The Quixotic Engineer: Recent Episodes
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Like many other game designers with a systems bent, I have spent copious enjoyable hours this year with the breakout indie hit Balatro. It’s usually described as a “poker roguelike”, which is a perfect logline for onboarding curious new players. Framed this way, it makes sense that it often invites comparison to Slay The Spire, another hugely popular deckbuilding roguelike.
It’s therefore ironic that the developer’s primary inspiration was not poker, but rather a Cantonese card game called Big Two. Furthermore, LocalThunk has stated that he drew initial inspiration from the score-chasing roulette game Luck Be A Landlord, but otherwise intentionally avoided playing other roguelikes during development. This often makes Balatro feel mechanically distinct from other roguelikes, since it does not always converge on the consensus “best practices” in the genre.
Seeing the game this way led me to an offbeat hypothesis. In returning to first principles on a deckbuilding roguelike, I believe Balatro’s design had a sort of convergent evolution towards a different game genre. A genre where players also seek synergies while drafting an evolving build, banking funds is rewarded with interest, risk mitigation is a fundamental skill, and the winner must survive multiple structured rounds with escalating stakes.
That genre is “auto chess”, which exploded in 2019 with the release of the popular mod Dota Auto Chess1. While there are many thriving games in the genre today, the one I’m most familiar with is Teamfight Tactics (TFT), which uses the game engine and characters from League of Legends. Riot’s president of esports claims it is “the number one strategy game in the world” in terms of popularity. For the sake of this comparison I will use it as representative of the wider auto chess genre.
Structurally, both Teamfight Tactics and Balatro always progress through an ordered structure of stages (antes) and rounds (blinds). The games are divided between the core phase (champions autobattling or playing poker hands) and the deckbuilding phase (drafting champions or buying jokers). The player’s performance in the core phase generates the currency for the deckbuilding phase. Both games also feature special rounds scheduled at the end of each stage (a carousel draft or a boss blind).
Note that, unlike Balatro, modern roguelikes do not usually follow this kind of regular sequence. Most have instead structurally converged on Slay The Spire’s randomly generated branching adventure map. Furthermore, it’s uncommon for deckbuilders to use currency for drafting; most favor the simpler “choose one from three options” mechanic.
More conspicuously, Balatro shares interest as a mechanic with auto chess: players receive additional currency at the end of each round for each $5 they’re sitting on, like interest in a bank account. This is an exceedingly rare mechanic in video games more broadly, even in the strategy genre. It suggests to me that the designers of both games had a similar need to incentivize conservative purchasing decisions. Otherwise, the player’s existential drive to win each round would discourage them from sitting on unproductive money. The interest mechanic rewards players who just barely win each round, leaving the remainder of their unspent resources to grow.
In terms of drafting, champions in auto chess and jokers in Balatro provide specific roles within a build. TFT gives buffs for stacking several champions of the same class and origin, and generally rewards balancing combat roles (tank, damage, healer). Balatro players can seek to maximize their score engine by assembling +Chips, +Mult, and ×Mult rewards across multiple jokers, ideally with significant overlap in their trigger conditions.
A tactical element of both games is the power curve of certain champions and jokers. To survive the early rounds, a player needs to draft for things that provide immediate value and tempo. Cheap $1 and $2 champions carry the early rounds in TFT. Similarly, jokers like Ice Cream and Popcorn provide immediate value, but decrease in potency after each round. As the game progresses to later stages, players need to pivot their build towards scaling power2. Managing this transition is a major skill element in both games.
Another shared strategic element is the ability of players to viably target “high” or “low” builds. For instance, an obvious strategy in Balatro is to build around high-value hands such as Flush and Straight. However, there are also competitive strategies for building around the lowest hand possible: High Card. Similarly, there are team compositions in TFT that seek to level up stacks of $2 champions, and others that count on turning out a $5 hypercarry.
Having a broad range of meta builds gives skillful players the opportunity to adjust their strategy on the fly based on the luck of the draft. Additionally, both games have mechanics that disincentivize relying on the same build every run regardless of circumstance. In TFT, all players are drafting from the same pool of champions. If another player is attempting the same team composition, those champions will get snatched up and become harder to find. Skillful TFT players can use this information to their advantage, pivoting their build towards undervalued champions.
