PreMortem.Games

FEBRUARY 15, 2024

I play games (old and new) to get inspiration and bounce ideas off my wife and friends. I also released the demo on Steam early (after invite-only playtesting) so I can gather feedback from real players. How do you stay motivated through (years of) development? Making the game and brainstorming ideas is fun and silly.

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Build Dev Playtesting Development 138

PreMortem.Games

JULY 29, 2024

Oscar Salandin , known as Peculiar Pixels, received a major validation for his debut game, BOTSU Ridiculous Robots , by being named the Overall Winner at the Develop Indie Showcase Awards 2024. The English solo developer began his journey right after the Pandemic. Inevitably, I’ve gone over time and over budget,” he says.

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Dev Development Sandbox Indy 138

Brand Game Development

JULY 9, 2018

Need help on your board game? Join my community of over 2,000 game developers, artists, and passionate creators. To help us understand the nuances of Reddit, particularly board game Reddit, I’ve brought in Raf Cordero. Brandon: Assume you’re talking to a game developer who’s never used Reddit before.

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Dev Playtesting Games Platformer 130

PreMortem.Games

APRIL 19, 2024

Things were getting serious three years later when Ryding decided to quit his job as a software engineer and work full time as a game developer. 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.

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Playtesting Games Mobile Mobile 129

Brand Game Development

JANUARY 25, 2021

I’ve written before about the usefulness of documenting your playtesting. It contains both pragmatic advice and a primer to the mindset I want you to take into playtesting. Need help on your board game? Join my community of over 2,000 game developers, artists, and passionate creators. Don’t interfere.

Playtesting 130

Playtesting Games Mechanics Editing 130

Brand Game Development

APRIL 7, 2017

I’m trying something different on the Dev Diary. I’ll be explaining my development processes for this game so that you can learn from them. I’ll be explaining my development processes for this game so that you can learn from them. We’re in this together, game devs.

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Mechanics Dev Simulation Games 130

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.

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Dev Build Content Feature 52

Brand Game Development

NOVEMBER 28, 2016

Need help on your board game? Join my community of over 2,000 game developers, artists, and passionate creators. Theme and mechanics are inseparable parts of board games as a whole. Then you can start developing mechanics. Through playtesting, you can answer the question “do the mechanics suit the theme?”.

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Mechanics Playtesting Concepts Art 100

Brand Game Development

MARCH 9, 2020

When board gamers need a game to mercilessly mock , they look no further than Monopoly. Need help on your board game? Join my community of over 2,000 game developers, artists, and passionate creators. Monopoly is a bad game, but have a little respect. Watch your playtesters’ reactions.

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Game Design Game Designer Playtesting Games 130

Brand Game Development

JUNE 3, 2019

Need help on your board game? Join my community of over 2,000 game developers, artists, and passionate creators. For that reason, I’ve brought in Sean Fallon, Founder & CEO of Smunchy Games and User Experience (UX) Designer extraordinaire. That’s a complex question. In this particular case, gamification.

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UX Playtesting Game Design Game Designer 130

Brand Game Development

MAY 1, 2017

One of the most jarring experiences for new game developers is the process of getting their game reviewed. Drama aside, it truly is difficult at first because you have to identify reviewers, send prototypes, make sure your game is ready enough, cross your fingers, and hope they like it. You can keep a dev diary.

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Games Playtesting Dev Prototyping 130

Brand Game Development

APRIL 27, 2020

” Need help on your board game? Join my community of over 2,000 game developers, artists, and passionate creators. Before you ask people to play-test your game, bear in mind the following advice. Two groups that come to mind are the Tabletop Game Playtesters Guild and Card & Board Game Designers Guild.

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Demo Playtesting Simulation Advertising 130

PreMortem.Games

FEBRUARY 19, 2024

This article is part of the game-dev advice newsletter Levelling the Playing Field by Rami Ismail. If you want to know more about the art, craft and science of game development, subscribe here. The newsletter is free but you can support the existence of LTPF with a small subscription fee.

