times at an early puzzle that tests a critical skill, then to play far into the game without having learned that skill.

Ghost of Tsushima – Honoring the Blade and Lethality – Focus on the “time to kill” values.

• There’s a samurai trope when they hit one or a few sword slashes and a rain of blood. high lethality, low damage sponge. The challenge was to keep a few hits to kill and have more challenging enemies in later areas and meaningful upgrades. 
• They removed RPG hp scaling, players were saying that their sword didn’t feel sharp. They instead added block and stagger. There’s still some HP and damage scaling but max 10 hits. 
• They made these charts that show hits to kill different enemies with different gear progression. What are acceptable values? They found that players were more acceptable with a few extra hits, like 5-7 if they didn’t show the health bar to you. They only show it when the enemy had low HP, and their stagger meter. 
• Difficulty didn’t change hp or stagger values, instead changed damage values. 
• Aggressive timing required for dodging and parry. Lethality hit, players die in 1-2 hits, but they also deal more damage and kill enemies in 1-2 hits. 
• Less progression with these tuning. 
• Players wanted longer fights for boss fights, added hp bar, phases.

Star Wars Galaxy Online Post-Mortem – 

• How to make Jedi rare? 
• Generated custom to player group and missions – terrain generation, use a tool to layer different types of terrain on a grid that would later be generated at run time, to save up storage space. dynamic set pieces, because the terrain was generated on the fly, a ship could crashland and players could enter it as a quest, tailored for their group. 
• Recover stress in bars – You get stressed from combat and need to hang out in a bar and listen to music to remove the stress. 
• Deep crafting system, player driven economy. 
• Over hype – Don’t go out with information too early about the game, only just before beta, people set up expectations in their head, and they are hard to change later on, perception is reality. launch, no content, bad combat. IT was a great sandbox experience. Player housing and player cities.
• Fraction pvp – You could put down bases which can be destroyed with the generated terrain system. Unlock these moments when you would be inside a city and suddenly there would be a battle erupting around you. 
• Player driven shops, 1/3 of players had one up and running. 
• They made a patch to revamp the combat system, but it’s not a good idea to change the inner loops of a live game. 
• Class system, you can’t pick and choose skills, like in WoW. 
• Patched out pets – Turned off pets. It made newspaper headlines because of how much players disliked it. lots of players left. Later on old players would join the dev team and add back things to the sandbox experience. 
• Everyday life in a virtual world – At the time people didn’t like the idea of being common people, but that was what players remembered: to live an everyday life in a virtual world, like in games like Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley. 
• Idle game – Usually you had to mine all day in games to get resources, the feature to put down a mine and come back the next day became the basis for farmville and facebook games. 
• Decoration – Minecraft. games built on decorating hoses. 
• Blog posts – Star Wars Galaxies Design Process

Gauntlet Arcade Post-Mortem – 

• Field test – Put the game on a field test. If it didn’t get enough coins it wasn’t released. 60% of games fully developed were never released: And only 10% of released games were profitable, aka made back their costs. 
• Oversaturation of arcade games – The video game crash, over saturated the market, there were games everywhere, no where to put games. Dentists and doctors offices. In 1984. In 1978 games were sold mostly to arcade halls, 1983 mostly to street locations. by 1985 it was impossible to sell to street locations, they would have been full of old used games instead. 
• Coin cost and multiplayer – 25 cents coins, 20-180 seconds, 59 cents would kill a game, 1 dollar was impossible. 4 players for 1 dollar play for 2 min. Players could drop in any time, no need to wait for other players to finish. 
• Sharing coins? – Each player would put in 1 coin in their slot to play, marketing didnt want that at first, They wanted players to share coins, have hp distributed. Coin input slots would break easily, it was risky to have 4 slots, 1 per player. But it made it straightforward for players to input the coin and get it themselves. 
• move or shoot with one stick. Compared to Robotron’s move and shoot with twinsticks. 
• Patched endless trick – There was a trick so you could play forever. They made a patch which reduced the health for 1 player and 2 players, and reduced the food drops the further you get. Asteroid also had a patch to reduce long play sessions. People would play it less with it, so they removed it quickly. 
• Early game with character classes.
• Takeaways from the arcade area for current game designers? – what would you say is  from students from the arcade era? I’m not sure if I can answer that, the game industry has changed a lot since then. people would say things like: if you can play it with a beer in one hand, easy to learn, hard to master, that was the classic one. For me it was, you want to make a game when people walk up to it and they say, I know what to do, you don’t need to read the rules or give them instructions. For arcade games that was absolutely necessary. There’s no instruction booklet or help menus. you just put in a quarter and if you didn’t figure it out or didn’t think that you would figure it out you just walked away. For all great games you would walk up and know what to do. If there appeared to be lots of strategies, “should I do this or that.” You want to put in coins to find different strategies to find out what works.

