Notes about difficulty in games
In the arcades, games were difficult on purpose to make the player put more coins in, in the first consoles, games had artificial difficulty to make up for the lack of content that the games had.
In the arcades, games were difficult on purpose to make the player put more coins in, in the first consoles, games had artificial difficulty to make up for the lack of content that the games had.
Easter eggs are a great way to make the player feel good/amazed if they discover them, or even if they watch someone else discover them.
In Dig-Dug you take the role of a guy with an air pump that needs to inflate underground animals until they explode and die.
Galaga is a shoot ’em up where you need to destroy the alien ships while avoiding getting hitted by the ships or by their projectiles.
Here’s a mini-analysis on the mechanics and AI from the original Pac-Man.
I’ve tried to optimize the number of verbs from Maniac Mansion.
Tangential Learning is an interesting subject to treat in the realm of game design, here’s an example on how it’s applied in an old retro game.
Having a grasp of the different kinds of ways to learn will be useful to learn how to arrange the different systems in your game to incentivise or demotivate certain behaviors from your players.
Déjà Vu is a point n’ click game, in this post I’m going to talk about the NES version and how it’s possible to make the player interaction with the interface more confortable for the player.
Some games forces you to disconnect your controller to show up the keyboard keys in the tutorial. Here are some ways to fix this from a design perspective.