game design

From the reserve power section of Star Fleet Battles rulebook: SFB is as complex as you can make a game and still be commercially viable, IMHO. I would also say it's the deepest game I know, too. X4 is the most complex and the deepest video game I know about, though I wouldn't be shocked if...

Back in the days of yore, it wasn't all that rare for a game in a series to ask you for a save game from a previous game in the series. For instance, Dragon Age 2 would check what your character looked like in DA1 and put a statue up that looked like your old character. Now, the practice is...

Options are a wonderful way to widen a game's appeal. Graphic options let you tailor a game's graphics to fit your system's capabilities and your own tastes (depth of field OFF!). Difficulty settings let you tailor the game to your own skills and even mood. Gameplay settings let you customize...

@Kaamos_Llama's topic on original games reminded me of a really ancient one... (You do NOT want to know what my parents paid for that game!) After the initial years, though, games have REALLY hate mazes. If there's a choice in direction at all, the "wrong" way will only let you go for maybe...

The re-release of Mass Effect reminds me of something I first noticed in Mass Effect 1: if you can get through the opening 20 hours or so, the rest of the game (barring a few boss fights) is a cake run. That's really become the norm now in games, particularly RPGs. I just finished Trails of...

Hello everyone, I'm a game designer and a researcher and the Game Design field. I'm contacting you after a quick email with Andy Chalk, that suggested me to directly use the forum. I'm trying to collect feedback from the gamer community in order to identify different game design practise and...

In 2004, a paper was published in which an attempt was made to formalize some of the language used to talk about game design: https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download;jsessionid=24640B609CF819EE213B7C42AC0E1355?doi=10.1.1.79.4561&rep=rep1&type=pdf A video that explains the aesthetics...

@Sarafan's post in another topic reminded me of an issue I mumble about a lot: RPGs that are supposed to be non-linear but actually are. I'm not talking about cheap dialog choices where the only difference the choice makes is that one or two lines of dialog will be different, I'm talking on the...