Psychic Detective, FMV, 1996 – 

• Measure character strength based on the game state – Groundhog day, what a movie would be like as an interactive movie. In the conclusion, you play a board game with the bad guy where each side takes turns picking 4 characters from the movie, and based on their current state they have a different strength vs the other characters. You place them on the board and the stronger one stays, the other disappears. The side with the most points at the end “wins”.
• List of endings – You get different endings, and get a list of them at the end of the game, which you have and have not triggered. 
• Interactive fiction feedback loop – The feedback loop is more delayed in interactive fiction compared to other games. You might get a response in the next scene. The characters you get on the gameboard in the end are the ones that had a key role in that round, some some other random characters. You replay the game, to form an opinion for the end game, and some of them were right, through the feedback mechanism. It’s possible to experiment and change a few actions in the game to end up in a certain way that they want, as a set up for the end game. 
• Inside the minds – When allowing the player to jump into the minds of others, an intuitive way of navigating a realm of character driven possibilities. (Did this game inspire Psychonauts? I have memories that Time Shafier confirms it in a Doublefine documentary)
• Dev time – 2 years dev time. 3 months of writing, 6 months of writing, 20 days of shooting. a year of editing and coding.

Furcadia – 

• Script custom rules – Dragon Speak, scripting language to make level with custom rooms, condition and effect, no way to crash, no loops function etc, select commands from a list.
• Combat MUDs vs Social MUDs – There were combat MUDs, and social MUDs at that time. If you have a combat MUD people would usually talk about finding groups, loot, and what monsters to kill. Social MUDs are more free form, people would talk about anything. (What other types of MUDs existed?)
• Non-competitive – The game isn’t competitive so there’s no reason to cheat, tbh I think making the game non-competitive removes a lot of the potential players that might behave badly. Also a lot of players were into the creative side instead of competitive, making custom levels (dreams) and commissioned profile pictures. 
• Helper players – First time user experience, when you login the first time, there will be someone there asking if you want help. It’s run by a group of volunteers. They made a guild called The Circle which would help other players. They had a dream called Sanctuary which contained 25% of all players on the day and 50% of the players on the night, when there were fewer players. 
• Griefing filters –  people can write “ignore” to stop hearing someone. If a lot of players write “ignore” to the same person there will come a message attached when they speak to other players, “other players have recently ignored this player, type /ignore to do it as well”. If a lot of players continue to do it, that player will be ignored by default. Instead of putting bad behaving players into a specially designed room, or giving clear feedback when other players mute them, which they might see as a personal challenge, they get no feedback and might continue for a while without any reactions. 
• Role playing in other games – Supporting role playing in other games might improve the community as well. WoW split up with specific roleplaying servers, but it’s not the same thing even there.

Chris Crawford’s dragon speech GDC 1992 – 

• Dreaming, fantasies and planning – Fantasize is looking towards the sky, unconstrained by reality. Planning is all about practicality. Dreaming is about doing both, it’s very hard to have both perspectives and do it well. You fantasize about a girl, practicalities would be where you would live and who would do the dishes? 
• Media overlap – List different things that could be in games, but a lot of them could as well be done in other mediums. No point reinventing the wheel with cruder materials. 
• Interactivity as reproducible dialogue – Kittens learn to hunt by playing with other kittens. Not by listening to someone telling them the formula and drawing jumping curves on a black board. Mass media is passive. A dialogue with a lecturer would be more effective, but it doesn’t work on a large scale, mass media is more efficient. Making a program can capture the effectiveness of interactivity and the efficiency of mass distribution. To automate interactivity. 
• Example 1 – What game lacks are humans, facial experience, reactions, emotions, Gossip 1983, had these basic things, but was primitive. 
• Example 2 – Balance of the planet, environmental policy and trade-offs. rejected by the market, industry and other game designers. It’s the closest thing to art, but it’s just not fun. 
• Games for a ladder of escalated depth – Game literacy. Players want to climb the ladder. There’s different types of games. Each game has a market window. It’s easier to sell games to dedicated gamers, they know how to find games. Everyday people don’t know about them, and you never get to know why they don’t like it. Dedicated players want more depth, that builds on what they learned from the last game, to continue climbing the ladder. Crawford’s dream is about breath, different types of human emotions. It’s an interesting conflict.

