Game Developer

MARCH 20, 2024

Game design professor Jeremy Bond shares how to prepare your students for the uncertain game industry future.

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Brand Game Development

JUNE 29, 2020

A couple of months ago, I asked the readers of this blog to send in answers to the question “ what confuses you most about board game development ?” ” I got a lot of responses, and two of them were about knowing when to pivot during a game design project. Need help on your board game?

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Brand Game Development

JULY 13, 2020

Certainly, board game designers can learn a lot from well-designed escape rooms. Exit Games by Kosmos are the closest we can get to the authentic in-person experience right now. Some of the puzzles in Exit Games, much like in real-life Escape Rooms, are devilishly hard. Exit Games find a workaround.

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Brand Game Development

NOVEMBER 25, 2019

Escape Rooms will make you a better board game designer. This is partly because Escape Rooms are everything that board games aspire to be – complex problem-solving games that appeal to a wide audience and provide a remarkable physical experience. Board games often run the risk of having themes that feel pasted-on.

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Brand Game Development

MARCH 9, 2020

.” Besides, when we – as gamers and game developers – put aside our frustration for a moment, we can actually see Monopoly for what it is: a solid concept with bad execution. There are a lot of questionable game design decisions that, if corrected, could have made for a fantastic game.

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Game Wisdom

FEBRUARY 13, 2023

Learning About Game Design in the Classroom Josh Bycer josh@game-wisdom.com width="560" height="314" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" For this perceptive podcast, I’m talking with Jeremy Yanofsky who hosts the Engage Show to discuss what does teaching game design and using games in the classroom look like today.

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Brand Game Development

JANUARY 14, 2019

The rules could not possibly be simpler, and yet the strategy of the game gets pretty heady. There are lots of reasons I love, love, love this game. For the purposes of this article, though, we’ll be discussing four lessons for board game designers to take away from it. Physical game presence counts for a lot.

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Game Developer

MARCH 13, 2023

For anyone with an interest in game design, Polaris' developer summit has different articles covering various aspects of design development.

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Game Developer

APRIL 10, 2023

With his Alice: Asylum pitch rejected by Electronic Arts, game designer American McGee is leaving the game industry entirely behind.

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Brand Game Development

FEBRUARY 17, 2020

By using my own work as an example, I hope you can read their original write-up with a concrete context and use their lessons to make an incredible game of your own. The post 10 Elements of Good Game Design appeared first on Brandon the Game Dev.

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Brand Game Development

JANUARY 28, 2019

Chance elements are valuable in game design because they keep games from being “solved” in the same way that chess – a perfect information, zero luck game – ultimately was. Take note, aspiring game designers! This is arguably one of the worst feelings that a game can give you.

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Brand Game Development

SEPTEMBER 3, 2019

No matter how you feel about it, there is a lot that new board game designers can learn from it. Need help on your board game? Join my community of over 2,000 game developers, artists, and passionate creators. In my opinion, pacing is one of the most underrated aspects of board game design.

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Brand Game Development

SEPTEMBER 16, 2019

By playing it and studying it, we can learn more about effectively implementing asymmetrical game design. It’s also great at teaching us how to use theme to introduce gamers to much grittier games than they would normally play. Not bad for a game about woodland creatures!

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Brand Game Development

FEBRUARY 11, 2019

On top of that, the experience for beginners and the experience for advanced players are different enough to keep the game engaging even as you learn more about it. For these reasons and more, we’re going to dive into Ticket to Ride and talk about what new board game designers can learn from this 15-year-old game.

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Ask a Game Dev

DECEMBER 29, 2022

So what does this have to do with game design? As a game designer, you’ve got to convey a constant flow of game information to the player, and you want to avoid overwhelming them with it. If you want to be a game designer, you should keep this in your pocket as a tool to use when the time is right.

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Brand Game Development

JANUARY 27, 2020

Aspiring board game designers should take note of how the name and the theme tear down barriers that would otherwise keep would-be-gamers out of gaming. The post 4 Lessons from Quacks of Quedlinburg for Aspiring Board Game Designers appeared first on Brandon the Game Dev.

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Brand Game Development

SEPTEMBER 30, 2019

It has to be the benchmark by which your design, should you decide to make something as heavy as this game, is measured. No two games should be the same. So many of the great games that I find inspiring from a game design perspective share this quality. You can call it replayability or variance.

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Ask a Game Dev

SEPTEMBER 11, 2024

It's primarily a feature handled by game design and engineering. The designers figure out how the camera needs to behave for the intended player experience and then the engineers figure out how to translate those behavior rules into code.

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Ask a Game Dev

NOVEMBER 30, 2023

Getting a promotion in the game industry usually requires the designer to take two steps. This means taking on more difficult responsibilities and tasks, the sort that the mid or senior level devs are doing. In my experience, most promotions in a game design career don't happen internally.

