The best way to get a lot of game design is to start with 0 game design and then subtract 1 to cause an underflow, giving you the maximum possible amount of game design. This assumes the game design is unsigned, of course. #bigbrain #gamedesign

Kind Games: Designing for Prosocial Multiplayer is a game design report exploring "multiplayer games designed from the start with systems that deliberately promote prosocial behaviour". Come for the charts, stay for the design patterns to use in your own games: polarisgamedesign.com/2022/kind-ga...

Ok, so I don’t think I know what other game designers mean when they say “ludologist” as a school/style of game design thought. I know the dictionary definition, and the etymology, but not it’s meaning as a specific design aesthetic Does… anyone else know?

Ruin a book by adding “Tom Clancy’s” to the title Tom Clancy’s The Little Mermaid

Home-made waffles on a late Sunday afternoon ❤️

"I don't care what anyone says, I like that movie."

I've been screaming about this shit for YEARS, both as a former journalist and as a parent who writes books about this kind of thing. Roblox is dangerous. It's always been dangerous. It always WILL be dangerous.

#mildlyinteresting This is a bottle of Urge that shipped from Norway to Singapore for my birthday. To my knowledge, not available anywhere in Asia, maybe outside online shops with worldwide shipping. Tastes much better than the (discontinued?) "Surge" drink it preceded🙃Definitely a buy ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

😥

"The best part about back integration is when you get to back integrate your back integrated changes from the current branch _to_ the current branch, because a copy-up took place immediately after your initial back integration, rendering said back integration null and void." - Marcus Aurelius, maybe

have you tried opening a whole bunch of tabs to see if that helps if you're thinking you tried that is it a possibility that you just haven't opened enough tabs yet maybe more tabs would fix it

The site has had it's quarterly update. As always, the site is a FREE resource for those looking for how to take some first steps into making games. Shares appreciated. This is purely a passion project for me so the only marketing it gets is from all of you :) #Gamedev #Indiedev

Imo, there's a difference between "designed friction" and "accidental/lazy friction"/friction caused by technical limitations. The former helps shape the experience, the latter takes away from it. Maybe stating the obvious, but some people seem unable (or unwilling) to separate between these.

Weekend! Time to grind down that Steam backlog. I aim to reduce it by a good ~10 to 15% before the weekend is over. No, for real! Just going to get in one quick game of Civ VII first...

It's very cool to see our little, cozy, horse, mystery, game featured alongside some other awesome games as part of @ign.com's IGN Live event this weekend. There will be new trailer footage and previews coming soon, so we hope folks are intrigued enough to come check the game out! #indiegames

Hey game devs and designers! What are your sources/references for ways to go about/think about action game combat design? (Devil May Cry, Ninja Gaiden, Souls games, etc.) I'm familiar with (and love) @jasondeheras.bsky.social blog - what other sources are there you'd recommend? #gamedev #gamedesign

73.51% of all statistics you read online are made up, and 88.6% of all placeholder numbers are never updated again.

Looks like it will be one of those days. I just spent 10 minutes trying to figure out why the "Next" button on xkcd didn't work in my browser... Trying alternate browsers, different devices, etc. All along, I was looking at the latest one /facepalm

To nerf, or not to nerf, that is the question: Whether 'tis unbalanced or not I'll suffer The shit-posting and curses of outraged players, So... Take action? Release the Nerfhammer!? And by nerfing bring balance. Peace?

Just realized I never paid the cat tax. Better late than never?

Sigh. I'm done with new shows. Such a colossal waste of time. Time to rewatch something that I know will last. Like... Stargate SG-1 maybe? Hm yeah

Game design is so much about coralling uncertainty. Constructing a little pen where uncertainty can prowl around and delight onlookers but never actually escape the confines.

Keep getting randomly logged out of Bluesky mobile app (Android), and it's driving me nuts. Remember meeeeeee~

This week's episode of Design Delve from @designdelve.bsky.social is now available! Taking a look at the dungeon designs of Oblivion... which haven't aged all that well, but still remain important to modern game design.

Been thinking about game design documents a lot again lately, and recalled doing a thread about how to make them accessible over on the other site. So I thought I'd reshare here, with a few improvements for good measure, just help remind myself too. #gamedesign #gamedev #design 🧵

I wonder what the Minecraft movie would have been like if it had been created by Uwe Boll 🤔

Finally playing Last of Us Part I, for the first time, on PC - with M&K. Totally worth the wait, looks and plays pretty damn good! The number of times I've gotten poor Joel killed tho... 🫠

Done!

