Game Design is a kind of language. It has basic elements, it has rules, and we use it to express specific sensations. Therefore, as a language, it has a proper grammar with its alphabet, its morphology, and its syntax and semantic. In this article I’ll briefly try to exapand this thought.

Random Walking is a handy technique to have in your gamdev toolbelt and - despite the name - it is most useful for everything but actual walking. With random walking, we define the output of a process that can be described sequence of random steps. The main difference with a random sequence is that each new value will be statistically near the previous one. Imagine a gold price chart and assume that the current cost is 10€ for 1g of gold. We cannot guess what will be the price in one hour but we can be sure that it will be around 10€ per gram, maybe 9.5€, maybe 10.5€. What is certain, is that a sudden drop to 1€ per gram would be deeply unlikely.

In this article, we will talk briefly about random walking and its ability to simulate many real-world processes such as resources prices, temperature, floating objects position over time, and much more.

I would like to expand the answer I gave on /r/gamedesign some days ago. The main point of the question was: how can I decide if it “better” to implement the decision-making layer of our game AI with Behavior Trees (BTs) or with more advanced plan-based techniques such as Goal Oriented Action Planning (GOAP) or Simple Hierarchical Ordered Planner (SHOP). First consideration: this is not a technical problem The first thing to know is that writing game AI is not a race for the best technology.

Level-based progression is an extremely popular way of providing the player with the feeling of “getting stronger.” The system is born with Role-Playing Games (RPG), but it is nowadays embedded in practically every game; some more, some less. Even if it is entirely possible to provide progression feeling without levels and experience points, level-based progression is natural, direct, and linear, and it fits well in many (too many?) game genres.

This small article is born from a discussion I had with a friend of mine this week. He was writing a review on Playersunknown’s Battlegrounds (from now on, PUBG) and he ended up talking about the evolution of the genre and its triumph over every other competitor. The article was good but it did not enter in detail about, what I think, it is a greatly important and interesting question: Why PUBG? Why not any of the other dozens of battle royal games we were plagued in the last years?

PUBG is clearly a winner in this competition. It sold more than 8 million copies on Steam only, and I can see the trend going with the future release on consoles. The problem, in my opinion, is that, on paper, there is nothing in PUBG implementation that seems “right”. Nevertheless, it won.

Machiavelli once said that success is 50% luck. That’s definitely true for PUBG. But the other 50% must be researched in the PUBG qualities. Analyzing them, despite the massive “errors”, it is very important for any game designer.

I hope you agree with me: controls are the true essence of every game. Sometimes, controls schemes are enough to define the game itself: once you decide the game controls mechanics, the rest of the game will follow. So I thought to start exploring controls schemes in a more formal way, searching for a way to analyze games from the user interaction point of view only. We will start from the simplest control scheme possible: a game with a single button.