The Bottom Feeder

JUNE 12, 2024

Baldur’s Gate 3 Has Mountains of Stuff Over the years, I've tended to make my game designs cleaner. One of the best articles ever written about game design is about Magic: The Gathering. I found fights in BG3 where it became really hard to target the high-up enemies. That is my personal aesthetic.

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The Bottom Feeder

MAY 11, 2022

It's such a big, unique, popular game that not picking it apart a bit is game-writer malpractice. Even if you hate From Software games, and many do, if you care about game design as an art, it's worth a good look. The game is already huge. Fighting the same boss a few times is ok if the game is fun.

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Sirlin

OCTOBER 20, 2015

Codex is a new take on customizable card games. Though you might as well wait until next week because there will be a balance update within a week. Finally, we discuss what Geiger's moves will be in the Fantasy Strike fighting game. Last month, I offered early access to (physical) Codex cards.

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The Bottom Feeder

FEBRUARY 22, 2023

That fight really stomped me." "Do Designers are sensitive and can generally pick up non-verbal cues. When I watch someone play one of my games, I can pick up when they switch from enchanted to annoyed. So I went onto Twitch and YouTube and watched how Serious Gamerz did the hard fights. These are perfectly balanced.

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Fighting Games Balance Writing 92

Keith Burgun

SEPTEMBER 6, 2022

Over the last 10-11 months, and over 100 different numbered versions of the game, the game has evolved into… really, its own thing, and that’s why the title no longer reflects its Dragon Bridge origins. I’ve also gotten graphic design help from the amazing pro graphic designer Jenny Bee.

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Sirlin

JANUARY 16, 2015

@SirlinGames www.facebook.com/SirlinGames New and revised characters for the popular fighting card game round out cast to 20 available characters throughout 2015. Yomi simulates the mind games and other strategic choices found in video fighting games without requiring that players have the dexterity required to master those games.

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Sirlin

JULY 25, 2019

I’m aware that this is a subjective claim, that people will be skeptical, and rightly so because so many other fighting have done a questionable job with “accessibility.” User Interface for Friend Matches This is the kind of innovation that isn’t new to the world, but it IS new to fighting games. No, not to my knowledge.

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Fantasy Feature Fighting Point and Click 52

Brand Game Development

NOVEMBER 20, 2017

Board game development is a very individual process. Every single developer has different methods for creating their games. This article is the third of a 19-part suite on board game design and development. Need help on your board game? I studied Game Design at UAT in Tempe, AZ and graduated with honors in 2009.

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Radiator Blog

NOVEMBER 10, 2021

This is similar to my tactics games writeup and Enderal (huge Skyrim mod) writeup where I spoil some interesting game designer / systems design things. I don't discuss much of the game narrative. I assume general game design knowledge but minimal Deathloop-specific knowledge. Limited regen (e.g.

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Sirlin

AUGUST 23, 2015

You're also invited to give feedback on Patreon about balance issues. That said, it won't make sense to make balance claims right off the bat. You'll need to get your head around the game and play against competent players before you'd even know if some strategy was truly hard to beat.

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Keith Burgun

MARCH 13, 2024

There are almost never fights in town – you are almost always entirely safe in town. Videogames, especially the higher budget games, have a tendency towards being conservative: making sure that everyone understands exactly what is happening at all times. Kakariko Village from Ocarina of Time is one of my favorite towns.

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Fighting Fantasy Balance Games 59

The Bottom Feeder

APRIL 27, 2022

I've been trying to get good at game design for almost 30 years. In other words, yes, the game will troll you. The game will trick you and hide things and be confusing and unfair. Yet, when it matters, when you're in the fights, the meat of the game, you always have a fair chance. I mean, seriously.

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Grid Sage Games

MARCH 10, 2022

Some roguelikes don’t strive for balance, but maintaining balance has always been important to me for Cogmind, since it fits better with my vision for this type of game, heavy on tough, complex, and consequential decision-making at multiple strategic and tactical levels. Alien Artifacts. Exiles Prototypes.

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Tom Francis

NOVEMBER 9, 2022

The early game is slow and boring. All your good pieces are trapped behind a wall of bad pieces, so you both have to spend a bunch of turns moving the bad pieces out of the way so the good pieces can fight. The pawn is a shitshow of clumsy balance changes. Ooh, tough game design problem! That’s not great.

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Concepts Game Designer Game Design Tile 100

Deconstructor of Fun

JANUARY 19, 2021

The effect of the release highlights the importance of balancing between releasing things quickly and testing. The game brings 99% of N3TWORK’s IAP revenue signaling dire times for a publisher that was at its top only a couple of years ago. Fighting Games. All are the same within the Fighting games.

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Deconstructor of Fun

OCTOBER 10, 2021

I should have predicted a $10 billion-a-year game if I wanted to sound like a true visionary. In my heart, I am a game designer. I spend most of my waking hours thinking about game mechanics and how they will make players feel. I know a thing or two about power creep in game economy.

