Forging a Title

Right now, I'm trying to come up with a title for my game. The working title that I'm using for the beta is "Apocalypses Now". The general gist of the game is that the world is ending, and players are struggling to survive in the ruins of the Earth. The title, as it stands, while a little clever, is also very derivative, and not particularly interesting or entertaining. It doesn't roll off the tongue or stick in the mind. It isn't even easy to spell or say.

The Role of RPGs

A friend asked me what aspects and themes I liked about RPGs, and I responded with a word vomit. It is not clear, concise or even likely representative of my opinions, but it includes some, if not most of them and it is from the perspective of a designers, a GM and a player, so it is worth including here.

Mind Control for Practical Purposes

Earlier this year, I designed, organized and ran a campus wide Mafia game (Rules here). Surprising nobody other than myself, it required a lot of work and effort to keep on top of it. This was the first time the game was played, so I had to make rules decisions and re-balance the game while it was being played. As a designer, it is important to note that people are really crazy, and they'll come up with questions you wouldn't think of asking, much less answering. This is particularly pertinent when you are designing an open RPG as the question of "What can I do?" is often answered with "What do you want to do?". Eventually, however, they will want to do something outside of the rules that you have codified, and someone needs to decide how things should play out. For this, as I was running the game, the decisions fell to me.

Rise of Champions: A Senior Thesis in Game Design

While writing yesterday's post, I realized that I hadn't mentioned, much less discussed my senior thesis. I spent several months designing, resigning and revising Rise of Champions, as well as writing several pieces the history and design of other tabletop RPGs. I've just grabbed a couple pieces from the final hundred-twenty-five pages describing what I did and my intent while working on the project. If you're interested in reading the whole thing, it is currently available here.

The Rulebook on Rules

In my experience, the hard part about creating a game isn't figuring out the concept, or the mechanics, or even coming up with the specific rules. It is writing them down. Putting pen to paper isn't the challenge, but explaining the rules to somebody who isn't as intimate with them as I am is often quite difficult.

It's Pretty Simple: Complicated vs. Complex

One of my problems early in game design was learning how to get through the language barrier. What makes it tricky is that it isn't an actual language, and that it isn't really codified anywhere. When working internationally, you can learn a foreign language or pick up on cultural behaviors. When programming or working in tech, again, you can learn the literal language and study the jargon. With game design, different designers often use the same words to say different things. From my experiences, the language used is not necessarily constant, and that can lead to arguments that end up being semantics, but the debaters believe that they are arguing over the core of a term.

Game Design: Breaking the Seesaw

Time to enter the ring for another bout with balance. The last two posts have been about single player and multi-player balance respectively. This time, I'm going to try to look at a few different methods and approaches to balancing games. By changing the way you approach balancing, you change the way the game is played. Additionally, you oftentimes have to come to an accord with outside forces influencing your game.

Game Design: Playing on the Seesaw

In my previous post, I talked at some length about balance, particularly in single player environments. This time around, I'm going to dive into multi-player balance. As previously explored, the core of single player balance is making sure that the player continues to be able to make interesting and valid choices. This continues to be true in multi-player games, but requires additional care.

Game Design: Keeping the Spoon on the Nose

To me, as a designer, balance means a couple different things. In a single player game, it means that the player has interesting and valid choices available to them. For multi-player, it means that given equal skill, from the beginning of the game, each player has an equal chance to win. Its a bit more complicated than that however, so let's dive in.

Mafia: A Game of Disorganized Crime

For more than the past decade, I've traditionally gone camping with a number of other families. I bring this up, because, around the campfire, we often play the game "Mafia". The game rules are fairly simple, and we generally kept to the base rules with minimum fuss. Once diving past the base level of play, it becomes a fascinating game. The choices the players make are very rarely based on any concrete evidence provided to them from the game, but instead are based on conjecture and uninformed guesses.

How Guns Work (in Mass Effect)

The following is an article I wrote and posted a year or two back, talking about the then-upcomming Mass Effect 3. Its mostly a rant on the various ways to set up and design ammunition in a game. Without further ado, the original post: