Game Design

The Design of Play

VR Pitfalls in Super Man vs Monster

Adding VR to the city-wrecking and beast-slaying Man vs Monster taught designer Diederik Groesbeek a few lessons about his design. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJ8tWUobUlU "After the unboxing of the fi... Read More...

Rationing Rare Occurrences in Chalo Chalo

Tomasz Kaye

Game Design

In Chalo Chalo you pilot a slow-moving dot towards a goal at the other side of an abstract landscape. Designer Tomasz Kaye purposely built in ‘rarities’ to spice things up. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ho... Read More...

How Interstellar Rift makes you feel at home in space

Paul Mertens

Game Design

Gameplay programmer Paul Mertens doesn’t like menus. If you want something done in Interstellar Rift you will have to talk to the spaceship’s systems directly. "The main goal of Interstellar Rift is building a spaceship from scratch, being able to walk aro... Read More...

Unfated: Era of Wanderers plays cards against tropes in RPGs

Joris Dormans

Game Design

Designer Joris Dormans plays with some of RPG’s most common mechanics to battle some of it’s most common tropes. In Unfated, Era of Wanderers we use the same gameplay mechanics for combat and dialog. For a ... Read More...

The Witcher 3 Quest Design: How To Not Drown

Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz (CD Projekt RED)

Game Design

Webs of variables and branches in our games have always been very complicated, posing a huge challenge for quest designers to control and keep track of. This becomes even more visible in The Witcher 3, since we... Read More...

Creating a procedurally morphing billiards table

François Alliot (Nerial)

Game Design

Before starting this post-mortem, you may ask yourself : Why but why did you decide to "create a procedurally morphing billiards table" ? It’s a fair question with a simple answer. We wanted to «open» the possibilities of French billiards (or Carambolage) w... Read More...

Implementing Kip Thorne’s Science In Interstellar The Game

Jeroen De Cloe (Sticky Studios)

Game Design

After meeting with Christopher Nolan and watching Interstellar six months prior to release, Jeroen De Cloe, founder of Sticky Studios, started working on the game based on the movie. He explains how his team wo... Read More...

Character Beats Plot In Borderlands 2 DLC

Eric Bartelson

Game Design

The next instalment of our new series GDC Gems* comes from Anthony Burch, Lead Writer of Borderlands 2, who at GDC 2015 explained why it’s more important to have strong characters than (strong) plot in DLC. ... Read More...

Making violence meaningful through narrative in Spec Ops: The Line

Eric Bartelson

Game Design

We start of our new series GDC Gems* with writer Walt Williams, who at GDC 2013 explained how he critiqued the use of violence in games by making the violent game Spec Ops: The Line. *) GDC Gems are micro mortems based on some of the most fascinating GDC-ta... Read More...

The Summer That Launched My Career

Cliff Bleszinski (Boss Key)

Game Design

One day Tim Sweeney of Epic sent me a download of a prototype that looked like the old Amiga game "Turrican". It moved at an amazingly smooth frame rate and more importantly, had a super slick editing program t... Read More...