Why I Stopped Playing Your Boring Game Demo

I've played many game demos and prototypes. Most fail to impress.

The worst offenders come from programmers who just want to code the "engine" but don't put the same effort into game design. It's the game developer equivalent of skipping leg day.

With that in mind, I figured it would be helpful to give you a crash course on game design fundamentals while showing you how I designed all of the puzzles in my most recent game, Mooselutions.

Buy Mooselutions on Steam:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/22...

This video only scratches the surface of game design, which is highly interdisciplinary in nature. I reference whole fields in just a sentence or two. Here is more background.

When discussing possibility spaces and interesting decisions, I leaned pretty heavily on ideas expressed in one of Jonathan Blow's older talks. It's worth a watch if you haven't already seen it. This is the talk that inspired me to design games.

Truth in Game Design:
   • Jonathan Blow - Truth In Game Design  

I also briefly made a reference to my favorite philosopher, Martin Heidegger. The language in his primary work, Being And Time, makes it difficult to express his core ideas to a general audience, but I believe they are relevant to game design no less.

Being And Time is worth a read, but you sort of need a sherpa to guide you through it. The words don't mean what you think they mean. I would recommend some kind of book club or reading group to help make sense of it.