All Episodes

Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 in total

9: Managing the player's cognitive load

How do you communicate complex rules to players? It's worth thinking about what kind of complexity you're communicating, how you communicate it, and when you communica...

8: AI is horrible at game design

LLMs excel at churning out sugar free vanilla paste. That's great when you're writing code. And it's awful when you're doing creative work.

7: Escape the mind palace

A game is only a game if it is playable. It is so hard for me to resist the temptation to retreat to the "mind palace" where my game devolves from a playable, testable...

6: Letting players decide the victory condition

My white whale (one of them, at least) is to let players decide how they want to win, and even decide whether it's a cooperative or competitive game. I haven't cracked...

5: Suspension of disbelief is a skill

There are two voices in your head. You don't know which is correct, but you do know that one is more useful. 

4: High energy, low ego

Everything I learned at my first game conference. Buy Colossi now.

3: The prototyping machine

You can play "Hot Takes" in The Social Game right now!

2: Kill your darlings

When you love something, but it's confusing as heck.

1: What happens when you can't test a game

Links: The Social Game, my work podcast where we talked about this, and Videos of the event.

0: Intro

Test test. 

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