In Part 1, we discussed what Telepath Tactics cost to make; what sort of sales it needed in order to reimburse me for those costs; and how many additional units it needed to sell to allow me to meet my ultimate goal of leaving behind my day job and developing…
Read More »I’ve posted a lot about the development of Telepath Tactics: my design philosophy, my month-to-month progress, and so on. Now, a couple of months out from the game’s release, I want to take an in-depth look at Telepath Tactics from a financial standpoint. Prior to Telepath Tactics’s release, I did…
Read More »Almost exactly one year ago, I discussed the four virtues of a good turn-based combat system and shared 12 techniques that RPGs commonly overlook for achieving those virtues. Today, after a year of contemplation and careful design work, I feel ready to expand the list. What follows are 6 additional…
Read More »Thanksgiving is a peculiar but wonderful American holiday. What originated as a harvest festival has become a time to gather with family and close friends and share the many things we’re thankful for over the prior year. Forget the aprocyphal tales of Native Americans sharing turkeys with pilgrims: this is…
Read More »I’ve found myself wondering about “gamification” with increasing frequency these last few months as various articles appear online to denounce it. What is it, exactly? And is it really as bad as they all say? What follows is a brief exploration of the concept and a look at its applications. …
Read More »Last week we had a double-barreled shotgun blast of opinion pieces advocating for RPGs to hide or drop some of their core conventions and abstractions. Tom Bissell, writing about Dead Island, complained about pop-up damage numbers in a real-world zombie RPG and landed a glancing blow against leveling and statistics-based…
Read More »Looking back on my last developer rant, I’ve decided that I was a little bit too scattershot in my approach. I wanted to cover a multiplicity of areas where detail tends to get overlooked in RPGs, but in doing so I skimped on solutions. In particular, I want to revisit…
Read More »The RPG is an inherently inelegant creature. It is something of a Frankenstein monster, a suite of different gameplay systems stitched together into a shambling chimera. Character creation, simulated markets, item management, navigation, combat, stealth, dialogue, puzzles, class and skill trees–as a developer, it is difficult enough simply to make…
Read More »In my last opinion piece, I provoked a certain subsection of the world of RPG enthusiasts by slaughtering a particularly sacred cow: the D&D-style combat system. A surprising number of people wrote in agreeing with me. Predictably, however, others responded in one of two ways: (1) “So you think a…
Read More »Dungeons and Dragons, son of Chainmail, is the great granddaddy of the modern role-playing game. Its importance cannot be overstated: not only was it revolutionary for its time, it has also directly inspired many of the early computer RPGs on which the genre is now based. Because of D&D’s power…
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