Learning Game Design™

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!