In this past year, I started this blog to focus on game design and my own projects. Now that the year is coming to an end, I’d like to take look back on a few of my favorite posts.
Specifically, I want to highlight three game analysis/postmortems which I believe are my best articles of the year, plus one honorable mention that I felt should be included. I also want to highlight three posts about my personal projects and processes which I found to be enjoyable. If you have yet to check these out, I highly recommend them because I think they are excellent!
In this post, I sat down with an old friend who also worked on the NFL RUSH apps, and talked about what went wrong and what went right. It highlights some of the work we did and is easily the most popular of my posts this year!
I know I am technically cheating by counting these three as one post. In this series, I break down three of the toughest sections of Destiny’s King’s Fall Raid. I explored how the player learns to defeat each section, and eventually how they beat the raid.
A mobile game which captured my heart. My goal for this post was to understand why it was so pleasant. What are the core mechanics? How do they use the free to play model? What makes it so charming? What can we learn from this game?
Honorary Mention: Warhammer 40,000: Freeblade - Touching the Grim Dark Future
“Freeblade is a lot of things, and I could gush about so many things it does right, but today I want to stick to the controls. Controls in iOS games typically fall into one of two categories: either they are intuitive and easy to use, or an absolute mess and frustrating.” Excerpt from
Warhammer 40,000: Freeblade - Touching the Grim Dark Future
Personal Projects:
In my personal projects posts, I went for a less formal tone and more of a casual blog style than the analysis posts. I hope you enjoy them!
Here i’m going to walk you through a bit of my process. This is in no way how you should necessarily do things; this is just to show how I sometimes do things. I also discuss what I did programming-wise to bring this prototype to life.
2. Blog: Diamond Raven Games & Haunted Hop not quite a post mortem
Here I talk briefly about the process of bringing “Haunted Hop” to life, and eventually to the iOS app store.
“I like to prototype. It helps me to figure out my thoughts and test the game mechanics to see if they are actually fun. Also I don’t have beautiful colors or great looking assets to cloud my judgment. It allows me to focus solely on the mechanics.” Excerpt from Prototyping… I love it.
Last but not least I’d like to thank you. By reading and giving me feedback on my posts, whether through conversations over coffee or in the comments section, I learn more about what I’m doing right and what I’m doing wrong. I’ve improved because of your feedback. And even if you didn’t get the chance to give me feedback directly, I’d like to thank you as well for using your time to read my ramblings. Thank you and I hope you had an excellent 2015!
I’ll see you guys next week,
Scott