“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 […]
Let’s talk about “Net Fun” in PvP games. If your game is only fun when you win, you have a big problem. Matchmaking can’t fix this. Given a 50% win rate, Humans still feel the impact of losses more intensely than we feel the benefit of gains (thanks “loss aversion”). I think about it like […]
Game studios, founders, and investors, here’s how to navigate this market: 1. Stop chasing the current breakout hit genre, unless you have a VERY good reason to believe you can beat all the other trend-chasing studios to market by 6 months. Your scariest competition isn’t the breakout game itself, it’s all the other studios that […]
Want to know why games like Clash Royale offer 4 choices at a time, when 3 appears to be a standard? Last time I talked about why Slay the Spire, Hades, and many more games offer only 3 options at a time and got a great response, so I’m back for more. I explained how […]
Among the game devs that I mentor, it’s never the seniors that ask me the headache-causing questions. It’s the college students. Often they’re sending me some thought-provoking article or paper on the “nature of games as a medium”. These pieces get so far away from how I view design in general and art as a […]
Dan Felder 