Hi, and welcome to the beginning of a(nother) new series of articles. As the title suggests, this one’s going to focus on the absolute basics of game design, and is meant to be both a good starting point for beginners, as well as a generally useful review of some of the more key concepts in…
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It’s part 3 of 5 for the MOPED principles, and today we’ll be looking at that old crowd favorite: Parameterization. Just the word itself is a mouthful, and considering the amount of things that can go wrong (or right) when it comes to parameterization, we’d best start dismantling this mechanical monstrosity. Definition Parameterization – The…
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In this article, I want to take a step back from the details of game design and instead look at the bigger picture of our games as projects. And where there are projects, there’s project management. This is an article that is very likely to be updated multiple times in the future, mostly because these…
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Welcome again to another Sidequest, which is consequently the first article of 2021 for me. And boy oh boy, after what an absolute shitshow of a year 2020 was, it’s only fair to start off with a Sidequest. I’ve touched upon a few different topics with the articles I’ve written so far, and as always,…
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In this post, we’re gonna take a look at a topic I’ve always found very interesting. It’s a thing that can be applied to any game’s mechanics, at (more or less) all levels of abstraction. Simply put, it’s the difference between mechanics which help a player win, and mechanics which help a player stay in…
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Welcome to the second of five articles where we take a deeper dive into the principles that make up MOPED. Last time we talked about Modularity, and how it helps to structure your project into easily-manageable chunks. This time, we’ll be taking a closer look at Optimization—why do it, how to do it, and finding…
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Testing your games is important. I’ve said that in a lot of different ways and context with my articles thus far. With interactive systems, the only time you can get useful metrics and input is when you actually go and interact with them. This time, we’ll take a bit of a deeper dive into testing,…
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Alright, let’s get this show on the road. This is the first of the detailed posts I’m going to do regarding MOPED (link to the outline/concept here). As the title suggests, we’re gonna be tackling the topic of modularity in games. To that end, I’ll be splitting this article in a few distinct sections, and…
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Last post I mentioned something called ‘my MOPED design principles’, and I intend for this article to be a brief overview and introduction to each of them. I’ll be doing a full article on each of the five principles, going in detail and with examples from games I’ve played or have worked on. Talking about…
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Sidequest #3, eh? Time for some next-level rambling, cause boy do we have a topic fit for that: my projects! See, while completely shitting on other people’s work is rude, completely shitting on your own work is actually a good thing. Being “self-critical”, whatever that means. Whichever way you spin it, if you have nothing…
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