Ideas

  • Non-Game Design Books that Influence my Game Design

    The non-game design books that influence my game design include: Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. Not just for information theory, but for how to take a medium, break it down into component parts, then use those pieces to tell stories and convey emotions. The Art of Language Invention by David Petersen. Presents conlanging in a…

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  • Designing in public: Player 1 is Missing

    I think I’m making a game for the one-page RPG jam. Currently, I have some ideas, which I’m going to try to make into a playable game in this thread. Maybe that’s a thing other people are interested in seeing? (If not, just skip over the rest of this post.) The theme of the jam…

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  • Hit Stops in narrative games

    Masahiro Sakurai (the creator of Kirby and Smash Bros) has a YouTube channel on game design. Obviously, he’s an expert in action games, but I think there are lessons you can apply even to analog, narrative games like the sort I’m most interested in. Take this video about Hit Stops: https://youtu.be/OdVkEOzdCPw You can’t shake the…

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  • Spotlight Mechanics

    One interesting thing in Glitch: A Story Of the Not are spotlights. Each player has a few spotlights they are supposed to use each chapter of the story. When you spend one, you ask the GM (or someone else) to describe something in greater detail, until you’re satisfied. And that’s it! Pretty simple, but I…

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  • The Art of Analogy

    Game design is the art of analogy. “This die is your Courage” you say. “These points are your life.” “When you discover a terrible truth, draw one card.” It is about making an imaginary connection between the thing in the real world and a thing in the fictional world. So my game design process usually…

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  • A new trick for Swords Without Master

    Long Memory a new trick for Swords Without Master Before the Overplayer begins a new phase, you may demand the next phase be framed as a flashback, to events before the story began. Instead of the usual tones, the tones for this phase are Naive Optimism and Ominous Foreboding.

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  • Game Chef ingredients are up, and I’ve been thinking about them for a while. ( http://game-chef.com/ ) I had an idea for a game about druids writing a reality-altering book, but I’m not really very enthused by it. I may return to it later, but right now my brain is more interested in this potential…

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  • Card drafting for character creation

    Here’s a thing that I tried in The Devil, John Moulton and Medical Bay Three. Creating a character works like card drafting in 7 Wonders or a booster draft Magic: The Gathering tournament. Each player gets a hand of cards, each of which has a piece of background information on it and some mechanical effect…

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  • Diagrams are like dungeons built out of abstract concepts.

    One thing I was trying to do when making Medical Bay Three was to make it a game where the player didn’t have to know anything about being a doctor to play a doctor in the game. Everything you need to know is on the patient’s chart: it lists a variety of diseases common to…

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  • Operation CD Kingfisher-3

    Operation CD-Kingfisher-3 is my entry into the annual One Page Dungeon Contest for 2013. It is a system free espionage adventure. It would probably work great in World of Secrets.

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