The Nathanomicon

I decided to try my hand at streaming playing a game. Looking through my collection of games on Steam, I chose Shadowrun Returns  by Harebrained Schemes as my first game. It's fun, it looks great, and I'm curious if a second playthrough with a different character and making different story choices will substantially change the experience. Twitch YouTube I don't have a regular schedule yet, but hopefully I can do a follow-up session soon.

Last post on this subject for a while! In previous posts I’ve discussed communicating with your publisher and with your development team. As a game designer, the third group of people you have to communicate with are your players. I can’t possibly cover this entire concept in a single blog post. There are numerous ways you are communicating with your players through the game, even before they hit start. Your advertising, box cover art, promotional materials are all communicating your game. Tutorials, menu interfaces, help screens also communicate extra information. Level layout, lighting, placement of collectibles, types of in-game currencies. But I want to hit on what I think is the main focus of communicating with your player: Use consistent visual language. That is the most important thing you can do. Remember, everything the player knows about your game is learned through interacting with it. You can’t be there to explain your intent. You can’t ship a designer with e...

In my previous post I discussed Communicating with Your Publisher. Let’s assume you’ve cleared that hurdle, a publisher has agreed to fund the project, contracts are signed, hands shaked, you’re good to go. Now you have to make the game. What do you have to communicate to the team that is actually going to make the game? I don’t mean just generally being polite and communicating nicely. What information about the game do you actually need to convey? You will have programmers writing code, writing scripts, getting the engine to function or customizing an existing engine. They need to know what they are coding. You have artists that need to develop or follow a consistent visual style and build all the assets going into the game. They need to know what art they are creating. Designers all need to be using the same tools, following the same guidelines, so the game flows from one area to the next. They need to know what content they are creating. Everyone needs to st...