Between two Worlds

 Hello again.      I am in the pleasant position to announce that i have finished my work on a card game i've been making. As such, i have both the time and the mental capacity to bless you once again with an article. This time i would like to talk about a topic near and dear to the internet's hearts, which is balancing. Balancing is, i would wager, the most common topic of discussion when it comes to game design. I would also wager that it is the easiest topic to talk about and one that dominates discussions way too much. People talk too much about balancing and people talk too much about balancing from a flawed point of view, which i would like to tackle by talking about employing balancing to reinforce a game's feeling, something which i believe is more important than a "perfectly balanced" game.     To get into the meat and potatoes of the article, here is my position: it would be okay in a game for an element to be objectively more powerful and useful ...

 Hello again!       The enigma that is my schedule has permitted me to resurface once again and i have decided to spend this golden opportunity to talk about league of legends again. Last time i swore that league doesn't occupy as much of my headspace as it seems but the numbers say otherwise. Maybe spending 8 hours a day on league in the entirety of my middle school might've left something in my brain that i am not aware of. Oh well!      This post actually came to me when i was talking with a lovely lady who recently started playing league (my condolences). Eventually the conversation touched upon the topic of toxicity and i shared an incredibly barebones analysis of how league's gameplay creates and intensifies the problem. The idea is  that the game doesn't encourage enough team play and players treat league as a single player game where other people can fuck up your experience. People run their lane, with other lanes being more opportuni...

Hello again.     It is no surprise that i am obsessed with Tekken. As i am writing this actually, i am listening to Celebration On Seine. There is a lot to love about Tekken's design and it's fascinating to uncover the treasure trove of 30 years of design that this series hauls around. Today, i will talk about a few random Tekken-related thoughts and anecdotes i'd like to share.     To start us off, i would like to talk about Kazama Jin, specifically in Tekken 7. Jin is my character of choice, my love, my babygirl and i have spent countless hours slowly integrating his entire moveset into the way i play (which is 78 moves btw), with each move being a certain tool to combat a very specific situation. That is by no means surprising to a game designer, as making a player use a cascade of tools means that tools should not share uses, because in that case players will simply opt to use the one they like the most and ignore the rest. One move in particular that goes agains...

 Happy holidays!     The flow of my brain activity has decided to bless you all today with another game design article. What i want to talk about today is harmony. More specifically, the idea that design begets design.     Some time ago, i read somewhere that Michelangelo said that he doesn't sculpt; rather, he "frees the statue trapped inside the slab of marble". It's been so much time actually that i don't even remember if it was Michelangelo, but this saying stuck with me. At first it seemed like a romanticization or just something stupid because like, come on dude. There's no statue stuck in there you're just chipping away at a block of marble with your chisel. But now that i am more experienced, older, wiser and more mentally ill i can see that he had a point.     One key pillar of game design i think we can all agree is that different aspects of design need to agree with each other. I cannot design a horror monster to be spooky and scary and have...

Hello. It's been a while.     I have been thinking some things that i want to share with you. Indulge me for a second. If i were to lay out the difficulty curve of a game and how this curve is achieved in relation to the player character's power, the logical way to put it would be that the player's power relation with the game starts out with the player being more powerful than the challenges they face, then the challenges slowly catch up to them until the game overtakes the player character in power, calling for the player to make up the deficit with their skill (should the game ever reach that point. Some games never make the player face something that can overpower them.). That all makes sense thus far, right? Am i making sense? I think i am making sense. If i truly am making sense then riddle me this: why the fuck do RPG games do it backwards?     In an RPG game the player character's power only grows . Of course, the enemies' power grows in accordance to the di...

 Hello everyone.      As always, i am usually preoccupied with my fantasies about games that could've been, or could be. Once such a fantasy takes over my mind a few times over, it has officially passed the test of my tiny attention span and is promoted to a blog post or even an active project. One such fantasy has been additions and changes i'd like to make to one of my favorite games of all time, Patapon 3. Fantasizing about Patapon 3 came about when i played an incredible overhaul mod by Madwig and the changes within that mod sparked my imagination and made it fly away. It'd be cool if i could offer my designer chops to the project. Actually, this blogpost may even serve as a presentation!      For anyone unfamiliar with Patapon 3, i won't go into detail about the game. The post is shaping up to be quite long already. Basically, Patapon 3 is a rhythm game/dungeon crawling 2D RPG where the player controls a party of three Patapon and one Uberhero or ...