Blog Archives
Evil Islands Playtest Story (Translation)
What goes below is a translation of an article written by Aleksei Sviridov back in the year 2000. Aleksei was the lead writer of Evil Islands. This article was my first glimpse into the world of game industry, and I think this is the one that has started an avalanche in my decision process of choosing a future career. It’s a pretty funny story, so I hope you all enjoy the read.
Adventure Puzzle Design
Writing recently about A New Beginning, I thought it would be a nice time to talk about adventure game puzzle design, and just adventure game design in general. Puzzle design in traditional & click adventure games is arguably one of the weirdest facets of Game Design. For the most part you’re not really designing actual puzzles, more like situations that require some sort of a logical solution. And the ‘logical’ part can be problematic.
Achievements as a Design tool
I have somewhat of a love-hate relationship with video game achievement systems. The ‘hate’ comes mostly from the fact that I tend to really disagree with how they are used nowadays. I believe achievements can and should be part of a game’s design, but more often than not they’re relegated to just some medals for completing certain parts of the game or pure boring grind. There are also skill-based achievements, like getting a perfect run in Super Meat Boy, – I think those are perfectly valid since, well, you have to actually achieve something. But then there’s achievements that can motivate the player to experiment with the game, try out different things, and it seems to me there’s just too few of that.
Stanislav Costiuc 