David Stark
While doing some game design on the currently-in-abeyance Bonescape RPG, I was thinking about how to represent your reputation in the game, in particular your personality. I ended up with five attributes which I think are nicely independent of one another. You can have any of them without it...
David Stark
I've been thinking about games where you build stuff again. This is both because of the ongoing popularity of colony builder games such as Rimworld and Dwarf Fortress and The Wandering Village, and also because I'm embarking on another community-driven balancing round for Airships: Conquer the...
David Stark
So currently city builders (base builders, colony builders, whatever) are a very popular game genre, and so it would arguably make sense for me to get in on that and make one too. After all, I already made an airship builder, so I have plenty of experience making games where you place structures...
David Stark
I mentioned on Twitter that I wanted to write a post comparing Armageddon Empires, a 2007 post-apocalyptic strategy game, with Old World, a freshly released historical strategy game. I bought Old World (OW), tried to play it, and found myself pretty bored, and returned to Armageddon Empires (AE)....
David Stark
I've been contributing to compiling a complete list of Swiss games for a few years. It was started by David Javet, and consists of a Google sheet that aims to collect all computer games ever made in Switzerland. We currently have 458 entries going back to 1987. But there's a weird hole in our...
David Stark
How big is a tile in a roguelike or similar game? What shape does it have? I've been playing (and modding) a lot of Caves of Qud, so this is something I'm thinking about again. I'd love to see or make a roguelike where the levels are truly three-dimensional rather than 2D levels connected by...
David Stark
I haven't done much blogging on here, mostly because of the self-reinforcing thing that if you haven't written anything for a while, the next thing you write had better be good - which of course means it dies as a draft, or in my head. So I'm going to intentionally lower the bar quite a lot and...
David Stark
I just finished playing through Chimera Squad, the spontaneously appeared XCOM spinoff, on Normal/Iron Man. It's... an OK game. The writing is uneven: some of the banter is cringeworthy and your opponents are a bit uninspired. But I love the food ads on the radio. They're also clearly trying out...
David Stark
I'm back playing Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. I play a lot of strategy games, but this is the one I've been in love with the longest, despite its flaws. It's now more than 20 years on, and kind of an abandoned evolutionary side-branch of the Civilization series. The more recent Civ-in-space,...
David Stark
This is now an incredibly cold take, but I finally wanted to write down my thoughts on Civilization: Beyond Earth (BE), and how it compares to Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri (SMAC), which is sort of its predecessor. It's probably not surprising that I find BE a disappointment, but I want to spell out...
David Stark
This is my Global Game Jam 2018 entry on the theme "transmission". It's a short experimental piece of interactive fiction, where I tried to do A Thing with stories. When you play a game, you tell yourself a story. You might be a conquering hero, or a reluctant one, or a rational actor. You have...
David Stark
A game can either have an open world where the player can move freely, or a world that changes as the plot advances. If it has both, the player will miss out on most of the game's content. There are some approaches to deal with this, though... So I've been thinking about the Skyrim Problem in...
David Stark
tl;dr: Developers, revoke the Steam keys you supplied to Indie Game Stand! I'm the developer of a game called Airships: Conquer the Skies. It can be bought through a bunch of platforms, including Steam, and, until it shut down earlier this year, Indie Game Stand. I supplied IGS with builds of the...
David Stark
This post was originally published in 2013, on the previous incarnation of this website. I just read a pretty neat article that argues for more interesting forms of magic in computer games. One idea I really like (because I'm horrible) is having to pay a permanent price for each spell cast. (The...
David Stark
I've been thinking about the different kinds of grids of tiles and blocks used in games, which come in a variety of scales and shapes. Scale By scale I mean how much real-world space each tile represents, not its size on the screen. Large (103+m) Strategy games tend to use very large grids. The...
David Stark
I just bought and played Voyageur, a science fiction story game for mobile. It's one of the games supported through Failbetter's Fundbetter programme, and since I'm mildly obsessed with Sunless Sea, I thought I'd give it a try. I was largely disappointed, though. I won't bore you with explaining...
