Antoine Henry

And who knows, maybe also inspire AAA studios to stop reinventing the wheel (as has been my experience with camera systems) and control their costs!

Black Eye Technologies A powerful camera system for the Unreal Engine

For fairness, I should also mention Black Eye, which is also starting to have interesting gameplay features.
blackeyetechnologies.com

Cameras are a cornerstone of good game feel and a polished experience.
I'm excited to see plugins like this surface, as it will help indies and AA continue to raise the quality bar at reasonable costs.

What Riveting Realms is offering here is an absolute bargain. It will save teams big and small months of work, for a potentially better result if you don't have or cannot hire a camera specialist.

Contexts, transitions, collisions, targeting, etc. are involving not-so-trivial maths and logic, and most importantly require a lot of finesse and tricks to feel good and smooth.

I just saw Riveting Realms is releasing an "early access" version of their camera plugin for Unreal.

www.rivetingrealms.com

I've contributed to the design of 2 camera systems in my career, and authored camera data for a few more. In my experience, the complexity of cameras is often overlooked.

➡️🧵

Muriwai beach at sunset.

Muriwai beach at sunset.

First short trip out of Auckland: Muriwai. 🤩

Goodbye Singapore!

It's been a very eventful 11 years. High highs, low lows. C'est la vie !

Throughout my journey I got to meet amazing people. Colleagues, friends and people that I now consider family. What a ride it's been!

On to the next adventure! 🛫🇳🇿

I wish the games industry did a much better job at educating its audience on the cost of development.
We'd get healthier, less hostile conversations about free updates for premium titles, updates for live games with small communities, crowdfunding campaigns, etc.

I posted about the importance of designing for player perception, rather than objective mechanical balance.
Seems relevant to bring it back in this context:
bsky.app/profile/bob2...

The lie for this one was not so much on the developers side than it was on Nintendo's side.
What they showed in the marketing was actually impossible to detect reliably with the hardware present in the wiimote.
Their games "lied" as much as any other about the movements required to play.

Yes, I've encountered that when I was at Riot. The best you can do is show that you're listening and keep on adjusting. Over time, it buys a bit of credibility, trust and goodwill.

I find that designing these types of experiences takes a shift in mindset: design a possibility space, embrace the unknown possibilities and adjust based on data (playtests, tracked data if live).

Nebula Flow on Steam Nebula Flow is a music game where you follow the melodic trail charted by your dog across colorful pixel art landscapes. Stock up on notes to power your canine companion to the end of each song!

These two twists on the genre's standards set it apart in a very good way: it feels like it's about musicianship, more than pure dexterity and memory as most rhythm games are.
Give it a try, it's a good lesson of how to integrate musicality into game design.
store.steampowered.com/app/2616170/...

2. Unlike all of the rhythm games I've ever played (and I've played a bunch!), its difficulty is not based on how many and how fast it can throw things at you. Instead, it's based on the complexity of the rhythm itself: syncopation, variations, embellishments, polyrhythms, etc.

1. While the rhythm you're expected to play to the music is always the same, the path to follow (i.e. whether a "note" is a movement up, down or a jump) is different every time.
It feels like sight-reading (i.e. reading sheet music you don't know as you play) and it's an exhilarating feeling.

YouTube video by Songe Launch trailer for my game, Nebula Flow!

I discovered 𝗡𝗲𝗯𝘂𝗹𝗮 𝗙𝗹𝗼𝘄 yesterday.
It's a rhythm game that is clearly made by people who understand and love music.
You play as a girl following the path of a dog, each movement being synced to a music track.
It does 2 fundamental things differently that make it feel so musical. →🧵

#gamedesign

Working on my project's budget and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 came up since... it's all people talk about these days! But also its scope is comparable. With all the discourse about the size of their team, I deep dove into behind-the-scene interviews and the game credits.
Well...
😯😮🤯
Mad respect.

In case you need help choosing: what will have the biggest impact on the experience of your playtesters? Have them understand the game more easily or have a more balanced experience? Is your game easy to grasp? Is the current balancing so broken it can't be enjoyed, and too difficult to balance?

It was their big strategy for introducing new 3D mechanics at the time. Navi was the character representing their camera lock-on system (a k.a. z-targeting) in Zelda OoT.
Both the free camera (and camera-relative controls that go with it) and the camera lock-on were big design innovations!

YouTube video by The Arcade Crew Drop Duchy - Launch Trailer

Tetris + deck builder + roguelike + puzzle sounds like a random combination. Yet it's been mixed expertly in Drop Duchy! It's amazing how tightly woven its game design elements are and how deep they get.
Props to @jboger.bsky.social.
Try it out, it's a lesson in game design. And it's super fun!

I think the nature of GaaS and a certain type of AAA definitely pushed for an extreme reduction of friction, but once again I've not seen people designing these advocate for this as a golden rule of GD.
Not sure where the generalization come from. 🤔

I'm definitely seeing a trend on Bluesky of designers - often not very experienced - that take design models/methods as recipes to follow instead of tools to use. I posted about it recently!
I've rarely - if ever - seen a GDC talk that is prescriptive though.

I'm curious what you are referring to as "good game design".
In your opening post you say "if you can make it fun or meaningful, it doesn't matter if it's any good". But isn't making an experience fun and meaningful the goal of game design? How is this not "good game design"?

I'm seeing a trend on this platform of game designers discussing the merits or lack thereof of game design models/methods as if they were recipes or plans to follow.
Any model/method is nothing more than a 𝘁𝗼𝗼𝗹. What you do using it and whether it's relevant in your context is up to you!
#gamedesign

If your focus is fall speed, make a simple LD setup with a ledge, and just walk off the ledge to test your values.
This way you isolate just what you want to iterate on.
It will be easier this way to see if the problem is your gravity value or the way gravity is applied in your code.

It's very tricky to tune any character controller without context and intent.
If you haven't already, I'd advise to define intent (e.g. a few adjectives).
Set up some basic LD situations as context, and loop between adjusting successively controller and LD, one parameter at a time. Hope this helps!

I see no problem here. It's actually how we speak.

Learn Through Play A multiplayer sandbox game to learn to skills of the future

They are not ready yet to talk about or show things publicly, but you can get some info about their high level approach and goals here: www.uma.games

Indeed, factoring in data and metrics can also be a factor for a less "human" feel to the design.
But to get back to your initial post, I'm not sure if schools "format" students by exposing them to certain methods or if it's just a typical junior issue: lack of understanding of what's adapted when.