How to write a Game Design Document
Game Developer
AUGUST 15, 2023
Game Design Documents (GDD) have a long history and a different place in many designers' toolboxes. Here's how to write a useful, up-to-date GDD.
Game Writing Job Hunt Misconceptions
Game Design Aspect
APRIL 15, 2022
In this video, game writer Sande Chen lists the top 5 game writing job hunt misconceptions she found during her research on job seekers wanting to break into the video game industry. In 2020 and 2021, I interviewed job seekers who were actively applying to jobs and internships in the video game industry.
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20 Game Design and Development Blogs: Great Writing On How To Make Games
Tiny Hydra
APRIL 22, 2021
The post 20 Game Design and Development Blogs: Great Writing On How To Make Games appeared first on Tiny Hydra. But, as you might guess while reading this very blog post, we’re still strong believers that a regularly updated blog full of well-crafted posts can be an invaluable source of both learning and entertainment.
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New and Improved Game Writing Portfolio Webinar!
Game Design Aspect
JULY 21, 2021
Last year, I was planning to have another run of Game Writing Primer but the pandemic and subsequent lockdown made that impossible. I checked in with my former students and was delighted to hear of their successes, games , awards, job offers, start-ups, and even a pending wedding between two of them!
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What Is Iterative Game Design?
Game Designing
SEPTEMBER 7, 2023
One of the most important steps in game development is iterative game design. It’s built on the idea that games aren’t perfect after one round of development. Let’s learn more about iterative game design and what it entails. Let’s learn more about iterative game design and what it entails.
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4 Lessons from Exit Games for Aspiring Board Game Designers
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. Exit Games by Kosmos are the closest we can get to the authentic in-person experience right now. Need help on your board game?
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4 Lessons from Root for Aspiring Board Game Designers
Brand Game Development
SEPTEMBER 16, 2019
.” – sedlak87, 9/10 “Still, while there are a lot of four-player, asymmetrical games out there, I think this is the best.” As you scroll, you notice people write reviews in a way that implies the balanced nature of the asymmetrical design is surprising. Not bad for a game about woodland creatures!
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10 Elements of Good Game Design
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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4 Lessons from Pandemic for Aspiring Board Game Designers
Brand Game Development
JANUARY 21, 2019
A well-designed co-op game like Pandemic stands out among the crowd. There is a relative dearth of good cooperative games out there in the board gaming world. At the time of writing this article, about 6% of board games listed on board game have cooperative play. You know what I’ve noticed?
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How the Challenges of Game Design Teach Kids Perseverance and Resilience
Real Programming
JULY 16, 2024
Gamification RP4K places video games at the centre of what we do in a couple of ways. We don’t only teach video games, but we also harness the same dynamics that make video games so engaging and addictive to help kids learn. Video games combine art forms.
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Make a Board Game in 28 Days: A Challenge by Brandon the Game Dev
Brand Game Development
FEBRUARY 1, 2021
Today, I have a challenge for you as a board game designer. I want to see you make a board game in 28 days. That’s why I’ve provided a 28-day game design challenge for you. This 28-day challenge is intended to give you the structure needed to get into the habit of board game design.
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Writing Better Practical Tests For The Games Industry
Tiny Hydra
MAY 27, 2021
I have been doing design and development tests for over a decade now (I even did some art tests early in my career) and I have come to the conclusion that most tests are bad. The idea of testing people isn’t bad, in fact, it’s imperative in the games industry.
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Kyzrati’s Game Design Philosophy
Grid Sage Games
MAY 8, 2022
Recently a player asked me a question regarding my game balance philosophy, and while I can often respond to queries by pointing to some previous article, despite all my writing and no doubt occasionally touching on related topics, I had yet to explicitly do any sort of summary of the philosophy behind my gamedev work.
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Save the Date: Webinars Coming
Game Design Aspect
MARCH 21, 2022
The autobiographical essay was the first memoir type of writing that I had ever published and it was later included in Covid-19 memory projects and in ArtsWestchester 's exhibition, " Together apART: Creating During Covid." At the same time, I've been interviewing hiring managers and updating my webinar on game writing portfolios.
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A deep dive into the beautiful (video) game in A Tale of Two Halves by Bitmap Books
PreMortem.Games
OCTOBER 16, 2024
The complexity of the process depends on the scale of the project, and for A Tale of Two Halves, which spans decades of football gaming history, the challenge was immense. This book has probably taken more like two years due to the sheer scale of the task to write and design it.”
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PlayCrafting Student Spotlight Update
Game Design Aspect
DECEMBER 31, 2020
It was a delight to hear from my former game writing students at PlayCrafting. They attended the one-night Game Writing Portfolio Workout sessions or the multi-week intensive Game Writing Primer course. Mary Georgescu is starting a new job as a game designer at Exploding Kittens.
