Learguy

Lessons from the Wasteland: Why Amazon’s Fallout is a Great Adaptation

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By any metric – critical acclaim, viewership, or audience reaction – Amazon’s live-action Fallout series is an enormous success. Viewers, even those who weren’t previously familiar with the long-running game series, embraced the quirky fifties-inspired post-apocalyptic setting and Fallout’s signature mix of humor, over-the-top gore, and grim themes. The first season of the series is …

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Neverending Stories: Designing Games Without Goals

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One of the most important foundational elements of the design of many game genres is a clear definition of the player’s goals.  When players understand the game’s goals, it adds context to the mechanics and gives purpose to the actions they’ll take during play. The best rulebooks for the myriad of board games on my …

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Rub the Right Way: Applying Friction in Game Design

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The Game of the Moment, the one people in my circle have been talking about for the last week – both positively and negatively – is Dragon’s Dogma 2. A sequel to Capcom’s RPG cult classic, the game is currently hovering at a 57% Mixed rating on Steam. Customers have plenty of valid complaints. At …

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Trope or Nope: Innovation and Familiarity in Game Design

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Helldivers 2 continues to impress. Between the constantly changing events in the dynamic live war, the friendly community, and the engaging core gameplay, it feels like a game built to last. Helldivers 2 innovates in several areas, but the setting is not one of them. Like the original Helldivers, it’s a thinly veiled riff on …

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Shadows of the Past: Great Games with Historical Themes

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In 1453, the city of Constantinople fell to the Ottoman forces of Sultan Mehmed II. The end of the long siege marked the final chapter of the Byzantine Empire. But the writing had been on the wall for the Byzantines for at least a couple of centuries prior – ever since the devastating plundering of …

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Good Times: The Cinematic Chaos of Helldivers 2

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Best practices for marketing games have changed dramatically in the last few years. Avoiding coverage of tentpole triple-A titles is impossible during the run-up to their launch, but in an overcrowded marketplace, smaller games have to catch a viral wave to stand out from the pack. There’s an art to improving the chances of a …

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Roads Not Taken: Building Better Narratives for Games, Part Two

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When you curl up with a good novel, you expect the writer to take you on a journey.  If the author’s any good, you won’t anticipate every plot beat. You’ll be surprised by the twists and turns of the story, and characters will do and say things you couldn’t have anticipated on page 1. The …

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Winter of our Discontent: The Game Industry’s Churn Continues

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I’m keeping it short this week. As the New Year began, I mentioned wanting to write less often about the industry’s problems. Last year was exhausting and I was determined to kick off 2024 with a more hopeful outlook. I still feel good about the long-term future of the game industry. A decade or two …

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Eating Well: Strategy Game Design and the Feast of Choice

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Regardless of the genre, playing games is fundamentally about making decisions. Good decisions in game design involve both choice and consequence. The more players see and feel the results of their decisions, the more engaging a game will be. In a shooter, choices and their consequences are immediate and clear – which enemy to target …

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Hand in Hand: Building Better Narratives for Games

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Game design was a less specialized vocation when I first entered the industry. Teams were smaller and most designers wore all the hats – systems, content, and narrative. Still, my previous experience as a writer and editor meant I often got tapped for narrative work. My first contract job was creating single-player campaign story content …

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