Mike Stout – Video Game Designer
Note: Five years ago I wrote an analysis of the exploration in Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. For those of you who haven’t played it, it’s like Elder Scrolls: Skyrim but not as user-friendly. It’s pretty cool, but hard to read the way I originally wrote it. I vaguely recall I was swamped at the time, so…
There are a lot of tutorials on singletons and what they are, so I’m gonna skip that. I wrote a class that’s a template for making Unity MonoBehavior Singletons that can run with an update and stuff, and which don’t suffer from the usual “null” pointer tedium. I’m not going to do too much explaining…
Warning — I didn’t give this post my usual level of editing and scrutiny because I haven’t been feeling too well. I wanted to post it, even in its raw state. Hopefully you’ll find some use from these rough notes, and when I move on to the later parts I’ll develop them more fully. Think…
I’ve been playing a lot of Blizzard’s new digital-only collectible card game Hearthstone, and I really like a lot of the decisions they made. There are a few things I really miss from playing Magic: The Gathering, though — and I’d love to give the following “merger” of the two a try some time: Magic:…
A quick note. The following work is considered public domain information. Use it however you want. If you’d like to tell me about it afterwards, I promise you it will make me a happy man — but if you don’t I won’t lose any sleep. On twitter the other day, I decided on a whim…
This was an FAQ I got from a lot of people, most recently from Youtuber Rebellion3112. My most recent attempt to explain it got so long that I thought it might just be better to post it here so that everyone can enjoy (and so in the future I can redirect people here and lazily…
I found this post I made on a gamasutra article, and I thought it might make good blog fodder. It was in response to a comment about games that felt “disrespectful” of their players. —- It seems to me like there are at least two types of players who want different things. One type likes…
Well, it KIND of is — but give me a second just to put a word in. I hear a lot of people say that “Diablo is fun, but not because of the core mechanic — it’s because of the loot.” Don’t get me wrong, I loves me some loot. Loot is probably the main…
I feel like I have a lot to say about the subject, but that writing it down isn’t the best way to get that across. Writing about some esoteric point or another requires laying a ton of groundwork just to even have a chance of getting to the point. It’s exhausting. I know Vincent Baker…
One of my favorite game design quotes has always been Sid Meier’s “Games are a series of interesting choices.” I was thinking a lot about it last night, and I think if I were saying it now I’d make a slight modification that, I think, might make Mr. Meier’s meaning a bit clearer to the…