Things I Learned from Being a GM & a Designer

I’ve been a GM and game designer for years now, and one thing that’s always struck me about the process is how much skills overlap there is in the process, and how many nuggets of wisdom carry over from one to the other. I’ve been thinking about some key points now that I’m working on two projects that should see the light of day relatively soon.

Continue reading “Things I Learned from Being a GM & a Designer”

Game Design: Play Economics

One of the important things to consider as a game designer is that players approaching your game will consider things in the game environment as being very real; sometimes holding incredible amounts of value. As a result, it is important to consider the bad economic decisions that players will make in order to prevent frustration and regrets, encouraging players to have a more positive experience with the game. Continue reading “Game Design: Play Economics”

Game Design: Managing Scale

One of the easiest ways for a game designer to damage their games is to pay too little attention to the methods by which they design the mechanics of the game. The flaw that comes up the most when I see it is a failure to correctly scale games’ mechanical structures in relationship to each other. Often, developers get lazy and use exponential or even linear scaling in their games and don’t realize the impact that their actions have on the difficulty and balance of their work.

Continue reading “Game Design: Managing Scale”