What kind of things do I enjoy making and playing? Honestly, a lot of what I make is “I should try that” but what really drives me, at least lately, has been the concept of making a “toy” and building rules and goals from that. A seminal text for me from university was Tracy Fullerton’s Game Design Workshop which discusses designing for the player experience first, rather than a set of mechanics....
I realised recently that there are kinds of games that I enjoy making and there are kinds of games I enjoy playing. For instance, I enjoy making platformers. it’s immediately gratifying to move a character around a 2D space and designing this space to cater for the movement and other mechanics available to the player. But I don’t really like playing them in my free time. Believe me, I’ve tried. I don’t have too much nostalgia tied to them either as my gaming really kicked off with 3D platformers and Pokemon....
The game Writer’s Block - now with updated name “Eugene Pencil”. I just want a free pizza This game was created as part of the Pizza Jam - a quirky jam where the winner would get a free pizza sent to them regardless of where they live. Needless to say - I was motivated. There were a variety of different themes to pick from but the ones that immediately put ideas into my head were “Copy … Paste” and “CLONE-ZONE”....
The game Maze Craze 20 seconds to Mars The next jam I entered was the 20 second game jam. Now this is my kind of theme! It had a clear constraint and - although it was a month long - it was a lot of fun devising different ways to design gameplay lasting a maximum of 20 seconds. Some of the previous entries are, frankly, incredible with my absolute favourite being Rubblar - a game about a wibbly wobbly rubber arm robbing a bank....
The game Agent Hackman Stealth The theme of the Github Game Off was “secrets” which is just about as vague a theme as you can get without flipping to a random page in the dictionary and blindly poking at a word. We were also given a month to complete it. For me, this was paralysing. I couldn’t focus on this jam for ages, as it felt like an inordinate amount of time with such a vague concept....
The game Cafe Day in Autumn Autumn The first game jam I entered was the Cozy Fall Jam - a thematically strong and focused jam making a cozy game which was … well, autumnal. Though I grew up in a country that didn’t have a strong cultural attachment to the season like the US, I was familiar with the morning frost, warm drinks and the colours of falling leaves. Despite eucalyptus being evergreen… (thank God for invasive deciduous species?...
I spent a month off from my day job to focus on working on my game development skills, and really dive deep into a hobby I’d had on the backburner for many years. What I did was sign up to five different Game Jams on itch.io and I want to spend the next few posts talking about each of them in detail. A what? So what’s a Game Jam? Well I had only really heard about them second-hand - some kind of 24-hour hackathon to create a game from scratch....
I have been trying my hand at creating pixel art from scratch (thanks to Libresprite) and it’s been oddly satisfying. I was able to whip up this familiar image fairly quickly using the original as a reference: Something super interesting is how much you have to do with so little, so every pixel is really important and counts towards the final product. Also dithering can make such a difference for shading and gradients....
About five years ago I started noting down each time I finished a book with a simple “rating” (ranging from Bad -> Excellent) and some quick words about how I felt about it. I can’t remember where I read about this concept, but it was called maintaining a “book of books”. It’s been an interesting experience thus far, and from observing and summarising the data I have the following conclusions:...
One of the things that makes game design incredibly difficult is that, unlike traditional linear media, you have little control over the experience of the person interacting with it. However, you can put all the pieces down, and guide them aesthetically and procedurally towards the intended experience. One classic example that comes to my mind is the board game Splendor. The TL;DR of this is game is that you are gathering “prestige” by buying, selling and trading precious stones....