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Tag: mechanics

Visceral Reactions and Abstract Damage

By John
|
July 30, 2012
| No Comments
| Game Design

So we’ve been discussing damage in Piece of Work. In a cybernoir story, eventually someone is going to get shot, stabbed, or clubbed. Mechanically, there are a lot of options available for tracking hurt—hit points, statuses, health levels—but each has drawbacks that doesn’t deliver the effect we’re after. We want something gripping but still lightweight […]

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Attention and Interaction

By Kit
|
February 28, 2012
| 1 Comment
| Game Design

This is a small idea I’ve been batting around. Let’s see if it makes sense. A game is, among other things, a system for manipulating the attention of the participants. Games I like, I’ve noticed, tend to move your attention back and forth through the fiction and the mechanics, sometimes by convincing you that they’re […]

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Systems Per Principle

By John
|
February 17, 2012
| No Comments
| A Piece of Work development, Game Design

It’s been a while since we’ve made as much good progress as we did tonight on Piece of Work. We’ve had trouble developing the game. At its core, there have always been problems with its cohesion. On one side, we want a game with cyberware and grit. On another side, we want it to play […]

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Metatopia post hoc

By Kit
|
November 8, 2011
| 1 Comment
| Et in Arcadia Ego development, Game Design Community

Metatopia was great. That’s the short of it. It was a relatively small con, but full of good smart people. I played two games, besides my own playtests, but went to a lot of panels and talks and spent a lot of time hanging out at the bar discussing game design. It was just what […]

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Et in Arcadia Ego: the basic mechanics

By Kit
|
June 10, 2011
| No Comments
| Et in Arcadia Ego development

Et in Arcadia Ego is our game of Regency-era magicians. It owes a lot to Susanna Clarke, Jane Austen, Lord Byron, and Mary Shelley. It has also been a fickle beast. We’ve been hacking at it, tweaking it, revising it, overhauling it, again and again for the past few months. It’s very much been a […]

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Value and Hoarding

By Kit
|
June 3, 2011
| 3 Comments
| Game Design

Have you ever noticed when you play a video game, you never use your big weapons? Austin has been playing Bioshock lately, in a fit of nostalgia for 2007, and he’s been holding on to his grenades or rockets or whatever in a pattern that is very familiar to me. I’ve done the same sort […]

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Teaching Situation

By Kit
|
May 20, 2011
| 1 Comment
| Game Design

So, without a game from last night to write about, I’ll take the opportunity to take some other thoughts that have been brewing and talk about what I see as the intrinsic elements of a story game, and how to communicate them. To start with, there are four major elements to a story-game, as I […]

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Macro Mechanics

By Austin
|
May 10, 2011
| 1 Comment
| Game Design

So first, read John’s brilliant post. I want to talk about some of the “fenceposts” we use to corner off that narrative space he mentions. My first attempt at designing a game was laden with the same kind of hubris the creators of GURPS had—trying to make a game that could do anything. And a […]

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Narrative Space

By John
|
May 7, 2011
| 2 Comments
| Game Design

First, let me just say that the word narrative is terribly overloaded in the game industry. Turn it this way, it means story. Turn it that way, it means the events in a game. Turn it yet another, and it’s a play style. Here, I’m using it to talk about genre. About the kinds of […]

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Modeling with Mechanics

By John
|
May 5, 2011
| 3 Comments
| Et in Arcadia Ego development, Game Design

Hello all. Long time no write. We are hard at work on Et in Arcadia Ego these days, and that’s been the subject of many trips to the Baker Street Pub. While all of us had a feel for the genre and had our source material in mind, we kept having problems modeling that material […]

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  • Bully Pulpit Games
  • Daniel Solis
  • Deadly Fredly
  • Galileo Games
  • Go Play
  • Lumpley Games
  • Margaret Weis Productions
  • One Thousand One
  • Rob Donoghue
  • Ryan Macklin
  • Story Games
  • The Impossible Dream
  • The Mighty Atom

Categories

  • A Piece of Work development
  • Actual Play
  • Critical Theory
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  • Game Design Community
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