The Serious Art of Designing Fun

This might be a nice time to give a shout-out to Owen Goss of Streaming Colours Studio. Owen is a games industry veteran who's presently developing his first indie title and is documenting his experience through a blog. In fact, it was his development blog that inspired me to start up my own blog.

If you're deeply interested in developing a game commercially as an indie developer, I'd encourage you to do so. He updates the site on an every day basis (for the most part) and his insight into into the both the design and development side is very instructive.

Welcome to my re-skinned blog. Some of the nice features of this new skin are that the main text is larger, and that the calender clearly highlights the dates that contain posts.

For the new look, I've decided to go with a simple banner which harkens back to the earlier days of computer/console games. That and I really like the dark blue background.

Now would probably be a good time to highlight the fact that I'm not very good with the whole art bit. Feel free to voice your opinions via comments. Better yet, if you'd like to help design a banner for this website, please feel to contact me.

What's the starting point of a game design? Some may argue that it begins with a story. Others might start with a game genre in mind. Still others may suggest starting with a compelling game mechanic. They're all perfectly great starting points for the game concept but I would argue that there needs to be more structure before a game concept becomes a design.

In fact, this is what game design and creative writing have in common. Both activities begin by first defining its key elements. Where they differ are the key elements itself. Today, I'm going to delve into the first two elements of a game design.

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This site is officially on the (Internet) map!

Many thanks to Eddie Parker for making the brilliant suggestion of tying the RSS article feed to my Facebook profile. It's a fantastic way of getting the news out to friends and family - highly recommended if you have your very own blog and you have a Facebook account.

In addition, one of the nice features of the blog software (I chose to go with b2evolution) is that it automatically relays entries to common search engines.

Games design is a creative endeavour. But so is creative writing. There are standard practices to creative writing so where are the standard practices for creative game design?

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