When a Design Feels Off
What to do when a teammate is sure your design is wrong but can't tell you why. A disagreement with a colleague, what a prototype showed us both, and how I run design discussions now.
Writing
Notes on why players care about a game, and on how teams ship one.
How Design Ships
Player Fantasy
Why Good Gameplay Isn't Enough
Good gameplay is what keeps players around, but it's rarely why they try something in the first place. What a Steel Hunters hero that tested well and still went unpicked taught me about fantasy.
How Design Ships
Contracts Between Game Systems
How to keep game systems easy to change and easy to combine, and keep the design docs that describe them from going stale. A way of working I've used across the interconnected games I've built, with a worked example from a game of my own.