When I worked at Ensemble, the studio was fortunate to have a dedicated balance team. The team included some of the best competitive real-time strategy players around; their full-time job was to balance the real-time strategy games that made the studio famous. No matter the genre, developers talk about balancing their game a lot. It’s […]
Thumb on the Scales: When to Toss Game Balance Aside Read More »
A freelance consultant’s days are busy but unpredictable. For any given week, I might have work for multiple clients, or I might be tinkering with my own game, or I might be seeking out new contracts for a future quarter. Most likely it’s a mix of all three. Consulting doesn’t have anywhere near the security
Mayhem, Madness, and Games: Farewell to 2023 Read More »
Those of us of a certain age will remember the old commercials for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. It’s an easy-to-understand idea – a candy that combines two flavors to produce something entirely new and tasty. Never mind that Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups (love them or hate them) don’t taste much like an actual chocolate bar
Peanut Butter and Chocolate: Mixing Genres in Game Design Read More »
The story has to start with The Wheel. I am not a gamer who buys a lot of hardware and peripherals. I eventually get around to getting a console or two every generation, but I’m never first in line and I wait for the price cuts. I’m primarily a PC gamer, but I’ll go five
East Bound and Down: A Love Letter to Euro Truck Simulator 2 Read More »
Spoiler warning for several older games, including the Bioshock series and Silent Hill 2, as well as the movie Memento. Memento, an early Christopher Nolan movie, is a well-executed example of a familiar writing trope: the unreliable narrator. The audience experiences the events of the movie from the point of view of the main character,
Trust No One: Unreliable Narratives in Games Read More »
My fourteen-year-old son likes games. I guess it’d be hard for him not to; most of the time, if his old man isn’t working on games, he’s playing them. He grew up in a house filled with toys – Lego, board games, Warhammer miniatures, and D&D books. He’s seen both his dad and his mom
What’s Old is New: Games and the Nostalgia Factor Read More »
So first, a quick refresher on recent events: In late spring of 2023, a major funding deal between the Swedish company Embracer Group and Savvy Games – a group backed by money from the Saudi government – spectacularly collapsed. The deal was supposedly worth two billion dollars in development funding over six years and had
Dangerous Roads: Carnage in the Game Industry Read More »
At several places I’ve worked, I developed a reputation as a “fun farmer.” I was the guy who’d play almost any game, regardless of the review scores, and try to find the nuggets of goodness in them. I could usually find something that made the effort worthwhile – a single feature, a great cinematic moment,
Monkey Business: Who’s To Blame for Skull Island: Rise of Kong? Read More »
Phantom Liberty, the recently released DLC for Cyberpunk 2077, is great. The story is compelling and lengthy, a masterclass in how to seamlessly add post-ship content into the middle of an existing narrative. The 2.0 patch for the game, which launched shortly before the DLC, overhauls and improves many of the game’s core systems, including
The Price of Redemption: When Bad Games Go Good Read More »
Here we go again. Last week, the game industry was rocked by 800 layoffs at Epic Games, nearly 16% of their total workforce. The announcement is just the latest in a string of “reductions in force” across the game industry – Striking Distance, Relic, Amazon, and Probably Monsters among them. I can’t remember a more
Destructive Imbalance: The Need for Game Developers to Organize Read More »