radioactivemouse's blog

I dunno if it's the season, but it seems I've just been thinking up game designs left and right.

Not too long ago, I acquired the game The Grizzled. I wanted to see what made it tick. For those that don't know, it's a 2-5 player co-op game that's supposed to simulate the struggles of war during WWI.

While playing it. I found it to have really solid game mechanics and overall it's a great game, but for some reason the mechanics of the game didn't really match with the theme.

But that's probably just me.

I'm always trying to look for game mechanics that are not exactly unique, but are not exactly popular either.

One of these mechanics is the traditional roll-and-move. Recently I was thinking of how I could revive the roll-and-move mechanic and I've come up with some interesting results.

But we're not talking about that right now :)

We're talking about Fudge Dice.

The fudge dice mechanism was created in 1992 (the year I graduate high school!) and runs traditionally as 4 6-sided dice with two plus symbols. 2 minus symbols, and 2 blank sides on each die.

I've been away from these forums for a while.

Maybe you didn't miss me, that's ok. If you did, I'm sorry I've been away.

If anyone has been following my blog, you'd note that I've recently had a child. Of course all you fathers out there know how much time and resources it takes to raise a baby, much less try and design games at the same time.

But I find myself still designing games and as is my lot in life. I've been trying to move up from Kismet and try something a little more complicated. Maybe I'll talk about it later, but I'm not sure if I'll be as active as used to be.

We all know that creating a game is not a walk in the park and it takes a lot of man hours just to get a prototype that's playable.

But I'm here to talk about something that is rarely talked about here, but is extremely important in game design: doing research.

Games...are diverse. There's no one game that appeals to everyone as everyone has their likes/dislikes. By defining what we want to express in our games, we can directly target our market instead of trying to make a game that pleases everyone; you'll find yourself disappointed in the end.

I truly believe the difference is between luck vs. strategy. By luck I mean elements that our out of our control...or at least elements that are not definitively controllable. When I refer to strategy in this blog, I mean play that is definitive; every move is controlled.