The quality of your game is directly related to the number of iterations you have time to make. The adage is that game development is an iterative process. We know we should be tweaking and tuning …

The quality of your game is directly related to the number of iterations you have time to make. The adage is that game development is an iterative process. We know we should be tweaking and tuning our game until it feels and runs great. To make it the best it can be; greater than the sum of its parts. Early on, to make sure that the features we work on are worth pursuing.

This post is all about what game balancing is and how to do it. Just remember that every game has its own unique needs and challenges, so cherry-pick whatever sounds reasonable for your game. This post will become a "living" post of sorts, added to over time. Tell me about your own balancing tools and tricks at annander@gmail.com or in a comment.

"We're making an ARPG with survival and roguelike elements," begins the pitch. "It also has some light platforming, is made with Godot, and intented for release on Steam in Early Access." For the business-minded person in the crowd who just played Path of Exile 2, they may focus on the ARPG bits or conjure up mental images of lucrative microtransactions.

The What and The How Hey there, I’m Keelan. For the better part of my career in the games industry I’ve worked as what’s known as a Game Economy Designer. Game Economy Design predominantly concerns…

The goal is to allow the player and their avatar to occupy the same emotional space. Harrison Pink, Snap to Character: Building Strong Player Attachment Through Narrative At Graewolv, while exploring the concept of the demon-powered first-person shooter, one question that kept nagging at my brain was who I was actually playing and why it led me to shooting people and interacting with demons in the first place.

Systemic design comes down to making objects and rules and inviting the player to interact with them. This sometimes clashes with game design at large or the expectations of external stakeholders. This post is dedicated to some challenges that are facing systemic game design right now. It won't go into broader problems like financing or marketing — not in this post.

There’s a popular joke about money and game development. It goes something like this: To make a small fortune from gamedev, start with a big one. A key element of gamedev finances is risk. Ga…

There's a popular joke about money and game development. It goes something like this: To make a small fortune from gamedev, start with a big one. A key element of gamedev finances is risk. Games are entertainment products, and even when someone has a great time testing your game at a conference or all the reviews come in at 11/10, that still doesn't mean people will want to give you money.

There, but certainly not back again. It's sometime around the late 1980s/early 1990s that some developers start talking about a "game engine" as a thing. Maybe not even using the term "engine" yet, but in the form of C/C++ libraries that can be linked or compiled into your project to provide you with ready-made solutions for problems. Color rendering for a particular screen, perhaps, or handling the input from a third-party joystick you want to support.

The object-rich world is crucial for making systemic games. Similarly, the state-space of your game can be used to describe the entirety of your design and to facilitate more holistic game development. But it's about time that we talked about data, since it keeps coming up. How to describe the smallest pieces of your simulation and the effects of this choice on your game.

This post is the last post in a series on combat design. There has been many attempts to classify storytelling. Georges Polti suggested The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations in 1895. Vladimir Propp used a selection of 31 functions to illustrate similar things in the 1920s. There's also the widely misused monomyth of Joseph Campbell, originally published in his book The Hero With a Thousand Faces…

This post is a continuation on a previous combat design post. Sport can be used as a layer on top of your gunplay or melee. Perhaps as added fairness (a sense of “good balancing”) or as…

The most consistent pushback I get when presenting my case for systemic design is against the idea that authorial games are not as interactive as more emergent games. “They surely are interac…

Quick and accessible sword & sorcery role-playing.

Something that has been missing from this blog is how players will experience playing your systemic games. What the inputs and outputs represent and what kind of game they help make. So that’…