First, I’ve taken a break from my game design experiment because I started a new job. I’m no longer a UX Manager at eBay. I’m now a Senior UX Designer at Indeed. My thoughts on job titles, taking a management (or individual contributor role), and looking for and leaving jobs will come later. I had […]
Author Archives: Daniel
Game Design – 4 Eras
Each of the 4 pre-defined eras (and any custom eras) starts with understanding the time period, state of the world, and the location of the story. What is the defining event that begins this era – whether it’s a deviation from our own history, or a future timeline? What is scarce, exciting, and new? What […]
Game Design – The World
The gameplay in an RPG is shaped by the system, which is shaped by the world. A high fantasy world doesn’t involve computer hacking, and an alternate-present sci-fi adventure doesn’t take well to magic spells (or at least needs some interesting hand-waving). Personally, I’m tired of ‘standard’ fantasy settings (think anything Tolkien or D&D inspired). […]
What isn’t UX design?
To summarize Christina Wodtke: User Experience Design is the design of: The concept or model for the system (or product) and its organization and use. System behavior, including feedback. How data is ordered and expressed to users. How the user interacts with all of the above, whether it’s a digital, physical, or voice UI, or […]
RPG Character Creation, Part 1
D&D is probably the best known modern RPG system, and it’s character creation system is fairly well known. Select a race and class, apply your randomly generated stats, and add the appropriate bonuses. This approach tends to lead to gaming the system for stat boosts, considering the nature of the game lies in modifying an […]
Conflict Resolution: Wrap Up
I’m not sure, right now, which conflict resolution system is better. Likely, I’ll want to do some beta testing to see what actually works best. On the surface, both options should work for their intended purposes of allowing informed, strategic decision making without being totally predictable. One unintended side effect is that individual rounds of […]
Conflict Resolution, Part 4: Poker-ish
The other system I sketched out to use cards as the resolution mechanism is based off ‘Stud’ poker. It’s definitely not poker, but it borrows some elements of the risk/reward system. Otherwise, I still like the basic success/mixed/failure model of the last iteration, though there are tweaks that could be made. Stealing from Poker The […]
Conflict Resolution, Part 3: Blackjack
Let’s revisit the parts of our system. First, we set the initiative – the order of play (if it can’t be determined purely by storytelling). Next, we resolve the action – determining the outcome and judging if there’s any modifier at play from character based skill or another player helping (or hindering). Ideally the player […]
Conflict resolution, Part 2: Randomness
First, go watch White, Brown, and Pink: The Flavors of Tabletop Game Randomness from GDC 2018. I’ll summarize a few points below, but in far less detail than that video. In designing games, a degree of uncertainty is essential. – Greg Costikyan, “Uncertainty in Games” (2013) According to the video, there are 4 main types […]
Game Design – The Story of a Session, Part 1
While this doesn’t directly effect the conflict resolution system itself, one thing I’d like to come out of this game design is a game that can tell a story in a single session, with minimal prep – or carry itself over a multiple sessions. Yes, you can run a pre-generated one-shot adventure in Dungeons and […]