In Balatro, the boss blinds create a similar dynamic. For instance, in the first week of the game’s release, the most popular strategy was to build a single-suit Flush deck. However, savvy players noticed that this choice was risky; there are four different boss blinds that each debuff a particular suit, which hard counters this build3. The philosophy that “a burnt hand is the best teacher” coaxes players to mitigate risk and integrate a secondary strategy into their drafting.
I have read and listened to several developer interviews about Balatro, and LocalThunk has been very open about his process and design values. I firmly believe that the similarities to auto chess that I’ve established here cannot be attributed to direct inspiration. Rather, I believe there are certain game design patterns that emerge organically when seeking to craft a particular kind of experience. Perhaps we’re all following these ley lines of game design, unwittingly tracing some underlying truth of mathematics and systems.
- Another connection: Dota Auto Chess was also inspired by a Chinese board game: Mahjong. ↩
- Balatro even plays with this as a difficulty element: adding “Eternal” stickers to jokers so they cannot be sold is a significant challenge. ↩
- LocalThunk discusses this design choice in detail in an interview on the podcast “Eggplant: The Secret Lives of Games” around the 20 minute mark. ↩
My daughter (age 6) is aware that her daddy makes video games, though with somewhat abstract notions of what that actually entails. She has often asked if we could make a game together, which led me to research various child-friendly gamedev tools. On a whim I picked up Game Builder Garage, a game-making toolkit released for the Switch in 2021. I hadn’t heard much about it since its release, but generally trusted Nintendo’s ability to appeal to young children.
I had every expectation that this experiment would fail. My kid enjoys playing games, but making games can be slow and tedious. Nintendo’s website says the game is designed for children “as young as first year elementary students”, which is slightly beyond her. She is still in the early stages of learning to read, so we always played together; she held the controller and I narrated the lessons.
Game Builder Garage uses a visual programming language based on placing and connecting “nodons”. There are various types of nodons for inputs, calculations, outputs, and object spawners. Each nodon is also given a little personality, with a unique cartoon avatar, audio FX, and quirky dialogue in the interactive tutorials. This is a great help in making abstract gamedev concepts more memorable.
The tutorials are well designed, slowly easing the player into new concepts and frequently switching back to “game view” to let the player test out their iterative changes. They’re tightly constrained experiences: the player can only do the “right thing” in every step and the lesson doesn’t advance until they do. The exception is the final step, where the player is given a limited opportunity for customization (selecting colours, adjusting music, etc.)
This format worked perfectly for my daughter. Each step was simple for her to follow and it was impossible to get the lesson into a bad state. If any part required math concepts that were beyond her (multiplication, negative numbers, cartesian coordinates), she could still advance the lesson by heedlessly following the simple instructions for nodon placement. It gave her confidence and pride to create full games with minimal parental assistance.
The seven interactive lessons covered multiple game genres in increasing complexity: a simple 2D platformer, a top-down ball roller, a side-scrolling shooter, a 3D puzzle room, a racing game, and culminating in a complex 3D platformer. It all felt like a vastly improved version of my own serendipitous childhood discovery of game making, attempting crude versions of every genre in the StarCraft campaign editor or on a TI-83+ graphing calculator.
This last weekend my daughter proudly finished the final interactive lesson, and I was curious if the appeal of Game Builder Garage would hold up when presented with a blank canvas. I was delighted to watch her confidently assemble new games from scratch, though so far mostly platformers and hewing closely to the concepts and structures taught in the lessons. Her biggest difficulty has been debugging when things aren’t right, but thankfully I’m able to assist with that.
It’s been fun to see gamedev concepts influence her thinking in small ways. Watching me play a PC game, she asked: is this game also made with nodons? She was very impressed when I told her that, basically, it was! She also, unprompted, made the following comparison (quoting a text message):
In the car [daughter] was asking about the airbags in the car. She asked how the car knows to pop them out. I said the force of the crash. She goes “oh so it’s like a touch nodon is in the front of the car that sends a signal to the airbag pop nodon”.
