A few years ago I wrote about how I'd been playing a simplified version of Carcassonne with Lily. We stopped for a while, but recently we've played simplified versions of Ticket to Ride, Race for the Galaxy, Guillotine, and Settlers of Catan. My general approach here is to find a core piece of the game that will be fun on its own, and then add to it as Lily wants more complexity. While the parti
Building games that can be understood at a glance
Building games that can be understood at a glance - Zach Gage, GDC 2018
Building games that can be understood at a glance
Building games that can be understood at a glance - Zach Gage, GDC 2018
GameSpot's SIMply Divine: The Story of Maxis Software
GameSpot action adventure driving puzzle role-playing simulation sports strategy hardware
Metroidbrainia: An in-depth exploration of knowledge-gated games · Thinky Games
Thinky Games presents a definitive guide to metroidbrania games: What they are, how different games explore the idea in their own way, and a list of our favorites.
Kittens Game - a Dark Souls of incremental gaming
How to write better (game) libraries
Introduction The aim of this article is to provide a series of good general advice and consideratio…
Game design is simple, actually
So, let’s just walk through the whole thing, end to end. Here’s a twelve-step program for understanding game design. One: Fun There are a lot of things people call “fun.” But most of them are not u…
Designing And Building Stockfighter, Our Programming Game | Kalzumeus Software
The Math of Idle Games, Part I
Originally published October 4, 2016 I’ve given a few talks in the past about the appeal and general mechanics of idle games, but what if you actually wanted to make one? Theory and patterns are nice, but there’s some complicated math running behind it. And how on earth
The World's Most Satisfying Checkbox | !Boring Software
The Art of Game Feel (a.k.a Juice) in Product Design
The best farm sims and games like Stardew Valley
Games like Stardew Valley have fully taken root on PC, so now we're thoroughly spoiled for choice on new games to plant parsnips in.
Games Like Zelda - What To Play After You've Finished Tears Of The Kingdom
Attack of the (Zelda) Clones
Grant Barbee — Portfolio
Conquer the Citadel was created as the final project for my VR course. The game is a VR roguelike deckbuilder that takes inspiration from games like Slay the Spire and Gloomhaven. Going into it, my teammate and I knew the scope was ambitious, but we managed to implement almost all of the systems we designed for the game. Altogether we managed to implement combat, status effects, a procedural dungeon map, adding cards to your deck, treasures that grant useful passives, multiple-choice events, shops, and two different characters with their own card pools. One interesting design choice we made was to make the cards and enemy AI highly data-driven. This way, we could add new cards and enemies using existing actions without writing any new code.