games
There is no app that replicates a deck of cards
Disorientation
Learning to walk through walls
The things that you’re meant to do
List of games that Buddha would not play
Right-Angle Doodling Machine
Follow the fun
An Article by Dave RupertAnother great dissertation from Mark Brown of Game Maker’s Toolkit: The Games that Designed Themselves. It’s the radical idea that designers should ignore their preconceived notions and look to the game itself to find out where the development should lead. How does something design itself? Well… the answer is: Prototypes.
A lot of great indie game masterpieces are the result of experimentation and early gameplay demos that changed the course of game’s development. As Brown points out, there’s a whole history of groundbreaking games that were developed “almost by accident” where bugs and glitches were turned into features.
Game feel
An Article by Dave RupertHow do you make a game that’s fun? ...You have to focus on gameplay. In order for the final product to be fun and exciting, the core game play needs to be fun and exciting. The creator of Mario calls this 手応え (tegotae), which is often translated as “game feel”. To find this game feel, you need to build small prototypes around a single idea, play test them, and then follow the fun. Nintendo does this, indie game devs do this; this is the not-so-secret of the gaming industry.
When Customer Journeys Don’t Work: Arcs, Loops, & Terrain
An Article by Stephen P. AndersonThinking [in terms of loops and arcs] allows us to let go of a specific journey or sequence, and imagine dozens of scenarios and possible sequences in which these skills can be learned. This doesn’t mean there aren’t more fundamental skills that other skills build upon, but we can let go the tyranny of how, precisely, a person will move through a system. We’re free to zoom in and obsess on these loops, which does two things for us:
- Approach the design of a system as the design of these as small but significant moments of learning.
- Consider the many ways these loops might be sequenced, with the exact order being less important.
If we were allowed to visit
A Poetry CollectionIf We Were Allowed To Visit is an anthology of poems by Gemma Mahadeo rendered by Ian MacLarty.
As you move through the game's environment, the poems are rearranged into the shapes of the objects they're about, each frame becoming a new generative poem.
Withered or seasoned?
An Article by Robin SloanThe Nintendo way of adapting technology is not to look for the state of the art but to utilize mature technology that can be mass-produced cheaply.
This is the reason a Nintendo console never has the fastest chips or the beefiest specs of its generation; instead, its remixes components in an interesting and generative way. Think of the Gameboy’s monochrome screen, the Wii’s motion controller, the Switch’s smartphone form.
[Gunpei Yokoi] is talking about reliability and predictability, in performance and supply alike. He wants the components to be boring, so their application can be daring.
Crashlands: Design by Chaos
A Talk by Seth Coster
To the Lighthouse
All the lives to be
And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves.
The alphabet
Yet he would not die lying down; he would find some crag of rock, and there, his eyes fixed on the storm, trying to the end to pierce the darkness, he would die standing. He would never reach R.
Gone crooked
He was coming to see himself, and everything he had ever known gone crooked a little. It was awfully strange.
Extinguished
One by one the lamps were all extinguished.
A thing you could ruffle with your breath
It was a thing you could ruffle with your breath; and a thing you could not dislodge with a team of horses.
A coherence in things
There is a coherence in things, a stability; something, she meant, is immune to change, and shines out…in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby.
All dark and spreading
Beneath it is all dark, it is spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by.
There, with a dash on the beach
How life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.
Distance
Distance had an extraordinary power.
So much depends, she thought, upon distance.They would never know
She would never know him. He would never know her. Human relations were all like that.