Designer Notes

MARCH 31, 2023

I gave an Old World postmortem at GDC 2022, which is available on YouTube: However, I fully scripted the talk ahead of time, so I decided it would be worth taking the time to post the slides online, in three parts to have mercy on your browser. So, why should I go back to make a historical, tile-based 4X game? A Civ-like, so to speak.

Tile 98

Tile Point and Click AI Mechanics 98

Deconstructor of Fun

AUGUST 19, 2024

Since its release in 2022, Gossip Harbor has enjoyed remarkably stable and close to linear growth, which is especially impressive in a post ATT-world. We will now go through many aspects of what the game is, but keep in mind that we will be looking at the balancing and pricing for one player account in this piece.

Balance 98

Balance Mechanics Games Build 98

Deconstructor of Fun

MAY 23, 2023

Fastforward to September of 2022 and the game, Marvel Snap, is finally out globally after a considerable amount of time in soft launch. As certain decks become dominant, players can quickly create counter decks to keep the game balanced and interesting. This means that the tile will show up 40% more often in games.

Feature 95

Feature Mechanics Tile Mobile 95

Logic Simplified

NOVEMBER 26, 2024

Subway Surfers was the most popular game for three consecutive years, with 218 million downloads in 2023, 304 million in 2022, and 191 million in 2021. This type of level designing involves procedural generation where reusable tiles (including power-ups, obstacles, and aesthetic features) are randomly assembled.

Mechanics 40

Mechanics Games Concepts Feature 40

Mircosoft Game Dev

SEPTEMBER 15, 2022

with 17 alpha builds distributed in 2022, and continuous development effort since 2019. Volumetric fog is making its first appearance in Godot 4, balancing a realistic look and fast performance, thanks to the use of temporal reprojection. You can probably build half a game with tiles alone! It has been a long road to Godot 4.0

Beta 52

Beta Engine Engineering Feature 52

Deconstructor of Fun

JANUARY 10, 2021

This increase, sliced by subgenre, was driven mostly by Tile Blast and Puzzle & Decorate. The earliest would be 2022 and until then they’ll most likely scratch the puzzle itch through investment in studios who specialize in puzzle. A big advantage of this strategy is its scalability. 2021 will show who will come out victorious.

Puzzle 52

Puzzle Mobile Mobile Games 52

Radiator Blog

JUNE 30, 2022

A broughlike is a variation on a roguelike named after designer Michael Brough , who has spoken before on his design patterns like square tiles, orthogonal movement, turn parity, glitching, limited info, simple maze designs, minimal resources. Robert Yang, 2022; (right) poem "Long years apart."

Code 100

Code Education Educational Prototyping 100