David Stark
I've been ill over the last few days, probably as an inevitable consequence of doing so many events in January. So I've been playing a fair amount of Sunless Sea, a great game if you're ill, because it's quite soothing in a "dark sea filled with monsters" kind of way. And as always when I play...
David Stark
The last few years have seen a number of games attempting to reinvigorate the Space 4X game. They have all been disappointments. The trouble is that Master of Orion II still looms large. New games not only have to compete against it on their own merits. They have to be both better than MoO2 and at...
David Stark
Short version: For one day, on Thursday, 23. June, I will buy and play every single game released on Steam that day. I will stream myself playing. I will play each game for twenty minutes, and at the end of that time, I will render one of two verdicts: "keep" or "refund". There are so many games...
David Stark
I just came across the Kickstarter for Potions: A Curious Tale, a fantasy game with an emphasis on creative problem solving and experimenting with potion crafting. So pretty much this concept I wrote about nearly three years ago. My point here is not that I think they "stole my idea". It is...
David Stark
A while ago I listened to a podcast interview with one of the developers of Don't Starve. They were discussing the design of the Science Machine, the building that lets you discover new crafting recipes. In its original version, players could dump any items they didn't want into the machine, and...
David Stark
If you've been following me for a long time, you know that before Airships, I was working on another project called Space Exploration: Serpens Sector. It was a space RPG that started out as a clone of the original Strange Adventures in Infinite Space, and ended up being something like Sunless Sea...
David Stark
Be warned, this is a tasteless idea, but still kind of entertaining, which is why I wrote it up. Diablo in reverse: an action-RPG where you take on heaven, working your way through orphanages and monasteries, smashing through the pearly gates to take on the angelic host... and kill god. Gameplay...
David Stark
At The Gates is an under-development 4X game by Jon Shafer, a game designer formerly of Firaxis Games. In the game, you play as a barbarian tribe in the twilight days of the Roman empire. It got kickstarted back in early 2013 and has been making its way through the tortuous process of development...
David Stark
I'm not sure where I first saw Reveal the Deep. I thought it was on JGO, but I can't find any trace of it now. So I was vaguely aware of it when it popped up on the Steam new releases page, with a price of $1, launch-discounted down to 64 cents. And I was worried that the developers had so little...
David Stark
I never finish role-playing games. A few hours in, I reach a point where I get overwhelmed by side-quests and options. My suspension of disbelief breaks down as it becomes clear just how much the world revolves around me: I can start a quest, wander off for three months, and when I'm back,...
David Stark
I've been thinking about the Civilization series of games again. It's weird that after so many iterations, their fundamental problem is still not fixed: the end-game is painfully slow. As the number of entities (cities, units) you control rises, and the number of options you have for each rises as...
David Stark
I once read wonderful blog post which imagines an alternate universe where instead of D&D, Gygax and Arneson made a game about people's feelings. Feelings, it said, are easy, just some variables describing emotional states. Combat is hard: all that detail, all that complexity. No one does...
David Stark
Endless Sky became available on Steam the other day, and this prompted me to think a bit about the possible future of Escape Velocity, the classic game that Endless Sky aims to be a successor to. Sadly, Endless Sky is a bit of a disappointment: it does a good job of recreating the basic gameplay...
David Stark
It's occurred to me that all three dungeon crawler games I currently play have something in common: positioning matters a lot. Hoplite is literally the only Android game I actually play. It's a simple but elegant hex-based dungeon crawl wherein you must traverse sixteen levels to reach the Fleece...
David Stark
Recently, when ideas for major new features for Airships have cropped up, I've taken to saying "that's a good idea for an expansion". Understandably, this has got some people concerned that the game's going to down the route of endless DLC. I want to address those concerns here and describe what I...
David Stark
Two major events have happened in the world of indie game distribution this past week: Steam announced their new refund policy, and Bad Juju Games, operators of Desura, have declared bankruptcy. What do these shifts in the landscape mean for Airships, and for other indie games? Desura's...
David Stark
So it's pretty well documented by now that there are more women playing computer games than men. This goes against gut feel because "real" games are still defined as a specific subset where men still are in the majority: PC and console rather than mobile, "hardcore" rather than "casual". Typical...
