"Dungeons & Dragons Next" Creators Look To Simplicity, Open Development To Regain Lost Gamers Wizards of the Coast, publishers of fantasy roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons, faces a unique problem. The game goes back to 1974, but has gone through many iterations since. Every four or five years D&D is either revised or updated with a whole new edition, and every four or five years some of its fans stop playing. People drop off because they don’t like the changes in rules and the style of play that results. When the fourth edition was launched in 2008, the changes gave the game more of a war strategy feel and a video game/MMO sensibility. As a result, some players dropped off, disliking what they perceived as a game anchored in statistics. "If you want to play D&D, you need to find people to play with," said Mike Mearls, Senior Manager, D&D Research and Development. But the company won’t just design the rules for all different types of players--it will get those players to contribute to them. And others in the role-playing industry agree.
Chaos Engineering | Why Level 1 is Rarely Your First Level Chaos Engineering | Choice through scarcity Chaos Engineering | The Trouble with Feats (and À la Carte Design) Game Design Logs If you still practice or encourage the outdated practice of writing long design documents, you are doing your team and your business a grave disfavor. Long design docs embody and promote an insidious world view: They make the false claim that the most effective way to make a game is to create a fixed engineering specification and then hand that off to developers to implement feature by bullet-pointed feature. Great game development is actively harmed by this assumption. Pre-allocating resources at an early stage interrupts the exploratory iteration needed to find the fun in a game. A written plan that stretches months into the future is like a stake through the heart of a good game process. Instead of quickly pivoting to amplify a delightful opportunity found during play testing, you end up blindly barreling towards completion on a some ineffectual paper fantasy. Yet, there is still a need for documentation. Design logs What I do now is write a little something I call a 'design log.'
Budd Royce Lam | Game Design Canvas Get the Game Design Canvas Game Design Canvas by Budd Royce Lam is licensed under aCreative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at The Excel version can be found here: DOWNLOAD THE GAME DESIGN CANVAS What is the Game Design Canvas? The Game Design Canvas is my adaptation of Alexander Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas for game development. Game Design Canvas vs Game Design Document The canvas does not completely replace a GDD as it does not contain all the minute details that a GDD contains. How do I use the canvas? Realistically, just download the excel file and fill in the boxes. Do I have to fill in all the boxes? No, but it’s best that you do. Can I change the boxes? If you need change or add boxes to the canvas, you are more than welcome to do so. What’s a Minimum Viable Prototype? The MVP is something I coined based off the Minimum Viable Product from the Business Model Canvas. Why is there a Player Segment?
Quick Concept Format: A Method for Developing Game Concepts I use this method along with other ideation methods (i.e. brainstorming). Why do I use it?It’s better suited for iteration.It’s focused on creating a game concept, not a bunch of loose random ideas for features. It lets the individual take time to germinate game concepts. Ideation if not focused correctly can develop concepts but leave the important questions that lead to a design unanswered. Most brainstorming methods focus on fast-group-procreation of concepts, this method encourages slow-individual-germination of game concepts. You can access the Quick Concept Format worksheet here. How to use: Give your concept a working title. The QCF is also an excellent tool for aiding designers in structuring discussions about design.
» Deconstructing “Feel” (1 of 3) As promised, here’s the text of my submission to Supple Interfaces. I’m experimenting with a good way to divide by pages; I’ve sunk a surprising amount of time into trying to get various WordPress plugins to do this properly, but it seems to come down to something in the Theme. If you know a good way to do this, please let me know :). Part 2 = Wednesday. ABSTRACT Digital games are a new medium and, as such, include many unexplored areas. INTRODUCTION There exists in the collective minds of video game players a deep and nuanced classification of the “feel” of the games they play and enjoy. Feel is not artwork, immersion, or theme. When players do describe the feel of exercising control over a game avatar, they do so in kinesthetic terms. Disciplines of Interactive Aesthetics Below I have outlined four practical disciplines that, in my experience, must be applied to create a good feeling game. 1. This is where the feel of a game begins. 2. Continued Wednesday…
Game Design: Small Choices Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 14, 2011 As a gamer, we want deeply meaningful decisions that can change the whole course of the story, a la the old Choose Your Own Adventure books. We want big, dramatic decisions with big, dramatic consequences. Unfortunately, reality dictates that we must usually settle for something less. Too often it’s a lot less, and we get stupid decisions that feel meaningless for all their overwrought set-up. It’s like the designers want to give us these great big, dramatic decisions, but it ends up being all sound and fury signifying nothing. It doesn’t have to be a big story-changing deal. Later, Ultima IV gave us a very simple template for interesting, intelligent choices that were not at all the black-and-white – starting with the gypsy woman letting us choose our character class not by choosing good versus evil, but by choosing priorities of multiple virtues. I think it was the last point that was key. It was a small decision.
4 principles for the design of game interfaces The latest issue of User Experience Magazine features a gem of an article for those looking for a very brief intro into basic heuristics for game design. "Designing Game-Based Tools for Youth" By Sarah Chu and Constance Steinkuehler reveals findings from their research into the UX of the massively popular and massively multiplayer game, World of War Craft. Their conclusions...Keep the interface simple at first. Introduce information and functions as users need them. Minimize the amount of written information. Allow for interface customization. This is an excellent principle to carry over to learning interface design. Just-in-time help - The game introduces byte-sized tutorial pop-ups that appear strictly when they are needed (chunked and contextualized.) In-game chat and easy access to external resources played another strong part in moving users across the learning curve in the World of Warcraft studies. Go to the UX Magazine website to download the full article Related Posts
Card Design Commandments | Hyperbole Games Post by: Grant Rodiek I have a thing for card games. I like playing them and I like designing them. As I design card games, play card games, and give advice to other designers about their card games, I see a few patterns emerging. Text should be easy to read: Two smart individuals, Chris Farrell and Daniel Solis, have already written about this (and many topics in this post) at length. Bottom line, it should be incredibly easy for people of all ages to read the text on your cards. Use icons where possible: If you’re using a term or rule often, create an icon. Good iconography saves space on cards and immediately gives the player an idea of the card’s purpose at a glance. Sample Poor Abby proto card Sample icons I made for my prototype One game that uses icons fairly effectively in my opinion is Eminent Domain, designed by Seth Jaffe and published by Tasty Minstrel Games. That’s a great amount of information to process, but luckily this is an advanced card. Overwhelming!
10 Game Design Commandments « My Simple Minded World Implement these fundamental rules and your game will be fun to play. Always reward the playerNever punish the player arbitrarilyControl is kingWaiting should be avoided at all costs 4B. It’s called multiPLAYer not multiWAITERDon’t prevent players from experiencing all of your gameDon’t tack on half-baked new game modes to spice things upBe logically consistentLet players craft their own experience 8b. Explanation 1. Each minute that the player is playing your game they should feel a sense of accomplishment and progression. Good example: Call of Duty 4 COD4′s multiplayer has quickly become the standard by which other multiplayer games are judged. Bad Example: Forza 2 Again, looking at the multiplayer side of things the way Forza’s reward system works is that the more competitive a race is, the higher the rewards, with 1st getting the most, and scaling down from there. 2. Good example: Call of Duty 4 Multiplayer It’s impossible in COD4 for you to lose experience points. 3. 4. 4b. Dear God. 5.