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Writing Communications Point and Click Prototyping 104

Brand Game Development

JANUARY 2, 2018

Board game development is a very individual process. Every single developer has different methods for creating their games. This article is the ninth of a 19-part suite on board game design and development. Need help on your board game? Games are more than just what’s in the box. Who is Carla?

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Playtesting Games Advertising Prototyping 130

PreMortem.Games

FEBRUARY 7, 2024

With Solium Infernum, Australian game developer League of Geeks has revived Vic Davis’ PC cult classic from 2009. A strategy game of politics, intrigue, and betrayal in which players take on the role of a powerful fallen Archfiend and do everything in their power to conquer the Throne of Hell.

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Studios Concepts Playtesting Development 145

Brand Game Development

FEBRUARY 17, 2020

When I was a neophyte game developer, I found an excellent article by Wizards of the Coast, creators of Magic: the Gathering , called Ten Things Every Game Needs. No matter what type of game you’re making, these 10 elements are critical to making a good game. Need help on your board game?

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Game Design Game Designer Tile Games 130

Brand Game Development

OCTOBER 23, 2017

I’ve talked about the benefits and challenges of working alone in the board game industry. Yet I’m a bit of an odd beast in the board game development world since most people prefer to work in teams. Need help on your board game? I’m a designer, and I do development and social media outreach.

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Prototyping Playtesting Games Game Designer 130

Brand Game Development

APRIL 20, 2020

A couple of weeks ago, I asked the readers of this blog to send in answers to the question “ what confuses you most about board game development ?” Need help on your board game? Join my community of over 2,000 game developers, artists, and passionate creators. ” And, wow, did you all deliver!

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Writing Playtesting Game Developer Game Development 130

Brand Game Development

SEPTEMBER 24, 2019

Now it’s time to start tweaking board game rules. This is where board game design often becomes very tricky. Need help on your board game? Join my community of over 2,000 game developers, artists, and passionate creators. With this in mind, let’s talk about how exactly you can make board game rules.

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Balance Games Communications Mechanics 130

Game Dev Unchained

JULY 5, 2023

This episode is sponsored by [link] ⁠ 56% off subscription 20% for one-time purchases with my code GAMEDEV20 Introducing a special guest Max Fink, one of the developers behind the steam sensation, Battle Bit Remastered. Community-Driven Game Development Max spoke candidly about their journey.

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Indy Game Developer Game Development Development 103

Brand Game Development

MARCH 29, 2021

Need help on your board game? Join my community of over 2,000 game developers, artists, and passionate creators. If you don’t consistently work to improve, you won’t make the game you want to make. Now look, some parts of game design – like playtesting or accessibility testing – can be tedious.

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Game Design Game Designer Games Playtesting 130

Brand Game Development

MAY 18, 2020

That’s because it’s easy to make board games in Tabletop Simulator, an inexpensive board game simulation tool available on the Steam store. Need help on your board game? Join my community of over 2,000 game developers, artists, and passionate creators. Need help on your board game?

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Simulation Games Demo Playtesting 130

Brand Game Development

MARCH 16, 2020

To get the Start to Finish series going, I’ve spent some time discussing games, game development, and the amount of careful messaging that is needed to create and sell a great game. At this point, you may be beginning to have some healthy doubts about the benefits and drawbacks of self-publishing a game.

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Games Quality Assurance Art Game Developer 130

SOVEREIGN MOON

OCTOBER 12, 2020

In this introductory tutorial series, we’ll teach beginners how to use the basic controls within Gogot’s game engine. Godot is a free and open source game development software that game devs can use to make beautiful 2D and 3D games. . Want to Make Video Games? Do you love game design?

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Asset Editing Code Scripting 52

Brand Game Development

DECEMBER 3, 2018

Yet the process, so heavy on rejection, has left many game designers heartbroken. Need help on your board game? Join my community of over 2,000 game developers, artists, and passionate creators. Board game publishers have to sort good from bad. They could be manufacturers, retailers, designers, or playtesters.

