Between two Worlds

 Hello everyone. One constant in the league of legends community is criticism of the game's design, especially in the champion department. The 200 or whatever years of game design is a meme for a reason after all and i have to admit that i have indulged in the revel of making fun of the riot designers. Would i really be able to do a better job than them? I think it's time to put my money where my mouth is! And if i really come up with a better design than them, then i think i have earned the right to keep making fun of them (all in good spirit though). To be quite honest, even finding something to design is extremely difficult. The game has been constantly making new champions for well over a decade now and basically every idea i had was already utilized by one of the champions already in the game. So i said screw it and just decided to make bridget from guilty gear! Passive, Master of Yo-Yo : This champion wields a yo-yo! Normally the champion's auto attacks are ranged wit...

It is no secret that i have been making a lot of minecraft servers. Thankfully whatever mental illness compelled me to do that is currently in regression but i cannot guarantee that i will not make another in the near future. And every time i make a server, i build upon the foundations that my previous work and the work of others on the field have built. The process of perfecting my live service shall never end. This post is merely another stop in that journey. Every try thus far has been met with the eventual fizzling out of the live service, no matter the improvement. Every time i find a mountain of issues to tackle, but at some point i thought that i reached a point where i couldn't find enough fault with the design or execution to say that it would fail. Yet, nevertheless, fail it still did, which prompted me to begin looking ways to foster and retain an audience. That search eventually had me landing on gacha games. I specifically enjoy Limbus Company's story, aesthetic an...

 A while back i wrote a little D&D adventure, where a group of traders gets lost in a jungle. I filled that adventure with all sorts of imagery and concepts that i was really interested in and one of those ideas that i really liked was a final dungeon at the end, which i added a few "callouts". I'm gonna call them "callouts" to keep things casual (and so i don't show that i don't know the proper term) and im gonna define them as the game designer telling the player(s) through design that they know their next move and then succeed. One such "callout" was that, during the dungeon, an entity that can't be killed chases after the party and the players have to work around it. I, however, gave them a conspicuous room with one door that locks and unlocks from outside. So they get the dastardly idea to shove the entity inside and lock the door, solving their problem! Too bad i made it so they have to retrieve an item from inside that room later...

 I am a sucker for military development. I don't know what's up with that very specific niche but thus far, i have based quite a few of my designs over the years on this very concept. There's just something about constantly evolving strategies, political and cultural landscapes and technologies . It's like a puzzle game, but you also get to command your solution. One game which i really enjoyed doing this in is total war: Attila, but to be honest the game isn't made with that concept in mind. It just kinda manifested itself as an accident. It could serve as a basis for our concept today though! So i am pretty much thinking up a new total war game right now.  So one thing about military development, especially in the pre-modern times, is that culture affected it greatly. There wasn't really an empirical and scientific way of creating tactics, routines or technological advancements. New ideas would pop up and go through the process of memetic darwinism with the wi...

 So nice you're gonna design twice. I decided to revisit the souls-like concept and this time expand on the mechanics, because damn it i liked the idea! So let's break it down: Nowadays, when designing combat, i tend to gravitate towards aggression. As a player i am naturally aggressive and my highest points are the rush of overwhelming any foe with reckless abandon, which should not surprise you since i am a sol badguy main in guilty gear xrd rev 2 and a romero evangelist in hunt showdown. In terms of feeling, i prefer a balance between heavy aggressive and fast aggressive, which will be my goal to achieve with today's design. Also any controls referenced will be using a controller and specifically the XBOX 360 one. What can you do, i'm a PC kiddie. Another thing i would like to accomplish is give the players a slew of options to express themselves, like dark souls, but unlike dark souls i want to make every choice meaningful and impactful (looking at you, 3/4ths of th...

  Groaaaannnn  yeah get it all out of your system. Yes, this is a concept for a souls-like. Yes, i am aware that the only good souls-likes are the souls series and maybe Nioh depending on today's horoscope (sorry the Surge). Fortunately for you, i am not interested in souls-like combat. Actually, this entire concept is called a souls-like because i was inspired from Dark Souls, the first one specifically and its level design specifically. The combat could itself could be literally anything. I'm going to default to souls-like combat for now though because i haven't really thought about it. So to get to it, i was watching ymfah's video " Beginner's guide to dark souls " and while watching the performance of a certain glitch which has the player negate all fall damage for as long as a spell is active and after the spell is over, the fall damage catches up to them and they die immediately.  The concept is simple: the map is a giant sinkhole, with the player st...

 It's something that everyone who plays a game can instantly pick up, but nobody is able to explain what exactly it is. It even has a pretty mysterious name: Execution . No matter how nebulous the term is, a game designer must always pay great attention to execution, and while it's easy to delegate the job of execution to the developers, a designer must always remain aware of it. How much of a game's quality is based on its execution? It's hard to tell, but i've heard of games whose concept did not excite me but when playing them, i actually enjoyed them, and vice versa. Actually, i can conjure a staggering amount of examples where the opposite is true, where a game's concept excited me only for the way it's made to promptly kill that enthusiasm. If i had to answer the question of how important execution is though, then i would describe the relationship as such: if a game was a person, then its concept would be the DNA and execution would be the entire rest ...

 How you doin'. I have worked with teams making games before. Whether they have been created by me or i simply joined them doesn't matter, i always end up seeing crimes against designing being committed by non-designers. So, like a galliant knight galloping towards the gaping maw of the dragon, i have arrived to share my personal beliefs on what a designer should be and should be doing. What is the job of a designer? To put it simply, a game designer comes up with a game and creates the blueprints necessary to develop it. Of course, no designer is god and the initial draft will always have kinks and mistakes, thus adding to the designer's list of responsibilities the job of supervising the development process and dealing with any issues that may arise.  This job description can be broken down into two very distinct parts. A designer's job is to: Come up with ideas, concepts and mechanics and finding a way to make them resonate with each other. Critique their own design:...