How to talk about game in public topics – 

• Less of an effect then TV – TV has no significant connection to violent behaviour, and studies have shown that games have less of a connection then TV…? 40% of leisure time is spent watching TV. 
• Leisure is political – Attacking a leisure is to chip away at a culture and enforce your own culture. And we have less leisure time now, with an overwork culture. 
• Replicated results – Game and violence gets a lot of critique, scrutiny, which is good. Some tests are starting to get replicated results. The marshmallow test wasn’t replicable, if you resist the marshmallow it’s an indicator of grit and success in life, but it turned out to have less to do with grit and more to do with socioeconomic background. 
• Different types of expressed violence – Barrie Gunter (2016) book: Does playing games make players more violent? Violence is not one thing: violent thoughts, violent feelings, violent behaviour. 
• Substitutes for testing violent behaviour – You can’t test violent behaviour because of ethical reasons. Instead you have substitutes: how loud are you speaking, how much hot sauce do you put on your food…?! 
• Risk factors – Most agree that it depends on risk factors, a long list of things. 
• Problem with meta analysis – The problem is if you take multiple crappy studies and put them together, you just get one big crappy study. Problematic when studies don’t show age spans of participants. 
• Ask: “What do people do with games in their life”, instead of asking “What does games do with people?” 
• Talk only about the positive with exercise – When we talk about exercise we don’t talk about the negatives of exercise addiction, we talk about the benefits. In the same way talk about the things that are good with games. A study prescribing 30 min Bejeweled for state stress and general trait stress. It had the same effect as low doses of benzo and vanity(?). Also people might skip taking their drugs, but people would play more of the game than what was prescribed. 
• Horse shoe shape and depression – Those that don’t play games and thoes that play a lot of games experience depression more often than people that play moderate amounts. 
• Not talking about hard topics is seeding a void – Sometimes you are afraid to say something that might get quoted on twitter in the wrong way. If you don’t say anything, you are seeding a void for other people to fill in in that discussion that might have less experience in the subject matter. 
• Public interest and research funding – What we say in the discussion in the media affects what might get funded for research down the line.

Skylanders and Playtesting with Children – 

• 6 vs12 years perspective – They compare the perspectives of their reactions when seeing a sign for motion sensor tap water. 6 year old: “Cool laser!” The 12 year old focuses on how it’s used to accomplish a goal, aka wash your hands. 
• Rating levels – They used a likert scale with 3 steps, with faces to describe the emotion. They ask how each level would be rated, and creates a graph of the quality of the game. And repeats it multiple times after the level has been improved. Testing all characters in the same test level, to focus on the difference between characters and not the level.
• Example of character issues – Rattle Shake, a playetest commenting: “Is he shooting his snake babies?!” A backdash move was also confusing: they wanted to use it to attack, play aggressive, but they would sometimes dash off platforms or into enemies instead. 
• Daycare – Parents would use it as daycare. Drop them off and pick them up after work. They would get pizza. One kid that disliked a level so much he asked if he could go home. They said no, they promised his parents to give him pizza.

Pippin Barr, The Sequel to the Artist is Present – 

• A game about performance art. 80 by 60 resolution, sierra style.
• Play for 1 hour – you sign a contract that you can’t leave until after an hour, in the game you hold down the shift key all the time, if you lift it for too long you fall asleep and wake up an hour later when everything has ended. also you can’t leave, some room wraps around, 
• Gaminess – Walk slowly, press once to move one frame in the animation. 
• New age crystals with an ambiguity effect– There were a lot of new age crystals, he didn’t believe in them and didn’t want the game to represent something he couldn’t stand for. The crystals are in the game, but they have no visible effect, it’s up to the player to interpret the ambiguity. 
• Binary performance – Includes a digital representation of a performance. It changes when it’s no longer in the physical world. It’s about climbing a ladder up and down for hours, which is hard to do IRL, but it’s simple for a sprite to repeat the same animation. There’s no variation, no sweat, determination or human suffering. 
• Guest book – afterwards, you get to write down your experience.

Assault Android Cactus – 

• Battery system – Players might play passive with a life system. You want to move around, but the system rewards players that stay in the back and play safe. They went for a battery system which drains all the time, enemies drop battery pickups, you need to pick them up to continue playing. Encourages players to play more aggressively. 
• No dead-end strategies – They didn’t want to include any strategic dead ends. If something works when you start playing the game, it should also work ok when you get better. 
• S+ combo rank as optional objective – There is an optional objective in the game to chain combos between every enemy to gain a S+ rank. As an incentive to replay levels. When the battery is about to run out, you are in a high intense zone where every second counts. It’s the same when trying to keep a S+ rank going. 
• Fighting game like characters – Characters like in fighting games, appearance and playstyles appeal to different players. Community discussing tier list of characters. 
• Battery hint text – They added a text over batteries, after playing with kids that didnt understand that you need to pick them up to continue playing. There’s a bunch of things to collect in a level, but these things are a little more important to collect. The text only appears the first 5 times you pick up a battery or when you miss one and let it disappear.

