Ugurcan

Nope

So how did your experience is going with lenses? Do they help you with self-diagnosing so far?

Well…

One thing is you can’t know if a ‘game idea’ is a good one before battle test it.

On one hand it’s similar to writing a book or shooting a movie. Sometimes most mundane narratives have something that ‘clicks’, making it a hit. And sometimes most interesting ones have bad execution, to become instant failures.

On the other hand, of course there are some understanding about ‘what is entertaining’ and ‘how to make things fun’. There are lots of discovered rules, tropes, approaches that worked so far. Like, Game of Thrones books always meant to be a cash cow TV series, and you see traces of almost all the rules that makes a book a good TV material. So there are many sources about narrative and game design that can guide you through your journey.

Of course the concepts discussed in these sources aren’t definitive and open to interpretation. But they helped me dearly exploring ideas and hand down better experiences.

Some I can recommend are,

• Art of Game Design (Jesse Schell): It comes with a deck of cards which is very valuable for self-feedbacking.

• The Game Narrative Toolbox

• How Games Move Us

With games, it’s ‘vertical slice’s, like preparing a 10 minute condensed version of a game. You can gather lots of feedback with that. Every game had that at one point. Balatro had that, GTA 6 had that, as well as “What Remains of Edith Finch” had that. If you can pique interest with a vertical slice, it’s mostly good idea to pursue the rest from that point.

Excellent?.. Well, your experience might be different but even though I clocked way more hours at BL3, I don’t remember an inch about it. I remember lots of details and fun moments about BL1 and BL2 though.

I don’t buy promises anymore, sorry.

It doesn’t have Hot Seat either. I instantly refunded when I realized that. How the hell a Civ game have multiplayer but not hot seat?

The peak of my career also was definitely when we crashed Steam for a few hours during our EA launch - even though the Steam devs were prepared.

I’m also really happy that Silksong is getting so much love from players. The team behind it truly seems to deserve it.

Nokia done so many things for the user interfaces in general, like they’re the power behind QT as well.

ZA/UM’s toxicity really on par with the Detective’s worst behavior.

I miss Humphrey too 🐪.

OG Mount & Blade (box) and Warband also published by Paradox. And then we self published Bannerlord, with local agreements for box sets.