Designer Notes

DECEMBER 10, 2023

Frank Lantz recently interviewed me on Donkeyspace , his excellent Substack, which generally focuses on the current AI boom but, in reality, is about his ongoing work on the human condition. I’m curious about all-human, no-AI Civ. Is it very different from the single-player game vs bots?

AI 52

AI Racing Engine Engineering 52

Designer Notes

AUGUST 10, 2021

The game, a historical 4X set in classical antiquity, released on July 1, 2021, and is available for purchase here. The big change that always gets mentioned when going from Civ 4 to Civ 5 is one-unit-per-tile (1UPT), which is interesting as 1UPT is purely a mechanical – as opposed to thematic – change.

Tile 40

Tile Point and Click AI Mechanics 40

Raph Koster

JULY 3, 2024

Like UO, every “tile” knows what materials it is. On UO, we could only change the totals every 64 tiles, and we couldn’t reflect it visually at all, because the map was baked down and static). Like UO, creature AI is driven by looking for these underlying qualities — not by referencing specific object types.

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Simulation Tile Terrain Content 77

Designer Notes

MARCH 31, 2023

Welcome to My Elephant in the Room: An Old World Design Postmortem. Here are the games that I’ve worked on. Spoiler alert: Civilization 3 and 4 are going to come up a lot in the presentation… I also do a podcast where I interview game designers about why they make games, so check it out if you have time for 4-hour interviews.

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Tile Point and Click AI Mechanics 98

Designer Notes

AUGUST 31, 2021

The following is an excerpt from the Designer Notes for Old World. The game, a historical 4X set in classical antiquity, released on July 1, 2021, and is available for purchase here. The first Civilization game was like a game design thunderbolt, sent from the heavens and marking everything it touched.

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Tile Terrain Game Design Game Designer 40

Grid Sage Games

NOVEMBER 20, 2023

Well I don’t really want* to go as far as creating a full-blown in-game design system with a dedicated interactive UI like you might find in some sort of RTS or games with a vehicle design element. in order to force them to use alternatives, either from their inventory or provided by Cogmind.

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Mechanics Build Point and Click Tile 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. A dense randomized mini-chess puzzle where everything matters.

Code 100

Code Educational Education Prototyping 100