September 2009 Archives

Bacon wrapped in sausage wrapped in bacon. Yikes. It's a Bacon Explosion!

This looks like a great little game, due out in the end of October.

I still play Diablo II now and then, when I'm up for some random dungeon crawling. And while D3 is still years away from completion, this has such a fun, unique, steampunky feel to it.

That and I love this quote on game design and development. Emphasis mine.

Runic Games has a fundamental belief that "you always have and maintain a playable build of the game, all the time" which is directly attributable to Travis Baldree's previous projects. It was with this philosophy that we took our shell of a game and alternated between playing it and iterating on the various elements.

As a group we're probably outside of the norm when it comes to design process. Our structure and work culture is designed around the idea that we're a team striving for the same goals and that every single team member should feel like they can share ideas or criticisms on any portion of the game regardless of their role. Our offices are of an open design, where everyone can see everyone else and issues that might warrant a meeting in other studios are just a quick conversation away for us.

We are often asked how we're able to do so much in such little time. Besides the fact that Travis and others on the team do the work of three or four people, our structure and methods for essentially circumventing a traditional meeting unless absolutely necessary is a big part of this.

There is also much to be said for hands-on, practical, iterative game design over trying to solve things hypothetically within a design document. We're not completely dismissive of design docs, but in documents can be held with too high a regard. Sometimes it's just a matter of implementing it, playing it, tweaking it, and playing it again until you have the results you want.

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