I’ve been evangelizing Game Builder Garage to all the other parents I know. It’s truly a terrific way to introduce programming and gamedev concepts to young children. My kid had a blast with it, and I’m grateful to get to share game making with her as a creative medium and hobby.
Wanted to share a bit of news about what I’ve been up to since shipping The Last of Us Part I remake in 2022. I’ve had the privilege to continue in the role of game director on The Last of Us Part II Remastered. I helped oversee porting the game to the PlayStation 5, including various technical enhancements and DualSense controller integration. We also added a whole slate of new features: lost levels with developer commentary, a guitar free play mode, new bonus skins, audio descriptions for cinematics, and much more.
The one that is closest to my heart is the new roguelike mode: No Return. I was the lead systems designer on the original The Last of Us Part II (PS4), so I was well-versed in our extremely robust enemy AI, terrific combat spaces, and a deep roster of weapon, melee, crafting, stealth and upgrade systems. In pitching this mode, I knew that we could remix these elements (and some fun new ones, more on that later) into thousands of dynamic combinations.
Why make a roguelike? We certainly took broad inspiration from the amazing games that have revitalized the genre in the modern era; some of my personal favourites include Spelunky, Hades, Dead Cells, Vampires Survivors, FTL, Cult of the Lamb, Prey: Mooncrash, The Path of Champions, and Inscryption. The sheer variety of these games proves that the fundamental roguelike concepts can be flexibly adapted to serve many genres, and to resonate with different design goals.
The particular design goals of No Return have been on my mind for a long time as a combat designer; in fact, I’ve written about them before on this very blog. In “Thwarting Boring Tactics”, I shared how Deathloop stymied my bad immersive sim habits by removing my ability to save scum. The permadeath aspect of a roguelike forces players to push through and improvise when plans go awry, emerging from the situation with either a memorable defeat or a hard fought comeback. The escalating stakes as you move deeper into a run create a thrilling tension.
Another major design goal was improvisational play (see “Intentionality & Improvisation”), which is a type of gameplay loop that asks the player to constantly make new plans on the fly. A roguelike structure supports this playstyle through randomized items and encounters.
Each character in No Return begins with a unique loadout, but the guns, recipes, and upgrades you acquire during a run are randomized. Because of this, players can’t always rely on their favourite standby items and tactics, and may instead be forced to equip a gun or crafting item that they neglected in the main story. The weapon may be unfamiliar or unwieldy at first, and lead to some spectacular failures; with luck, it eventually expands the player’s toolkit with a new option.
A similar dynamic is found on the randomized encounter side. The player may know one of the WLF combat encounters by heart, but the strategies become totally different with infected enemies in that space. They know how to fight the Rat King with Abby’s arsenal, but what about Ellie’s kit? We also have some small variations in certain layouts; the player may have to scramble when they find their go-to escape route closed off.
This philosophy also led to the addition of “mods”, which are random rule variants found on certain encounters. Because No Return is not canon, we had the freedom to experiment while eschewing the series’s usual groundedness. Some mods were designed to shake up the player’s playstyle, either reinforcing certain tactics (e.g. melee sets enemies on fire) or limiting them (e.g. long guns locked). Other mods create exciting new situations for the player to figure out: foes dropping pipe bombs on death, infected pustule clouds raining from the sky, or even (my favourite) invisible enemies.
As you can probably already tell, No Return was a real passion project for me, and I’m thrilled to have had the opportunity to marry the excitement of a roguelike structure with the incredible combat mechanics of The Last of Us. I’m looking forward to seeing the reaction to the many new features in The Last of Us Part II Remastered when the game releases worldwide on January 19th, 2024.
Diagram via LoL Esports
Back in 2011, a friend gently guided me through the steep learning curve of League of Legends, and I’ve been playing it on and off ever since. For about as long, I’ve been casually following the competitive LoL esports scene, especially enjoying the Worlds championship tournament that caps off each year. Worlds 2023 has been particularly great thanks to a big change: Riot Games replaced the traditional “groups” stage with a “Swiss” format stage instead. Examining this change through a game design lens helps reveal why it has been so successful and impactful.