David Stark
I used to devour "Making Magic", the game design column written by Mark Rosewater, then lead designer of Magic: The Gathering. I never got into playing Magic itself, but I found the inside view of game design and balancing interesting nevertheless. Probably the most famous column is Timmy, Johnny...
David Stark
I previously wrote a post about a game jam format where you refine your game by re-making it repeatedly, halving the time allotted each time. People rightly pointed out that this would probably be horribly stressful. So here's an improved version, more of a prototyping technique than a jam format...
David Stark
I've previously written about the problem of rising complexity in strategy games. You manage a number of units (team members, cities, spaceships, etc.) that have some degree of complexity. As the game goes on, you need to acquire more units to succeed. But since the complexity of managing each of...
David Stark
In between bouts of working on Airships, I've been playing lots more Sunless Sea. I wrote about it a while ago, when it was still in Early Access. Now that it's out, I have some more thoughts. As someone remarked on Metafilter, the game is kind of like a slower Escape Velocity set not in space....
David Stark
If you're a game developer, you've likely encountered these: emails from people claiming to be a Let's Player or representing a game news site, asking you for a review copy of your game. A lot of these are fake, but of course there are real ones too, which you really need to get the word out about...
David Stark
I just got quoted in this article by 20 Minuten that argues Swiss game developers lack a certain grand vision to make it big. I'd like to expand on my quotes here, because I don't think the issue is exactly a lack of vision. First off, I totally stand behind my quotes - I approved them before...
David Stark
Defeat Screen by Yasmin König Over the last weekend, I again got to participate in the Global Game Jam. It's a pretty big event here in Zurich, with about 80 participants each year, held in one big ex-factory hall. Like last year, I worked together with Kaspar Manz, though Kristina Balanc, who...
David Stark
A few months ago, I got introduced to Caverna at a board game evening. Caverna is pretty much "Dwarf Fortress: The Board Game" in that you run a group of dwarves digging out caverns, creating a living space, mining and farming. Unsurprisingly, this got me to start playing Dwarf Fortress itself...
David Stark
When programming game AI, a common pattern is to look at each possible action and assign them a numerical score to figure out which to take. This may be done explicitly, with each possible action actually considered, or implicitly. A lot of thought may go into calculating the best action scores,...
David Stark
Another game from the 90s that I am once again able to play thanks to GOG.com. In Chaos Overlords, you play as the head of a criminal organization plotting to take over the city, sector by sector. You are assisted in this by an array of deeply weird gangs that you can hire and use to expand your...
David Stark
Thanks to the continuing work of GOG.com, I am once more able to play Imperialism II. I originally got the game back in 1999, when it was released for Mac OS 8, and absolutely loved it. Sadly, the Mac version did not support later Mac OS versions, and I didn't have a Windows machine until a few...
David Stark
Escape Velocity, released way back in 1996, was the first game I lost large chunks of time to, and what set me on the path to game development. It could be best described as 2D Elite: You command and steer a spaceship in a top-down 2D view, flying between planets and star systems, fighting,...
David Stark
I spend a fair amount of time on Steam Greenlight. Not just because I have a game of my own on there, but also because the steady flow of games is interesting, and there's the occasional gem. After a while, I noticed some definite national preferences towards specific genres. So I did what every...
David Stark
In this magic-based dungeon crawler, instead of using individual spells, you use the mouse cursor to manipulate various things: stone, fire, metal, souls. Your cursor is your magical focus, and click to grab and drag to move. You can also change the radius of your focus, from small and...
David Stark
I may write more about Civ: Beyond Earth later, but suffice it to say for now that it's a bland and tedious thing not worth the asking price. One of the tacked-on victory conditions is the good old "the planet is quasi-sentient and we must merge our minds with it", just like in Sid Meier's Alpha...
David Stark
I've been collecting unusual game ideas for a followup for this post, and this is one that struck me as worthy of a more in-depth treatment. The game is a narrative about family secrets and the way people may choose to selectively remember the past. It plays out in a number of short scenes which...
David Stark
As you might have noticed, I totally love survival games because they provide a constant challenge to overcome with careful resource management and general cleverness. I haven't quite found my perfect survival game, but my search has generated quite a number of opinions and ideas on them. (Do read...