Deconstructor of Fun

MAY 15, 2022

Balancing relies heavily on gear, maps are crowded with question marks, Boss fights feature repetitive mechanisms. The map models are rich and varied in terms of items, buildings, and terrain changes, which offsets outdated graphics performance. However, there are not many innovative areas in the core gameplay and UX.

Cutscenes 52

Cutscenes Art Content Mechanics 52

Grid Sage Games

JULY 17, 2022

I considered a lot of options here, going as far as thinking of building a new generator from scratch (one that would make encounters much easier to implement), but I liked the established and consistent core theme of existing Garrisons and didn’t want to mess with that. Rampant terrain destruction is awesome, by the way ;).

Beta 52

Beta Content Balance Mechanics 52

PreMortem.Games

MAY 8, 2023

The size gives the advantage that you can see much more terrain, so the action is much more interesting. As I was trying the builds, the game itself was telling me what things would be interesting to add, so I added them. How much did the project and your way of working change in the 8 years it took to build Moons of Darsalon? “I

Fighting 222

Fighting Dev Games Simulation 222

The Bottom Feeder

OCTOBER 18, 2023

The trick is making sure the fighting part is engaging. Restrictive terrain. Unless actually fighting a boss fight. Retraining your character should be affordable, so that you can easily experiment with different builds. That's the loop. The move part is always boring, and looting should always be fun. No suspense.

Games 83

Games Fantasy Fighting Art 83

Designer Notes

SEPTEMBER 6, 2023

I’d like to talk about some of these examples today and examine how best to build meaning in our games. Consider the case of Fortnite, which started as a game about building forts while fighting off waves of zombies. So, is game design just sorting through accidents like this to see what works?

Mechanics 80

Mechanics Game Designer Game Design Build 80

Radiator Blog

MAY 5, 2021

But without any meaningful code access to upgrade terrain engines or lighting systems, that mostly means spamming set dressing and clutter everywhere. It's not uncommon to walk between towns and fight like 6 different packs of wolves. This decouples the player's behavior from their character build. Money sink.

Open World 130

Open World NPC Cutscenes Terrain 130

Grid Sage Games

NOVEMBER 28, 2022

The interesting part is that you can see all these statues on the way in, foreshadowing potentially difficult bottlenecks on the way out (assuming you can’t directly confront and outright destroy all the living statues, a decent assumption for many builds). Not universally so, to be sure, but grind tends to be more of a roguelite thing.

Point and Click 52

Point and Click Mechanics Feature Open World 52