Re-watched Airplane! for the first time in over a decade and a half! Great movie, but my immersion was broken by the unrealistic portrayal of available legroom between the seats.

VETERAN NARRATIVE DESIGNER/GAME WRITER IN DESPERATE NEED OF A JOB - Almost 20 years experience - Original writer/ND for mobile hit Lily’s Garden - Worked with big IPs like World of Warcraft, Marvel, DC - Experience with mobile, console, and PC Please, please, please help me. I am out of time.

I just finished and 100%'d a game for the first time in a while: Caravan Sandwitch (great work, @sandwitchdev.bsky.social!) Very chill, and very good vibes. If I had to provide one tiny piece of criticism, it might be that the ending felt a bit rushed, but aside from that I had an absolute blast!

This is epic! I didn't know it until just now, but I _had_ been craving exactly this mashup!

Not at GDC, but living vicariously through all of you who went and keep reporting back... 🙂🥲😭

Quick sketch drawn during an extensive meeting at work, with haiku added later. Not consciously a metaphor for anything... 👀

When coders review designer script code.

Do you design game systems, even a little as a treat? Will you also be at GDC this year? Gosh do I have the event for you. Our tenth annual GDC Systems Design meetup. Wednesday, March 19th at noon. Register, chat, enjoy! lu.ma/ileesdw6

I know someone's gonna ask, so here are my other pillars for making a game about exploration, plussome of the supporting patterns for keeping the player attention on the environment >_> Sorta tangential to Monster Hunter since it is NOT necessarily an exploration game. (work-in-progress)

The difficulty setting I wish to see in more video games is ”Fewer Battles”. Fewer battles —> less xp & loot —> harder battles, which are slower but less frequent. Owlcat’s Rogue Trader and Dragon Age: Origins would be LOT better with this. #gamedesign #videogames

Paying 1775 gold for a temple that costs 268 gold in Civilization VII. What is going on... what am I missing? 😵‍💫

Ack, just learned that my favourite lunch place near work is closing down. As a creature of habit, this saddens me.

I, for one, welcome our new home assistant robot overlords. Being ruled by robots is the future we were promised. That, and hoverboards. And flying cars. And pneumatic tubes for travelling to work.

The rate at which design documentation for a live game becomes outdated is inversely proportional to the time spent updating said documentation. 🙃 #gamedesign

The rate at which design documentation for a live game becomes outdated is inversely proportional to the time spent updating said documentation. 🙃 #gamedesign

niche game design tip: if you want something to happen for players daily, don't use a 24h timer. use a 20h timer. if it's a half-day or you have two charges of capacitance, make it a 10h timer instead of 12h. this allows players to drive full benefit on a stable schedule. whatever that schedule is.

Also often true in game design. If you just explain a game mechanic, the player will struggle to recall, but if they figure it out through experimentation and clear feedback, it'll stick. I call this "sparky design": given 2 rocks to bang together, they get sparks, then they set the world on fire.

No matter the decade, no matter the PC, no matter the size of the drive, sooner or later I always desperately clean up files, uninstall games I haven't touched in ages and generally shuffle data around as Windows inevitably reports less than half a MB left free on C. Thanks a lot, Parkinson('s Law)!

Funny how anything people like about a game is "good game design" and anything they dislike is "bad game design." Feels... reductive. And maybe a bit unfair to everyone who puts in the work across so many different fields within game development? Or maybe I'm just splitting hairs over terminology :)

Time for a thread where I voice random first impressions of Civ VII for anyone who might care! Like many of the other games in the series, the initial release of this one introduces some new and interesting systems, but also suffers from some almost baffling flaws. For instance..

This article on game balancing by Richard Garfield is spot on, even for video games. Balancing on demand for the "best" (or most vocal) players is not a guaranteed recipe for success! Instead, listen to _all_ the feedback, and see the full picture before making balance changes. #gamedesign

Re-reintroduction: Hi all! I'm Geir, a Senior Game Designer from Norway currently @ Ubisoft Singapore. Been in the industry since 2008. #gamedesign #gamedev #games Created 3 Starter Packs with 400+ video game designers to follow - enjoy! go.bsky.app/HN7KHXa go.bsky.app/KFBJn7C go.bsky.app/BoEMZY8