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100 Word Review: Cyberpunk 2077 (2020)

Anyone who only spent a couple of hours with Cyberpunk would be forgiven for thinking it will be 200 hours of insubstantial gun-porn. After a few hours the overlong onboarding gives way to a remarkably well-realized love letter to an oft-misunderstood literary genre. Yes, this is a game where you hack into a camera to hack into a man to make that man shoot his friends and maybe himself. But under…

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Game Pitches: Purposes and Types

People often seem surprised when I tell them how much of my time in industry was spent writing pitches. Yes, I would spend most of my week designing or testing new features or bits of content for our current project. But a big part of the role of a designer is in trying to articulate ideas for new games, so that a studio can have a project to get paid to do when the current one runs out. Maybe…

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Reflecting on the Creative Urge: Don't Dream, Just Do

Reflecting on the Creative Urge: Don’t Dream, Just Do

When I was about 9 I was given my older brother’s AMSTRAD CPC. It came with a manual which taught you how to code some simple games in BASIC. My dad encouraged me to work through some of it and before long I had found an enjoyment in making things this way. I got to the point where I was writing and saving little text adventures with several rooms (graphical games were a bit more of a pain in the…

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Does it Really Need to be VR? Technology Fetishism and (Dis)embodiment

Does it Really Need to be in VR? Technology Fetishism and (Dis)embodiment A thread (from Ludogogical.com) ⬇️

I first got a chance to play around with virtual reality at my old studio when the boss set up a rig and we started throwing around ideas for what, if anything, we would makdse in it. We weren’t a 3D-games-focussed studio, for a start. I remember “playing” some of the Oculus demo scenes, and particularly enjoying sensations of vertigo, of staring down a T-Rex and the phantom-limb oddness of…

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#ian bogost #persuasive games #sid meiers civilisation #vr

ShutterBugs (2019): a 4-player arcade game about taking photos at the British seaside.

Shutterbugs is a (currently demo only) chaotic 4-player photography game where you pilot a cute little drone-robot around and take photos of, amongst other things, a scub diver, numerous pirates, and business Cthulhu. It was produced in collaboration with Dr. Alan Meades, my teaching colleague on the Games Design BA at Canterbury Christ Church University. I built the game in GameMaker Studio 2…

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We're All in This Together (2015): a dystopian text adventure about connection and mental health.

We’re All in This Together (2015): a dystopian text adventure about connection and mental health.

During 2015 I made a scifi-horror Twine called We’re All In This Together. https://twitter.com/joebaxterwebb/status/658775683620061185 In the game, you play an “inspector” in a near-future London, tasked with rooting out individuals with a hallucinatory affliction by scanning their memories. The story unfolds through the protagonist’s daily work routine. Gameplay revolves around using a…

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StarCross (2020): a frogger-inspired game about intergalactic love-letter deliveries.

Early in 2020, as the University term was rudely interrupted by a pandemic. To help us all cope with the new rules, and with social isolation, we ran an internal game jam called IsoJam, where staff and students were tasked with making a game around the theme “keep your distance”. One of our students – Matthew Fuller – did a more thorough write-up of the event over at Big Boss Battle, and you can…

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Arcane Academy: designing a game about a [wizard] university

Arcane Academy is a euro-game (a board game mainly around economic/resource management) that I’ve been designing for a while now, and it’s finally reached a point where I think it needs it’s own page. I’ll give a description of the top-level features of the game up here, and then step through images and caption them with what they show. Thanks in particular to the #tabletop community over on the…

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Getting started with Game Stories

This post is intended as a bit of a primer for anyone who is perhaps making games from more of a mechanics and art perspective and who might struggle a bit with story or narrative. Let’s start with what those two words mean, because they mean different things. “Narrative” implies the existence of a narrator. While a story is a series of events – real or fictional – the narrative is the *telling*…

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#narrative design

Arcane Academy

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100 Word Review: Kings Quest III: To Heir is Human (1986)

I played a few games in this series as a kid, but KQ3 did something noteworthy in terms of its structure. The player-character is a young lad who needs to escape the abusive service of a horrible old wizard. The wizard leaves for periods, and while he’s away, players get to snoop around the house or scour the local countryside for help before he returns. It’s horribly claustrophobic, but KQ3…

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100 Word Review: Loop Hero (2021)

Loop Hero ticks a lot of my indie game boxes. It’s aesthetically and thematically interesting, despite still largely being standard fantasy knight-fights-monsters affair. It will remind you that pixel-art is a technique – not a style – and that “another pixel-art indie game” only became a disparaging term because so many people were using the technique with far less style than Loop Hero…

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Diablo III (2012)

I’ve only played through Diablo III a few times, but I can confirm that it does what I want an action RPG to do. Each class feels like a different game mode, and equipment items vary enough in function that there isn’t always an obvious choice. As a piece of game design history, however, one of the things I find most interesting is how – even after Blizzard have stripped out every superfluous…

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100 Word Review: Disco Elysium

Videogame skill-trees are usually there to gate off complexity, to prevent player overwhelm while offering an illusion of expressive freedom. Disco Elysium, however, takes the point-and-click adventure format and then constructs plater “builds” from cop fiction, using each character skill as a unique unlockable narrative device. This begs the question; what other profession has enough fictional…

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100 Word Review: It Came From The Desert (1989)

With a similar to Sid Meier’s Pirates! the Cinemaware games from this period were usually minigame collections strung together with a narrative, a map and some resource management. In the case of It Came From The Desert! none of the mini-games was particularly mind-blowing, but their sparsity and diversity created a special sort of tension. How am I supposed to get good at shooting off an ant’s…

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100 Word Review: Slay the Spire

I love tabletop deckbuilding games like Dominion where you’re constantly modifying your deck every turn. This isn’t quite the case in Slay the Spire and other games like it, where deckbuilding is there to provide a meta-game to consecutive encounters. But still, STS has me hooked; and unlike twitchy skill-based roguelikes like Spelunky, I can actually finish it. The art direction does nothing for…

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