WHO IS RARE? Way back in the nineties when gaming was still in its infancy, a company called Rare was making a stir. They were a group of British developers with a unique brand of humour and silliness. Rare garnered a team that were able to produce truly unique and […]
Game Design
Over the last few years Capcom’s Resident Evil franchise has had a triumphant return. Fans were excited to see the new direction of the series after Resident Evil 7 went back to the games survival horror roots. Both Resident Evil 2 & 3 have shown that under the lens of modern game design, the classic games […]
The bigger budgeted video games become, the more developers want to inject bombastic high-octane story telling into their narratives. What this requires is a rather large helping of traditional storytelling. So for the original Half-Life Valve brought on horror novelist Marc Laidlaw to pen the game. He went on to write all of […]
Games can be confusing. Sometimes certain mechanics or design philosophies can be difficult to understand, especially for inexperienced players. To combat these problems, game designers create tutorials — segments of a video game specifically aimed to teach the player what the game is about and how it works. Here’s the […]
We’ve recently published the article “Open World Games: It’s all In The Details” on the site. Where we examined how open world games are made, and how developers have shifted design ideologies to improve the genre. So this article is going to do the opposite. I’m going to take a […]
Challenges and How We Face Them A lot of what I love about playing video games are the challenges and obstacles that they force us to deal with. Whether these are combat, puzzles, or platforming, games present us with difficult tasks, and we must overcome them. In lots of instances, […]
The perfect game does not exist. This is because there is no game without frustrations, large or small. It is a pain to be forced to buy and sell single units of items at a time, or experience a poor checkpoint system that doesn’t adequately comprehend where difficulty may lie […]
Who lives and who dies? Should I save the damsel or rob her blind? Should I lie if it gets me what I want or only if it’s for what I need? Although player choice matters in every genre, it matters most and has the largest impact in story-based games. […]