I’ve been playing tabletop roleplaying games for a little over a decade now. They’ve phased in and out of my life, but for the past two years, I’ve been pretty consistently playing and running campaigns. Naturally, this affects the way I think about games.

This week we’ll be exploring some narrative design issues I’ve found and solved for Clysmoids. We’ll be touching on how to decenter violence from games, the dissonance between tone and gameplay, and how to make things click.

It’s the 20th edition of this newsletter, isn’t that crazy? For the past week, I was obsessed with map making. It has not been great for productivity and the plans I made regarding all the other projects I was working on. So I want to talk about how I use hyperfixation as a tool and what the drawbacks are.

Spring is approaching and that means love is in the air. For this week’s edition, I will share my first love of making games. Before I was a narrative designer, before I was a technical artist, before I was a Unity developer and before I was a game artist; I was a level designer at heart. Sort of… let’s get into it!

We’re doing something a little different today. I want to do a little analysis on one of my favorite games of all time. In the process, we’ll look at the legacy baggage of older games, Advance Wars and a prototype I made a thousand years ago.