Josh Bycer's Blog
For more than seven years, I have been researching and contributing to the field of game design. These contributions range from QA for professional game productions to writing articles for sites like Gamasutra and Quarter To Three.
With my site Game-Wisdom our goal is to create a centralized source of critical thinking about the game industry for everyone from enthusiasts, game makers and casual fans; to examine the art and science of games. I also do video plays and analysis on my Youtube channel. I have interviewed over 500 members of the game industry around the world, and I'm a two-time author on game design with "20 Essential Games to Study" and "Game Design Deep Dive Platformers."
Expert Blogs
Playing a game as the bad guy can be a guilty pleasure and a unique experience. For today, we're going to look at this further, and why designing around being bad is harder than playing it that way.
Posted by
Josh Bycer
on Mon, 20 Jul 2020 10:41:00 EDT
in
Gacha and loot box progression are often conflated, but we're going to break down the differences today and examine their impact on a game's design.
Roguelike design has come a long way over the last 20 years, and we're going to talk about a recent change that has afforded modern roguelikes to be more approachable to newcomers of the genre.
An underrated skill when it comes to working in the industry is remaining humble, and its something more people need to learn.
Free to Play and mobile games make use of a lot of unfortunately shady practices to get people to pay and play, and I want to talk about some of the less overt examples in today's post.
A new marketing tactic we're seeing from indie developers is the use of "prologue" versions of their games. For today's piece, we're going to talk about them and the benefits of creating a smaller version of your game.
Josh Bycer's Comments
Comment In:
[Blog - 07/20/2020 - 10:41]
Comment In:
[Blog - 06/30/2020 - 11:03]
For instance, Magia Record is ...
For instance, Magia Record is having an event right now where you can buy a guaranteed SSR of your choice for a coupon in a pack which IIRC costs 650 gems. So if you go to the gem buying page, you will see you can get that many gems for ...
Comment In:
[News - 06/08/2020 - 01:02]
Comment In:
[Blog - 05/26/2020 - 10:17]
The very fact that the ...
The very fact that the beginning of these games is bad is especially damning. If someone is finding issues in minute one of playing, what does that say about the rest of your game Unfortunately, with my weekly indie dev showcases, I 've been exposed to this more than anybody ...
Comment In:
[Blog - 03/31/2020 - 12:21]
And of course that isn ...
And of course that isn 't a secret to anyone telling you the lie with a straight face. The negative psychological value of trash pull after trash pull is what makes the dopamine rush of the good pull even more intense. All by design. r n r nOne thing I ...
Comment In:
[Blog - 03/06/2020 - 10:13]
In fact, I 'd love ...
In fact, I 'd love to see a follow-up piece that walks through this way of understanding game design with a hands-on, practical example. What 's an actual case of imagining several possible CGLs for a new game to testing and evaluating contenders, to iterating on the winning CGL to ...
