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Playtesting and Record Keeping

Brand Game Development

When you playtest a game, alone or with other people, you’re going to be creating a lot of data. Log every single playtest with the game and make sure your playtest matches with a game version number. First, I discourage the use of BoardGameGeek for playtest record keeping. Who played? What was the outcome?

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The History of the Commodore 64 in Twelve Objects #5: Zzap!64 and other Magazines

Jesper Juul

Commodore 64 games were usually so challenging as to be impossible – playtesting was not yet formalized or required – and especially European magazines regularly published cheat codes in the form of programs and POKEs that would modify the game program, making the games playable and completeable after all.

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SenAm Games is developing Al-Sirah, a game that educates young muslims about the Islam

PreMortem.Games

Great formula In order to make the game appealing to the whole family, the studio opted for a bright and cartoony look of the graphics. We already conducted lots of playtests with children from the age group 10-12 years and really feel that we have hit upon a great formula for the game. That is if they can get the financing in place.

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Rebots by FlatPonies launches after 6 years “We’re ready for more ambitious projects”

PreMortem.Games

The quirky graphical style of Rebots adds much to the overall mood of the game. We entered Steam Festivals, ran regular playtests and used social media.” It’s a focused effort that ties the whole game’s progression together and it’s a joy to explore.” Our visual style is thanks to our amazing Art Director Simon Post,” says Porkoláb.

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Parallel Experiment by Eleven Puzzles: “Put your heart into it and players will notice”

PreMortem.Games

We make simple sketches and truly ugly placeholder graphics. “Playtesting is key. .” Once a concept is chosen, it goes through a prototyping phase where function takes priority over form. “At this stage, we dont care about visuals at all. Seriously, they look like something a toddler would draw! But thats the point!

Puzzle 138
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Feral Cat Den is pushing the audio-visual boundaries of games with Nirvana Noir

PreMortem.Games

Our visual style comes from our background in motion graphics,” says Evan Anthony , Co-founder and Creative Lead at Feral Cat Den. This field of visual art emphasizes abstraction and graphic design to compress storytelling into quick digestible and fun chunks.” This gave the studio a bit of an outsider perspective.

Art 138
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Theme vs. Mechanics

Brand Game Development

Through playtesting, you can answer the question “do the mechanics suit the theme?”. Once you’ve got mechanics to suit a core theme, you can develop the theme a little more through art, story, and graphic design. Then you can start developing mechanics. The further you go, the grittier rules become.

Mechanics 100