January 2011
1 post
RPS: Illuminated Ones: Shadow & Light In Games →
Jordan Thomas on light and shadow in level design.
December 2010
1 post
Super Mario Bros 3 Level Design Lessons «... →
November 2010
1 post
Planescape Torment treatment/pitch document →
October 2010
2 posts
Gnome Stew: Player Narrative →
Don Norman: Design without Designers →
September 2010
1 post
Reaching Perfection: Forge Lessons →
“Forge Lessons is a series devoted to teaching readers about the inner workings of level design. It involves the tips and tricks of the trade that allow pro designers to get a step ahead. All Forge Lessons are guidelines and suggestions. They are not meant to be treated as law, however they exist to be used and to be observed for any extensions as level design becomes more popular.”
August 2010
4 posts
Game Career Guide: Gameplay Analysis: Batman... →
Moving Pixels: My Own Private Architecture →
Gamasutra: Addressing Conflict: Tension and... →
MIT Tech TV: Clint Hocking: The Territory is Not... →
July 2010
2 posts
The Psychology of Immersion in Video Games →
Ed Catmull: Inside Pixar's Leadership →
June 2010
3 posts
Rule-Based Programming in Interactive Fiction →
Kotaku: My Own Private Architecture →
Procedural Content Generation Wiki →
April 2010
4 posts
Gamasutra: Toby Gard - Action Adventure Level... →
Gamasutra: Toby Gard - Action Adventure Level... →
Gamasutra: Toby Gard - Action Adventure Level... →
Gamasutra: Toby Gard - Action Adventure Level... →
March 2010
2 posts
GDC 2010: "What Happened Here?" - Environmental... →
NASA basic aerodynamics for simulations →
February 2010
3 posts
Jesse Schell on the future of games (DICE 2010)
UNCHARTED 2: Among Thieves(tm) - Our Process Was... →
Papers by Julien Togelius →
A selection of published papers relating to player experience and machine learning by Prof Julien Togelius of ITU in Copenhagen.
January 2010
3 posts
Iwata asks: New Super Mario Bros Wii →
Interview with Miyamoto and Iwata. Miyamoto tries to avoid talking about game design but can’t quite manage it.
Miyamoto: Now, a fun game should always be easy to understand - you should be able to take one look at it and know what you have to do straight away. It should be so well constructed that you can tell at a glance what your goal is and, even if you don’t succeed, you’ll blame...
Applying Game Achievement Systems to Enhance User... →
Nokia analyses Boku Sudoku, Mass Effect, Spore, GTA IV and WoW to see if they can graft the achievement systems onto their non-game application. The table listing the achievement categories is pretty good.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on flow
December 2009
7 posts
Gamasutra: The Evolution Of The Class System In... →
“When a class fits a person’s playstyle, their weaknesses feel less pronounced. If the Heavy player values strength over speed, he won’t feel cheated or weak by a slow character. If they player did, they could simply switch to something like a Scout. In the same round of TF2, each player may be playing what amounts to a different game depending on their class. The Spy sneaking behind enemy...
Mike Booth (Valve) - The AI Systems of Left 4 Dead →
Terra Nova: Gender differences in MMOs →
Jordan Mechner: Tips for game designers →
Via @SorenJonson
http://www.good.is/post/Design-with-Intent/ →
Via @clinthocking
Gamasutra: The Idiot's Guide to Marketing Your... →
Gamasutra: Adam Saltsman's Blog - Bytes: The 0.99... →
On pricing games for the app store and why you should only price one at 99c if you can guarantee a hit.
November 2009
6 posts
Jordan Mechner's Prince of Persia dev diary →
Excellent stuff, but my favourite post is this one:
1988/11/november-12-1988/
Still not enough. What’s the point in running, running to get to the exit, if all it gets you is more of the same? The princess waiting at the end is a reward only in the story. We need rewards in the game - like beating a guard in Karateka. What makes a game fun? Tension/release, tension/release. Prince of Persia...
Jordan Mechner: Designing story-based games →
One book, many readings →
A detailed analysis of Choose Your Own Adventure books, with some very pretty graphs.
Losing For the Win: Defeat and Failure in Gaming →
“Books and movies have a huge advantage in not incurring regret in their audience. Their “players” have no agency; as much as they may dislike a twist in the plot, it’s not their fault. As game designers, we must reckon with regret. Our players have to do more than like the story; they have to accept each turn of events and roll with them, and never wonder if they should...
Procedural level geometry from Left 4 Dead 2:... →
Lost Garden - Testosterone and Competitive Play →
October 2009
23 posts
VGA09 - Game Designers - Everything you know is... →
About how monetization is a game design problem in the free-to-play markets.
Gamasutra - Staying Power: Rethinking Feedback to... →
An excellent article with some stats about completion rates of some AAA-games. COD4: close to 80%; GTA4: less than 30%. GTA4 sold more copies and was much longer, but does that account for the difference, and is it worth developing all that content if nearly three quarters of the people who buy the game won’t see all of it?
Gamasutra - Rocksteady's Sefton Hill Unmasks... →
Never in Batman should you watch a scene and find what you’re doing has not changed, or the importance of your actions has not changed in any way. You learn something new that makes you think about the story in a different way or want to do something in a different way. It’s quite easy to write a lot of scenes on paper, but they’re not affecting the play experience. We really...
Gamasutra - Examining Game Pace: How Single-Player... →
Post Position » Curveship in AI Magazine →
Scientific American - Getting it Wrong: Surprising... →
People remember things better, longer, if they are given very challenging tests on the material, tests at which they are bound to fail. In a series of experiments, they showed that if students make an unsuccessful attempt to retrieve information before receiving an answer, they remember the information better than in a control condition in which they simply study the information. Trying and...
2D Boy - World of Goo Pay-What-You-Want Birthday... →
The purpose of this post is to share the data we’ve collected during the experiment, not do draw conclusions. This is just one data point about how this kind of pricing methodology can work, and we would need other developers to try it with different games and under different circumstances in order to be able to draw any real conclusions. One thing we can say for sure, is that a large reason...
Brenda Brathwaite's comments on Level Design Docs
A huge collection of crowdsourced tips about level design in five pages:
Comments on Level Design Docs « Applied Game Design
More Comments on Level Docs
Still More Comments on Level Docs
Endless Comments on Level Docs
Possibly the Last Set of Comments on Level Docs
The Big Quest(ion) | Rock, Paper, Shotgun →
Big quests, side quests and binary choices.
Nonlinear Storytelling in Games: Deconstructing... →
Narrative is the combination of story and discourse. I believe the distinction of story and discourse is quite novel and under-appreciated in the area of interactive storytelling. For the purposes of this discussion, I’d like to deconstruct the nonlinear in narrative to give deeper insight into what this relationship between story and discourse actually entails. The term nonlinear takes many...