Between two Worlds

 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 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 ...

 Minecraftheads consider yourselves lucky. My history with this game runs deep, so naturally i will have a bunch of designs for it. This will not be the last time you hear of Minecraft. This post will be a short one (i think), detailing a few minor changes i would make to vanilla minecraft to make its pvp that much more exciting. When i say minor i mean it, btw. They are very indirect mechanical changes and their aim is to manipulate the already existing structure of minecraft's pvp to make it as deep as it can be. To detail the changes in short, i propose adding a weight value to minecraft's armours making players wearing them slower and limiting weapons to being able to carry only two in your inventory at all times.  I will first of all tackle the fact that both changes clash with minecraft's central vision. You cannot have a survival game where it's all about gathering resources and upgrading your gear if you make it all be useful, with the same applying to limiting ...

 In this case, the plugin is for minecraft. Hello everyone. I am an avid fan of artillery in games and have been looking to create my own set of artillery in any sort of game and i got an offer for a plugin to be made, provided the design is good enough (and it's feasible). These artillery pieces and the mechanics surrounding them will be based on two key points. One of them being vanilla compatibility, meaning that the pieces' design will orbit minecraft's design (and specifically the combat found in that design) and the other being the most amount of depth possible through the design limitations. With those two design goals out of the way, let us tackle the plugin. Most values provided in this document are not exact, to make room for adjustments as are needed. The lineup consists of three cannons. Every cannon has been designed with a siege in mind, both because that's where a cannon shines the most and also because that's the vast majority of engagements in a min...

 Returning back to familiar waters, i am tackling once again the souls-like i have been cooking up for about a month now. This concept has been swimming in my brain for a while now and it has officially passed the Lars Christiansen test: it resurfaces again and again, like a phantom, to haunt me. Honestly if it didn't take a massive amount of resources, i'd tackle development of this game. But let us put annoying things like production aside- today we tackle the setting and the story. Honestly the story has been present in my mind ever since i wrote the first blogpost about this concept. I didn't write the story down because writing a story down is not game design, it's writing. Yesterday however i got a pretty nice idea about the setting, which ties to gameplay, so i can fit the story as a little bonus present to anyone keeping up with this concept and is interested to learn more. I might even tie the three posts together into a light little design document and toss it...

 Back at it again with league! I swear league doesn't occupy as much of my brainspace as this blog makes it seem, im just tossing a few designs in here because im working on other stuff. I started playing league by watching SIV HD's (and sp4zie's but SIV was the one i watched the most) videos and the #1 thing promoted in his videos were non-standard ways to play the game of league. League for me was so full of experimentation back then, partly because i was a little kid and partly because the game hadn't matured as much as it has now. I know "retvrn"ing to league is a really common thing to say ever since 2016 ironically because 2016 was ages ago and now it's 2023 but damn it im an adult now and i get to design the league of my dreams. The gamemode is called Volatile Adversity. The idea is that, in a 5v5 map, close to summoner's rift but i want it to be adapted for the gamemode, players get to play a game of league with randomized builds. Items at the ...

 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...

 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...

 How you doin'. It is no secret of mine that i am an RTS fan. I have played all sorts of games (not Starcraft tho) and something that i find interesting is the fact that, out of all the people i have played with, nobody ever talks about resource gathering in those games. Which, from a general standpoint, makes sense. Most people play RTS to command armies battling it out with each other! Nobody really wants to think about logistics. But as a game designer, it is my job to think about everything, including logistics (and it really helps the fact that i find logistics interesting as well lol). Two of my favorite titles actually have really simple and dynamic mechanics behind resource gathering. The first is Supreme Commander, in which title, resource gathering is done through two main avenues (and for the one viewer who have played the game, i am talking about mass generation).  The first is fairly standard, with certain spots on the map having points where, upon construction, a...