My OUYA dev console arrived last week, and almost immediately afterwards I heard about the Kill Screen CREATE game jam. Since deadlines do wonders for my productivity, and since I knew I eventually wanted to make something for the OUYA anyway, I decided to give it a shot. I started late, unfortunately. It’s billed as […]
Read more →You can play Farmpunk here. I created Farmpunk for the 2012 Indie Speed Run, a 48-hour game jam / competition. It was my first game jam ever, and I worked solo. Development was kind of a mess. What Went Right: 1) The idea. I was given the random variables of “Construction” and “Seeds”. In the […]
Read more →Hi. I’m E McNeill, and I am an indie game designer. I’ve been making that claim for a while, but only now do I feel like I can really mean it wholeheartedly. About a month ago I finally took the plunge. I went indie full-time. Of course, I’ve been doing my own work in games […]
Read more →Moralityball, my experimental sport / social experiment, finally debuted at the 2012 DCGames Festival on September 1st. I wrote previously about playtesting the game, which gave a pretty good idea of how the game is played. I didn’t settle on the “final” rules until the night before the festival, but I’m pleased to report that the game […]
Read more →Moralityball is a new sport / social experiment that I submitted to this year’s DCGames festival. It was originally created for a “Values at Play” course at Dartmouth College, drawing inspiration from the Prisoner’s Dilemma and the Tragedy of the Commons to model a tricky collaborative problem. That was the intention, anyway! In practice, it needed a lot of work, […]
Read more →Some games are designed to addict players and take their money. That is their purpose in this world. If the player engages with the game repeatedly, the game verbs are declared “fun”, no matter how vapid they may be. The usual pattern is to get players emotionally invested in the game loop and then hold […]
Read more →If you’re intentionally making dull games with variable ratio extrinsic motivators to separate people from their money, you have my pity. – Chris Hecker Designers know what they are doing. They know when they show up in the office – “My goal is to degrade the player’s quality of life”. They probably won’t think about […]
Read more →I finished Dear Esther a couple of minutes before writing this, having played straight through, and I found myself itching to talk about it. Dear Esther is the second game to come out of the venerable Indie Fund, which was reason enough for me to play it. It’s unlikely that the game could have been […]
Read more →“I love this game, even though it’s terrible.” Amanda Lange’s feelings towards Skyrim mirror my own attitude towards almost every video game I’ve played. I love video games. I’ve made them the focus of my education, my career, and my leisure time. I plan to spend the rest of my life making and playing them. […]
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