Strategy games go hand in hand with war and conflict. Why is this and what are the alternatives? The majority of strategy games revolve around conflict and war. It’s hard to even name a non-violent strategy game outside of abstract games like Go or Draughts. Even these games are arguably an abstraction of conflict, pitting two players in direct opposition. War and conflict are historic realities and sadly will continue to be in the future. So it’s right for games to explore this space. Wi...| Crystalline Green
Even in the virtual world, saving the rainforest is not straight forward For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been playing a game called Eco. The premise is simple – A meteor will crash into your planet in 30 days. Starting from the stone-age, build up a civilization capable of blasting the meteor to pieces and thus saving the planet. However, you need to do it without destroying the natural environment in the process. The catch is it’s an online multiplayer game. You need to cooperate wi...| Crystalline Green
Where digital fashion and games collided, I found only a long hard slog. Last year it was announced that one of the senior designers for fashion brand Louis Vuitton was himself a big gamer and would be designing a new avatar “skin” for the video game League of Legends. Since this was a game I was familiar with, and given my previous experiments with digital fashion, I set myself the goal of acquiring said skin. It proved to be a long and less-than-fun experience, to the point I quit playi...| Crystalline Green
Coming from a video games background, the world of fashion appears otherworldly. A place full of lurid colours and fantastical designs springing off the pages of glossy magazines and posters. It often makes games look monochrome and unimaginative by comparison. But the fashion world is also distant and disconnected from games. So when the chance came up to attend a Digital Fashion workshop in Prague at the start of the summer, I was intrigued. Could technology provide a bridge between these w...| Crystalline Green
Apparently I wrote this blog when Flight of Light was launched way back in August 2017, but for some reason never published it. So here it is, looking back at one of the key aspects of the game’s evolution over its 3+ years development time! Flight of Light was developed using an organic / evolutionary design method – At each stage of development, I took the work-in-progress game to a lot of different events and conventions. Allowing its design to be guided by feedback and suggestions fro...| Crystalline Green
Last week, I went to Amaze Festival in Berlin. It was fun to meet up with lots of developers from around Europe, and the event’s focus on the more artistic side of game making was refreshing. In particular, I went to a talk by Jenny Jiao Hsia on prototyping her personal games. Interestingly, she had both a fixed art style and set theme (dieting) that she pursued throughout the many prototypes she made. Her aim in experimenting with different mechanics was thus to find how best to fit the t...| Crystalline Green
Recently read BadgerHammer’s blog on video game marketing. Like them, I’ve been pressing all the marketing buttons prescribed by industry “conventional wisdom”, yet getting nowhere. This spurred me to write down some ideas I’ve had mulling in my head for a while now about indie game marketing. Marketing is usually referred to as something game developers do during and/or after game development. As if it’s a parallel process to the nuts and bolts of making a game. It isn’t. Way b...| Crystalline Green
It’s been a year since Totem Topple came out, and six months since the patch that fixed it, so feels like a good time to take a step back and analyse what went right and wrong with the game. The fact that it had to be extensively patched last summer attests to the issues with the original version that launched on PC and Wii U back in November 2015. You can read more about the making of the game, how it faltered, and efforts to rescue it, here. However, I want to dig into the game design its...| Crystalline Green
Back in May, I went to Amsterdam for the Unite Europe conference, and whilst in the city, visited the Stedlijk design museum. It’s a weird collection of modern art and design, but well worth a visit if you’re into that sort of stuff. It’s also partly housed in a gigantic bathtub!| Crystalline Green
Factorio is a game all about pollution, making it and its consequences. In it I found a distorted reflection of humanity’s relationship with the environment.| Crystalline Green