With the 2015 regular season well underway, I thought it would be nice to finally write something on what I’ve been thinking about a lot regarding the NFL’s post-season. From a game design point of view, there is one thing that seems illogical to me.
Also, the league has been contemplating the addition of an extra wild card slot in each conference. Which brings me to the intention of this article.
DigIt is a game for mobile phones I made during the Game Design & Development course at the Utrecht School of the Arts. Before we actually made a working version, I had already used the game concept by itself to apply for that course. The finished game was well received and very much complete, but after the project was officially over I saw some opportunities to improve the game even further. That’s what this article is about.
So, before you continue, please take a look in my portfolio to see how DigIt works exactly. It’s been a while since we completed DigIt, but I thought the design notes I made then (while playing the game on my Nokia 7610) would make for an interesting article about hands-on game design. We’ll start off with the one change to the game mechanics and then review the interface to better support gameplay.
On Independence Day, former colleague and game design intern at W!Games, Adriaan de Jongh, posted an interesting article about what he discovered were common game development pitfalls. When I read it the first time, I was impressed. Another colleague, a producer, also responded very positively to Adriaan’s post. When I took a look at it a second time, to see if I could come up with something he missed, I decided to write something about his article.
Now, Adriaan is still attending the same school as I went to, the Utrecht School of the Arts, which is why I was pleasantly surprised by his in depth observations on game development. And this is not just making obvious remarks, it really shows that Adriaan experienced these pitfalls first hand and that he has learned from them. Given that he has come to these conclusions so early in his career, and based on my collaboration with him at W!Games, I’m sure that Adriaan will come a long way in the industry.