If you mean follow folks in the starter pack, you can use the Follow All button in the upper right:

If you mean join the starter pack, we're currently limiting it to designers the Polaris organizers or attendees know quite well, so we can vouch for them personally in some way.

Tool 6: Procedural Generation

Good proc-gen creates moments that = singular, non-repeatable, & unexpected, which humans love telling stories about. It also lends itself to collaborative storytelling, with more room for interpretation & expression than passive experiences. (See: Caves of Qud)

First, these designers found 3 major phases of a player story lifecycle:
- devtime (while making the game)
- playtime (while the player plays)
- sharetime (after playing, players tell their story)

These tools come into play or show their results at different points in the "pipeline". Let's dive in!

Here's a few other examples visualizations for different PAUSEs... can you guess which are for what? Afterwards, check the paper and learn more! Spreadsheets are great, but it's just one tool in the toolbox.

polarisgamedesign.com/2022/when-sp...

Purpose: relating to the rest of the game
Audience: dev team
Use: consulted periodically, kept up to date
Scope: complete mechanically, not content
Emphasis: emphasize effort of connections between systems

Maybe we'd make this!

Tool 2 Consonance & Dissonance
Consonance (on-theme)
Dissonance (off-theme)

Strengthen your themes with BOTH consonant AND dissonant mechanics. Resident Evil alternates between consonant tones of pressure & uncertainty into dissonant thematic safety, then subverts that back into consonace.

The paper explores four different structures of meaning-making between mechanics and narrative: Divergent (different paths), Parallel (separate paths), Congruent (sometimes intersect), Coalescent (totally combined) in order to understand when and how playful narrative moments can occur

Kind Games: Designing for Prosocial Multiplayer is a game design report exploring "multiplayer games designed from the start with systems that deliberately promote prosocial behaviour".

Come for the charts, stay for the design patterns to use in your own games: polarisgamedesign.com/2022/kind-ga...