Between two Worlds

 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 ...

 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 ...

 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...

 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...