game design

  • The Game Crafter: Cafepress for board games!

    Hours Categories Gamemaking
    Comments 11 Comments

    Gamecrafter logoThis is awesome, and I will be signing up tonight and probably throwing one of my board game designs up there to try it out. 🙂 The short form: CafePress for board game designers.

    Their brief FAQ covers the basics.

    At TGC, you can start selling your game with only the push of a button. There are no up-front fees, no contractural obligations, no distributors, and you don’t need a big publisher to decide your game will sell 10,000 units in the first year.

    TGC is your dream made simple!

    Why TGC? We’ve been in the game design/manufacturing industry for over 10 years and published many of our own titles. We’ve always specialized in small run games, but we did it only for ourselves. Over the years we’ve gotten hundreds of requests from other indie designers asking if we’d publish their games, and finally we realized that our process could be applied to games other than our own as well.

    — The Game Crafter – Your game REALIZED – Home.

    Looks like they handle not just boards and cards, but also sell a nice assortment of parts that can go into the game. Not as wide an array as I have in my prototype kit, but decent nonetheless. 🙂

  • Great article on essential RPGs

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 7 Comments

    Game Design Essentials: 20 RPGs on Gamasutra is an excellent and in-depth look at RPGs.

    I do miss at least some mention of MUD or DikuMUD, rather than jumping direct to World of Warcraft as the sole exemplar there; almost all MMORPGs today draw from those roots. And there’s also a curious lack of mention of the influence of free-form stuff or more storytelling-based RPGs, even in pen & paper.

    Still, an excellent article.

  • Game Design Concepts: free online class!

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 8 Comments

    Earlier today I noticed that Theory of Fun was listed as “frequently bought with” Understanding Comics on Amazon. And also with Challenges for Game Designers, by Brenda Brathwaite and Ian Schreiber. I thought it was neat, I tweeted it, the end. Then I get replies piling in saying that it is because of Game Design Concepts, a cool thing that Ian is doing this summer: a free class in game design, conducted over the web by blog.

    This blog is a course in game design (specifically, non-digital systems design).

    • Tuition: none. This class is open to all.
    • Prerequisites: none. It is my intention to make this course accessible to all levels of experience, while providing useful additional resources for those who are advanced.
    • Schedule: Monday 6/29/2009 through Sunday 9/6/2009. Posts will be made twice per week. You can read them at your own pace. The course lasts ten weeks.
    • Audience: anyone with an interest in game design. This includes students who are interested in game design; faculty who teach courses in game design and would like to compare course material; game developers with an interest in design or a desire to see an example of what students are being taught these days; or relatives of game designers who are curious about what these people do all day.

    Course Description:

    This course provides students with a theoretical and conceptual understanding of the field of game design, along with practical exposure to the process of creating a game. Topics covered include iteration, rapid prototyping, mechanics, dynamics, flow theory, the nature of fun, game balance, and user interface design. Primary focus is on non-digital games.

    I am guessing this may be of interest to some who read this blog. 🙂 Not sure how I missed it before!

  • Richard Bartle Q&A log

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 21 Comments

    The full log of a great Q&A session with Richard Bartle in Metaplace has been posted up on the Metaplace Forums. It was a wide-ranging discussion, attended by over 70 people. Richard’s dry wit was, as usual, on full display.

    A typical, provocative, snippet:

    [05/26/09 13:13:10] gguillotte: I’ve been watching procedurally generated content for a while. Love comes to mind, a PG MMO. What sort of impact is this going to have, where content generation is automated?

    [05/26/09 13:13:45] Richard: it depends if the generation of the content is the game or is filler
    [05/26/09 13:14:11] Richard: procedural content can work – I’ve spent many, many hours playing Rogue for example
    [05/26/09 13:14:42] Richard: using procedural content to create a canvas for virtual worlds seems a perfectly rational thing to do
    [05/26/09 13:15:22] Richard: however, the designer has to put their soul in it somewhere: either this is by modifying the procedural content or by creating the framework that creates it
    [05/26/09 13:15:59] Richard: now the former is the traditional way for designers to speak to players; if a designer wants to speak through the content-generation rules, well
    [05/26/09 13:16:12] Richard: that would be possible but we don’t have the vocabulary for it yet

    [05/26/09 13:16:28] gguillotte: Thanks.

    [05/26/09 13:16:31] Richard: that makes it an interesting time for us

    [05/26/09 13:16:38] gguillotte: Indeed 😀

    [05/26/09 13:17:11] Richard: Metaplace is a similar thing, btw – we’ll see things here that we haven’t seen the like of before

    [05/26/09 13:17:21] Cuppycake: (We already have!)

    [05/26/09 13:17:24] Richard: which is why I’m so enthusiastic for it
    [05/26/09 13:17:55] Richard: I don’t mean new worlds, I mean new ways of communicating through world creation

  • More on how the body & brain react to games

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 8 Comments

    Gamasutra has a report from a GDC Canada session discussion the role of emotions in games — that is, a researcher who is not Nicole Lazzaro! And it sounds like a fun and meaty discussion.

    The counter is fear, which can cause physiological responses due to the “fight or flight” impulse. Many people love that sensation: “Look at the prevalence of the horror movie; it’s everywhere. Look at horror games.”

    “Surely there’s no harm in that? Well, actually, there is,” said Chandler: Scientists have recently determined that after sustained fear, bodies stop producing adrenaline and being producing cortisol, which begins to break down non-essential organs and tissues to feed vital organs, increasing pain, promoting heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, and obesity.

    So, here we have “games can cause heart disease!” 🙂 Though it should be noted, so can shock horror movies… or perhaps excessive rollercoaster riding.

    There’s also a bit bolstering the arguments I made not long ago about how we have unconscious predispositions towards people and things that looks like people (such as avatars).

    Speaking of which, there was a lengthy discussion on that topic on the latest “Shut Up. We’re Talking” podcast, which has led to even more debate and controversy.

    Unfortunately, I think the SUWT crew missed the point a bit by saying “well, maybe mature or experienced gamers learn not to have these subconscious reactions.” Unfortunately, I don’t think that is true — any more than informed and mature people sail through those tests of their reaction times with photographs of people of mixed races. This is not an easy bias to remove…