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.

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.

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: