Mixed Martial Arts is a shuffle-building head to head fighting game. It’s a love letter to one of my favorite games growing up, Star Wars – Epic Duels. The rules can be taught in under 5 minutes (I usually teach them in less than 2) and games are lightning fast. There’s also a wealth of […]

We reach the final boss. On the way we execute the famous holy water run and dig into the wicked design of the final level. Explore how the designers added extensive gameplay by just shifting a few pixels on the screen. These guys are good.

One podcast wasn’t enough. Today we dig further into why High Difficulty is the sonic screwdriver of rpg adventure design and how to implement it successfully into a campaign. You can listen to it here.

A lot of designers, writers and artists I work with often have an impulse to do things differently. Differently than what? Differently than whatever is normally done of course. Why? Because it’s more creative! Imagine applying this thinking to fields where success and failure are more clear and objective. Why are you trying to cure this […]

Last weekend Reuben and I got a chance to interview the creator of the incredible Multiverse tool for MTG set creation, the man who discovered a way to perform computations MTG cards and the entity that finally proved why Phasing should return to standard… And it was all the same person! You can listen to the whole […]

My favorite level of the game. Check out how these designers build multiple routes into an entirely linear level. Clever health pickup placement, checkpoint design and one of the most infamous hallways in videogame history make this one to remember.

It’s up! High Difficulty is the sonic screwdriver of RPG design. While not technically necessary, it does SO many things, comes with SO many advantages to make your games extremely difficult that I can barely imagine a running a game without it. You can listen to it here. Or subscribe on iTunes. Subscribing makes the […]

A surge of crunch time at work unfortunately prevented me from recording Episode 6 of the GM’s Guide until today. After I run an errand or two I’m going to sit down and get podcasting. Sorry for the delay. I’ll be recording episodes in advance this weekend to prevent this happening in the future.

The people have spoken, they desireth the DM’s guide podcast on iTunes. As a kind and merciful dungeonmaster, I have provided. However, I did have to change the name to “The GM’s Guide” for two reasons. First, because this podcast really is applicable to any RPG and even a lot of games beyond it. GM […]

I’ve lost count of how often I hear people respond to a design problem with, “just design it better”. One example is the detective vision mode in the Batman Arkham series, which has been used in many similar titles, entering a special vision mode that shows you the items you can interact with more clearly […]