Storytelling in BIOSHOCK: Empowering Players to Care about Your Stupid Story – 

• Nobody cares about your stupid story – If they are predisposed of not caring, how do we make them care? Details sound like hard work, but they really aren’t your friend, they drag you down. How to choose which details are important and what isn’t, what you should exclude? 
• Narrative details – Video games have come a long way of rendering detailed digital worlds. They are a good way of presenting narrative. Players spend time being engaged in the world. There are so many missed opportunities in the primary gameplay experience to tell a story. An early version of Bioshock had a lot of details. It looks like the final game, but it doesn’t say anything about the world of Rapture. 
• Build a giant slab of stone – Sculpture starts with a giant slab of stone and chip away until they have a sculpture. Game developers first have to build the giant slab and then chip away. The problem is, it takes so much work to build it so you don’t want to remove things from it, it’s so difficult to do. They started out with a complex story and removed details, only a few characters ended up in the final story. 
• Limited narrative interface of games – If it was a novel maybe it would have become a bad novel, but the interface you have in games with the audience is actually very limited. 
• Each character represents a concept – Who are your main characters and what do they want? Each character gets to represent a single concept in the game.
  • A person experiencing the war and revolution first hand, 
  • someone representing the ideal of Rapture that could have worked. 
  • Little sisters and Big daddy, a parent losing her daughter. 
• Challenging to have these characters you love and focus them, don’t allow them to go out of that restricted space. 
• Push vs pull information – Movie cutscenes push the information to the player, video games strength is the interactivity. Let the player pull the information. Aren’t players going to miss that? Half-Life pioneering that. You have to accept that they are going to miss most of it, but that’s ok because the players that engage with the narrative are going to be passionate about that stuff because they made the decision, because it wasn’t forced onto them. 
• Option to opt out – Give options for players to opt out of the story. If you have a deep narrative you have to make the game playable for people that don’t care. 3 levels of story: 1. objectives, basic understanding of characters and relationships. 3. The equivalent of a kid writing Nirvana lyrics in his notebooks in the corner of the classroom. 
• List things games don’t do well and avoid it! – Fill the audio space with as much as possible. If you can’t do it well, don’t do it. For System Shock, list things that games don’t do well and avoid it. You are inside a spaceship, you can’t go out of it. There’s no characters that you can talk to, most of them are dead. 
• Keep it familiar – Bioshock was a period piece, people knew that time period of the music etc, which keeps the world familiar, even if its an underwater city. Your movie can be about an alien going to earth or a human going to an alien world, it can’t be an alien going to an alien world, there’s no frame of reference. 
• Simple plot – if you want players to follow along your plot it has to be really fucking simple, act 1 get to a sub and escape rapture. Act 2, the sub blew up, I guess we need to kill Ryan. Indiana Jones, if you stop him any time in the movie, what does he say: I’m looking for the ark. In every scene: “looking for the ark”. 
• Detective story and details – everyone is playing a metagame while reading: who did it? Bioshock, you get down to this place, everybody is dead, what happened? Doom could only render enemies and pickups, the tech allows us to render a lot of details of none important things, and let players look through them. In Clue if you only have the dining room, the table and the wrench, it’s not a detective story, other things are needed as well. Now we can render the shaff. 
• Focus the story on the gameplay elements – big daddy, little sisters, morality arc, plasmids, what people do with their bodies. 
• Preface characters before they enter the scene – If the player isn’t an outside observer but a participant involved in it, he will be a lot more engaged. Odd couple theater play: it takes 20 min before one of the characters enters the scene, at that time the audience is ready and have a lot of understanding about him. Stainbeck, you get a lot of information, when he finally arrives he’s just a dude with a machine gun. 
• Mystery Balloon – Storytelling, you want to answer questions about what’s going on in the world. Answering questions isn’t as interesting as asking them. Intro with the lighthouse, we didn’t answer these questions right away, we kept them going. mystery balloon. It’s like a half filled helium balloon which is leaking and shrinking. You want to tap it up before it’s empty, but don’t fill it up too much and people will get lost. Even with all the mystery you had a basic understanding that people could follow through. Lose Robinson Crusoe, stranded on an island. 
• Story coming late in the process – games take years to make and things change. He would get inspired by what he saw, and would go and write it down. all these opportunities that come up, if you write the script a year ahad. you aren’t going to be able to integrate the story and the gameplay enough. Everybody knows that we do balance changes late in the game, the story is no different. Posters in the game world. outside of the combat and physics, games are very deterministic, you would need combat simulation but for narrative. They listed gameplay objects and objectives early, but changed the details around that. Mission flow was messed with because of gameplay problems but not because of the story. 
• Unreliable narrator – The audience perception of events isn’t accurate. Postmodern joke that the player don’t have control, set that up, but there’s no mechanics to give the player control afterwards.

E.T. on Atari 2600 – 

• Controls – You only have 4 directions and 1 button. 
• Context sensitive actions – The button is used for context sensitive actions and there’s different activation zones. The zones are invisible until you step on them and are randomized each run. 
• Main Goal – You collect 4 parts to assemble your phone so you can call home and go to the forest and get picked up by a UFO. The phone parts are scattered inside pits, which you normally would avoid. There’s a question mark activation zone in each area which reveal which pit the parts are inside. 
• FBI Enemies – there’s a FBI agent running around and chasing you, he takes you into a prison which you can escape from, There’s a call for help zone which scares them away. another zone which makes you run. 
• Pits – If you fall into a pit you have to mash a button to levitate out of it. 
• Game length and replayability – The game takes about 4 minutes to complete if you know how it works. There’s 3 modes, 1 without enemies which is trivial, one with 1 enemy, and one with 2 enemies. 
• Level design – There’s only 6 screens in the game, 4 areas with holes, 1 street area where they take you to and lock you in a prison and 1 forest area where the UFO will pick you up. The screens are arranged in a cube formation and the hole areas are randomized, the street and forest area are always on the opposite sides of each other. Aka the hole areas are all connected to each other and to the forest and the street area which are both a dead end. 
• Worst game ever? – E.T. for Atari 2600 is infamous for being one of the worst games in history, selling so badly and single handedly crashing the game market in 1983. Although after hearing how it works, it doesn’t look that bad, but it also has to do with the hype and what players expected and how they could figure out the gameplay.

