Three photos, one of two men in suits, the second with two women in suits and the third a wedding photo of a man and a woman

Excellent recontextualization of advertising photos by Richard Prince

Honoured to be in great company at the IGDN Indie Groundbreaker Awards! What Should We Have Tomorrow? Has been nominated for Game of the Year and Graphic Design, and owes a lot to @lostwaysclub.itch.io who was responsible for the graphic design and game consulting. www.igdnonline.com/groundbreakers

Okay, this isn't a live-service game.

It's a small, $15 regular 5v5 multiplayer game. The only DLC is a $5 'supporter pack' that gives every character one more skin and the soundtrack.

It's exactly what people have been demanding because they HATE live-service games. And then gets punished as one!

If you want to make a game about resisting, it should be as crunchy as possible because organising is hard.

a poster for the game workers conference, taking place on may 22-23. in the bottom-left corner, a red stream of game tools & iconography emanate from a sun composed of abstract shapes. it's nestled, slightly askew inside another poster for a boshi's place watch party for the conference. boshi's face at the bottom left overlaps the conference poster slightly, with small illustrated decorations in pure blue scattered around the rest of the frame.

we're hosting a watch party for @gameworkerscon.bsky.social may 22-23! it's a free, online conference by & for workers organized by @videogameworkers.bsky.social.

please use the qr code to rsvp! there will be snacks, swag, park hangs during breaks, & we can learn how to build worker power together.

Eurobasket had me expecting a completely different season for Sengun

Colorful painting of two people in white robes meeting with a kick. Twin Sunset - Andras Koncz

This would go hard in a taekwondo gym.

My college is hiring a full time game design faculty, with a strong union! please share around, link in reply.

$85k-100k Salary
Benefits and retirement matching
Design, Programming or Art disciplines
Seattle Area

I was not ready for part one of Angel Down. I don’t know if it’s the book to start a vacation with but those bullets have flown straight through the book’s trenches to lodge directly between my eyes.

All the Alpha Centauri dialog was written in a strange fugue while rereading Dune while listening to the soundtrack for Les Miserables :D

Betrayal At Club Low is a really great game and you should play it if you have not

I really liked Crawford's Art of Computer Game Design. A lot of it is dictated by the technology of the time and that dates it, unlike Schell and Koster's books which are the obvious comparisons, but it is still well worth reading.

During June, I wrote the short novel that accompanies the game. This novella was not part of the original design. I only thought of it in April: realizing that the manual would be very large, I decided that I might as well go all out and write a novel to e.xplain the rules. My original intention was that the novel would explain the entire game and that no other documents would accompany it. It took me one day to prepare an outline that addressed all aspects of the game. I then wrote a chapter a day, two days a week. It was a most enjoyable writing task.

I'm so jealous.

I don’t agree with a lot of Crawford’s assertions. I don’t think more options are always a good thing, for instance. However, I really appreciate his confidence in making them. If your aim is an introductory work, vacillating makes it hard for the reader to engage.

How Brutalism Became Both a Utopian Dream and a Dystopian Meme Brutalism, an architectural movement associated with state power and science fiction, is perpetually misunderstood – yet it has left an indelible imprint on popular culture.

I like the point this game makes about decaying brutalism as an aesthetic unto itself. Is an equivalent with AAA games conceivable?

www.sothebys.com/en/articles/...

I still appreciate the South of the Circle scene transitions but the prompting is at once killing the pacing of the dialogue and often frustrating me by not being what I expected to say

history.state.gov/historicaldo...

"Tamagotchi on steroids" - how one "groundbreaking" video game from the 90s paved the way for the AI of Google DeepMind, Gemini and beyond Peter Molyneux, Google DeepMind's Richard Evans, and more on the making and legacy of Black & White as it turns 25.

There's a lot in this @lewisgordon.bsky.social piece on Black and White but what strikes the most is the line between tamagotchis and the game. I would love to see a piece on the influence tamagotchis had on the industry at large.

www.eurogamer.net/black-and-wh...

Maybe this is the difference? You and I can see the value in cognitive challenges for how they hone the mind and not just for the output they produce?

The argument that an AI booster would make (because they don’t understand how things work) would be that the skill of knowing how to make a section consistent with a thinker is obsolete in the age of AI?

A giant centipede chases you while you while you climb down a massive hole in indie climbing horror game, Idols of Ash!

Out now and FREE for a limited time, on Itch: leafygames.itch.io/idols-of-ash

Full Gameplay Video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRJt...

by indie dev @leafygames.bsky.social #gaming

A variety of other systems have been used for playtesting. Most rely on gathering large groups of "real people" and assessing their reactions to the game. I have little respect for such systems. Although they are scientific, objective, and democratic, they seldom yield useful design information, for consumers make lousy critics. Their suggestions too often are inane and impractical. They don't know enough about computers or games to give practical criticism. Such methods may work with detergent and shaving cream, but I doubt that any great movie, book, or song was created through market research of this kind. I will concede that such methods can prove to be a useful way to guide the mass production of cheap games by designers of limited talents, but this book is not written for them.

You tell 'em Chris.

CHOOSE A GOAL AND A TOPIC This vitally important step seems obvious, yet is ignored time and time again by game designers who set out with no clear intent. In my conversations with designers, I have often noticed indifference to the need for clear goals. Game designers sometimes admit trying to produce a "fun" game or an "exciting" game, but that is usually the extent of their thinking about goals. A game must have a clearly defined goal, and it must be expressed in terms of the effect it will have on the player. It is not enough to declare that a game will be enjoyable, fun, exciting, or good; the goal must establish the fantasies that the game will support and the types of emotions it will engender in its audience. Since many games are in some way educational, the goal in these cases should establish what the player will learn. It is entirely appropriate for the game designer to ask how the game will enlighten its audience. The importance of a goal does not become obvious until later in the design cycle. The crucial problems in game development with microcomputers are always problems of trade-offs. Everything that the game designer wants to do costs memory, and microcomputer memory is always in short supply. Thus, the designer must make trade-offs. Some game features can be included; some must be rejected. At two o'clock in the morning, when you face the awful decision of rejecting one of two highly desirable features, the only criterion for making this painful choice is the goal you have established for the game. If your goals are clear, your decision will be painful but obvious. If they are murky, you may well make the wrong choice, and whatever you choose, you will never know if your decision was correct. How does one select a proper goal? There is no objective answer to this question. The selection of a goal is undeniably the most subjective process in the art of computer game design. This is your opportunity to express yourself; choose a goal in which you…

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose from Crawford's Art of Computer Game Design (1984)

Stationery comes from stationary because writing materials were one of the few things you would buy from a fixed shop instead of an itinerant merchant because the shops were located near universities.

idk why it took me until reading this to realize that I could just file down the sharp edges of my macbook kentwalters.com/posts/corners/

"Thank you for failing so completely to understand what I wrote (genuine). I will see if I can write a version that even you can understand (complimentary)."

The playoffs are now live in Hoop Dungeon

store.steampowered.com/app/4250030/...

First Slay the Spire 2 and now Sol Cesto. I do not pick good times for Hoop Dungeon launches.

🌞 SOL CESTO – 1.0 OUT NOW ON STEAM 🌞

It took us nearly 3 years, but Sol Cesto is finally complete! We hope you’ll enjoy our weird roguelite and all the surprises we’ve added 👀

Please help us spread the word 🙌

I'm really enjoying the @sagarberoshi.bsky.social episode of Game Narrative Kaleidoscope, especially as I worked by Episode long ago, but I disagree with the idea that Netflix repeating plot points is pragmatic and not ideological (if that distinction exists). This is in line with who they are.