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 have interviewed over 500 members of the game industry around the world, and I'm a two-time author on game design with "20 Essential Games to Study" and "Game Design Deep Dive Platformers."
Expert Blogs
Lootbox design has often been equated to randomized progression seen in ARPGs, but today's post will dispel that myth and how random and randomized progression aren't the same for the player.
For this post, I share my thoughts on analyzing videogames and the key areas to look at when examining game design.
We're talking about the core gameplay loop of a title in today's post, and how it's crucial for getting someone invested in playing your game over the long term.
World of Horror may have just came onto early access, but this game is a refreshing take on horror design that more developers need to consider for their games.
Microtransactions were one of the major trends of the game industry last decade, but this strategy presents some long-term issues for the games designed around it.
While many people will talk about aesthetically pleasing games, we're going to talk about how to present your gameplay and why this matters for long term engagement.
Josh Bycer's Comments
Comment In:
[Blog - 03/31/2020 - 12:21]
And of course that isn ...
And of course that isn 't a secret to anyone telling you the lie with a straight face. The negative psychological value of trash pull after trash pull is what makes the dopamine rush of the good pull even more intense. All by design. r n r nOne thing I ...
Comment In:
[Blog - 03/06/2020 - 10:13]
In fact, I 'd love ...
In fact, I 'd love to see a follow-up piece that walks through this way of understanding game design with a hands-on, practical example. What 's an actual case of imagining several possible CGLs for a new game to testing and evaluating contenders, to iterating on the winning CGL to ...
Comment In:
[Blog - 01/17/2020 - 12:20]
There are a lot of ...
There are a lot of issues with this article that are mischaracterizing roguelike and procedural design. r n r n And this is why I Hate Roguelikes: most of the time, it is impossible to win a roguelike, because the random elements align in one of a million different ways ...
Comment In:
[Blog - 01/10/2020 - 10:13]
organic tutorials are definitely the ...
organic tutorials are definitely the best, but often the hardest to design around especially if the gameplay is abstracted. r n r nRe: Good tutorials demonstrate the purpose of what 's being taught, so the player is motivated to learn the facts to fulfill that purpose. This right here is ...
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 ...
