With the design of GrandMasterPixel, I’ve generally worked on the principle that features should have to fight to be included (ala 37signals), and worked to create the bare minimum required to play the game. No more, no less. Part of that philosophy lead me to forgo the customary title screen found in many games. At [...]

So, the Game Design Concepts course officially finished a little over two weeks ago. I followed along for the first half, but dropped the ball when it came to the month-long design project. Playtesting is time consuming, but essential – and finding a bunch of ‘randoms’ to act as testers for blind playtesting is tricky. [...]

Here’s a new game I’ve been developing on-and-off for a few months now. I’ve become pretty busy at “The Day Job” recently, and due to commuting time I haven’t found time to add all the features I’d like. I thought rather than sit on this game for many more months, I’d just release it as [...]

Some game design quotes at RandomTerrian. There are some pearls of wisdom here, eg: For me the retrogaming movement is more than just nostalgia of misty eyed Gen X’ers. It’s a reaction to the current graphical overkill, the simulation obsessed gaming environment of the late 90s. In our quest for absolute graphical realism, we have [...]

The 400 Project is an expanding list of “400 game design rules“. I suspect the project may have stalled at rule #112 .. still, there’s some juicy stuff in there. I also suspect that for at least half these ‘rules’ there is at least one professional developer somewhere who would say “No ! Never Do [...]