Max Nichols' Game Design blog
For years I’ve pondered a paradox:
1) The fact that crunch is poisonous to creative work.
2) The fact that many of my favorite games were made with crunch.
My answer:
Crunch allows a team to naively reach a crucial creative state, at high personal cost.
It can be reached without crunch.
A drum I want to beat:
Overwork starts with management and planning, but half of why it happens is team culture.
Nobody has more impact on team culture than senior team members and lower-middle managers
If you are in the trenches and someone folks look to, then your example defines team culture.
The theme of this class is “World Design”, a subset of Game Design. The goal of this document is to explain what that means!
“World Design” is nebulously defined. Some companies have “World Designer” as a job title, but they don’t necessarily describe the same job. I’ve seen it used to describe traditional mission or level design work, designing vast non-linear spaces in open world games, and even the design of systems or UI related to the game world. So we will use a very broad definition in this class.
If Game Design is…
Tyson Green is an experienced designer at Bungie. I rarely work with him myself, but other designers who have will often quote this rule of his:…
Chris Clay was a senior designer I worked with at Turbine. Sometimes we would spend a lot of time in the weeds, talking about a…
This is the story of my first lay off, what I learned from it, and how I recovered. I recently received a job offer; this…