Trash Dev Game Design

Hot tip; bet on YouTube Its time for me to go back to Tracy Fullerton. But I have to be honest, I have tried to write this blog post a few times. I read chapters over and over trying to find something I wanted to talk about but I hate this text book. Its painfully boring, unimaginative and lacks the fun and soul that makes game design mean something. I could write an essay on how much I dislike this Textbook, but I'm not going to do that. Instead lets do something more fun and more nice. I'm going to highlight some YouTube channels and videos that are infinitely better resources and free. so, lets begin.  GDC - https://www.youtube.com/@Gdconf/featured GDC (Game Design Conference) is a legendary channel, honestly its a gold mine. According to its own description "GDC talks cover a range of developmental topics including game design, programming, audio, visual arts, business management, production, online games, and much more." In short they get professionals in the gam...

Back at it again with the textbook things Last time we sat down with Tracy Fullerton's Game Design Workshop I wasn't impressed. It seemed to me that it was very introductory for a textbook. I had hoped that this would be maybe a bit more in depth, but then I suppose that in such a technical world as game design I would expect that the really in-depth stuff would be found in a more technological space, rather than an old-fashioned textbook. But I also said I would give it another shot, so today I am reading chapter 3: Working with Formal Elements. Chapter 3, Part 1: Players  First thing is an activity about changing the rules to Gin Rummy, I have never played Gin Rummy so attempting to parse this activity just confused me, moving on. There's an interesting section here on the invitation to game and the way this allows for players to move into a different head space where they are open to act in ways the usually wouldn't. It seems to me that this is mostly applicable to b...

  As part of my assessment I am expected to read this textbook, Tracy Fullerton: Game Design Workshop, and include reflections of its content. Today I sat down with the book and read through the first two chapters, sadly I have to admit that so far I have found it quite dull. There is nothing here that couldn't be found in a much more interesting YouTube video and most of the ideas and concepts being explained are very introductory. Although of course I have only read the first two chapters and maybe it gets more compelling further on. I did enjoy reading the "Designer Perspective" interview sections, specifically the interview with Warren Spector was a good read as I am a fan of his work at Looking Glass Studios and Ion Storm. Although again as the interview is mostly a list of game recommendations, I'm sure this content can be found in YouTube video. There were also five exercises presented through the first chapter which I thought might be fun to have a go at. Of t...