As an independent developer with a board game, I sometimes find myself traveling to board game nights and events to demo True Messiah and build interest. At these events, I’m often asked: “What other games does True Messiah play like?” I often respond with something like, “Go meets Magic the…
Read More »There is a secret known only to RPG developers, a gleaming nugget of knowledge unearthed anew through long struggle by each succeeding generation of would-be Richard Garriotts and Shouzou Kagas. It is, simply: making RPGs is kind of a pain in the ass. I love making RPGs, but it’s true. The…
Read More »I’ve discovered a number of oddities during my foray into the world of indie board game development, but few rank quite as high for me as the fact that there exists no standardized, free-to-use set of box art icons. Box art icons? Yes, you know: those little icons that denote…
Read More »<< Continued from Part 20 Creating a campaign that’s challenging, interesting, and fun One of my longtime fans on the Sinister Design forums recently asked me to write a tutorial entry talking not just about how to create a Telepath Tactics campaign, but how to create one that’s challenging, interesting,…
Read More »Just yesterday, I finished patching out the last of the major issues in Telepath Tactics. Now seems like a good time to begin a second marketing push! For this reason, I’ve written the following article–aimed at the media, but probably of interest to others as well–explaining why this game is…
Read More »If you’ve spent any significant time going through my archive of design-focused articles, you probably know that I am allergic to dogmatic declarations about how to design games. Over the past four years, I’ve responded to calls to remove text from games, calls to remove story and attractive visual art…
Read More »Back in April, Dutch indie studio Vlambeer was embroiled in a controversy over the use of Nazi-style imagery in its 2D dogfighting game Luftrausers. Rami Ismail (the business half of Vlambeer, and a fellow developer whose company and conversation I quite enjoy) took to the Vlambeer blog to defuse the…
Read More »Our industry has long had a problem with representing women in games, and the recent news about Assassin’s Creed Unity dropping its female playable characters continues the trend in a fittingly embarrassing fashion. Earlier today, VideoGamer.com asked Ubisoft technical director James Therien why they had canned female playable characters in…
Read More »John Walker of RockPaperShotgun wrote an editorial today that has worked the internet into one of its customary tizzies. As I sometimes do, I feel obliged to weigh in here. I can understand why some people are upset. For one thing, the piece focuses on the tiny minority of artists…
Read More »This PAX Prime was my first PAX Prime. It was incredible. We won a Drool Award from Twinfinite.net, one of only 10 they give out at the event; TotalBiscuit stopped by my booth and played a live 1-v-1 match against the AI for 30 minutes; I got to do interviews…
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