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Brand Game Development

JANUARY 21, 2019

The interesting decision points around balancing short-term and long-term needs and the manageable chance-driven events are worth study by all aspiring game designers. Learn from Pandemic and you’ll make a game people never get sick of.

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PreMortem.Games

MAY 24, 2024

Since childhood, Nicot always had a fascination with video games, but when it was time to pick a career, game designer wasn’t on the radar. He went into transportation management, but game development never really left his mind. The Sanctua game design document was 95% complete before I started coding.

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Brand Game Development

JANUARY 7, 2019

For modern game designers, my recommendation is that even in competitive games, you find opportunities to encourage players to form alliances. This isn’t always doable, but when it is, it creates a whole new layer to the game. A lot of games have come and gone and Catan endures.

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Brand Game Development

NOVEMBER 11, 2019

Then they create a game that meets those demands, in short, assuring product-market fit. If you’re a board game designer looking to make a financially successful game, one good place to start is by researching the market. Many game designers see theme as having two primary objectives. Draw players in.

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Ask a Game Dev

AUGUST 5, 2024

I think you have the wrong idea about what game designers do. We're not project leads that pitch entire games, we're [ content creators ] that build the bits of specific content in games - the spells, the monsters, the fights, the classes, the races, the quests, the environments, the stats, the companions, and so on.

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Brand Game Development

FEBRUARY 4, 2019

I am pleased to say that it is an absolutely fantastic game that’s worth purchasing. I consider this to really valuable for learning game design simply because there is so much going on. Need help on your board game? Join my community of over 2,000 game developers, artists, and passionate creators.

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Brand Game Development

OCTOBER 28, 2019

The post 4 Lessons from Everdell for Aspiring Board Game Designers appeared first on Brandon the Game Dev. And it has just the right amount of gimmickry to make you pay attention. Not bad for a civilization of woodland creatures!

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GamesIndustry.biz

JULY 8, 2024

Jennifer and Bjorn Pankratz – who previously served Piranha Bytes as story and game designer and creative director, respectively – hope to "develop immersive and fantastic indie games " at their new start-up, Pithead, which was formed on July 4, 2024.

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Brand Game Development

OCTOBER 14, 2019

Its art, components, and use of late 80s / early 90s nostalgia made the game stand out in a noisy world. From its success, we can all learn how to create games with enticing themes. The post 4 Lessons from Dinosaur Island for Aspiring Board Game Designers appeared first on Brandon the Game Dev.

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Brand Game Development

JANUARY 13, 2020

Lastly, the variable player powers are balanced in such a way that the game stays fresh for a long time! The post 4 Lessons from Spirit Island for Aspiring Board Game Designers appeared first on Brandon the Game Dev.

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Brand Game Development

FEBRUARY 18, 2019

For those of you who are fans of Azul , what else can we learn from this game to become better designers? The post 4 Lessons from Azul for Aspiring Board Game Designers appeared first on Brandon the Game Dev.

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PreMortem.Games

OCTOBER 2, 2024

Solo devs have to be generalists, and that’s not for everyone”. Typically I’ll design and iterate alone, make playable builds, then have others play them and check the response and any (new) problems that crop up in the user’s experience. .” I think this helps with keeping game dev burnout at bay.”

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Ask a Game Dev

FEBRUARY 28, 2024

Is doing game design professionally what you really want, or would doing game design as an amateur hobbyist be enough? The second major question you need to ask yourself is "Do I really need to go to school to study game design?" I'll tell you now that I never went to school for game design.

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GamesIndustry.biz

APRIL 9, 2024

Part of 2024's cohort is Rafif Kalantan, an emerging narrative and game designer from Saudi Arabia who spoke to GamesIndustry.biz about her journey from studying computer science to winning the 2023 Yugo BAFTA Student Award for her puzzle game Eros Xavier's Love Solutions.

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Game Wisdom

NOVEMBER 8, 2024

Why You Can’t Objectively Build Great Games Josh Bycer josh@game-wisdom.com I was reading a piece over on Game Developer that gave me pause for a second about whether this is what game design at the AAA level is about now — focusing on analytics and trying to “math” the perfect … The post Why You Can’t Objectively (..)

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GamesIndustry.biz

MARCH 27, 2024

AEGIS calls this the first developer union contract at a major US games firm. It will provide various protections for the union unit across company divisions, including game design, translation, and marketing. Read more

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PreMortem.Games

OCTOBER 30, 2024

After finishing IHAS, I will start to build a strong team to work on games that are beyond my scope a solo dev.” I’ve been working on a game for close to 3 years at this point and the whole idea of IHAS has transpired through these years of development. How did you get the idea for IHAS? How do you deal with that? “

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Grid Sage Games

MAY 8, 2022

Cogmind’s world map as seen in my yEd graph (initially shared in my Cogmind dev tools article), albeit with branches distorted and some locations completely removed to keep the spoiler level low. You can still see how there are paths from individual branch maps that cut out early to return to the main areas.

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