Games that inspired leading innovators GDC 2012 – 

• Pinball construction set – software toy, construction, system and intuitive GUI. 
• Seven cities of gold – Simulate players imagination, interesting subject was a kid, random maps, mix genres and open world.
• Zelda – Gold cartage and secrets
• Pac-Man – Ghosts with personality, Different from shooting and racing, Pills, Stealth genre
• limitless possibilities of game design – And it shows that game design can be anything you can think of, Pac-Man just blew everything out of the mental box the whole industry was in.
• Danger of games becoming self referential – We built games on our experience as kids, now games are built on games that you liked. Encourage game designers to reach out to their experience, what do they think is cool other then other games they have played. Link to notes

Path of Exile interview – 

• Skill tree signals the complexity – The skill tree is overwhelming for new players, but it doesn’t matter too much. The game signals to the player instantly that it might be too complex and not a game for them.
• New players start with how to guide – It’s common nowaday that new players start by watching guides instead of testing different strategies themselves. They know how to play the game optimally, but they might not understand why. For example they might aim for an end game build, but they don’t understand that they need to play the game with items that’s easier to find until they get the key items for the build.
• Flawless economy – They prioritize a flawless economy above all else, prevent cheating etc, because the important items are for the long term. Bad server connections are bad for a while, but if the economy is bad players’ trust is lost and they then have no reason to continue playing the game. 
• Lock hard content behind resources – Players want hard content but if they play it and it’s too hard for them it feels bad. What they did was to lock hard content behind resource locks. The player needs to collect lots of things to try it out, and if they aren’t ready for it, they will lose the resources spent. That leads to instead of playing it, players will wait out when they are ready for it. 
• Play a league and take a break – The game is split up in leagues over 13 weeks. Players play it focused for a short time until their character is maxed out. They then take a break, play something else, until the next season starts. It’s different from other games that encourage players to only play one game at the time. 
• Don’t chase fads and trends – What would you recommend for game creators, don’t chase fads and trends, make the game you are knowledgeable about and innovate in that direction.

Mark Roosvalt, podcast constructing criticism 

• Don’t attack the person, mind the tone, don’t write too long posts, detailed enough. Build up or teardown the world. 
• Feedback is a very valuable asset for creative people, if done right. 
• Leave positive feedback as well, hard to know when something is done right. would it be better if it wasn’t there?
• In any creative process, you get an intuition that something is needed, but when you add it you might sometimes add other things as well which might not be necessary, feedback makes you reconsider if it was the right decision. 
• Educating the audience so they can give more detailed feedback. writing lots of articles about mtg. As writer one of the most powerful things is when you write something and a person takes that to heart and applies it to their life.

Shadow Complex – 

• Xbox Arcade vs AAA – Xbox arcade, early digital distribution. Why would you want a cheap version of God of War when you can go out and buy the full version. Make unique experiences. Find what a small game can do that a large can won’t do. Abandoned genre. 
• Rapidly prototype the entire game – Movies don’t use vertical slices, they make movie scripts and animatics, Rough versions of the whole experience. 
• Playtest the map in illustrator – They made the whole map in illustrator in scale, and moved around a player maker with jump distance and distance for abilities to test how the level would flow. The whole team would playtest it over a few weeks, and make iterations. integrate mechanics into each other. Foam, shoot to jump on. You can also stick grenades into it and grapple hook it. 
• Development time – 2 years development time, 10 developers, 3 programmers, 6 artists. import the illustrator map as collision directly into the game. 
• First impression stepping – Trial version on xbox arcade, make the first 5s impressive, aka title screen, then 30s, 5 min, 30min, 90 min. make the demo awesome, but leave the player hanging.

How do you define success in game development? 

• list of different types of success 
• Intuition and analysis matrix –  wrong intuition, wrong analysis, right analysis, right intuition, harder to describe when you are no longer conscious about your competence, you have been doing it for so long so it becomes an intuition. 
• Indie dev vs AAA definition of success – Did you notice any difference between indie developers and AAA developers? Yes, indie developers haven’t lost hope, the magic of game development. AAA saw it more as a business, a small part of the machine. Indie devs felt like they had more agency. More indie devs wanted to participate in the studie, AAA answered: “no, we are not sure what you are going to write.” Indie dev: “anything is possible as long as I work on this thing, eventually I will be successful.” And that was amazing to hear. 
• Book – She wrote a book about it: Why we design games: Frameworks from indie to AAA by Dana Ruggiero

Dreamscape, Combat on a budget – 

• Elemental attacks – Added elemental attacks, combine 2 for an automatic critical attack, adds a lot of depth without increasing the amount of components. 
• Damaged states – Damage states like knockback and knock up etc, adds an extra factor to attacks, forcing the player to shift focus between enemies. Some enemies could be immune to them for variety. 
• Switch lag – Switch has 8 frames of hardware latency, added a large input window for latency. 
• Interrupting actions – All offensive actions can be interrupted by defensive actions.
• Movement from an attack – bake in forward momentum into attacks, harder to miss an attack because of too short range if the character also moves forward with the attack. 
• Hit reactions – Hit reaction animations, instant, no blending, the snappiness feels impactful. 
• 20% extra speed up – Playtester made a video of the game speed up by 20 percent, they tested it and players agreed it was an improvement. 
• Animation time saving – used animation sequencer for spawning attack effects, used a lot of asset store effects and models which were repurposed to fit in the game. didn’t animate attacks back to idle because players would usually interrupt the attacks anyway, saving a lot of work time. 
• Dodge variations – you can find variants of dodge moves as roguelike upgrades.