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The importance of a game design document & how to create one – part 1
The Knights of Unity
FEBRUARY 5, 2021
After all, in a couple of hours that you would spend on writing all the ideas down, you might be coding and make these ideas come to live instead, right? If you decide to work on your design doc at the beginning of the project, your future self will probably thank your past self on many occasions. Well, not exactly. .
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A Day in the Life of a Game Writer
Game Design Aspect
JULY 6, 2021
This year, when I interviewed numerous aspiring game writers and narrative designers, I discovered that many were a bit fuzzy on the actual day-to-day tasks of the job. It was much like when people ask about game design and then find out with surprise that the actual job entails spreadsheets.
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Makhoba Kamogelo: “Don’t let fear stop you from reinventing yourself”
PreMortem.Games
NOVEMBER 13, 2023
A community manager and new game designer. A game filled with cute armoured babies on a brave mission to save their daycare from a goblin invasion. She explains, “Creativity ended the minute high school began, you had to do things a certain way and the only room for creativity was in writing English essays.”
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Forging Socio-Emotional Connections in Games
Game Design Aspect
JUNE 2, 2022
In this article, game designer Sande Chen relates important lessons learned from the design of that game company's games, Journey and Sky. The conversation really tied in with a previous panel topic at CIMFest, Designing Non-Toxic Game Communities. In addition, players cannot disguise themselves.
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A friend of mine wants to become a game designer without learning any other disciplines in game dev, he seems very sure this is possible but his confidence comes off as “idea guy” to me. I like thinking about design as well and how it could all fit together cohesively but I’m worried he’s setting himself up for failure by not learning another discipline to go along with it. Am I correct in this thought or am I being an jerk?
Ask a Game Dev
AUGUST 3, 2023
At the very least he'll need to create his own assets and/or write his own code. If you look at any indie game, you'll generally see a small team of a handful of devs who are each responsible for a huge amount of different kinds of work. There's just too much work to be done without enough hands to do it within a small team.
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Game Idea Lists
Game Design Aspect
JULY 10, 2020
In this article, game designer Sande Chen discusses the practice of generating game ideas on a daily or weekly basis. In writing classes, students sometimes are asked to journal or write daily. Similarly, game design students may be asked to generate lists of game ideas or mechanics.
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Passionate Resilience: The Rise of Pineapple on Pizza Studios with Kushal Sithlu
PreMortem.Games
JULY 8, 2024
His turning point came in 2019 at Comic Con Africa, where he discovered a Game Design degree at Wits University’s stand. “I However, it still took a nudge from a dreadful experience in an Applied Mathematics class to propel him to switch from Computer Science to Game Design. I quickly wrote a story, and she loved it.
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Solo dev Tomasz Kaye: “ChatGPT massively sped up the development of Axe Ghost”
PreMortem.Games
OCTOBER 2, 2024
What started as a simple concept quickly turned into a game that challenges players with a mix of strategic depth and risk-reward mechanics. I used ChatGPT heavily while writing the backend Amazon service that handles the daily challenge.” I think we have a similar attitude about what ‘good game design’ is, mechanically.
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How much paperwork does a game designer or other “trench level” game developers deal with? Does the amount of paperwork increase the higher up the chain you go?
Ask a Game Dev
FEBRUARY 9, 2024
Besides the leads, some specific disciplines tend to do more paperwork - QA spends a huge amount of time filling out bug reports, designers have to write design documents, and production have to create most/all of the non-bug tasks to be tracked.
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Jussi Kemppainen is exploring AI-assisted game development with Echoes of Somewhere
PreMortem.Games
AUGUST 30, 2023
AI affects game design The project’s trajectory shifted with the integration of AI tools. “To produce a point and click game, and to document the creation of a partly AI-generated game.” Next, I start generating assets for the game with AI, like locations, character designs etc.”
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The Ten Player Motives
iHobo
FEBRUARY 22, 2023
The ten player motives (10PM) is a player satisfaction model developed by International Hobo Ltd, one that we use as a key tool when helping clients with the challenging process of crafting enjoyable, engaging, and memorable games.
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Game of Thrones Predictions from a Game Designer
Sirlin
APRIL 26, 2019
My predictions below relied on the premise that good writing would basically force some events to happen, and I was thrown by a loop by the, well, not good writing. I leave this prediction post up for reference anyway —- I’m going to give my predictions for how Game of Thrones ends up. You can throw all that out. Bran’s power.
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2020 Women in Games Hall of Fame Awards
Game Design Aspect
SEPTEMBER 8, 2020
I'm thrilled to be shortlisted for one of the 2020 Women in Games Hall of Fame Awards and I am particularly excited that I can spotlight learning games and serious game development within the global game industry. Sande Chen is a writer and game designer with over 15 years of experience in the game industry.
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Tasty Humans Launches on Kickstarter Tomorrow
Brand Game Development
JUNE 24, 2019
To celebrate the launch, I’ll be releasing a five-part case study on the development of the game every week for the next five weeks. I didn’t write these articles – Ryan Langewisch did. He is the designer of Tasty Humans. He won Panjam, a 48-hour board game design contest that Pangea ran in 2018.
