Hey everyone! Last week I started a two-part article on maintaining player morale. Player morale, the feeling of confidence and enthusiasm that players have while playing the game, is a major factor in determining whether players will finish your game and want to play again. If you want players to keep coming back to your…
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Hey everybody – This week I had to grade research papers, so I did not have time to write a new post. The article that was scheduled for this week (about personality in games) will hopefully be up next Saturday. Until then, enjoy this post about the relationship between Luck and Skill in game design,…
Read MoreRock-Paper-Scissors is one of those games that is so ubiquitous that it’s hard to imagine a world without it. As a tool for making random decisions, it ranks up there with flipping a coin or shaking a magic 8 ball. The difference, however, is that there is no World Championship of Flipping Coins. Despite it’s…
Read MoreWhen I started researching for this article, my original plan was to talk mainly about a category of games known as “Solved Games”, or games that have a mathematically proven optimal strategy. I was going to use that article to talk about what it means to have solved a game, different games that have been…
Read MoreThis semester I am taking a class based around the design of game engines, and in that class we recently had a brainstorming session for a game. One of the biggest talking points of that discussion was whether or not we should design the game to use procedurally generated elements, or design everything manually. Inspired…
Read MoreI’ve been writing this blog for around 10 months now, and in that time I have covered a lot of different topics in the fields of gaming and game design. We have studied ancient games from history, mobile apps, and even modern console masterpieces, but one type of game I have yet to talk about…
Read MoreRandomness is one of the most important elements of almost any game, and also one of the most misunderstood. Randomness can have a huge impact both on the design and experience of a game, and can lead both to very exciting moments and very frustrating ones. This is a huge topic, and one that I…
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