Load Out Systems – 

• Loadout vs decks in card games –  Loadouts are 6-8 options, while deck ex in Hearthstone 30 cards to fill. 
• Extending an RTS? – It’s hard to add new content to a RTS, loadout system is an option for that. 
• Fixed units – Some units are fixed and a few slots can be picked by the player, to give each race some identity and allow for flexibility, but also giving players some all around and some specialized units, that might be too niche to pick every match. Company of heroes 3, battlegroup, choose before the match and decide between 2 options at a few points in the game. 
• Decided before the match – Risk to give too much influence of the loadout chosen before the match, blind counter, one build counters the other and decides the match before it even started. Since RTS have rock-paper-scissor units, picking different units can have a large impact on matches. 
• Unlocking – How to handle unlocking of units, aka meta progression? RTS PvP players tend to dislike microtransactions formats with soft / hard currency which are used in other types of games. “I have this, which you can’t have because you didn’t pay/grind”.
• Unit shops in maps – Warcraft 3 had random item drops from creeps, and shops inside that map that sell limited elite units and items, as an extra component to mix up gameplay when switching maps.

Game demos, skip to 15:00 for the how to section.

• Shareware heroes – Book, how to make demos, from the 90s.
• In media res – Not just a slice of the game, it’s a condensed version of the game, starting right at the action. Amiga shoot em up game Xeon 2, they give you all of the power ups right from the start so you know how the game will play later on.
• Show the goal of the demo – a map with a boss fight in the end. A game “Don’t press the button” and the words are said by the narrator. The demo can’t just end abruptly.
• Show what they will get in the full version – Have a full world map that is grayed out, include menu options you can’t press etc. Tell them what is not in the demo.
• Call to action – He suggests that you have the call to action to buy the demo in 4 places: start screen, pause screen, quit screen and end of demo. (add a image of you and your cat, humanize the developer)
• Show your earlier games – Cross promoting your earlier game in the demo message. 
• Too early discord – If you make your discord too early, there’s nothing to talk about, an empty party. Do it when the demo goes live. 
• Keep the demo up – Put up and pull it down the demo after festivals? Streamers can’t play it if it goes down.
• Add analytics – Add analytics in the demo
• Feedback in-game – Ability to leave feedback inside the game.
• Playtime 30 min – Median playtime is 12 minutes, but the median indie game doesn’t sell. Top 75% sales have 25 minutes demo, and higher have 30-60 min demos. But it’s not about game time, but actually how long players play it. 
• Chill-play – A game with 15 min play time, asked how to improve it on reddit, the game was too hard, so he changed default difficulty to easy, people played it for 38 minutes median. You think people on steam is hardcore but they want to chill-play games.
• Linear demos work well – Some people don’t think that linear games work well with demos, compared to roguelikes etc with high replay value. They work well, people play through them, they can end on a narrative cliffhanger. Experimental, or games with joke mechanics might not benefit from demos, since the demo gives the full experience.

How generalists win in the information age – 

• Have high energy levels – Exercising improves test scores. It feels like play for you and work for all others.
• Products with no marginal costs of reproduction – Code or media. 
• Writing skill – Meta skill, writing, putting down a clear thought. If you can explain your ideas in a structured way, make presentations etc, people can understand it and will give you money or… anything! 
• Learning new technologies – The ultra meta skill, being good with computers, code, finding things in search engines, learn programs quickly, and have an understanding of what other tools exist, so you know what is possible to learn when it’s needed.
• Humans are tool builders – The fastest running animal per calories. Humans are not in the top, but humans on a bike are on the top. Humans are tool builders, to amplify efforts. Steve Jobs: “For me a computer has always been a bicycle of the mind, something that takes us far beyond our inherent abilities.” 
• Great division of distractions – “In the future there will be a great division of those who can acquire new skills and discipline the minds, and those who are irrevocably distracted by all the media around them and can never focus enough to learn.” Robert Greene. 