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Asset Games Fighting Mobile 52

Deconstructor of Fun

JANUARY 29, 2024

Many game designers will instantly say: "How can we show the player the same thing? Yes, in an ideal world of paid games, this could be true: a unique gaming experience is played only once. This surprised us, as Clockmaker is a mystical game. They're not going to play it again.

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Keith Burgun

JANUARY 27, 2023

I mean, you spend a LOT of time fighting in this game. One last thing about the combat: it is very poorly balanced. There’s several systems of collectible quest kind of things where you find an icon on the map, do a boring, easy fight, rinse and repeat. The quests are super commodified and boring.

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Grid Sage Games

JULY 17, 2022

RIF Installers were already a prefab to begin with, one which (without precedent anywhere else in the game) were actually inserted via a separate hard-coded method, so let’s add it as an encounter instead. I wrote about this factor in my recent article on game design philosophy.

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Grid Sage Games

NOVEMBER 28, 2022

Being able to backtrack is generally going to be more realistic in the RPG sense--of course your character should be able to go back and pick up that item they left behind, or fight that enemy that scared you away before. In a game setting, though, this can be quite an annoyance from a design perspective (harder to balance!)

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Deconstructor of Fun

SEPTEMBER 28, 2020

This analysis is written by Taras Koshelev (Lead Game Designer at My.Games Venture Capital) who focused on game mechanics and loops and Michail Katkoff (Founder of Savage Game Studios) who covered the market and marketability. Instead, a balanced team of one her per faction is pretty much all a player needs.

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Deconstructor of Fun

MARCH 4, 2019

With progressively deep content wrapped into a single slot machine, casual art style, a more substantial meta, strong social features, hyperactive live operations and great UX/production value, Israeli developer Moon Active has pretty much flipped the traditional Slots games design model on its head.

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Deconstructor of Fun

MARCH 27, 2019

And since there are two to three missile platforms to fight for on a map, it often leads idle areas appearing on the map. The control system is a key illustration of the game’s struggles to deliver in terms of immediate gratification. The designers on the game clearly faced a balancing dilemma.

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Rindoku

OCTOBER 7, 2016

Everything would work out as designed if the player started fighting in the new area but of course players will surprise you. Balancing the difficulty for a wide range of players will be a b h. Here’s the scenario: the player enters a new “zone” but doesn’t really know that because there’s no clear indicator. Yeah… no luck.

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Deconstructor of Fun

JANUARY 17, 2020

As ironSource agrees , a corner stone for making a hit hypercasual game is to reduce CPIs by increasing IPMs (installs per thousand impressions). This sort of elongated production process obviously has increased project cost ramifications, which only reinforces the above mentioned design evolution - more Hybridcasual!

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Deconstructor of Fun

DECEMBER 12, 2021

All in all, Axie Infinity’s growth spurt is decelerating (although still positive), and a majority of its player base treats the game like a daily job to make daily financial ends meet. Game Loops and Systems Overview Axie Infinity’s game design falls under the “Turn-based RPG” subgenre, according to GameRefinery’s taxonomy.

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Tom Francis

MARCH 11, 2017

Gunpoint was derivative, but at least it was derivative of many things rather than any one game. This is not unoriginal game design, it’s playable games criticism! I used to write about where games went right or wrong, now I actually try fixing their problems and find out if I’m right!

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Deconstructor of Fun

AUGUST 27, 2019

This deconstruct is written by Eva Grillova (Game Designer at Smirk Game Studios) and Abhimanyu Kumar (Mobile Games Consultant). Further, it has been relatively successful in both the East and the West - something that not too many games are easily able to achieve.

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Deconstructor of Fun

APRIL 25, 2022

Many people say that Cookie Run: Kingdom chose a very smart setup - on one hand, it has a vast universe with long histories, legends, power struggles, supernatural forces, and the eternal fight between good and evil; on the other, cookies are the sweet dessert that we see every day and associate with holiday, celebration, and happiness.

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Deconstructor of Fun

MAY 15, 2022

Lost Ark outshines other MMO games because each element mentioned above is polished to the next level. Balancing relies heavily on gear, maps are crowded with question marks, Boss fights feature repetitive mechanisms. Though, all of these foibles could be found in other games as well.

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Cutscenes Art Content Mechanics 52

Radiator Blog

DECEMBER 12, 2022

A homophobic English farmboy is forced to work with a hunky Romanian farmhand, and so inevitable muddy fight sex and simmering romance ensues. Because the dialogue happens at the same time as the walking, I felt I had to keep the other game systems relatively simple too or else it would feel overwhelming.

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Deconstructor of Fun

NOVEMBER 25, 2019

However, Tencent loves to make its internal developers fight over the same prize, even if it means making the same game twice. Battle Royale modes restrict the rewards players can be offered; permanent weapon upgrades impact the game balance, which kills the motivation to play. Why does Call of Duty Mobile retain so well?

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