Polaris Game Design

I have worked with Laura a ton and there's no one more dependable. Completely hilarious and professional. Can adapt to anything. When I see an impossible narrative obstacle down the tracks I try to get Laura hired so the train doesn't derail.

a_maplemystery - Twitch Solo indie dev of The Crimson Diamond! I also stream EGA games, particularly EGA adventure games. Based in Toronto, Canada!

Live now, it's Crimson C'Tuesdayyyy! Come hang out and let's do pixel art and look at photos of mushrooms and play games! www.twitch.tv/a_maplemystery

A Toolkit for Encouraging Player Stories Players play games, and when things go right, they tell compelling stories about their play experiences. Sometimes these stories even become community legends. This report looks to identify the condit...

The group actually explored "planting" vs "harvesting" player stories as an extensive metaphor and found some interesting design bits there too.

To learn more, read the whole thing, I dare you: polarisgamedesign.com/2022/a-toolk...

To encourage player stories:

1 Define an expressive range
2 Leave gaps
3 Acknowledge the player
4 Support player framing
5 Curate/summarize their play
6 Procedurally generate
7 Manage your community

We can't tell the player's story for them... but we can plant the seeds! 🌱🎮💬

Tool 7: Community Management

Hey a tool to use AFTER dev!

So you made a game.

Now, as players play it, give them explicit spaces to tell their stories! Make it safe and and easy welcoming to share and maybe you'll get storytellers like the Dwarf Fortress & Qud communities.

Tool 6: Procedural Generation

Good proc-gen creates moments that = singular, non-repeatable, & unexpected, which humans love telling stories about. It also lends itself to collaborative storytelling, with more room for interpretation & expression than passive experiences. (See: Caves of Qud)

Tool 5: Curation

Summarize the player's experience to help them along the road to interpreting meaning and sharing it with others. Help the player understand what happened, especially if it was systemically complex.

Ex: Dwarf Fortress legends mode distills huge volumes into meaning-rich subsets.

Tool 4: Support Player Framing

Let the player emphasize & highlight pieces of their play experience. Ask the player open-ended, subjective questions without consequences and they might enter a storytelling mindset.

Ex: Fallen London provides scrapbook & mantlepiece spaces in player profiles!

ALSO this toolkit for encouraging player stories (see surrounding thread) was brought to you by the hard work of @galaxykate.bsky.social @jfg.land @rainysector.bsky.social @emilyshort.bsky.social @tanyaxshort.bsky.social, with special thanks to @catacalypto.bsky.social and @bravemule.bsky.social 😍🤩

Tool 3: Acknowledgements

(Devtime) Players want to feel seen! Whether it's ye olde achievements or elaborate scripting (Ex: Facade), figure out how the game can say "yes, and" / "yes, but" to the player's expressions, reflecting them, even if you can't be sure of what exactly they're trying to do.

Tool 2: Lacunae.

(Devtime) Intentionally leave gaps in the lore, encouraging 'reparative play', where players bring their own personalization to explain the details.

Ex: Boyfriend Dungeon devs didn't answer all questions about weapon-transformation, to make room for fan & community explanations

Tool 1: Define an Expressive Range.

(Devtime) Set expectations about what stories look like "here", to help players accurately imagine what KINDS of stories they might tell, and how those stories might be unique.

EX: Sea of Thieves leans into various archetypes, aiding in player pirate stories.

First, these designers found 3 major phases of a player story lifecycle:
- devtime (while making the game)
- playtime (while the player plays)
- sharetime (after playing, players tell their story)

These tools come into play or show their results at different points in the "pipeline". Let's dive in!

Designers talk a lot abt the stories they want to tell through games. But what about the PLAYER's story? How can we empower players to tell THEIR unique play story to each other?

Let's amp up the "tellability"! Here's 7 design tools for player stories: polarisgamedesign.com/2022/a-toolk... (thread)

Welcome, new followers! We're a group of game designers trying to push our craft forward through deep thought, collaboration, and open minds. We think, we chat, we write, we experiment.

