Uneven Balance
One of the most hazardous unquestioned assumptions of game design is that a game should be balanced. Don’t get me wrong, it certainly can be an issue if one tool is too strong, or many tools too weak, particularly in…
Tag Video Games
The Great Unknown
I find randomness a fascinating topic. Core to many game designs, a hint of randomization can cause the possibility space to explode in many directions, create a sense of mystery and possibility, and convert simple puzzles with straightforward solutions into…
Bound City DevBlog, April 2023 – Versions and Diversions
Well, my assumption was that after finishing the demo, I’d be mostly taking the month away from Bound City to focus on other things. That didn’t happen so much for two reasons: First, the feedback from the demo and bugs…
Juice, Crunch, and Clarity
I recently saw this video explaining easy ways to make your game feel “juicy”. I don’t know if I’d heard this specific term used before, but it meant exactly what I would have assumed it to mean: Adding a bunch…
Hospitable Hostility
“What do my science fiction stories have in common with pornography? Fantasies of an impossibly hospitable world, I’m told.” -Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. One of the most interesting and useful angles with which to examine any art is that of what…
Bound City DevBlog, February/March 2023 – Demonstration
Well, first off, apologies on having to make another two-month devblog, and on having not really kept up on other weekly posts. Hopefully, though, what I’m about to say will make up for it: The demo/vertical slice that I’ve been…
Living Failures
The way games treat failure has shifted significantly over the years. The earliest commercial games were coin-operated, so in this case the loss of the coins used to play the game in the first place provided a self-evident punishment for…
The Meta-Game
Some game design decisions are hard boundaries — if you jump off a cliff you die, if you try to walk from A to C you will be blocked by a wall, and so forth. Just as often, though, design…
Bound City DevBlog, December/January 2022/2023 – Building Up
Well, clearly I’ve fallen behind. I ended up combining two months of DevBlogging here partially because I fell so far behind on putting up a DevBlog and partially because January ended up being a very low-progress month, with about half…
Bound City DevBlog, September 2022 – Connections
This was another weird month, in part due to a sort of mental backlash against the whole deadline thing from last month. While I didn’t quite reach said deadline, the whole perspective of this as a thing that could be…