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State of the Blog

When was the last time I wrote something in this blog? It was a while ago. Hmm… Let me check.

Yikes! It was over a year ago! That’s probably the longest gap ever in the history of this blog. What happened? And most importantly for the two of you still reading, what’s going to happen over here?

Subterfuge happened mostly. It was a long project that ran much longer than we expected. This last year I was focused on getting Subterfuge out the door. The little bit of writing energy I had went into writing for the Subterfuge development blog.

For those of you who missed it, here are some of the highlights of the stuff I wrote focused on game design. Also check it all out because Ron wrote a bunch of good stuff as well:

  • A Board Game At Heart. Where I explain how Subterfuge is more like a board game without any of the physical manifestations of a physical board game.
  • Luck in Subterfuge. Applying one of my favorite topics to Subterfuge.
  • Balancing Different Paths to Victory. Balancing a competitive, multiplayer game was tricky and new for me. Lots of lessons learned.
  • Emergent Depth. Why simplicity and depth are not mutually exclusive.
  • Depth-First Design. More on how we first designed Subterfuge for depth.
  • Gaming the Game. The pains of a multiplayer, competitive game. And that was even before launch!
  • Cycling and Subterfuge. One of the least popular posts, but one of my favorites, highlighting how Subterfuge and road cycling have several similar dynamics.

OK, so I was busy. You get it. What’s going to happen over here in the future? To be honest, it wasn’t an easy decision.

I considered stopping writing new entries in the blog and just leaving it up as an archive. Interesting game design conversations happen over at Twitter fairly frequently and so I have a reduced impulse to write here. Unfortunately those conversations are a) hard to follow b) quickly lost. So if what I write gets split up in a bunch of small tweets, it would be an overall loss.

At the other extreme, I considered getting back on a regular schedule and writing one article every week while back in the days of #idevblogaday. It’s tempting, but I didn’t like the pressure to have something written by a particular day. Nor did I like to feel that I had to come up with a significant, polished article.

So instead I’ll take a middle road: I’ll write relatively short posts in a relatively frequent schedule. How’s that for vague? 🙂

As for the content of the posts, it will all be centered around game design (probably not much pure programming anymore) and hopefully cover all the phases of my next project. I’m also curious about possibly doing some streaming, but I have to find some content that fits well with that medium.

If you have some topics you’d like me to cover, make sure to let me know on the comments or on Twitter.

Happy 2016 everybody!

  1. Good to see you back! I was just thinking about writing you to ask if there was going to be a “best board games of 2015” edition. 🙂

    (Happy new year!)

    Looking forward to it. Glad to see you’ll be updating, even if briefly.

    • Thanks! I won’t do a best board games of 2015 because I haven’t played that many new board games this year. I think I will do a post about my shifting tastes in games and why I’m replaying old games instead of always seeking new ones though.

  2. Oh cool looking forward for more post from your side. I mostly enjoyed your TDD articles, that’s why I found this blog btw.

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