For years, the essential structure of the Worlds tournament has been the same. In the “groups” stage, teams are randomly drawn into smaller groups (usually four groups of four), and the top two teams from each group advance to the “knockout” stage quarterfinals. In 2014, the concept of “pools” was added so that teams would be seeded for groups based on their regional standings. This structure has worked reasonably well and created some terrific memorable tournaments, but one persistent awkward issue has been the randomness of the initial groups drawing.
For game designers, randomness is a tool and not necessarily a bad thing. It’s also not a unitary property; there are many different flavours of randomness, as I explored in a previous article about card design in Hearthstone. For designing a tournament, there are many upsides to randomness: it has the potential to create exciting matchups and surprising upsets, and a random draw is “fair” to all competitors.
However, a tournament has two primary objectives: to crown the best team based on skill, and to showcase exciting matches for the spectators. The fact that the initial random drawing for groups has an outsize impact on the overall outcome is inimical to both of these goals.
Because of the large skill discrepancies between teams and regions, the chance placement into groups can effectively predetermine who will advance. In mathematics this is called “sensitive dependence on initial conditions”. For instance, sometimes four strong teams are drawn into the same group. This creates a fiercely competitive “group of death” with a hard road for any of them to advance to quarterfinals. The opposite is an unbalanced “group of life” with two strong teams and two weak teams. This produces boring one-sided matchups and a practically foregone outcome. Even worse, it can set up pointless matches for teams that have already been mathematically eliminated.
From a game design perspective then, what is the fundamental flaw here? To quote Mark Rosewater: “randomness cannot be the destination; it has to be the journey.” Randomness is fun when players have a chance to respond to it. An ideal tournament format would not sharply delimit the range of possible outcomes with the initial random draw, but instead empower teams to change their destinies through their hard fought victories and defeats. From the spectator’s point of view, it should also produce close matchups and provide high stakes.
For comparison, let’s examine the “Swiss” stage which replaced the “groups” stage at Worlds 2023. The structure of this format was developed in the 1890’s for chess tournaments. In the first round, teams are randomly paired (against a region other than their own). In each subsequent round, teams are randomly paired against teams with the same win-loss record. This continues for five rounds until each team advances (with 3 wins) or is eliminated (with 3 losses); elimination and advancement matches are best-of-3.
For example, in round 3, there will necessarily be four teams with 2 wins, eight teams with 1 win / 1 loss, and four teams with 2 losses. A random draw will pair each team against another team with an identical win-loss record. A 2-0 team that wins advances to the next stage; a 0-2 team that loses is eliminated. All other teams continue into round 4 with either a 2-1 or a 1-2 record, and those records determine the next random pairing.
This structure provides a beautiful mix of positive and negative feedback that any game designer would recognize approvingly. Teams that win get closer to advancement, but also place themselves into the more competitive “group” of other winners (negative feedback). When winning teams qualify for the next stage, they no longer stick around to act as spoilers for the remaining matches (negative feedback). On the other hand, weaker teams eliminated early no longer provide “easy wins” (positive feedback).
Note that both formats rely heavily on random drawings for determining matchups. The critical difference is that the “groups” format fully resolves all randomization before the first match is played. In the “Swiss” format, something teams can control (their win-loss record) is fed back into the randomization. Teams are no longer trapped in groups of life or death, but chart a course through “fair” matchups driven by their skillful play.
Note that this format does not eliminate “luck” in draws; compare NRG’s easy path through the Swiss stage with KT Rolster’s slog. Recall, however, that a tournament has a second primary goal: to create excitement for the spectators. In this regard, the Swiss format has two significant benefits.
Firstly, the format optimizes for matchups between teams that are close in skill. The strongest and weakest teams quickly diverge into separate trajectories, reducing the odds of a one-sided stomp as the tournament advances. Secondly, it ensures that every match is meaningful to the outcome of the tournament. There are no lopsided groups or predetermined outcomes; every match is a fight to advance or a fight to survive.
