Category: Game Design
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No One Argues About The Reactor
In 1957, British author C. Northcote Parkinson described a fictional committee with three items on their agenda. First: signing a £10 million contract to build a nuclear reactor. Second: a proposal to build a £350 bicycle shed for the clerical staff. Third: £21 a year to supply refreshments for the committee itself. The fictional committee’s…
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Vibes
We were watching a cinematic sequence that wasn’t hitting. Everyone in the room understood what it was trying to communicate — the intent was clear, the performances were there, the edit was technically fine. But something was off. It didn’t feel right. It felt like it was moving too fast, too sharp, cutting through moments…
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Prove It
I used to pester the user research team every time I heard a playtest was scheduled. Can you ask if they understood the narrative? Can you ask if they prefer the way this gun sounds or that one? I wanted feedback from people who weren’t on the project team badly enough that I made myself…
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The Island of Misfit Toys
There was a senior producer on one of the games I worked on who had spent years managing a high-end restaurant kitchen before she ended up in the games industry. The more I thought about it, the more sense it made. Kitchen management at that level is logistics, triage, people management, quality control, and crisis…
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The Pillars Will See You Now (Part 2)
In Part 1 we talked about what game pillars actually are — rules to test decisions against, not directives or mood boards — and the three traps that tend to make them useless: too many, too obvious, and too vague. If you haven’t read it, it’s worth starting there. This is the part where we…
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Everything Should Be Fun (And Other Useless Pillars)
I was brought onto a project as part of a co-development arrangement. My whole team went through an onboarding process that included a presentation of the game and its pillars — the foundational principles that were supposed to guide every decision made on the project. I remember sitting there trying to get my bearings on…
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The Fastest “Team” In The Room
Let me be upfront about something before we get into it: AI is one of those topics where I think nuance tends to get flattened fast. I completely understand why a lot of creatives — artists, musicians, writers, developers — have strong and formal objections to AI tools, particularly around generated art and audio. Those…
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Interpreting Thelonious Monk’s “25 Tips for Musicians” To Game Development
In 1960, saxophonist Steve Lacy was hired to play a series of performances with Thelonious Monk. During that time he wrote down a list of tips — things Monk said, observations he made, advice offered in the way that advice often gets offered in a working band: casually, in the moment, not necessarily intended to…
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Nobody Came Here To Watch You Know Things
It’s 20XX and I’m settling into a folding chair at GDC, buzzing with the kind of excitement that only makes sense if you understand what it took to get there. This was my first time at the conference after nearly eight years in the industry. A few colleagues and I had pooled resources and were…
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Narrative Structure Is a Budget Decision (Part 3)
If you’ve read Parts 1 and 2, you now have a vocabulary for the distinct structures that tend to get lumped together under “branching narrative.” This is the part where I tell you how I actually use that vocabulary — and why the most important conversation about narrative structure usually happens in a budget meeting,…