WoW and what we left behind – 

• Few Modes – Current WoW has multiple parallel activities. Compared to vanilla which only had quests, dungeons and raids, and later added PvP arena. You are stuck in a tunnel doing one thing at the time, and raiding required 40 people and a lot of setup with gear and consumables, it was impossible to do if you only played a few days a week. 
• Social Dependencies – It was hard to play alone, the game required other players. Everquest was more of that, but it’s still a lot easier and safer to complete quests as 2 players, and require less grinding when switching zones. That concept doesn’t work if most players are max leveled, there’s no one left to level up with. 
• Mundane rotation of activities – He mentions that current WoW’s list of activities can become mundane when a player switches between all things, like a rotation. It’s not because you want to switch, but because you have to do it, and it’s all just a number of small tasks. You log in, do them one by one and then you are done. 
• Openness of grinding – He describes grinding as a way for the player to decide what they do, instead of following a quest. Maybe these are only a few good optional ways to grind, but it gives the illusion of openness, the player still needs to make the decision of where to do it.

Lists of resources / More things I haven’t watched / read yet

• Jonathan Blow talks
• Experimental Game Workshop – Chronology
• Postmortem playlist
• UX talks
• Game UI database – Lots of images for menus and GUI.
• Video game library – Online site with video game related books.
• Narrascope – Narrative game convention talks.
• Psychgeist games and psychology
• Game dev resources – Compilation table.
• Jason Rohorer design articles
• 2d level design, long list of references
• Another spreadsheet of design videos
• Notion site with UX resources
• Ethics in games, youtube channel with podcasts
• Game user research
• Tom francis design videos
• Practica talks from NYGC – Interdisciplinary with game design thematic.
• Game user research podcast

Marketing

Pitch a game to a publisher – All the parts of a short pitch aimed towards publishers.

Tips for submitting games to IGF –

• Might be good just to get the game in front of a lot of people in the jury. 
• Say everything about your game, even if it might spoil it. 
• They only play the first part so say if there’s something good in the first 30 min. 
• Include debugging so they can skip parts to see more of the game. 
• Include mail or twitter so people can contact you. 
• Getting feedback isn’t guaranteed, but some people might leave feedback anyway. 

Reviewing game dev kickstarters

Steam sales numbers comparing 2017 to 2018. 500 to 50 sold games on average. removing all the crap, 2000 on average. pick a higher price. 

Popular genres on steam 2022 version

Article about how to sell your games to web platforms in 2019

Steam statistics for genres and sales

How to borrow money to make games – It’s not hard if you are good at making games. People have money and want to lend it to creative people. The problem is to find them. Most people will use up the money without completing the game. Show that you have something interesting and a direction.

Thread about marketing apps for games

Marketing for games, is your game a feather or a bowling ball? – Marketing can lift the game in varying degrees, but the game then has to live on its own, depending on how fast it falls. 
Steam, are great games being ignored? – Doesn’t seem like it.

About green lighting indie games – Basically, scope budget, build a game that stands as is but can be expanded, make a game with a pitch that sells itself. He gets questions from people that leave their jobs, use their life savings to build a game that looks like everything else, stops halfway because they ran out of money, and asks: what’s the next step? There’s no good next step, you should have explored different paths earlier.

What game can you build with 100k? Shovel knight cost more than 300k, by multiple skilled team members. 1 person full time in 1 year in the US, or a few team members in other countries with lower living costs.

Game dev Twitter tips. Aida format

Curious Tidbits / All click bait:y videos that turned out to be interesting

How to run online conferences – Make it asynchronous and spread it out over a week. 

• Recorded – Everyone records the lectures and adds them in a playlist on youtube. There’s a schedule with 2h per day. 
• Discord chat for questions – After you watch it, there’s a discord channel for each talk where you can ask questions, and the speaker can reply when they have time. Everyone can read the questions when they watch the talk at their own pace and ask other questions if it hasn’t already been answered. 
• No timezone or breaking routines – You don’t have to adapt to the timezones of other countries, or skip other responsibilities when traveling. 

Chinese menus with Column A and B – You combine things from column A and B into a meal. It’s an interesting format for setting up restaurant menus, letting the customer pick what they want, mixing and matching in different combinations.

Japanese counting technique, Acabus – It’s like a competition, calculating high numbers within a time limit. They have rankings like in go and karate, with kue and dan, improving requires a lot of practice. 

Flat hierarchy – A flat hierarchy is supposed to be even, but there’s a power vacuum and some people then get to have a higher influence. If you advertise that company structure in your job search there’s 25% less women applying. A company needs management when there’s around 20-30 employees. It’s easier to have a management structure up from the beginning, instead of having to set it up later when the company has grown and there’s a higher need for it.

Borrow a random library books with different wrappings based on genres

Console bingo – Play one game on every console you own.

Why obvious lies make great propaganda 

• – They are not just lying about obvious things, they are asserting that they are not constrained by reality. 
• – You have to engage with what he is saying even if it is false. 
• – Firehosing, high volume, repetitive, no connection to objective reality, no commitment to consistency. aka They can say one thing and then the opposite, without a worry. The obviousness of the lie makes it part of the power play. “Yes I know that you know that it’s a lie, but I assert my right to say whatever I want to say whenever I want to.”
• – Fact checking becomes a waste of time for the person that’s doing it. A little like stating the obvious. 
• – When people point out that the person is lying, the conversation gets degraded and both sides are accusing the other of lying. The point isn’t to tell lies and attempt to get them passed as truth. The point is to erode the meaning of facts and reality. To reduce truth to just an opinion. I have my opinions, you have your opinions. (Sick!)

