Surprisingly, Three Hundred Mechanics has nothing to do with Seven Hundred Hoboes, although I see no good reason why not. It is a web site by Sean Howard listing 300 game mechanics (well, currently about 60). I like them. It’s like the ideas one occasionally has about game design, only with a neat formal twist, [...]
Intelligent Artifice
Game Design —
The art and craft of designing games
Category Archives: Game Design
On Team Fortress 2 and Portal
Let’s get the most important fact out of the way first: I don’t have the Orange Box yet. Regardless, here are some Team Fortress 2- and Portal-related items you might find interesting. Rock Paper Shotgun has an interview with Erik Wolpaw, who is currently working at Valve and who was the writer of Portal. I [...]
The forgotten genre of the submarine simulation
Falko Löffler has posted a mini-rant about the lost genre of submarine simulations. In German. Basically, he doesn’t see the point of simulating a submarine. I do. I don’t like them or play them, but I do see the point. They have one quality which is fairly rare, and it has to do with immersion. [...]
What to do if you don’t have a game designer on your team
A while ago I explained why game design is important. A reader asked in the comments: What do you do if you don’t have a game designer on your team? There are a number of reasons why you might be in this situation: You don’t have the budget for another person on your team. The [...]
Why game design is important
A long, long time ago I worked at a company that did not have a game design position, and I wanted to convince the people there that, you know, maybe you should have game designers. Like, one per project, at least. Ah, the good old days. So with the help of Mark Barrett I wrote [...]
Surreal Game Design: a group blog on game design
Surreal Game Design is a group blog on game design by the designers – all 17 of them! – at Surreal Software in Seattle. They make me feel inadequate by writing lots of great articles about professional game design, but then again, they’re 17 and I am just by myself. Also, I need a lot [...]
Study proves violent video games make women smarter
OK, that is a slight oversimplification, but there’s an interesting article in this week’s Economist which sort of goes like this: Scientists test people’s ability to spot unusual objects in their field of vision. Men do better than women. Scientists suppress urge to ‘explain this in terms of division of labour on the African savannah’. [...]
Regarding The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion
Whoops. Never write drafts early in the morning :P One might hit ‘Send’ by mistake… So what was it that struck my eye about UGO.com’s mention of The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion? Oblivion, the latest in the series, takes that freedom to ridiculous extremes. Accidentally freed from a jail cell by Emperor Septim, the player is [...]
Checkers has been ‘solved’
New Scientist reports that Checkers has been solved and joins the ranks of Tic Tac Toe and, apparently, Connect 4. Computer games expert (in a different sense than usual within the context of this blog) and spoilsport Jonathan Schaeffer worked on the problem for 18 years! (Via BoingBoing.)
More complete, produced game design documents
I just got some more links from Tobi (thanks again). Radical Entertainment, a very well-organized developer in Canada, cooperated with the Computer Science department of the University of Calgary for a computer game programming course. As part of the course, they provided various game documents from their titles: game designs, high concept documents and technical [...]
