by Will Hindmarch | Dec 18, 2009 | Design, RPGs, Story, Video Games
Jordan Mechner is among my favorite game designers, not least because I dig the way he integrates stories into gameplay. I played the original Prince of Persia and the later reinvention, The Sands of Time, over and over again, sometimes to sample the story again and...
by Jeff Tidball | Dec 8, 2009 | Design, Video Games
I’ve been playing Drop7 on my iPhone. It’s a game that its developer, Area/Code, describes as “Tetris meet Sudoku.” You blow up numbered circles by dropping them to make contiguous rows or columns of circles equal to the number. Blowed-up...
by Will Hindmarch | Oct 19, 2009 | Design, Play, RPGs
Surfacescapes Demo Walkthrough from Visual Story TAs on Vimeo. Have a look at this: it’s a prototype for D&D play using Microsoft’s tabletop Surface technology. What I see is something pointed in the direction of the interactive tabletop we’ve...
by Will Hindmarch | Oct 19, 2009 | Design, Play, RPGs
Surfacescapes Demo Walkthrough from Visual Story TAs on Vimeo. Have a look at this: it’s a prototype for D&D play using Microsoft’s tabletop Surface technology. What I see is something pointed in the direction of the interactive tabletop we’ve...
by Will Hindmarch | Sep 28, 2009 | Board Games, card games, Design, Musing, Video Games
In his post on paragaming, Jesper Juul (Half-Real) cites a few fundamental criteria for good video-game design, each of which is violated by China Miner, a game that he enjoys despite, and because of, its faults. (Each of these might be thought of as a Thing Juul...
by Will Hindmarch | Sep 24, 2009 | Design, Fantasy, RPGs, Uncategorized, Writing
This is about inspiration. This is about narrowing down an infinite array of potential attitudes and ideas into a smaller headspace, a common playground with a common language — someplace where I can say the word viking and conjure the right kind of image. This is...
