I’ve been spending all my free time lately working on my GDC talk. So, if you’re at the conference, come see me play career roulette on Friday afternoon. And if you aren’t in SF this week, I should resume posting when I get back with lots of new material from the talk.
Maximum Cooldown Time: 6-12 seconds Purple hippos. Green puppies. Red monkeys. Short term memory is an interesting thing. Yellow birds. Blue horses. It can only hold around seven items (give or take a few, depending on your level of concentration.) Which means for some of you “Orange lizards” is going to drive the first animal … Continue reading
Last year I wrote about balancing multiplayer weapons, why I’ll never make a free-to-play game, the best way to exploit platform achievements, and 70+ other topics, but the ones that stirred up the most traffic were giving a 7.5 to Uncharted and “pornography games“. Well, that and when neogaf found out I had left Bungie. … Continue reading
Seems you can find me everywhere but here, this week! I was the “special guest” on this month’s 343 Industries’ Sparkcast and had a great time reminiscing about the original Halo with David Ellis and Frank O’conner. Halo: Anniversary looks great, but I must admit it’s a little disconcerting, like someone found a bunch of my baby … Continue reading
Hey! I’m in the August issue of Game Developer Magazine! There I was, noodling around in my little corner of the internet — creatively avoiding updating the blog — when I got an email from the editors at Game Developer asking if I’d like to write a guest column for them. Boy, would I! So … Continue reading
As a fan of international competitions and a patriot, it was tough to see the American team lose in the World Cup Finals. But as a professional game designer, it was even worse to see them lose during a penalty shoot-out. If I suggested such a duct-tape solution to a fundamental design flaw I’d be … Continue reading
One of the reasons I have not been updating as regularly recently is because I was answering pages upon pages of questions from Joystiq‘s Ludwig Kietzmann for an extended interview about game design. You can find the first part here. He probably has enough material for a book, or at least a large pamphlet, so expect more!
It has been exactly six months and one day since I abruptly and inexplicably retired from game design after thirteen years at Bungie Studios (creators of Halo, Halo 2, Halo 3, Halo: ODST and Halo: Reach.) And now, after precisely six months of spending time with my family, traveling the globe and watching daytime television… it’s time for me to … Continue reading
Eventually, I’ll have to supplement this self-indulgent experiment with a real job. (Turns out retirement isn’t actually that exciting.) And when I do, I’d like to be able to continue writing about game design, which means I need to make this site a little more manageable. To that end, I made some changes to the … Continue reading
[Update] I’m back in Seattle and (mostly) recovered. Thanks to everyone that came to either of my User Research or Game Design talks. Special thanks to all the readers that introduced themselves; it seems like I am reaching my intended audience of “veteran game designers”. A narrow demographic, to be sure. Unfortunately, I spent too much … Continue reading
I’m going to be in San Francisco for GDC where I’ll be giving a talk called Design in Detail: Tuning the Muzzle Velocity of the Plasma Rifle Bolt on Legendary Difficulty Across the Halo Franchise. It is a follow-up to last year’s talk,which EDGE called “one of the most fascinating sessions of GDC“. The slides … Continue reading
Throughout my career I have been a strong proponent of User Research and have taken advantage of every opportunity to investigate the desires, expectations and reactions of actual gamers. Designing from a single perspective leads to a one-dimensional game, which is why honest answers to authentic questions is so valuable. I don’t see that writing … Continue reading
I’m excited about the following post, not because it is especially insightful, but because it features this blog’s first interactive example! Games are so dependent on interactivy, it’s virtually impossible to explain certain key concepts without some kind of playable demonstration. Sometimes I need to make my point about game design with a game! To … Continue reading
I’ve managed to post three times a week for two weeks; I’ve even got a couple posts in the queue. I have a rough outline of future topics, blog software I like and a site design I don’t hate. I’ve already rocketed to the the top of Google’s search results* so I guess it’s time to find some readers! This site … Continue reading
Although this is a blogging site, this isn’t a blog. I won’t be reviewing games or collecting links to more interesting writers or making “insightful” comments about the latest gaming news to troll for traffic. In fact, even though these words will be public, I don’t expect anyone to read them, at least in this … Continue reading
