Learning Game Design™

The one and currently only book about team leadership in the game industry, all the other books of the same vein will follow what Seth Spaulding did first. So how is it?

Seth definitely has the credentials to write a book about leadership. His credits date back to 1995 and he’s worked his share of Command & Conquer, Mechwarrior, Civilization etc. to name a few. Currently an Art Director at Firaxis, Seth visited Finland couple of years ago and I briefly met the guy while working at Bugbear. Unexpectedly, part of his experiences with finnish game studios has been recorded in the book, in a positive light.

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Hi there!

My name is Rafael Kuhnen and I will be collaborating with Reko on this new blog. On this post I will be talking about my experience in changing from the a more hardcore MMOG (Massively Multiplayer Online Game) Industry to the more casual Mobile Industry.  Please keep in mind that all of this is a real wrapped up, over-simplified summary of my experiences. The Job is a lot more complicated then this. :)

The Beginning

As I started to work professionally  as a game designer, I had to first put behind all the knowledge I previously had about being a game designer. I knew what a game designer was suppose to do, but hardly had a clue on how everything was suppose to be done. It was a harsh learning period.

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Above: Part of our lego collection at Sumea for prototyping ideas

There are a few things essential for any game designer who’s job out there is to take a game from a concept/vision stage into full feature specs, to production and finally onto the shelves or in digital stores.

This is a list of what a good game designer should do and have.

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In “The Job” articles, we look a bit of what game designers should actually be doing, what are the fun and less fun aspects of the job and possibly in the future, even interview some designers.

So what’s it all about?

The “Game Designer” is almost like a blanket term for the people in the industry who fall in-between the artists and the programmers. They are the curious kind that always evoke the question “So what do you really do?” whenever the job title is mentioned.

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Wasabi is a recent boardgame published by Z-Man games that could be compared to the match-3 games like Bejeweled, but with a few twists that make it more interesting.

In short, up to four players draw ingredients from the pantry and put them behind their covers, where they also hold up to three different recipies. Recipies range from easy 2 ingredient pieces to a maximum of 5 piece culinaristic explosions of gastronomy.

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IT-viikko has a short story about Habbo’s path to profitability. It’s in finnish though, but very interesting nevertheless. You can find the figures here in english.

In the beginning, they didn’t want to brand themselves as a game, but more of an “Multi-user application”. Lives got better as they decided to be a game, finally. Another strongpoint of Habbo has always been the very loose restriction on user actions, which has created many kinds of unforeseen uses for their game mechanics. And turned the game more into a play.

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Hi all! This is my new blog about my adventures in the game development industry. I used to blog about it in my personal blog, but it was getting too mixed up with all the other personal blogging… and well, it was in finnish as well. Since the dev industry is so global and many of my co-workers are from abroad as well, it just makes more sense to do all of this in english.

I’ll blog about all things games related, be it traditional board games or more fancier video games. I’ll share reviews, interesting articles and stuff I encounter in daily life within the industry.

I mostly do this for myself, apart from writing game design stuff, I like to write in general, which is why I typically carry around a few notebooks for ideas. Some of that stuff is visible in the background of this page. Still, after Facebook came along, my blogging ground to a standstill and this is one aspect of booting it up again.

Hope you enjoy!