Awhile back I mentioned that my number one rule in game design is: Gameplay is King. It will always be king. There is nothing that should ever trump it. Not the art, not the license, nothing. Except for one thing: Jedi. It goes without saying that Jedi are extremely popular in geek/nerdlore/culture. So, it seems [...]

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Was playing some Naruto:  Rise of the Ninja at work today, and did some head-to-head vs. mode combat.  It turns out it was good research/competitive analysis, because Naruto only uses two attack buttons, and it seems that’s the direction a lot of modern titles are heading in for combat as well.  The idea is that [...]

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Awhile back Clint over at ClickNothing did a great critique of Bioshock, and it got me thinking that designers should be doing this regularly. As an industry, we have countless outlets for reviews of games; a consumer level media wrap-up of a “buy it or not” standard. But what we don’t have is a professional [...]

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I was checking out an older post from Damion over at Zen of Design earlier today, discussing repeatability in games, and it reminded me of a piece I was going to craft awhile back trying to chain-of-thought figure out why we’re so dependent on guns in video games these days. Damion explores that repeatability is [...]

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