Hey everyone, I wrote a short story a couple months ago called The Feast. It’s about a family that gets trapped in a cave by a host of demons, and must tell it stories in order to escape. The story is told in an old-timey fairy-tale sort of voice, and I think it worked out…
Tag: Story
A Meier Modification
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…
Guest Post: Colin Munson – “Challenging Challenges for Thinking People”
My friend and fellow designer Colin Munson asked if he could write a guest post for my blog, and my answer was “HELLS YEAH!” Colin and I worked together for 5 years at Insomniac, and he’s one of my favorite Game Designers in the industry. I found the following editorial fascinating, and I’m proud to…
Idea: Using Movie Structure to Inform Game Design?
I’ve been reading a lot about storytelling recently. Besides rereading “Characters and Viewpoint” by Orson Scott Card, the most recent ones I’ve read have been the “Save the Cat” books, by Blake Snyder (great reads, if you’re at all interested in screenwriting). Snyder proposes a very analytical breakdown of the plots in movies. He has…
Idea: A Pen-And-Paper RPG Meta-System
My gaming group is quite odd, as it turns out. It’s HUGE. When we get everyone, we have 11-13 people. This is great, but most games are made for 4-8 people. They tend to bog down when you get up above 8, and most pen-and-paper RPG designers aren’t trying to solve the problem of having too…
Oblivion Exploration Analysis
I’m really slammed at the moment, so I though I’d post some excerpts from some analysis I did a while back on the exploration in Oblivion. Note: I didn’t remove all spoilers or grammar errors, but I got a bunch of em. Summary One of the coolest things about Oblivion is how “free form” the…
Stealing Game Design… Properly (Part 1)
Note from Mike in 2012: I wrote this article and its companion more than 4 years ago. In that time, my game design philosophy has evolved and changed quite a bit. While I think there are still good nuggets to pull out of these articles, I just want to say that they’re no longer as…
[D3] Episode 5
“Why’d you call me here, Jason? What’s going on?” I had been wanting to ask the question since I arrived, but one thing or another had kept preventing me from doing so. Now that I had my chance, I was eager to hear what it was that had pulled me from my bed… Eager to…
Play by Blog Update
It looks like Dames Dollars and Derringers edged out Under the Bed as our choice for our next play-by-blog. I’m going to spend most of this week preparing, and should have Episode 1 out by Thursday. I’m going to do something a little different this time. Instead of voting on the main character, like we…
Next Play-By-Blog
So we did Ward 32 and that worked out pretty well — but now it’s time to vote for what’s next! Here’s how it’s going to work. I’ll list out the other three candidates from last time and you can all vote on which you’d like to see next.