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.
Tag: game design
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”.
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.
Fun vs Optimal
Sometimes competitive games ask you to do things that aren’t fun in order to win and make the things that are fun sub-optimal. Why is this and what can we do about it? And why aren’t you pushing the payload?