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category archives: design

digging beneath

3/20/2010 @ 2:25am

the above is how a single screen of letters from beneath, a game i made in 2008, looks in game maker’s level editor. i thought maybe it could shed some light on the way a designer’s goals shape her design (particularly following my admonishment that designing levels in a text editor, like redder’s were, is [...]

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on the design of redder

3/17/2010 @ 10:49pm

also, if you can stand more than one video of me in a single day, the folks at san jose state university’s game dev club have posted a video of a presentation i gave at their meeting last night. it began as a lecture on a single screen in redder and how it changed between [...]

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level design lesson: the light of day

1/5/2010 @ 4:06pm

epic megagames, before it was “epic games” (and after it was “potomac computer systems”) was interested in (or interested in selling) the idea of nintendo magic on the home computer. jill of the jungle is an attempt at creating an experience like super mario bros., but on the dos pc it’s not subject to many [...]

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the cheapest banditos: a tabletop game by amon and auntie

1/3/2010 @ 12:06am

Amon: is your new pc there yet??
auntie: not for another week
Amon: torrrrture .
doing any boardgame work?
auntie: i’m playing some boardgames tomorrow
Amon: what do you think of a tabletop game that doesnt have a board?
and isnt a variant of ‘pass the pigs’

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star guard

10/15/2009 @ 1:10am

star guard is very nearly a perfect game. it has a small, carefully-chosen cast of characters; though a single monster will necessarily reappear many times, the situations in which that monster is used are diverse enough, and of increasing complexity, that the game never repeats itself and no character gets more time on the stage [...]

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level design lesson: the face of mars

7/24/2009 @ 9:20pm

good level design serves a bunch of functions: it teaches the player the rules of the game, it explores the implications of those rules, and it develops motifs as the player’s understanding of those rules and their implications grows (usually for the purpose of making the game more difficult). but level design isn’t just functional: [...]

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game design lesson: h.e.r.o., in darkness

7/15/2009 @ 1:01pm

as we’ve discussed, a game is comprised of internal rules which govern how things work inside the “magic circle” (the space that the game creates). but a player also brings external knowledge to the game: her sense of how things work outside the circle. the rules of a game are often abstract (because games are [...]

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level design lesson: to the right, hold on tight

7/8/2009 @ 11:30am

(also in french and portuguese.)
much of the following is informed by friend and comrade jeremy penner’s breakdown of design trends in super mario bros. for further reading, see his “breaking the law of miyamoto” in the gamer’s quarter issue seven. i’m also indebted to eric-jon rossel waugh for the metaphor of verbs.
games (digital or otherwise) [...]

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level design lesson: in the pyramid

7/1/2009 @ 8:34am

(now in french, thanks to monsieur rien!)
last month i met with charles pratt of game design advance to record a conversation that should hopefully be available for to insterested eavesdroppers sometime soon. one of the subjects we discussed is the stupifying lack of discussion, decades after people started piecing together digital games, on the art [...]

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the gutter

5/23/2009 @ 10:35pm

the gutter is a game about steering a wobbly drunk into an alley to find a place to pass out. it’s also an obvious parody of the graveyard by tale of tales (half of which is seen here looking bewildered by the notion of a game in which players press buttons to cause things to [...]

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