Between two Worlds

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 ...

 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 ...