Games that incorporate randomness need to do so with great care and intentionality, and it’s been fascinating to see a “metagame” of tournament design incorporate those same design considerations. Riot Games deserves credit for shaking up their longstanding competitive structure, and I’m excited to continue following Worlds 2023 through the knockout stage.
At the beginning of 2022, I embarked on a project of drawing once per week for the entire year. On Christmas day I completed my 52nd and final sketch.
Among all the possible hobbies out there, why pursue sketching? I think on some level it’s an opportunity to revisit a beloved childhood hobby. Growing up in Quebec, I pored over my local library’s collection of Franco-Belgian bandes dessinées and Japanese manga imported from France (before it was widely available in English), then spent hours trying to recreate Akira Toriyama’s spiky-haired characters and incredible action shots. When this passtime suddenly became embarrassing in my self-conscious teenage years, I abandoned it entirely.
The more recent and direct inspiration for this project was visiting the Hayao Miyazaki exhibition at the Academy Museum last fall. I was familiar with the lavish storyboards he drew for his films, which only became more stunning in the final animation. However, what really struck me while touring this exhibition were Miyazaki’s preproduction sketches: the raw first drafts of characters and locations done in simple pencil and watercolours. While I could never aspire to be an artist on Miyazaki’s level, being able to share ideas visually in this simple manner seemed like an incredibly practical creative skill, and during that visit I developed the aspiration to cultivate it.
(I’ve also long noted sketching as a hobby among game developers I admire, including Brendon Chung, Adam Saltsman, and Derek Yu.)
I began my pursuit by reading “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” by Betty Edwards, which came highly recommended for people with an engineering background like myself. I appreciated the way she broke down the skill of drawing into components that gradually built on each other (edges, spaces, relationships, light & shadow, the gestalt), and I enjoyed completing the exercises provided with each chapter.
Edwards also provided another argument for learning to draw. Her perspective is that drawing is “basic to training visual perception”. To draw with correct proportion and perspective, you have to ignore the preconceived ideas of spatial relations from your “left brain” and rather see things as they actually are. Familiar objects acquire unintuitive properties when projected from three dimensions to two. Developing this way of seeing is a core building block skill for all “right brain” creative work1, and is therefore inherently valuable.
“Drawing used to be a civilized thing to do, like reading and writing. It was taught in elementary schools. It was democratic. It was a boon to happiness.” – Betty Edwards, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain
Finally, in structuring this particular challenge for myself, I drew from books such as “Atomic Habits” by James Clear, “Ultralearning” by Scott H. Young, and the works of Cal Newport. All three authors explore best practices for self-directed learning, and suggest strategies for maintaining progress and motivation. As someone with a busy schedule and prone to being fickle about new hobbies, I sought to structure my practice in a way that I could stick with for an entire year.
Clear’s book in particular suggests that common wisdom about motivation is backwards. The standard assumption is that you show up regularly to practice because you are motivated to do so. However, motivation is capricious, and easy to lose when you’re rarely seeing visible progress. Rather, Clear suggests that the goal should be to regularly engage with the skill you want to learn. This act of showing up on schedule with or without motivation develops a habit. Habits become deeply rooted, to the point where they no longer require extrinsic motivation.
“So, yes, perseverance, grit, and willpower are essential to success, but the way to improve these qualities is not by wishing you were a more disciplined person, but by creating a more disciplined environment.” – James Clear, Atomic Habits
Based on this principle, I designed my personal challenge around simply showing up and drawing. I didn’t need to take on progressively more complex subjects, or regularly adopt new techniques. I didn’t have to spend a particular amount of time completing my work. The goal was simply to complete one sketch per week for the entire year. They didn’t even have to be completed on schedule, though I tried never to float more than two per weekend.
In terms of equipment, I started with a set of drawing pencils, an eraser, a ruler, a protractor2, and a large 9″x12″ pad of paper. To truly capture the inspiration of my youth, I even managed to locate my childhood Dragon Ball pencil tin. Following directions from Betty Edwards and others, I began drawing faint practice lines with a 6H pencil until I got the shape I wanted, then went back and passed over with a darker HB at the end. At first this process was quite tedious: draw, erase, draw, erase, trial and error until the desired curve emerged. Gradually I developed some muscle memory that helped speed up the process.
