Hang around the messageboards for most amateur adventure game design software and you’ll find a lot of new designers releasing their first games. Of these, a depressingly large amount will have a title with some variation of ‘ESCAPE FROM MY HOUSE’, with sprite rips from other games for characters and line drawings for backgrounds, so that the whole mess looks like Roger Wilco is taking a walk through a 2-year-old’s colouring book. This phenomenon exists because of people who like the idea of designing their own adventure games but don’t have a story to tell. And if you don’t have a story to tell, you’re not making an adventure game so much as you are blowing your nose on your computer screen.

Ben ‘Yahtzee’ Croshaw, found at http://www.adventuregamers.com/articles/view/17875

Politics is not inserted into games by critics, but is in fact an integral part of the design process. I think this kind tweetable summary is the point where most people would start to have doubts, so we’re going to drill down on some sample games and make stunningly obvious observations about how their political context has influenced their design. Exciting stuff, right?!

Game Design Is Always Political I’m Not Even Exaggerating Here | Midnight Resistance (via humanegames)

[polygondotcom]

Why building the game is only the beginning

With most of the game built, development on Defense Grid 2 moves into its most complicated phase: adding the finishing touches.

Something strange happens during the first few minutes of the meeting.

This meeting starts, as most meetings do, with witty banter and people goofing around, settling into place and wondering if everyone who’s been invited has arrived. Then the talk turns to business. Just like any other meeting. But this meeting is about making video games, and it’s full of game developers. So the line between where the fun part of the meeting ends and the boring, business part begins is a little harder to spot.

(Link to the full story)