Remove Balance Remove Fighting Remove Mechanics
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Spotting and Dropping Bad Mechanics

Brand Game Development

Most board game mechanics will not work as well as you intend them to. Good board game developers need to know when to drop mechanics and when to refine them. I’ve been playing with a new mechanic called “traffic.” Yes, I thought this would make a good mechanic a week ago. Click here. So it goes.

Mechanics 130
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How to Design the Mechanics of Your Board Game

Brand Game Development

The core engine is what’s left when you strip a game of mechanics and obstacles. The core engine is the bare minimum set of mechanics and concepts you need to have a functioning (but not necessarily fun) game. Game mechanics are how we bring the core engine of a game to life. What are game mechanics?

Mechanics 130
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Say you’ve got a dungeon that can be played with 1-8 players; how do you scale that for each number of players? What variables tend to wind up being the most fun to have tweaked (enemy hp, numbers, etc)?

Ask a Game Dev

World of Warcraft's old raid system where raids supported only 10 or 25 players are examples of such where tuning and mechanics were modified to specific player numbers. However, doing this for one to eight players (or, as it stands now in WoW anywhere from 10 to 30) means eight balancing passes for every encounter.

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How Riot can Turn Team Fight Tactics into a Billion Dollar Game

Deconstructor of Fun

Riot’s Team Fight Tactics (TFT) was launched quickly to catch the emerging auto-chess genre that was gaining popularity as a mod on Twitch. Till date Team Fight Tactics has reached bit over 11M installs. A brand that is known to avoid excessive monetization mechanics steering always away from pay-to-win systems.

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How to Make Board Game Rules

Brand Game Development

As I said last week , “rules regulate the way mechanics are implemented. A mechanic is the concept behind the game and the rule is the way that it’s handled to ensure balance.” ” Rules are really tricky to do right because you have to serve two purposes: balance the game and communicate clearly.

Balance 130
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The Rise of Hybridization in Mobile Games: How Developers are Genre Mashing Their Way to Success

Game Refinery

In the past, hybridization was mainly seen in 4X strategy games that merged with puzzle and idle RPG mechanics , but in recent months this phenomenon has spread to titles of all shapes and sizes across the market – not just the hybrid-casual genre. Mechanically, the mode is relatively similar to Blizzard’s Hearthstone.

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4 Lessons from Spirit Island for Aspiring Board Game Designers

Brand Game Development

You and all the other players in the game play as Spirits who fight off the Invaders – basically, people who want to colonize your island. Sure, cooperative play is not exactly some exotic unseen mechanic too. Balanced asymmetry leads to greater variety. Spirit Island flips the standard colonization theme on its head.