I just finished An Architectural Approach to Level Design and I was really pleased with it as a whole!
Monthly Archives: April 2016
The Line Between Confusion and Discovery
Here’s a video of a Hyper Light Drifter player discovering how the chain dash works, and it’s just an utter delight! He struggles around with it until about 12:12, when it finally starts to click, and he gets SO excited at the discovery!
Walking the line between making sure your players understand the mechanics to be able to effectively play your game and leaving room for the delight of discovery is one the HARDEST calls to make as a game designer, I think.
Here’s something to keep in mind: If you were watching this person playtest, how long do you think it would have taken before you got squirmy and wanted to explain how it works? Subtract that timestamp from the one where he figures it out. Next time you run a playtest and get the squirmy “they aren’t understanding it” feeling, wait at least that amount of time more.
There’s also other factors at play: Was he more apt to keep trying because he had an audience? Is he just the sort of person that keeps hammering at stuff to figure it out? If so, is that who your target audience is? THESE ARE HARD GAME DESIGN QUESTIONS.
(Spoiler alert, he makes it to 800)
I Love Workflowy
As much as I enjoy playing around with different software and apps for task management, I always seem to return to Workflowy when it comes to my own personal to-do management. Yesterday I realized that I have been using it for years at this point, and in that time have come up with a pretty substantial and reliable system for keeping my life organized. Curious about the systems that other people had made for it, I asked around and found that there’s quite a range of approaches.
For the purposes of this post I’ll go over Workflowy’s strengths and weaknesses, outline my personal management system, and give some examples of ways that other people have used it.