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We. The Refugees. Ticket to Europe by Act Zero is a redemption for its maker
PreMortem.Games
MARCH 17, 2023
25 years old, fresh out of script writing studies and feeling detached from society. I felt like an imposter most of the time I was working on the game. The process of writing the 300,000-word script took me 20 months. Jędrzej Napiecek was not in a good place. To be honest, he just felt so… useless.
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Baladins from Seed by Seed is a narrative co-op RPG that respects your time
PreMortem.Games
MAY 15, 2024
The idea of community and consensus is fundamental in the whole story, so we needed this idea to appear in the game design as well.” Creating a narrative-driven multiplayer game that is fun both online and with some friends on the couch posed some real challenges.
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Upcoming CIMFest Keynote: Flavored by Authenticity
Game Design Aspect
JUNE 9, 2021
Roundtable: Creating Non-Toxic Gamer Communities (1 PM Eastern) What game design principles can be used to promote friendlier and harassment-free communities? Join us for a discussion on what strategies game designers can use to create safe virtual spaces that are enjoyable for all players.
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The Joy and Pain of Game Mastery
Game Wisdom
FEBRUARY 21, 2024
The Joy and Pain of Game Mastery Josh Bycer josh@game-wisdom.com As I was writing my shooter book, it meant revisiting some of the better shooters of the past 10 years, and another playthrough of Doom Eternal.
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Screen Time Debate: Puffs or Broccoli?
Game Design Aspect
SEPTEMBER 5, 2022
In this article, game designer Sande Chen delves into the parental guilt associated with app usage, as documented in the book, Baby, Unplugged. Hope you're having a good holiday and not working :) In the previous months, I've been following up on research about kid games, especially those for the preschool set. Happy Labor Day!
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Harvest Island is a mix of farming and horror “I figured it’s a unique premise”
PreMortem.Games
OCTOBER 18, 2023
I love to see players’ reactions when they play my game. Ironically, my cousin hated game design and instead works in real estate.” The cost of development is cheaper if you know how to draw, program, and write music. Or sometimes I would throw an entire idea away because it didn’t fit the game.
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Dear Daughter: A Quarantine Essay
Game Design Aspect
JULY 15, 2020
I want to thank those who have provided feedback and encouragement: Phi Beta Kappa NY for its Quarantine Stories session, my colleague Juliana Loh , my fellow writers from my USC writing circle, and Alia Wilhelm from Nearness.
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52 Upcoming: Together apART: Creating During COVID
Game Design Aspect
APRIL 11, 2021
It features more than 250 works of artwork by Hudson Valley artists in the form of sculpture, painting, photography, sewing, pottery, handicrafts, and writing. Sande Chen is a writer and game designer with over 15 years of experience in the game industry. Entry is free, with a suggested donation of $5.
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Game storytelling and narrative design
Jaunty Bear Games
JANUARY 31, 2023
Player choice and agency: Giving players meaningful choices and consequences throughout the game that allow them to shape the story and the outcome of the game. The post Game storytelling and narrative design appeared first on Jaunty Bear Games.
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How To Play-Test the Rules of Your Board Game
Brand Game Development
DECEMBER 11, 2017
Board game development is a very individual process. Every single developer has different methods for creating their games. This article is the sixth of a 19-part suite on board game design and development. Need help on your board game? What are some guidelines for writing good rules? Sean: Sure!
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Flavored by Authenticity: How Personal Experiences Amplify Narrative
Game Design Aspect
FEBRUARY 1, 2022
Matthew Farber, Juliana Loh, Kimberly Unger, and I headlined the Georgia Game Developers Association CIMFest last year with this powerful panel exploring how personal experiences empower narrative writing. She has been invited to the White House and represented the USA at the World Conference on Science Literacy.
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How To Perform Video Game Critical Analysis
Game Designing
SEPTEMBER 8, 2023
Here are the basic steps in creating a video game analysis: Determine Your Objective Why are you writing a video game critical analysis? It’s a question that only you can answer, and it will impact how you write the critique. It will make it easier for you to find the right voice when writing your analysis.
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Finding your true love may win the game in Fabledom by Grenaa Games
PreMortem.Games
APRIL 12, 2023
One day, Dave Kosak, who helped us with some writing, suggested the idea of finding true love. About the studio name Grenaa Games: “Grenaa is my family name from my mothers side, so it adds a nice personal touch I think! I do all the coding, game design, day to day production stuff, basically everything else.
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Picking Apart Baldur's Gate 3, Part 3 (The Only Thing You Should Care About: Loot.)
The Bottom Feeder
JUNE 12, 2024
It was a bold choice to ship this game with only one romance option. I wanted to write a third and final article about Baldur's Gate 3 (BG3 for short), a really great game that most people have moved on from, but I want to talk about the most important part of any RPG: LOOT. Making money writing helps the self-esteem.
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