PreMortem.Games

JULY 29, 2024

Working in Mixed Reality, I met many ex game devs and artists, who I learned from and was greatly inspired by. Although we weren’t making games, the tech for Mixed Reality was identical to making games, so I picked up a lot of technical ability with Unity, game dev, shaders and more.” Especially early-on. It’s made a huge difference.

Dev 138

Dev Development Sandbox Indy 138

PreMortem.Games

APRIL 19, 2024

One of my close friends, Ches Denison, joined me working 5-10 hours a week as a playtester, game designer, and just a general jack-of-all-trades-guy. Once playtesting began in early 2023, player feedback further refined my vision. Plus, maintaining a healthy work-life balance is the most important thing you can do as a game dev.

Playtesting 129

Playtesting Games Mobile Mobile 129

Game Analytics

FEBRUARY 14, 2023

Playtesting is crucial at this point. Not only does it help your team manage the workload, but it means you can roll out more content to keep your players engaged later. And many of the regular tricks that devs use to save on rendering costs are lost when building VR games. We added a light, but it didn’t help.

Dev 91

Dev Playtesting Fantasy Render 91

Brand Game Development

JANUARY 2, 2018

Every iteration of each game has to be created somehow and there are A LOT of iterations – usually a new one after each playtest, especially in the beginning. Whenever I demo or playtest, I make sure to get the email address of the person, so I can inform them when the Kickstarter starts. Carla: I also do a lot of interviews!

Playtesting 130

Playtesting Games Advertising Prototyping 130

Brand Game Development

MAY 18, 2020

Chai was the first game on the workshop to have a custom environment akin to the Tabletop Simulator DLC’s (downloadable content). Tabletop Simulator doesn’t just let people play before pledging, it’s also a great place to design and playtest games. This made the Tabletop Simulator creation stand out and it showed.

Simulation 130

Simulation Games Demo Playtesting 130

Ask a Game Dev

MAY 5, 2023

As we introduce new content, it helps if it is a little stronger or does something different than its predecessors to get the players excited about it. This is where playtesting comes in. We typically run playtests as often as possible in order to ferret out these issues so that we can adjust them if they are too egregious.

Playtesting 52

Playtesting Dev Content Texture 52

Grid Sage Games

DECEMBER 22, 2023

In previous years I’ve opened the review with a collage of dev images of varying themes and content, but approaching the end of this year we have one major theme that stands out, and that I’ll be writing more about below, so let’s hear it for the interface mockups! More on that later. Its time has come.

Beta 105

Beta Alpha Mechanics Build 105

Ask a Game Dev

JANUARY 23, 2024

Whenever I do solo dev work, the feature that always takes the longest and tends to require the most work to get something playable by actual players is the UI. Small-team dev also tends to build more system-driven games because it's more dev-time-efficient than creating single-use narrative-driven content.

Dev 52

Dev Build Content Feature 52

PreMortem.Games

FEBRUARY 19, 2024

This article is part of the game-dev advice newsletter Levelling the Playing Field by Rami Ismail. ” does not give them same context as “In playtests we found that a turn-based paradigm fits the prototype best, which answers questions raised about the prototype’s gameplay last week.”

Writing 104

Writing Communications Point and Click Prototyping 104

Ask a Game Dev

JUNE 4, 2024

One good strategy in puzzle design, in my experience, is to provide a secondary optional bonus puzzle that uses the same rules as the puzzle on the critical path, but provides some additional content or reward to the player for completing it. Remember the fundamentals of puzzle design when constructing them.

Puzzle 52

Puzzle Playtesting Advertising Dev 52

Ask a Game Dev

DECEMBER 20, 2022

One good strategy in puzzle design, in my experience, is to provide a secondary optional bonus puzzle that uses the same rules as the puzzle on the critical path, but provides some additional content or reward to the player for completing it. Remember the fundamentals of puzzle design when constructing them.

Puzzle 52

Puzzle Playtesting Advertising Dev 52

Game Dev Unchained

JULY 5, 2023

It forced them to reassess their development approach and switch to a steam playtesting model, allowing more players to access the game. One pivotal player in this growth was the content creator, ‘ Blue Drake ‘, whose enthusiastic promotion of the game helped kickstart its rise in popularity.

Indy 105

Indy Game Development Game Developer Development 105

Grid Sage Games

JUNE 30, 2023

Roguelikes Discord Back in mid-2016 a couple of friends decided to make a new Discord server on the topic of roguelikes, and started asking relevant devs like myself to join. Content Now that we have the ability for the game to post messages, what do we post? And where does this content go? What’s relevant for a roguelike?

Feature 52

Feature Content Build Dev 52

Grid Sage Games

JULY 17, 2022

The amount of content variety offered by the original Garrison design was more suited to a lower visitation rate, not the “I’m going to play almost my entire run inside these things” which it had become for some people. Sample Garrison content list from Beta 11. It’d sure be nice to resolve that!

Beta 52

Beta Content Balance Mechanics 52

Grid Sage Games

FEBRUARY 22, 2024

Although I already demonstrated much of the first new modal UI layout in an earlier forum announcement , I figure I could review those features here in order to provide closure to this series, plus cover some related dev topics as well as the second modal layout. It was a lot.

Demo 52

Demo Feature Code Beta 52

Game Global

JULY 12, 2021

Their job is to choose the clearest, highest-quality words they can assemble, and (usually) give them to other devs to be put into the game. How should I space out my content to create the pacing I want? Playtesting, bug fixing, incorporating or giving feedback, and keeping an ever-watchful eye out for ludo-narrative dissonance.

Cutscenes 52

Cutscenes Writing Scripting Localization 52

Grid Sage Games

MARCH 10, 2022

The first part of this so-called “Great Utility Update” began during Alpha 12 with a few fundamental mechanical changes, but since then the project remained on the to-do list until 1) even more content was added to the game, and 2) we collected more info about what items people were and were not using, and why. Fine tuning.

Balance 52

Balance Mechanics Beta Prototyping 52

Grid Sage Games

NOVEMBER 16, 2023

I’m going to go ahead and just make this a SPOILER discussion as far as game content goes, so that I can write freely about related mechanics, so maybe don’t read this one if you’re spoiler averse and not familiar with teleporting.

Mechanics 52

Mechanics Concepts Balance Terrain 52

PreMortem.Games

JUNE 11, 2024

” Initially conceived as a portfolio piece, the game evolved over a decade with content-heavy, story-driven mechanics. She used it both as a marketing and playtesting tool. . “The main issue why it took so long was I never intended for it to be a commercial product.”

Development 104

Development Playtesting Indy Prototyping 104

Radiator Blog

JUNE 30, 2022

CONTENT WARNING 1: I mention a suicide from a century ago. CONTENT WARNING 2: the game is rather explicit, but I've kept the imagery in this post relatively tame, at a semi-NSFW / soft-R rating. This marks its true public release, with finished graphics, gameplay, tuning, more sex, and finally an ending.

Code 100

Code Educational Education Prototyping 100