News

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Difficulty and fairness in Rainbow Laser Disco Dungeon
Difficulty and Fairness and... EASY MODES! I want to talk about the value of Easy Modes in games and how Rainbow Laser Disco Dungeon attempts to be welcoming and fair with it’s three different difficulty modes.
Sept. 29, 2021
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Reflections on difficulty pacing in Puzzledorf
This article talks about the difficulty level of Puzzledorf, how it changes over time, and how I tried to use that both to engage and retain players to help them finish the game.
Sept. 27, 2021
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Steam: the state of 'long tail' revenue in 2021!
GameDiscoverCo's Simon Carless shares some data on why your game's first week of sales and first year of sales might correlate--at least on Steam.
Sept. 23, 2021
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Progression mechanisms - The blessing or curse of modern action-adventure games?
Almost every action-adventure game that has been released during the last decade offers players progression mechanics heavily inspired by those of RPGs. So is this a good thing or is it a sign that the industry is struggling to renew itself?
Sept. 23, 2021
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User Research: Do players complain about weak characters because of too little damage?
Skills adjustment planning is often very careful. Because the adjustment of characters will have some collateral effect on other characters/heroes, which in turn leads to the potential affection of character balance of the entire game.
Sept. 23, 2021
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A new taxonomy of difficulty
A call to reconsider how we talk about difficulty in games.
Sept. 23, 2021
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What players wish Nintendo would fix for Switch discovery
In researching a recent Switch story, we were looking for fan reaction to console UIs/discoverability.
Sept. 21, 2021
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Platform non-realtime - could it be a new subgenre?
In this article I propose a new subgenre of platform games.
Sept. 21, 2021
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Game Dev Digest Issue #110 - Give your game a makeover
Game Dev Digest Issue #110 - Give your game a makeover. The latest from the free weekly Unity3d/gamedev newsletter.
Sept. 20, 2021
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Localizing Saviors of Sapphire Wings / Stranger of Sword City Revisited
Late in 2019 NIS America approached us to discuss porting these two games to the Nintendo Switch and PC. This article outlines the technical localization challenges that were found in the two games and how we approached solving them.
Sept. 18, 2021
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Localizing Saviors of Sapphire Wings and Stranger of Sword City Revisited
Late in 2019 NIS America approached us to discuss porting these two games to the Nintendo Switch and PC. This article outlines the technical localization challenges that were found in the two games and how we approached solving them.
Sept. 17, 2021
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Marketing meatball theory: How to use free to get more followers
It is really hard to get anyone to actually buy anything, much less take an action like joining your mailing list or Discord. It is even more difficult when you are offering a game that is different, or a bit avant garde.
Sept. 17, 2021