Josh Bycer's Blog
For more than seven years, I have been researching and contributing to the field of game design. These contributions range from QA for professional game productions to writing articles for sites like Gamasutra and Quarter To Three.
With my site Game-Wisdom our goal is to create a centralized source of critical thinking about the game industry for everyone from enthusiasts, game makers and casual fans; to examine the art and science of games. I also do video plays and analysis on my Youtube channel. I also have a Patreon Campaign set up to help support my family and keep things running while I continue to put out content here and on my site. Recently, I'm also the author of 20 Essential Games to Study and Game Design Deep Dive Platformers, with my aim to demystify a lot of the discussion around game design.
Member Blogs
Customization is a powerful option to give games depth, but it requires a careful eye when it comes to balancing an ever-growing number of choices.
2019 has been another banner year for amazing games being released, but it also shows how hard it is for games to stand out, and why just having a good game isn't enough anymore.
Today's post looks at the ever polarizing topic among roguelike fans, and how despite being used for trolling by some, does have some major design discussions around it
A quiet feature on Steam was unveiled recently that could mean big things for indie developers, and more people need to know about it.
Despite the resurgence of horror games in recent years, the state of the horror genre still is lacking when it comes to generating terror.
For this multi-part piece, we're going to be talking about how to improve playability in games, starting with quality of life features and improvements.
Josh Bycer's Comments
Comment In:
[Blog - 10/14/2019 - 10:42]
I know it 's harsh ...
I know it 's harsh to say 'most ' and 'trash ', since there are a lot of high effort and quality games that never go anywhere we see a lot of postmortems here , but I 'm including all the terrible shovelware and asian porn ports that come out ...
Comment In:
[Blog - 09/13/2019 - 10:47]
My problem with designs that ...
My problem with designs that turn off the core gameplay loop and leave it at that, is that it 's not really making the design better or fixing issues with it. It 's easy to make a game at either extreme of difficulty, but making something amazing for everyone is ...
Comment In:
[Blog - 08/12/2019 - 11:21]
I think marketing and presentation ...
I think marketing and presentation are the two biggies. I know when I spoke with the developer he didn 't spend a lot of time marketing the game it was not covered by any major site or youtuber that I saw. And the presentation doesn 't pop as we saw ...
Comment In:
[Blog - 05/17/2019 - 12:30]
This article makes the same ...
This article makes the same fallacy whenever there are discussions about difficulty in videogames -- accessibility has nothing to do with difficulty. In this situation, accessibility involves outside factors that prevent someone from playing a videogame colorblind, physical disorders, etc . This needs to stop, because its muddying up any ...
Comment In:
[Blog - 03/26/2019 - 10:38]
For me, I would rank ...
For me, I would rank the bosses from best to worse as G2, G3, Super Tyrant, G4, Birkin and then G5. The only reason I liked G2 was that it was the least offensive focused of the fights in my opinion thanks to the use of the crane.
Comment In:
[Blog - 01/22/2019 - 09:47]
I have to get the ...
I have to get the draft to the publisher by March, and then at least 3-6 months from there was the turnaround for the first book.
