Rules of the Game: Five Techniques from Quite Inventive Designers

Good stuff. Favorite talk: 28:00 on real enemy variety. Honorable mention @ 5:25 on "pizazz".

The talk about enemy variety covers some of the most important ways of looking at enemies, he even went over interesting prioritization that REALLY helps to make a single enemy translate interestingly to various contexts, stopping you from falling in patterns of seeing enemy x and doing y. I hope people hear this one, this is the thing I spend by far the most of my time on, the enemies, their traits, their ai, the way multiple enemies combine, all in a space that itself has meaning through your and the enemies' mechanics. I highly recommend just throwing together random levels and discovering how much more there is to your selection of enemies etc. than you though. The level will probably suck, but you end up seeing partial solutions to unbeatable encounters, and a little bit of fun that just needs some conflict in the trivial ones etc. etc. Basically, do what Jonathan Blow does, poke at your system and be perceptive of what happens and how you can harness that.

at first i was like "what a weird concept", so glad i didnt click away. binging these hard. 10minutes really cooks out an interesting essential message on which one can build.

george's talk was simple, comprehensive and very informative. loved it!

this is the complete opposite of what i heard i should do. i heard i should wait to put in these really fun special effects and work with programmer art for as long as i can and make the game fun before adding these things, that way the game is even more fun in the end. however what no one told me is that this makes developing the game a lot less fun for you, the dev and less fun slows down development. i might try giving my games a bit of polish early on, maybe this way i wont get depressed and give up halfway through.

I really liked the documentation talk!

Quite liked the Lee Perry talk, currently watching the Emily Short one and I'm liking it even more. This is a lot of fun to watch, and very interesting/informative.

the talk on documentation was surprisingly informative

this talk is literally "A man can get lost in the sauce, but the same man. can be lost without the sauce." -Gucci Mane

The documentation talk was great!

50:40 Ohh, no, it applies. Trust me. I have a habit to have a sort of ''master document'' where I go over everything that goes into everything, because I want to be reminded of how all the things that would otherwise be scattered over multiple docs come into play, only recently have I at least started to make more focused docs to supplement them, with ability to reference master doc at any time.

I never believed the Nemesis system would make me feel taunted and played through the game and barely died ever. Then I farmed some Runes and suddenly met a captain with ridiculous immunities, he easily killed me and I went back to avenge my death and I died again and he got became Warlord soon after! I was REALLY scared of this guy and used every trick in the game to trap, face and defeat him and his army in a 50min faceoff at the fortress with cliffs always going back and forth! Never would've thought this game could trigger this feeling in me and other than the story ending it's a masterpiece in most ways! Now even more disappointing and downright aggravating that the successor is turning out to be a shitshow we have to boycott

The game that really hit me hard with a cnosequence of my actions was "dishonored". Due to some choices a certain character dies. I go to the place where he/she dies and crouch on the corpse and press interact (which is used to examine) and the prompt just said "you discovered nothing". Don't know why but it hit me hard.

That talk on the nemesis system took me back to being a kid watching the race to break the home run record. It all seems like pro wrestling to me now though.

"Where do your ideas come from?" Through a melding of eldritch arts and perverted dark science I have managed to imprison a muse within a contraption that allows me to syphon inspiration from her like a hellish ichor. It's the easiest way.

The Pizzazz talk was really interesting and helpful

This is a really fantastic talk overall

What is the best software to make flow charts ? And they should be easy to modify too. Any suggestions would greatly help.

I loved Lee Perry's work on the Jamaican port of the E.T. game

29:26 naturally our player has a brain. next slide or does he?