#gamedesig

[courselogblog]

A modular, extendable, and easy-to-use physics engine for javascript

[thesimplegamedev-blog]

Maniac Goblin

This little guy is quick, strong and completely mental. He is the black sheep of the Goblin Family but they don’t hesitate to cut him lose when the situation needs it.

[everysaturdaygames]

Thin Red Line

This week we finished our second big playtest round so there is a feedback tsunami going on right now. Suddenly our to-do list flooded with hundreds of new tasks and we have to finish them before we ship the game. I have never seen a game that needed no more polish, but a line have to be drawn somewhere. It’s not an easy decision where to put this line. You know for certain that several parts of the game could be even better, but you have to let it go at some point.

The playtest made it clear that we are dangerously close to make this decision. We almost reached the state of the game that we dreamed about in the first place. During the development and the playtesting lots of great ideas emerge and it is easy to fall in love with them. But it would take too long to develop these, not to mention the fact that they would require to rewrite a big chunk of the current game. And to adjust the game mechanics and graphics also.

Ok, but where should we draw this line after all?  I think every game is a unique case. It is not rare that the continuous iteration makes the finished game differ hugely from the original concept, as we mentioned this a few weeks ago. We drew the line at this certain point: we will continue polishing until the base mechanics and the game’s balance will work in harmony with each other.

The feedbacks gave us plenty of good ideas but they would lead us to a different game. We decided to only keep the ideas that will improve our existing mechanics.