A background image used throughout the blog website. It is a map. It shows a castle on a bluff above a lake, with a small walled town around it. The lake has rivers flowing out on either side, and is surrounded by forests. The castle is rendered in high detrail and as you go to the edges of the image the map gets sketchier and sketchier

What is “World Design”?

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…

An image from Understanding Comics, by Scott McCloud. It shows a face drawn 5 times, in order from most abstract to most realistic.

2016-07-312026-07-08Narrative Design

Link, the Legendary Heroine

Preface (9/20/2016): This was originally published on Zeldauniverse.net, a Zelda fansite. The intended audience consisted of fairly dedicated Zelda fans, most of which were in their…

Do you think of yourself as a "Zelda fan"?

2014-06-102026-07-08Misc

Zelda Fan Survey 2014

Preface (3/23/2015): This survey was originally published almost a year ago, at my small Zelda site, Zeldadata.com. The audience was Zelda fans, not game devs!…

2011-03-022026-07-08Game Design

Controlling a MOBA on a console controller

Preface (3/24/2015): I wrote this four years ago, when I was still working in QA. I had never worked on a MOBA , or played…