One limitation of this setup was that it wasn’t very portable. Drawing this way basically required a tabletop setup, and sometimes I wanted to sketch while out in the world. In my search for inspiration, I chanced upon the book “Sketch Now, Think Later” by Mike Yoshiaki Daikubara. He demonstrated the amazing urban ink drawings he drew on location while travelling, optionally adding watercolours afterwards. Inspired by his work, I purchased a little 5½″x8½″ handheld notebook and a waterproof Pigma Micron 10 pen; I adore both. I love getting to draw when the mood strikes while travelling, and how pen drawing forces you to keep moving fluidly and creatively incorporate errors.
My final piece of sketching equipment was a digital pencil for my iPad Mini. I’ve used it to dabble in Procreate, though I haven’t started seriously learning its functionality yet. With layers, brushes, and unlimited undo, digital drawing certainly has the least friction of the three options. However, I find myself missing the fine-grain pressure control that physical drawing affords. The digital simulation isn’t quite as intuitive, or perhaps it requires some additional calibration.
“The easiest way to learn directly is to simply spend a lot of time doing the thing you want to become good at.” – Scott H. Young, Ultralearning
Between pencil, ink, and digital drawing, I completed my 52 weekly sketches. However, as I reflect back on this year-long project, I’m somewhat ambivalent about whether to consider it a success. Ostensibly, I achieved what I set out to do, and stuck with it despite a busy schedule and varying levels of motivation. It’s difficult to see any clear linear progression in drawing skill, but I certainly feel more comfortable and adept than I did at the start. I also generally had a nice time while sketching, it was a quiet relaxing contemplative hobby.
In a broader sense, however, my original inspiration for learning to sketch was being able to communicate ideas visually. I want to develop a practical skill for collaborating with others in the context of making a video game or other creative project. Contemplating this ultimate goal makes me question my learning strategy. Is copying from visual reference the best way to improve? Or should I structure my practice to more directly target creating original art? What is the next set of core skills I should seek to develop?
I’m still grappling with these questions, but I feel quite upbeat about this format of structured, regular practice, and I’m keen to see what other skills might be amenable to this sort of yearly project. Here’s to continuing to grow and learn in 2023.
- I’m a bit skeptical of the left/right brain distinction, but I’ll accept it as a premise of the book. ↩
- Surprisingly useful for learning two-point perspective! ↩
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RNG is often treated as a monolithic quality, but Hearthstone actually employs many distinct types of randomness in its mechanics. While each card interacts with randomness in a unique way, they can be broadly categorized by the set that they randomly pick from. We can use these categories to chart the evolution of randomness in Hearthstone through the years.
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Bill Siemering discusses the original NPR mission statement written in 1969; the document outlined their vision for non-commercial radio that would bring context, culture and humanity to the news.