How do YOU explore and improve as a game designer, besides making games? (Reposts welcome)

Many boxes arranged in a grid according to color and content

Silhouette of different objects in profile, arranged by height

Armor sets drop rate distribution explainer with pie charts

Graphic design pasted on a screenshot with simple mockup of interface

Here's a few other examples visualizations for different PAUSEs... can you guess which are for what? Afterwards, check the paper and learn more! Spreadsheets are great, but it's just one tool in the toolbox.

polarisgamedesign.com/2022/when-sp...

Purpose: relating to the rest of the game
Audience: dev team
Use: consulted periodically, kept up to date
Scope: complete mechanically, not content
Emphasis: emphasize effort of connections between systems

Maybe we'd make this!

If I were to viz a crafting system in a survival game, for my team... should we use

a spreadsheet of items?
a diagram of the game loop?
a state diagram of inputs?
a node diagram of recipes?
a filterable graph of items v costs?

Hmm. WELL. Let's think about the PAUSE!

5. Emphasis: Which aspects are most important?

Direct attention to the MOST important parts, building on your understanding of audience, usage, and scope to refine focus and highlight relationships in the systems.

Great, so you've PAUSEd... now how about an example?

4. Scope: What is the MINIMUM amount of info you need to share?

Like anything, priorities help here, to reach the simplest version quickly and maintain focus. Sometimes it's more important to be complete/accurate, but sometimes it's more important to be quickly digested and streamlined.

Let's take a quick author break! This report was written by @apepers.bsky.social @ichiro.bsky.social @osamadorias.bsky.social Crystin Cox, Melissa Ramsden, Michael Austin, and Brent Ellison at our 2022 retreat. Follow them for further design insights~

OK back to the paper on System Visualization!

3. Usage: how will it be used?

Is it always going to be explained by you directly, or will it live on a wiki or will it appear externally in marketing materials without context? Will you need to keep it to date? Should it be interactive? How far away will viewers be? How much time do they have?

2. Audience: WHO is your audience?

Depending on the experiences and expertise of who the visualization is for (you? programmers? artists? investors? testers? players?), different visualizations should come into play, for comfort, accessibility, or just comprehensibility.

So before you dive into assuming you want a spreadsheet or flow chart, first ask yourself about the...

Purpose: WHY are you creating this?

Are you helping communicate? Plan? Iterate? Analyze? Each has its own ideal visualization. Balancing an economy needs different viz than creative direction.

When Spreadsheets Aren’t Enough: A Framework for Approaching System Visualization Visualization techniques can help us design and maintain game rules and systems, communicate these internally (across the development team), and effectively convey them to external stakeholders (such ...

Let's talk System Visualization! As designers, we often lean on visuals to help understand, communicate, or simply use a system. But which visuals???

This report (polarisgamedesign.com/2022/when-sp...) suggests we "PAUSE" and consider:

- Purpose
- Audience
- Usage
- Scope
- Emphasis

(Thread!)

History in the making! A Polaris co-director's game is up for its first playtest, check it out:

Save 10% on Consume Me on Steam did you feel stupid, fat, lazy, and ugly in high school? well i did...but at least i made a life-simulation RPG about it!

Consume Me won the Independent Games Festival Grand Prize this year. To learn more about autobiography, narrative, visual art, and game design, please play it, as it's out today! Thanks to @qdork.bsky.social for your contribution to our art form! store.steampowered.com/app/2359120/...

Roguelike celebration — loveliest community, most inspired virtual conference space, greatest juxtaposition of in-field and out-of-field topics

if you haven't been, come this year! October 25-26 🎲💫
if you have, welcome back! see you there

A segment of Roguelike Celebration 2025's schedule Friday, 13:30 - Play as Procedural Generation: Oath as a Roguelike Strategy Game by Cole Wehrle Friday, 14:00 Teaching Long Term Consequences in Games by Jeff Lait

this year I'll call out the back-to-back Day 1 pairing of Cole Wehrle and Jeff Lait. Games are awash with brilliant people but even among the field, Cole & Jeff stand out as design thinkers I'm breaking down doors to listen to

Roguelike Celebration is one of the best game design events every year, with talks on systems, generation, and innovation. This year they have speakers like Michael Brough and Tyriq Plummer, and in the past have featured various Polaris alums.

Sign up: www.roguelike.club/event2025.html