I regularly take a break at the end of June, escaping the Texas heat for the glories of summer in rural New Hampshire where much of my family still lives. This trip was bittersweet this year. At the last minute, I had to make the journey alone while my wife and son stayed behind, and …
Musings on Malazan: The Best Fantasy Series You Haven’t Read Read More »
June marks a year since the unfortunate closure of BonusXP. For me personally, it marks a year of full-time consulting – a second go-around at dividing my time between my own solo game and work for a variety of paid clients, after my first stint back in 2019-2020. It’s no secret that the game industry …
The game industry – and the world in general – continues to grapple with the implications of increasingly-impressive generative AI technology. I touched on the intersection of AI and game development in earlier articles, but since then the tech has only become more prevalent and mainstream. Chatbots are now the first line of defense for …
Robot Overlords: Developing Games in a Future of Generative AI Read More »
One of the games I’ve worked on that I’m most proud of was the first Orcs Must Die! game. It was a modest title built by a small team that achieved commercial success and great user reviews. Orcs Must Die! started life as a prototype built from the bits and pieces of another scrapped project. …
Once More With Feeling: Building Game Sequels and Remakes Read More »
My fourteen-year-old son just finished eighth grade, which means next year I’ll have a high schooler in the house. I’m finding the prospect hard to process. He’s no longer a kid, and he’s interesting, unique, and opinionated – rapidly becoming his own person, with his own ideas (and, in typical teenage fashion, rejecting a lot …
Hot Elf Summer: The Return of Family Dungeons & Dragons Read More »
I spent a little time over the weekend playing Ker Nethalas. It’s a solo-focused pen-and-paper dungeon crawler, thematically dark with a heavy emphasis on dice-chucking combat. There’s not a lot of story to the game. If you’re looking for the great narratives that systems like Ironsworn generate, you won’t find them wandering through the endless …
Spring Cleaning: Tidying-Up Time for the Game Industry Read More »
The current monster title laid out on the table in my office is Folklore: The Affliction from Greenbriar Games. It’s typical of my solo gaming tastes – a messy cooperative fantasy adventure dripping with theme, with an often-vague ruleset and plenty of bookkeeping. As big fantasy board games go, there are better options out there …
Balancing Act: Making Great Difficulty Levels in Video Games Read More »
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 …
Lessons from the Wasteland: Why Amazon’s Fallout is a Great Adaptation Read More »
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 …
Neverending Stories: Designing Games Without Goals Read More »
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 …
Rub the Right Way: Applying Friction in Game Design Read More »