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I’m still not quite sure what to make of Deadly Premonition. Everything you’ve heard about it is true: it has atrocious combat, compelling mystery, laughable graphics, memorable characters, inappropriate music, etc. The game is full of fresh ideas and has stuck with me for months, but I still wouldn’t feel comfortable broadly recommending it. I […]
Few online multiplayer games have become as habitual for me as Team Fortress 2. I’ve returned to it every few months since its release back in 2007, usually to plumb the strategic depths of a handful of familiar maps. In August of 2008, the Heavy update introduced Steel, a community map created by Jamie “Fishbus” […]
Only ten months after promising that they were “coming soon”, the folks of No Fun Games (Kira, Renaud and myself) have finally finished porting our one-button real-time strategy game Pax Britannica to OSX and Linux. You can check them out at our fancy new website, or download them directly here: Mac Download / Linux Download […]
Minecraft was my gateway drug. It seduced my imagination with grand ideas: setting foot in a dangerous new world, gathering provisions from the wilderness, erecting meagre shelter and surviving on your cunning and creativity. Regrettably, these concepts quickly wane once you learn a handful of commonsense safety rituals. Late-game Minecraft becomes a different game entirely, […]
Back in late April, the No Fun Games gang (Renaud Bédard, Kira Boom, and I) took the train down to Toronto to participate in TOJam. Over three days, we hacked together a silly game called Tea Time Quarrel. Since then we’ve had the opportunity to present the game publicly at TOJam Arcade and the Mount […]
If you pay attention to video game news, you’ve probably heard a lot of buzz these last few weeks about an indie game called Minecraft. Ever since it caught the attention of gaming tastemakers Rock, Paper, Shotgun and Penny Arcade, my online social circle has been completely twitterpated. In fact, it has become so extraordinarily […]
Indie Gaming Gallery is a semi-regular feature where I attempt to support independent game development by highlighting some outstanding titles that you should definitely check out. Ancient Trader [XBLIG] It requires a bit of searching, but you can occasionally find a real gem in the unfortunate ghetto of Xbox Live Indie Games. Ancient Trader is […]
Earlier this summer I took the annual trip up to my friend Thomas’s family cottage in northern Ontario. I relished the opportunity to disconnect for a while and enjoy the long weekend without the usual digital distractions. The cottage procedure prescribes reading, swimming, fishing and cooking. After the sun goes down, the card games come […]
This post is partly a (two month late) response to Chris Hecker’s GDC 2010 rant entitled Please Finish Your Game. It also condenses some rough thoughts I’ve long held about motivation and game making. It took some effort to edit it into a coherent form, so I apologize in advance if it’s a tad rambling. […]
These past few weeks I’ve been fighting a pitched interstellar war against fellow game bloggers Matthew Burns, Ben Abraham and Michel McBride-Charpentier. Early in the game I had a long-standing alliance with Ben, and we peacefully teamed-up to take out our red neighbour “Dr Dinosaur”. I sold weapon technology to Matthew in his distant campaign […]
No Fun Games is proud to present Pax Britannica, a one-button real-time strategy game we made for the GAMMA4 design competition. Our team includes designers/programmers Kira Boom, Renaud Bédard and me, artist Daniel Burton and composer Ben Abraham. Unfortunately we were not selected and will not be showing off our game at GDC. However, we […]
Over the holidays I had the pleasure of talking to game bloggers Alex Raymond and Denis Farr on Michael Abbott’s Brainy Gamer Podcast. In this episode we discussed our personal favourite games of 2009, as well as which titles we’re looking forward to next year. I picked the most mainstream possible game as my favourite, […]
Happy new year everyone! You’ll have to excuse another decade retrospective in list form; we won’t get to do this again for ten years, after all. Here’s my perspective on the 00’s in video games, using the only honest metric I know: games that I personally enjoyed. 2000 The autumn years of the Nintendo 64 […]
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was a something of a sleeper hit for me. I had enjoyed the previous entries in the series, but only as World War 2 simulators with little lasting appeal. If it hadn’t been bundled economically with Assassin’s Creed1 at the time, I doubt I would have even bothered to […]
Anamanaguchi – Dawn Metropolis With the chiptune scene becoming increasingly important and interesting, it was only a matter of time before a band like Anamanaguchi showed up with a radical new take on the genre. While many chiptune artists create rocking music using synthesizers and NES sound chips alone, Anamanaguchi complement their sound with live […]
This week I attended the Montreal International Game Summit, a professional conference for game developers. Since that is not my profession (yet), I managed to get a free pass as a student volunteer. This was a compelling arrangement, even if it meant I didn’t always have my choice of presentations (I particularly regret missing Brenda […]
The project that became Norwegian Wood began in late April of this year. With school winding down and the weather heating up, I felt the itch to tackle something new. By chance I had met a number of like-minded people over the winter; students with big ideas and aspirations of working in the game industry. […]
The game project that I’ve been quietly working on this summer is finally ready for release! It’s a rhythm-based shmup inspired by the Beatles song Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown). You can download it for PC, Mac and Linux on the game’s website: Norwegian Wood – No Fun Games I have more to say […]