News

JikGuard
Indie Pre-Mortem: one year prototyping a side project
I explain the global steps and progress of the first year working on my first post studies project: Astre.
April 25, 2016
JikGuard
Overworld Overload: An Analysis of Link to the Past’s Light World, Part 2
A continuing look at the overworld of Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. In this installment, we look at the maze-like qualities of the world, and what makes the world so rich.
April 25, 2016
JikGuard
Finding Gamers Who Pay & Promote
April 2016 Research of MMO & Free-to-Play Games
April 25, 2016
JikGuard
Multi-Grid Graph Navigation Tutorial
Aron Granberg's A* pathfinding project is a fantastic way for Unity developers to perform pathfinding in their game. In this tutorial, I outline how to get an AI to use multiple grid graph navigation meshes at once, and find paths off of their own graph.
April 22, 2016
JikGuard
Taric’s League of Legends update: making protective classes fun in a combat game.
The support champion Taric got a big update in League of Legends, so I took him for a test drive to see how his updates reflect design trends with characters who don't go in for the kill.
April 22, 2016
JikGuard
My Google Play Publishing Disaster!
So you made it: after spending hours of coding, art, design and infinite bug fixing you’ve finally reached the point where you’re about to publish your first mobile game on the Google Play Store in front of millions…
April 22, 2016
JikGuard
Introduction to Inventory-Aware Pathfinding
Solving planning and pathfinding at the same time can save you a lot of time. It is the case of Inventory-Aware Pathfinding where we want to solve pathfinding in a map constrained by the items brought by the agent (e.g., keys to open locked doors).
April 22, 2016
JikGuard
Microtransactions Aren’t Evil - Why Viridi is Free-to-play
Viridi has received major mainstream attention, but dour critical response from the games community. The biggest complaint leveled against it is its pricing model: Viridi is F2P. Here I discuss why we made that choice and why we're sticking with it.
April 22, 2016
JikGuard
Death March Crunches: 10 Causes and Solutions
Early in my career, I'd been the victim and inflictor of extended crunch (death marches). I'm a slow learner, but eventually found many of the root causes and solutions to avoid it.
April 22, 2016
JikGuard
A few thoughts on game design methods
Summary of thoughts on video game design that where discussed on a private design panel with a great team. I tried to extract parts of their conclusions that were maybe not that commonly addressed in other similar articles of design "do’s and don’ts".
April 21, 2016
JikGuard
Balancing exposition and player agency in indie narratives
We wanted to hold a panel on the topic of narrative approaches by indie games during PAX East 2016, but scheduling didn't work out. So I invited a few neighbors from the IndieMEGABOOTH to share their thoughts for this blog post.
April 21, 2016
JikGuard
A Method For Creative Paper Map Design
Ryan Darcey discusses his process for generating unique map designs on Star Wars: First Assault.
April 21, 2016