I'm Mark. I'm an aspiring games writer about to graduate from Carnegie Mellon University. I love games and always have, and I especially love story in games. It's actually frightening how much I think about it. I've worked on a few student projects and I've tried to keep my profile steady and up to date. I love talking to people and one of my goals for the year is to interview all the designers and writers of my favorite games of 2012. Here's hoping I see that one completed!
2012 was one of the best years strategy gaming has seen in a long time. Titles like XCOM: Enemy Unknown. FTL, and Crusader Kings II showed that there's plenty of life left in the genre. Here are the 4 biggest lessons from last year's crop.
Posted by Mark Slabinski on Tue, 23 Apr 2013 01:43:00 EDT in
One of the most heated discussions I saw on the internet last week was about Gearbox buying the Homeworld IP. Some people didn't quite like it. I think it's the best thing to happen in a long time for fans of the classic space-based naval command RTS.
Flow can be one of the trickiest concepts to wrap your head around when it comes to designing games. Why is it important? What constitutes flow? What techniques can we use to reach flow? These are some of the questions I try to answer for myself.
I will say one thing about this from personal experience. I grew up in a place where our ISP was frequently unreliable in terms of service, didn 't provide us with the speeds we were paying for, and in general doing anything online was lag-ridden and prone to crashes or ...
I very much enjoyed this. I 've wrestled with similar questions about minimalism in games and I commend you for your research and sourcing. This is not an easy question to tackle in traditional media, and I feel in games it 's a particularly difficult one to approach. I think ...
I really wouldn 't be surprised if that happened. Honestly, given the state of the games industry and how much it 's spread out, I imagine huge swathes of people being shed every year as waves of layoffs follow games that had either mediocre sales or lukewarm reviews. It 's ...
So it seems like you 're saying that your suspension of disbelief was actively broken by these repeating loops, which I have heard before, oddly enough, from people who almost never play games all the game-y stuff sticks out to them like a sore thumb . It could very well ...
I 'm interested, as this seems more like what I had envisioned achievements to be back when they were announced way back when. It 's cool to know that these arbitrary tasks and collectibles can actually be put to use. If playing CS:GO gets me a 25 coupon for the ...
I just really liked how everything fit together in FTL. I don 't know why, but I really enjoyed the way the power distribution system is set up, and how all other pertinent information is made as clear to you as possible. This might be anecdotal, but I know my ...
