Martin Annander

Game Economy Design The What and The How Hey there, I’m Keelan. For the better part of my career in the games industry I’ve worked as what’s known as a Game Economy Designer. Game Economy Design predominantly concerns…

This month marks the 50th Playtank.io blog post, and also the first-ever guest post by ex-Sony system designer Keelan Bowker-O'Brien! Enjoy. He knows everything about game economy design that I don't.

playtank.io/2025/08/12/g...

Never even thought of that. My condolances.

Was using my thermos mug and realised as I put on the desk that this represents a considerable part of my professional career. I think this was a Starbreeze x-mas present in 2008 or 2009. The Helldivers 2 controller was given to me by Arrowhead earlier this year.

I laughed out loud when it happened, since it wasn't designed at all, just a consequence of the systems doing what they were supposed to. A friend of mine called the proto "Everyone else is Jason Bourne." :D

Hmm. This is supposed to be a .gif...

Anyway. Great post!

The AI follows a simple rule. If they spot the player the want to attack. If they want to attack and have no weapon, they go to the nearest room with a weapon and grab the nearest weapon. It just happened to be the one I was holding...

Unintended silly systemic stuff.

Love this: "AI feels smartest when it handles a situation gracefully that hardly ever comes up. Without that, no amount of clever behaviour will get you there."

Reminded me of this silliness that happened in a prototype this spring:

I was described as a "social introvert." Had to hear it to understand how accurate it was.

This month's blog post is special, since the excellent Martin Ekdal has given me permission to share some exploratory design work I did as Design Director at Graewolv. It's a post about how role-playing can be used as a game design tool. Enjoy!

Game design is a constantly evolving craft and many of its challenges are tied to its present. But this month's blog post tries to deal with a number of specific challenges, such as recency bias and IP tourism, that felt worth writing about.

Making Money Making Games There’s a popular joke about money and game development. It goes something like this: To make a small fortune from gamedev, start with a big one. A key element of gamedev finances is risk. Ga…

This month's blogging concerns how game studios make money. Making Money Making Games. The fact that many developers don't make money *selling* games is still something I need to explain with regularity and it still doesn't make intuitive sense.

playtank.io/2025/05/12/m...

Decided to write a little about game studio financing this month, since it's something many find somewhat unintuitive. Not an exhaustive treatise, but hopefully worth a read!

Playing Death Stranding, and reflecting how every Hideo Kojima game since MGS2 is an interesting often innovative #gamedesign wrapped in a messy indecipherable story told through poorly written 10+-minute cutscenes.

Data points I found fascinating looking through Steam achievements:

- ~10% stop playing in the very early game (tutorial).
- ~25-30% play single-player games to the end. Can be as high as 45-50% near launch for big blockbusters but shrinks over time.

What would happen if we made shorter games?

So many beginning developers ask "which engine should I use?" So this month, I'm going through the engines I've worked with (or alongside) myself, and the takeaways from them. The idea is to show you that engine matters less than getting the work done!

This month's post on #systemicdesign dives into data representation, and terms like state and context. A return to the more technical posts I used to write earlier in this blog's (short) lifetime!

A final entry in the combat philosophy series, that will wrap the more theoretical meanderings and leave me more room to focus on #systemicdesign!

I think it's the best of them too. The later instalments lay on the cutscenes, with The New Colossus having some that are probably 10-15 minutes long...

First week doing systemic design at Arrowhead Game Studios. Excited to see what this brings.

Building Systemic Sport This post is a continuation on a previous combat design post. Sport can be used as a layer on top of your gunplay or melee. Perhaps as added fairness (a sense of “good balancing”) or as…

This month's blog post on #gamedesign and #systemicdesign! It was a tough one to research and write, since I've tried to distill what makes a 'sport' tick in the interest of informing your combat design, and sport is not my area.

playtank.io/2025/01/12/b...

Catharsis!

Reading early 90s #TTRPG stuff (Dark Sun, from 1991), and it's incredibly inspiring for 100 different reasons. It's easy to forget the rich history of this brilliant hobby.

Judas comes out March this year, and though it does look like a BioShock game, it seems to be trying its hands at more roguelikey things. Cautiously curious about it, even if I'm not really a BioShock fan.

Also got myself one of those controllers, because it's gorgeous! And ironically, the only game I couldn't play it with was Starfield because it didn't work.

Looks like an AABB to me. :)

Wait until they see the Geralt changes between TW1, TW2, and TW3!

But WHY are you in a castle? Is it your summer house? ;)

i wrote about how gamers see story and narrative as something that can be separated from the games themselves and how we reward stories that are legible in the language of books and movies

read here: jakesteinberg.substack.com/p/gamers-don...

Great piece, and complete agreement! By not engaging with our own art form and celebrating genre, we turn every game into products of our combined fandoms rather than something inherently meaningful.