The Notes Page from 2020
Here’s a list of good links for game design and game development:
Game design hooks – Is it surprising and desirable? Pre-play hooks – Something that’s possible to test in a pitch or a trailer, it makes you want to play the game by just hearing about it. Post-play hooks – After you have tried the game you want to continue playing. It’s hard to test, a lot of people are polite at conventions, they tell you that they liked it but they didn’t really, it gives a fales sense of success.
GDC 2012 Designing for Game Designers – A talk about making board games where each game teach a different game design concept. Link to notes
Tutorial in Plants Vs Zombies – Game as the tutorial, shop, mini games, passive messaging, adaptive messaging. Link to notes
How Cameras in Side-Scrollers Work – Great list of different categories for cameras in 2d games, there’s also a article with lots of gif:s which is great for reference: Scroll Back: The Theory and Practice of Cameras in Side-Scrollers
Game Design Theory I Wish I had Known When I Started – Nice talk that summarise lots of game design theory in a short period of time.
Engines of play how player motivation changes over times – Describes how different games cover different kinds of motivations, and some very successful games cover multiple of them, like Minecraft. Also how the reason a player start playing games are different compared to the reason a player continues to playing the game.
The Game Making Journey 5 by 2kliksphilip – Hobby game wisdoms, ex make simple games and finish them, etc.
Juice it or lose it – Talk about game feel illustrated with a prototype where more effects are added in each layer.
Don’t Juice It or Lose It – You need to think about context, what kind of game and environment it is, example of dust particles when jumping in a sterile lab environment.
Blender Guru – Its worth to pay for content when learning (20:00) – For example instruction videos, the cost isc relatively low compared to the risk of putting a lot of time into bad material, which would lower your motivation. Your time and motivation is worth more then the money spent.
GDC With Shigeru Miyamoto from 1999 after the released Zelda: Ocarina of Time Note from around 0:40:00 Game developers often underestimate the time to develop the parts that’s taken for granted for that game genre. He calls that work for “labour” and try to make games which contains as little of it as possible. New genres contain little of that, because the same kind of problems hasn’t been solves earlier.
Talk about machination diagrams – Machination is a diagram language used to prototype gameplay loops inside their interactive program.
Joris Dormans – Cyclic Dungeon Generation [PROCJAM 2016] – An interesting model of generating levels based on a node system with different structure. The first step generate a list of words for structures, then nodes and finally multiple steps of in game level grid.
Game jam based on Fictional NES cartages – Lots of interesting looking cartages made for imaginary games.
Architectural Design Process: Managing Time (Tools + Tips) – Time management and time boxing. Break out the task into small parts and clear deliverables.
Mario and cadance – Revere level design about cadence, evolution and expansion in Super Mario World, summary of the same named level design book.
VGMaps’s 15th Anniversary – 15 BEST MAP SETS! – VG maps is an online database where people upload screenshots maps from retro games so you can view the whole map of a game in its entirety.
Video Game Atlas: Metal Slug (Mission 1) – Zoomed out gameplay so the level fills out the whole screen. There’s lots for other games on their youtube channel as well.
Interactive article about slot machines
Serline games articles – Designing Konagi, switching between characters and creating a mind game around it. There’s also other articles, ex fighting game introduction, Chess 2 etc
Top 100 scifi books – A list of high quality scifi books, most of them are from before the 80s.
The door problem – Describing how different professions approach game development from different perspectives, and uses doors as a example.
How to Survive in Gamedev for Eleven Years Without a Hit – Game production tips: collect data of time spent, long tail, be picky about contract work, “reskin” can be time consuming. Link to notes
Making Games in 2019 and Beyond by Jonathan Blow – It was challenging to develop Braid. People have a hard to understand novel games. They can just see what’s different from other games and say that it should be more like the games they already know about.
more experience less feature, gdc talk about messaging
compilation of 70s 80s arcade games
2014 vs. 2018: The Shape of Financial Success Before and After the Indiepocalypse– Measure success of indie games based on concurrent players, more then 100 players x months after release is good. The press is dead, doesn’t improve sales as much as in 2014. Christmas day, the ultimate word of mouth. Old: have you played x? New: Are you playing X? are you a X player? Consumable games vs infinite unique situation simulator. The games on Steams front pages based on algorithms and what they predict players will like.
Walden a game, survival, the goal in the game isn’t infinite growth, but to get inspired, experience life, and it’s a open experience so players get to pick the balance themselves. Some players minmax the experience too much and get a unentertaining experience.
