I just went to the biggest arcade in America. I went to play through the history of arcade games, in chronological order. Here’s my biggest takeaway: Every game designer needs to play modern Pinball machines. Hear me out. Once a quarter, I go deep into a game genre I never play. I learn everything I […]
Have your players ever groaned when they got a notification they had a bunch of unclaimed rewards? Mine have. That’s not a good sign. Legends of Runeterra had this problem. The game wanted to be generous, so it gave out so many free rewards that opening them became an annoyance. Riot Games gives devs free […]
Just ran a 5-hour session on how to design monetization systems. So many studios miss the beautiful reality of games: designers are alchemists. If you know what you’re doing, your designs can increase the value of your game’s goals and rewards. If something feels like it’s worth $5, then you have a lot of trouble […]
Counter-intuitively, a common reason that players are afraid to waste consumable items is that the items are too weak – not too strong. Devs often reduce the impact of consumables so players will be less afraid to waste them, or out of game balance concerns so they can ensure players can overcome all of a […]
The first few mintues of your game make a crazy amount of difference. Getting Over It worked because people knew what they were getting into. In the opening dev explains the point of the game and what’s about to happen. He tells you that this is a game about the frustration of starting over. You’re […]
I haven’t yet failed a take-home design test. Might be luck, but I’ve always made it to the next round. This is my top advice: Test-readers are exhausted, so get to the point in the first sentence. Explain your deeper reasoning as a follow-up. End before the reader gets bored. ^ Like that. Every word […]
“Modder’s Law – The more meticulously hand-crafted the game, world, and lore, the more fun it is to make an absolute mess of it.” Replacing Skyrim’s dragons with Thomas the Tank Engine is fun because it’s ridiculous. Players like the feeling of getting away with something, doing things in ways other than the devs expected. […]
A few days ago I posted here about the Machine Guarding technique. I talked about how this idea from industrial manufacturing helped our team solve one of the game’s peristent annoyances, and how it was a huge win that had no meaningful downside. It’s as close to “strictly better” an improvement as you can get. […]
Many people tend to assume system design is about algorithms, spreadsheets, data, and math – and so it should be perfect for AI-based solutions. In reality, systems design is much more about figuring out how to present incentives to a player in an intuitive and sustainable way, identify the emergent consequences of how mechanics and […]
“If you were turning on one cheat to make your game much easier to beat, what would it be? This tells you a lot more about your game than anything else.” Heard this from a YouTuber called Surnex, and got me thinking. In reality there’s a lot of ways to cheese the idea behind this […]
Dan Felder 