Two things are key to becoming a great game designer: making games, and playing games. In this article, Rodain Joubert extracts and explains three game design lessons from playing Dungeon Crawl that revolves around difficulty, providing meaningful decisions, and removing tedium from the game interface.
Nandrew
To prototype and get early feedback is great for getting rid of bugs, get ideas, test the fun factor, and keep yourself motivated. Use these tips get more players to play your game when it is not finished.
Making a tester’s life less miserable
The two Samorost games, the flash games by Amanita, has revolusionised the way we think of atmosphere and art in games. In this article, Rodain Joubert pays homage to the games that set a new benchmark for adventure games.
The Samorost Games
We all know that good old stereotype: the one which dictates that all computer-bound people are highly introverted and extremely antisocial individuals who wouldn’t know how to start a conversation even if they were slapped in the face with their grandmother’s knickers.
How to defeat negative self-talk
This article originally appeared in Dev.Mag Issue 26, released in October 2006. Compared to most other game development competitions, Game.Dev’s fondly-named “Comps” have always stood out on one particular front: each new incarnation has always set out to challenge, direct and develop entrants within the field of game development. Instead […]
The Game.Dev Comps – Part 1
So. Hot on the heels of my previous ShellBlast review comes this humble opinion of its new, Xbox-based cousin: ShellBlast HD. Vertigo Games was kind enough to supply me with a review copy for this sprightly bugger, so of course I latched onto it . And hey, guess what? It’s just as […]
ShellBlast HD
I’ll waste no time in dropping the hammer: I really don’t like World of Warcraft. The grinding bores me, the mentality upsets me and the game world just doesn’t engage me enough to warrant the odd five gazillion hours that you need to pour in just to get… well, anywhere. I’ve […]
Hate vs. Respect: Gaming as a Developer
When you sit down to write a book, one of the most important things to bear in mind is the shaping and formation of your expression: if you can elegantly express in a single sentence what a lesser writer would need a paragraph to evoke, then you’ve got yourself a […]
Minimised game design for indies
Save Jack was one of last year’s honorable mentions in Microsoft’s annual DreamBuildPlay game development competition, made by a pair of South African devs with a penchant for interesting ideas and a desire to put them into action. We decided that it would be a good idea to interview these […]
Jacking up
Ed: Yo Nandrew, where’s that ShellBlast review you promised me? You’re already a day late. Me: Ah, er, bad news. I haven’t written it yet. I’ve been banging my head against this level 30 nuke defusal for most of the afternoon, and as far as I know I’ve still got […]
Shellblast
Disclaimer: This article covers the hyperbolic ranting of an entirely fictional (and very foul-tempered) stick figure thing. As such, we reserve the right to label this article as satire and advise you to take any of Angry Joe’s advice in good humour and high spirits. Whether or not he happens […]
Four issues that developers need to drop already
This article originally appeared on NAG Online. Code in Python, go to outer space. A simple process, really. Do you really, really want to become a game programmer? Do you really, really have no idea how to start? Try some Python! This easy and simple programming language is not just […]
Easy Programming with Python
Blazing in at the IGF and leaving a clay-ridden trail of aliens, shotguns and grumpy farmers, Cletus Clay is shaping up to be one of the most interesting indie offerings around, not least because it uses a game world built entirely of plasticine models.
Playing with Clay
With the recent surfacing of the Game Maker 8 open beta, I felt duty-bound to download the tool and give it a whirl to see what’s improved over previous versions. It turns out that there’re quite a lot of tweaks in the new release: some of them are purely aesthetic, […]
First impressions: Game Maker 8
Sometimes, one just has to wonder: is history chock-full of great game developers that were never able to realise their full potential? Would Julius Caesar have invented Pac-Man if he was given a computer instead of the Roman Empire? Could Aristotle use his Greek superpowers of reasoning and insight to […]