The game course has hit project time. The initial task is to come up with three ideas. I thought I'd post them here and ask for some feedback. What should I go ahead with? Let me know what you think, and why.

Idea #1: Colony

This is intended to fit the strong embedded narrative constraint. In this game the players represent teams or ( Read more... )

More coursework, this time just coming up with a game concept rather than a whole working game. Very good timing, as I had a move on, and I wouldn't have been up to a full design.

The concept was somewhat challenging: a game specifically to appeal to griefers.

( Trappers )

The goal of this one was to make change the card game War so it was mostly skill that determined victory. I decided the most important mechanic to keep (so it was still War) was the blind card matching. Not much else survived.

( Winning the Battle, Losing the War )

This project for the Game Design Concepts course is from the Games and Art lesson ( Read more... )

Lesson four came with yet another game design exercise.

This time the goal was to: Make a board game adaptation of a videogame. Make a prototype in an hour. For extra challenge, make it an adaptation of a game designed for the Atari 2600.

( ET The Extra Terrestrial - An adaptation by Carl de Visser from the Atari game )

The course has a new assignment.

This time the goal is to create a game with the follwoing characteristics:

• World War One theme
• The primary objective of players cannot be territorial control, or capture/destroy.
• You cannot use territorial control or capture/destroy as game dynamics. (My game skirts pretty close to territorial control as a dynamic ( Read more... )

I've now completed lesson two of the game design course.

There are some interesting people on the course. Zack Johnson, the guy who runs Kingdom of Loathing is on the course with some other guys from KoL, as is a producer from PopCap.

Homework from lesson 2 included some iterative development on the games we made in lesson one. Here is the ( Read more... )

I am currently signed up for this online game design course. Very interesting so far, really enjoying the texts. Part of the course are some game design challenges. The first one was to come up with a path based game with some conflict in fifteen minutes. I came up with something and wrote it in my notebook in about 15 minutes, but I went way over ( Read more... )

I have recently being getting into Roleplaying Games again. After playing a game for a while I really was feeling the need to run a game again. To break myself in gently I ran a 6 session D&D 4th edition game. 4th edition is much more a fantasy tactical combat simulator than what I used to think of an RPG, but is great fun. Good rules, well written ( Read more... )

Earlier in the year, really early in fact, January 2nd, I did some wargaming ( Read more... )