What if wine commercials was honest  – Satire of common products and really upfront about the backside. 

Greets his younger brother at the bus stop with different costumes

Difference between face to face and digital – Although face to face might not be the best to actually resolve conflicts, because some people are good at sidestepping the issues in f2f, while it’s more black and white in digital, and cannot be avoided.

When all art becomes content – People end up doing things more to appeal to the algorithm instead of for themselves or to explore artistic directions. It becomes stale in the long run and not what they want to do. They also train themselves narrowly for a specific type of artwork for the algorithm, instead of trying and practicing different things. 

Stream deck – Programmable LCD buttons, it’s on the list because I want to design a game for one!

How to youtube intros – Show the hook of the video just in the beginning and give it a nice overview. Cut down long signature intros, and add a little humor.

Bonfire why you always get smoke in your eyes – You get smoke in your eyes because your body creates an air vacuum by blocking the air flow. The flow from the other side tilts towards you, aka smoke in your face. Sidestep it by having an extra air coming in below the fire, or have an equal blocking of air all around the fire.

90s tech compared to today – Book about the nineties, important to have conscious memory about the time before the internet and smartphones, how everything worked differently.

History of the origin of digital spreadsheets – VisiCalc on Apple II. Idea from business cases, lots of linked calculations, if you made an error early all of the other numbers would be wrong. What if the numbers were connected, once you change one all other in the chain would follow. 

Saved you the click video games – Takes clickbait  about video games and writes a new accurate title.

Saved you the click – Takes clickbait articles and writes a new accurate title.

Animated Infographics for console sales over the years

Indoor mountain bike park – Really dense, lots of tracks crammed next to each other, and different skill levels. A long loop going through all around the park.

7 ways to maximise your sadness

How to practice anything – Repeat, imagine the action, take breaks, stay focused by removing distractions.

Internet time machine – It’s a box which sends a request to the Wayback Machine, and with a dial on the top to tune in the year. Just connect it to an old machine to browse the internet in an authentic way.

Social isolation’s effect on the brain – Cognitive reserve, builds up over a lifetime, makes you more resilient to chronic stress etc, but it takes time to rebuild afterwards.

Why you want to work for a boring company – Better paid, less turnover so they charge more for employees, less focus on overtime, better management because they have worked longer and have less external pressure to perform. People are more chill, less conflicts when they see it, more of a “day to day work” instead of  them “living their dream”. Any type of job is unbearable with bad management. People don’t quit jobs, they quit management.

Terrible company management

• It’s common that people leave work because of bad management personnel. 
• Dilbert principle – when someone is bad at hands-on work, they get other tasks instead, to keep them out of the way from the other workers to not slow them down. These workers then look more qualified to do management because it looks like they did the normal work and the extra work, while in reality they probably did either particularly well. 
• Peter principle – People work hard to get a promotion. They worked well so they got to switch to other types of tasks. They then continue to be promoted until they can no longer perform the job at a high level. The problem is, it always leads to people in management having jobs they can’t perform very well. Noone is going to want to step back to their earlier job. and they are also less motivated when they no longer can work for promotions. They end up making the bare minimum work to avoid termination.

Internet addiction – People have always been distracted. Your mind wanders for a few minutes, but because you are sitting in the library studying you can’t act on it. Now, when you get distracted you can pull out your phone and watch Youtube, and the cost of getting distracted only once has a high price. The distraction is the same, what’s different is what happens after you get distracted. Because technology gets easier and more accessible, it feels harder to do things IRL, so you do less of it, and get less patience for it.

Cue ball spins – Effects of hitting a ball on a 3×3 grid, gives different types of spin.

Taxi conversation menu – A list of different conversation starters to talk about while riding his cab. Because the driver is tired of people asking the same type of questions each time. 

ADHD and autism dual diagnosis – Larger than usual of special interests. Hyper focuses on multiple hobbies. Switch to ADHD in under stimulated environments, ex home, in overstimulated areas: autism gets more visible. Can become too much for autistic friends, but can be draining with ADHD friends. Seek out other people with dual diagnosis.

Wheel of emotions – Splits up emotions in different categories and sort them in a wheel.

Creative writing practice

Sleep furiously – An app to connect arbitrary words into sentences.

language learning in under 5 minutes – What if something similar for game design?

Exclusansis – Giving up talking about experiences because people can’t relate to it.

System for finding books – Pick 4 opposites and pick a point on the scale. 

Capitalism realism – aka there’s nothing else. Capitalism is natural. Adding other ideologies is imposing the normal. 

Name of clouds

Biology of Metroid Fusion 

Top websites since 1993

Thinking fast and slow infographics

What I saw as a fake billionaire – Artist pretending to be a billionaire and looking for luxurious apartments at the top floor in New York, to photograph the views. Most buildings stand empty, because it’s a long term investment locally, so no one lives there, maybe someone rents it in short periods. At the same time, there’s a shortage of living spaces. 

What a writer thinks when they read a good book