Josh Bycer's Blog
For more than seven years, I have been researching and contributing to the field of game design. These contributions range from QA for professional game productions to writing articles for sites like Gamasutra and Quarter To Three.
With my site Game-Wisdom our goal is to create a centralized source of critical thinking about the game industry for everyone from enthusiasts, game makers and casual fans; to examine the art and science of games. I also do video plays and analysis on my Youtube channel. I also have a Patreon Campaign set up to help support my family and keep things running while I continue to put out content here and on my site.
Member Blogs
For this multi-part piece, we're going to be talking about how to improve playability in games, starting with quality of life features and improvements.
Posted by
Josh Bycer
on Mon, 14 Oct 2019 10:42:00 EDT
in
Despite the growth in the indie space, only a handful of games tend to reach the mainstream market, and for today, we're going to talk about why this focus on only the top games poses a problem for indie developers.
Monster Hunter World's global success came as a surprise last year, and I wanted to talk about how this cult series thrived over the years, to becoming Capcom's bestselling title.
While late to the party, I finally had the time to take a hard look at XCOM 2 and I wanted to share my thoughts on the design and issues I had with this close to perfection take on the genre.
Today's post looks at the growing conversations around accessibility when discussing game design, and how there's another aspect of making titles that can be enjoyed by a wider audience.
Tutorials are often overlooked by designers; especially indie developers, but today's post looks at how onboarding and the new player's experience is a vital part of the development process.
Josh Bycer's Comments
Comment In:
[Blog - 10/14/2019 - 10:42]
I know it 's harsh ...
I know it 's harsh to say 'most ' and 'trash ', since there are a lot of high effort and quality games that never go anywhere we see a lot of postmortems here , but I 'm including all the terrible shovelware and asian porn ports that come out ...
Comment In:
[Blog - 09/13/2019 - 10:47]
My problem with designs that ...
My problem with designs that turn off the core gameplay loop and leave it at that, is that it 's not really making the design better or fixing issues with it. It 's easy to make a game at either extreme of difficulty, but making something amazing for everyone is ...
Comment In:
[Blog - 08/12/2019 - 11:21]
I think marketing and presentation ...
I think marketing and presentation are the two biggies. I know when I spoke with the developer he didn 't spend a lot of time marketing the game it was not covered by any major site or youtuber that I saw. And the presentation doesn 't pop as we saw ...
Comment In:
[Blog - 05/17/2019 - 12:30]
This article makes the same ...
This article makes the same fallacy whenever there are discussions about difficulty in videogames -- accessibility has nothing to do with difficulty. In this situation, accessibility involves outside factors that prevent someone from playing a videogame colorblind, physical disorders, etc . This needs to stop, because its muddying up any ...
Comment In:
[Blog - 03/26/2019 - 10:38]
For me, I would rank ...
For me, I would rank the bosses from best to worse as G2, G3, Super Tyrant, G4, Birkin and then G5. The only reason I liked G2 was that it was the least offensive focused of the fights in my opinion thanks to the use of the crane.
Comment In:
[Blog - 01/22/2019 - 09:47]
I have to get the ...
I have to get the draft to the publisher by March, and then at least 3-6 months from there was the turnaround for the first book.
