thematic mechanic
Thursday, April 17th, 2008I know we’re all busy, so I’m not going to continue flogging the design challenge horse, but I do want to continue the conversation started in this weeks podcast. Specifically, I want to address the unspoken question, “Gee, Corvus. This theme ‘n’ metaphor stuff is neat and all, but what does it have to do [...]
Let’s Get Physical
Thursday, September 21st, 2006As I plotted out the course of my post on combat in the Drachurae Cycle, it occurred to me that I had yet to talk about how the elemental levels of a character (including objects) affect the physical nature of said character. So, a quick update on that topic is in order before we move [...]
Storytelling: Art vs. Craft
Thursday, September 7th, 2006Here’s what could potentially be upsetting about my definition of Story to designers/authors/storytellers - loss of authorial story control. Because on some level, accepting my definition of story as the implied and inferred experiential components of a narrative means that the most personal and powerful stories have far less to do with the storyteller and [...]
A Verb By Any Other Name
Wednesday, September 6th, 2006If we accept that games are a valid narrative form and are therefore capable of transmitting story*, then we have some serious thinking to do about the design process of our games and the terminology we use to describe it. Chris Bateman has suggested (link) that we can learn a lot about a game’s play [...]
Ooo, Ooo, It’s Magic!
Monday, September 4th, 2006Psychochild’s current weekend challenge (current to those of us in our third day of an extended weekend, that is) was to describe a non-traditional magic system (link). Since I’ve been meaning to write about the Drachurae Cycle magic system anyway, I figured now was as good a time as any.
To quickly recap many long posts [...]
I Got No Class
Tuesday, August 29th, 2006How did I miss this? There’s been a flare up of the Class vs. Skill debate recently. You can track it across multiple blogs: Nerfbat, Zen of Design, Broken Toys, Moorgard, Nerfbat, Probably Not, Sierra Kilo, Raph Koster, World IV.
My regulars have heard my stance on this a few times, but I’m dropping nuggets of [...]
Design Balance
Friday, August 25th, 2006I asked yesterday for feedback on this topic and quoted a developer who has this to say at our latest IGDA chapter meeting:
Are we reaching a point where we’re finally willing to take money out of the graphics bin and put it in the story bin?
I got five very insightful replies in the comments… Oops. [...]