50 games in 1 day – Comical video about taking the game jam format and pushing the time limit beyond what is reasonable. What is required for two game to be considered different? Concept of reusing a lot of content, pushing creativity to find something novel and playable.
Super smash bros ultimate frame data gifs
design overtime, super mario run
Critical Gaming Mario Level Design – layered level design and how sub optimal play feeds back into the system like noise turned into music
Your game idea is too big – A joke page that try to visualize how big of a challenge it is to develop large scale games.
Isometric and directional movement problem
GDC 2020, Custom Tool Time: Make More in Less Time – flags on levels in editor, ex: needs fix, idea, inprogress, good, great. He also made a level randomizer for mobile that could edit and save the levels so the user can make them playable.
Monte carlo simulator for board game
Steam Micro trailers on twitter, 6s trailers of newly released steam games, this is great for perspective.
Interactive screen with a slider for game design by stuffedwombat, To illustration how some concepts change based on gameplay changes.
Diagram for Core, Secondary, progression in game design
What’s a good character select screen? – should invite the player to pick a character that they like, music of a transitional expectations. All character should be on screen at the same time, they dislike scrollbars. They like information about the character, ex like Guilty Gear that categorise the characters into different playstyles that is labeled on the screen.
game a week currucilum – The class was optional, it would be too stressful otherwise. You make them make the best of a bad idea. Curriculum links: RMIT Game-a-week 2017 syllabus, NYU Prototype Studio 2017 syllabus
Making games is for everyone – Compilation of different games that developers sent to the youtuber running a tutorial series for Game Maker. Positive vibes.
Playable Concepts– initiating tiny embedded educational games
Castlevania: SotN randomizer x crowd controls – Chat buys modifiers with currency, the cost rises for every buy. The modifiers should effect the environment instead of the player, aka avoid abilities like: no attack, insta kill, back to start of area. Some nice abilities are: is use the library card (can be good or bad based on where you are heading) and moon gravity (changes platforming).
Does your dog bit? no but it can hurt you in other ways, the game you have spent X years developing will sell less then 500 copies unless it looks really cool in a 6s gif.
AI completes 57 Atari games – uses a meta controller to prioritize between short and long term decisions
talk, how to make the criterion to evolutionary generators for Mario levels. used slices of levels aka ground and the blocks on top of it.
pink square method – Use a posit-it note as a inspiration for a drawing and moves it around and fill in the blanks to create a complicated pattern.
The mechanics and monetization of self-playing games – Organic retention, Exponential gain and offline gain, New game plus, gold heroes. Link to notes
Doublefine adventure chronological playlist – Documentary about game development, 4 week games jams and development of the point and click adventure game broken age.
The Structure of Videogame Preference – by Rune Klevjer, Jan Fredrik Hovden. Article from 2018 that uses statistics from 2010 of people’s favourite games and order them into different clusters. Nintendos, Lads, Strategy games, e-sport, role playing games.
induen studios adventure game evolve, compared to fps – Adventure games are said to have died in the early 2000s, but what is that compared to what’s left from early fps games compared to current entries in the genre?
mobile ad revenue calculator – Shows the reason why there’s so much ads in mobile games and how hard it is to balance free to play with few players.
MtG Storm Scale – A article series that walks through the mechanics from the last magic set and rates each one on the likely hood if mechanic is going to get reused in a future set. Shows a lot of their design process and lists pros and cons for a lot of game keywords through out the years.
Fighting game training mode with a guitar hero like interface Link
Tower Defence game design videos
Jonathan Blow: How and why of game development – Most developers ask the question of how to develop games, but if you instead focus on asking why, the “how”s will come by themselves. Make something you have a interest in.
List of visual programming languages
Board game prototype art vs final art – What Board game publishers expect from art, and what they pay artists to improve it to.
Myst post-mortem – GDC talk about the original Myst. Prototype as table top RPG, pair playtesters so you can hear how they reason, puzzles to slow down gameplay. Link to notes.
Civilization Post-mortem – GDC talk about the original Civilization. Fog of war in tech trees, The manual made the game feel substantial, 30,30,30 rule. Link to notes
Arcade, Composite and Set Piece Era – Nishikado motion / difficulty curve (Space Invaders), Power ups (Pac-Man), Composite genres (RTS), Self contained set pieces (FPS). Link to notesWarren Spector Lecture series – Podcast style, each lecture has different guests from the game industry. It’s more on the game industry side with some game design anecdotes, depending on the guest.
See more notes here: https://ushallplay.wordpress.com/notes/
U Shall Play 