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Games Retail Game Designer Game Design 130

Radiator Blog

MARCH 16, 2023

Last month, game industry documentary makers 2 Player Productions debuted a massive 32-part YouTube game dev doc series Double Fine PsychOdyssey , chronicling the development of Psychonauts 2 from its earliest glimmers of pre-production in 2015 to its final release in 2021.

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Art Concepts Dev Studios 59

Mircosoft Game Dev

OCTOBER 7, 2018

The organizers of the Game Industry Conference (which is also in Poznań just after GodotCon) are letting us use their great venue, and it will be a great opportunity to get together with Godot users and core developers (our lead dev Juan Linietsky is coming from Argentina). All core devs as tutors.

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Demo Simulation Shaders Engineering 52

Rindoku

OCTOBER 7, 2016

After months of toiling in a secluded attic, the last weeks of which were particularly grueling, we finally took Second Hand to its first public showings: first to Dev-Play in Bucharest and shortly thereafter to Clujotronic in our very own Cluj. It was scary, thrilling, amazing and… we won the Dev-Play Indie Pitch! Color me excited!

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Point and Click Dev Demo Playtesting 52

Brand Game Development

JUNE 11, 2018

As such, board game developers often find their own interest in conventions piqued. Need help on your board game? Join my community of over 2,000 game developers, artists, and passionate creators. I’ve also been to some game conferences with the game as well as some small game development competitions.

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Prototyping Games Localization Demo 130

AWS Games

JULY 26, 2022

This is the responsibility of a game backend. Amazon GameSparks is a fully managed AWS service that provides a backend for game developers, allowing them to focus on building their game and leave managing and scaling cloud infrastructure to GameSparks. Setting up the game backend by importing the snapshot JSON.

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Build Console Code Games 64

Mircosoft Game Dev

JULY 2, 2018

After three days of intensive game development and two weeks of playtesting and rating (over 3,500 ratings!), we now have the results for our June 2018 Godot Community Game Jam ! 110 participants developed games with Godot Engine on the theme TEMPERATURE. Stay tuned for infos regarding our next jam!

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Playtesting Writing Animation Animation 52

Brand Game Development

DECEMBER 26, 2017

Board game development is a very individual process. Every single developer has different methods for creating their games. This article is the eighth of a 19-part suite on board game design and development. Need help on your board game? Playtesting storytelling. Dylan: You’re welcome.

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Art Mechanics Games Game Developer 130

Brand Game Development

JUNE 20, 2019

Need help on your board game? Join my community of over 2,000 game developers, artists, and passionate creators. Allow me to introduce you to Jeff Beck of Grandpa Beck’s Games. You might know their company through Cover Your Assets , their breakout game. It is also currently on Kickstarter!

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Asset Mechanics Games Balance 130

PreMortem.Games

JUNE 11, 2024

Renee Gittins , indie game developer of Potions: A Curious Tale , faced severe harassment after the release of her game on Steam earlier this year. When EA unexpectedly dropped their back catalog just hours after her game’s release, it derailed Gittins’ carefully planned path to success. This is her story.

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Development Playtesting Indy Prototyping 104

Game Global

JULY 12, 2021

They’re related, but the difference is this: A game writer’s primary responsibility is to promote the story that the game tells through the scripts they write. 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.

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Cutscenes Writing Scripting Localization 52

Brand Game Development

DECEMBER 9, 2019

Molly's latest game, The Million Dollar Doodle, is live on Kickstarter! In my game development experience, I’ve never sought out retail distribution. But even still, I feel that not talking about what board game retailers want is a glaring omission in Start to Finish. We had no experience in the game industry.

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Retail Games Writing Indy 130

Brand Game Development

JULY 22, 2019

Need help on your board game? Join my community of over 2,000 game developers, artists, and passionate creators. In each of the design diaries that I have written so far, I have focused on a specific game mechanic or isolated portion of the game. In playtesting, the time between turns has rarely been an issue.

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Tile Games Playtesting Balance 130