Playing Games, Making Games

Whenever I get bored, I try to do some sort of mental exercise. Today was one of these days. I spent about 45 minutes waiting for a bus, and during that time I went back to a certain problem I wanted to solve: making a card game which can be played with nothing but the regular 52 playing cards and lasts a very long time, meaning that a single game can take several hours. Games like poker do not count, because playing poker usually requires some other material: chips, real money or something to keep score. I couldn't solve that problem, but I did end up with a game I think is neat. Give it a shot some time, and tell me how you feel about it. Card Duel Needs: 2 players, 1 deck of playing cards Setup: Take a regular deck of 52 cards (no jokers), shuffle it and deal each player 26 cards, face down. These 26 cards are the player's card pool . From this card pool, each player must construct a hand and a deck . To construct a hand, take a number of cards from your card pool whose valu...

1st exam of the semester is down. This one was for the hardest class, by far, so I'm damn glad to have that over with. Time to pop 3ds max open and start making crap for the big project.

It is hard. But man, I can't remember the last game that made me spend an entire weekend playing it. I got it last saturday and had accumulated 15+ hours of playtime when monday rolled around. I wish I hadn't. It's going to make this exam week harder than it should be... But yeah, Demon's Souls. A weird and somewhat awkward name, hard to pronounce. A weird control scheme (square to use a potion? Really?). A ruthless difficulty level, possibly amplified because I was dumb enough to pick "Magician" as a class and pick up EVERY SINGLE ITEM, even those guarded by dragons. The combat is hard to get used to and very skill-focused for an action RPG. This is the kind of fighting system you'd expect from, say, God Hand. I ended up falling into the playstyle where I constantly hide behind a huge shield, using only quick jabs with a rapier to do damage and retreating at the first sign of danger to throw fireballs. I was absolutely terrible at the game when I started ...

Time for a rant about game design. Every once in a while, someone in a game development team jokes about adding something silly to the game. Maybe a unit with an unpronounceable name, or a gun that fires teapots, or an enemy that kills you and deletes your saved game. That's funny! It's a joke. A funny proposition. And yet far too often, someone adds "you know, we should actually put that into the game." and the designer says "yeah, this isn't a serious game, it'll be a joke". There's something profoundly wrong here. Having a game that doesn't take itself seriously and has less-than-serious dialog in it is perfectly fine. But those games are designed in an extremely serious and rigorous fashion. Take Plants vs Zombies, whose premise is fairly ridiculous and has you planting exploding potatoes. It's a silly game. But its design isn't silly - a ton of work has gone into making every plant interesting and unique in their own way, with th...