03 | supplement | self study digest
DEREK YU - Three Articles From The GameDev Heart
About pitfalls of game development in small teams. Derek Yu is an accomplished game developer that was there when indie games started to be a thing. He writes from the years of experience and without any marketing fluff. Worth the read, short, general yet relatable. Archetypes, Deathloops and Feedback are a must read.
RAYLENE DECK - a talk about open world design
Interesting insight into designing digital open worlds which is still an emerging field. Short (30 minutes) with use of quantic foundry player typology. Delivered in an understandable fashion.
- GDC: World Design for Different Player Types (2019) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mlf_pXwYajE
RAMI ISMAIL - a well spoken indie game developer about difficulty
Rami Ismail is well known speaker and indie game developer. His short article about the irrationality of game difficulty discourse is again... worth the read.
SID MAYER - a talk of a civilization creator
An older GDC talk (2010) about how different players and player psychology can result in better game while spending less dev resources.
- GDC: Sid Meier's Psychology of Game Design (2010) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtzCLd93SyU
JOURNAL - study of Games and a researcher hub - gamestudies.org
This journal may seem like an old thing from the nineties, but it is actually the most fruitful hub of quality research papers from the field of game studies, that is still in its developing stages. If you are interested in game design or understanding of games gamestudies.org is for you.
ARTICLE - early game design documents
Interesting article (and the blog) about early game design documents and how can we use them. Explore also the links to sources, some of the game design documents can be found there (Prince of Persia, Doom, Fallout, Diablo).
ARTICLE - about the game Journey and game design reduction
Short yet well written article with a lot of citation of game developers of Journey. It started as an MMO but resulted in something quite unique still to this day.
CURATED - list of awesome game dev talks 2000-2016 (not just GDC)
- https://github.com/hzoo/awesome-gametalks
- few tips:
- [2005] Heart of a Gamer: Satoru Iwata (Nintendo)
- [2014] TwitchPlayedPokemon: An Analysis of the Experimental Interactive Phenomenon: Alex Leavitt (USC)
- [2012] A Theory of Fun 10 Years Later: Raph Koster (Playdom)
- [2007] Indie Prototyping: Jonathan Blow (Number None, Inc.)
- [2012, TEDxCHUV] Your Brain On Video Games: Daphne Bavelier (University of Geneva)
- [2014, Tallinn University] Innovation in Game Design: Richard Bartle