Between two Worlds

 How you doing. I have been neglecting this blog. While it is true that i have been preoccupied with other ventures, i cannot claim those to be the reason. The cold, hard truth is that i have shunned this blog because it failed. The original aim for this blog was to find a way to package and sell pure game design to an audience, as a way to escape the clutches of the grind and accrue enough of a following to be able to finance my design. That has failed utterly and i have been thrown into the, for me painful, struggle to make a living. In that venture i have failed time and time again as well and looking back, this past year has been a string of failure upon failure ontop of previous years of ventures that also fell apart spectacularly, leaving me reeling, with no courage remaining to sally forth again to try my luck in striking gold. These past years have been me making a bet with the devil- i will give it my all and if i dont make it, then i can die and rest knowing i did what i ...

 Hello. Once again it has been a while and after this brief exchange between us, it will be another while. This blog is written for the most selfish, indulgent reasons and i want you to take this sparseness of posts as a celebration of those reasons. I truly only write whenever i am compulsed to do so.      Today, like the majority of my posts, i would like to write something i've been thinking up while taking a shower. The title might say context, but today i would like to talk about Magic.     Lately i have been working on and off in a different self-indulgent project of mine, a mod for minecraft. It began as a research mod: the world generates with a set of values selected at random and the player is called to study the world around them and experiment. Slowly i have introduced more and more fantastical elements and now the player must delve into the written literature of many many years and tackle science, alchemy, magic, various forms of religious expr...

 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.     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 once more!      Lately (three months now) i have been getting really into Tekken. I love fighting games because of their high skill ceiling in every conceivable aspect of the game, making me think really hard about the game and how to become the best. For a player, the game already has the best way to play it built-in; all they have to do is find it! Tekken however has taken this to another level. I have also sunk my teeth in guilty gear xrd (sol main btw) but it hasn't made me think as much as Tekken 7 has. I decided to go against my usual playstyle and i selected Jin to main, one of the most mechanically demanding characters in the game. Today specifically i was thinking about Jin's parry and that line of thinking led to me writing this post.     In Tekken 7, Jin Kazama is a generalist. He has every tool for every situation, even if other characters shine better in certain categories than him (master of none and all that). In order to learn the cha...

Hello again.     This began in my head as a conversation between me and a good friend of mine about a project we are indulging in, but i decided to turn it into a blogpost so that both he and now you, dear viewer, hear what i have to say on the matter. I did promise to post as much as i can and i have kinda been busy with other things, so here we are.      Games, as an artform, obviously have the capacity to make the player feel things. There are many such examples and i am sure you are currently summoning your favorites as you read this. Conversations around the matter are usually held from an outside perspective: how and why games make people feel things, what kind of things they make them feel, how good of a job games do at making people feel things etc. Today's conversation will be done from an insider's perspective:  As a game designer and as an artist, how do you imbue your work with the power to move people?     It's not always that a game ...

 This is a post i posted on reddit, which i thought was interesting enough to also include in my blog. The short version of the story is that i asked for some advice about landing a freelance gig and people in the replies began saying that i was not a game designer, because i obviously was an amateur and hadn't made any games yet. This is the follow-up post to that one. _____________________________________________________________________________________ Hello again people! My name is Lars and you might remember me from my post about freelance game design work. If not, that's cool as well. The response to my post has been thunderous and a mixed bag, full of helpful peeps who sacrificed time off their day to give advice to some rando and not-so-helpful peeps who were very eager to patronize me. I write this post because, as a game designer, i have an incredible love for game design, and in extension, game designers. There are some attitudes that are not very constructive floatin...

 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...

 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:...

Hi, how are ya.  Call me Lars. This is a little game design blog that i have been advised to start writing for and do my damnedest to maintain. This post will delve into why i would want to do such a thing and what i expect from the whole ordeal.  Like any other use of my time, this blog is a project. This is how i have learned to compartmentalize my life and everything i do and this is what my obsession with productivity makes me classify this thing as. To be quite honest, i personally do not feel a need to maintain a designer's blog. Taking time to write whatever i think about down takes time and effort, time and effort i could spend coming up with even more concepts. Because i do come up with an excessive amount of stuff. Anyone who has read Jesse Schell's book The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses will recognize the discipline of constantly designing and analyzing every single activity, to find some kind of insight. Well, i have taken that to its logical extreme: whet...