Would you like to go for a leisurely stroll while your character automatically shoots at millions of baddies? Sure you would! Come with me! Let’s have a ~brief~ look at horde survivors.
Author: danielzklein
I Read Too Many Books
(yes, yes, game design related posting will resume soon-ish, I think, but I needed to put this somewhere so I put it here.) This is a list of 80 books I read in the last ~18 to 24 months. I was going to do just 2024, but due to Audible’s actively user-hostile UX I can’t….
Overthinking Critical Damage
What if you thought about critical damage but like, too much? What would it mean to think about critical damage more than 100%? Wait, no.
Tom Cadwell’s Antipatterns
Tom Cadwell once posted a few anti-patterns on the League forums: things designers should avoid. In this article, I add 4k words and little of substance to the conversation.
Direct Player Communication: A Case Study
Originally the intro to the Tom Cadwell’s Anti-Patterns post, this is now about the context around communicating directly with your playerbase and I guess a little bit about who Tom is and why you should care what he says about design.
Standard Excessively Verbose Disclaimer
As an anxious wreck, I must wrap all my opinions and proclamations in a dense thick cocoon of disclaimers. This got tiresome to do in every article, so I modularized it. Consider this a function I can call whenever I need to say “no but really I don’t mean all design”.
Some Books I’ve Read
I could be normal and just post reviews on goodreads, but I choose to be a problem.
How? What? Why?
We can think of game design at three levels of abstraction: how, what, and why. Game Design courses tend to mostly cover the how. Why?
A Quick Portfolio
Sometimes prospective employers want to see a portfolio, so here is that thing. I don’t believe in portfolios for game designers, but I’m outvoted.
What isn’t a framework
Let’s quickly talk about what I mean when I say framework, why it’s not a small engine and why I’m also not super interested in big, all-encompassing theories of fun.