Why do players who skip 30-second cutscenes in most games hungrily watch 2 hour videos explaining the lore of Hollow Knight or Elden Ring? It’s not that those 30-second cutscenes are terribly written either. Simple: “Soulsborne Storytelling” isn’t Storytelling. Its Archaeology. Think of the player as an archaeologist exploring the ruins of a lost empire. […]
At Riot Games one of the designers reporting to me asked me a perfect question. “You’re the newest designer on the team… How do you keep getting new features on the roadmap?” I was surprised. I figured the other designers just liked the status quo. Nope, apparently they’d been trying to pitch a lot of […]
Last week, I had just 8 hours to design a combat system for a client. I’m fast, but that wasn’t enough time to design a core gameplay system. However… It was 𝘣𝘢𝘳𝘦𝘭𝘺 enough time to design 3 of them! Surprisingly, and there’s some science on this, designing 3 solutions often takes less time and mental […]
The Yu-Gi-Oh! trading cardgame’s world championships were a beautiful disaster. I’ve never seen anything like this. To understand what just happened, I need to explain what banning a card truly means to a trading cardgame, and what it implies about what’s going on the dev processes behind the scenes. Banning a card from competitive play […]
When debating whether something is worth removing from your game, try flipping it first. Ask yourself “if this wasn’t in the game yet, would we be desperate to add it in?” For example, a highly controversial statement from a lead at Mojang Studios was about the iconic Creeper. He pointed out that if the Creeper […]
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 […]
“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. […]
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 […]
