Game Theory - Marginal Advantage
interactive.usc.edu
interactive.usc.edu
FYI, the author, Sean Plott, is better known as Day[9], one of the top-ranked Starcraft players in the United States. Also a mathematician, as it turns out. His podcasts on the SCII beta are really insightful.
There's lots of fluffy, high level stuff at one end of the spectrum and then lots of stuff that discusses the details of specific well trodden genres ad nauseum.
There's not so much that's of direct use when you sit down and try and design an orginal type of game by applying principals like this it seems to me.
I don't know how much of that is because the people with such insight haven't written it down, or they really just do it by feel and trial and error rather than by applying easy to describe techniques.
Does anyone have any other recommendations like this?
Costikyan writes a lot of good stuff. http://playthisthing.com/randomness-blight-or-bane is a great example, and you can find some other writings of his in various archives. PTT itself has him (and a few other contributors of varying flavors) writing on new (indie, board, etc.) games.
Soren Johnson (Lead designer on Civ4) had a series going at http://www.designer-notes.com/, but hasn't appeared to have posted recently. http://www.designer-notes.com/?p=132 is a good example, discussing how easily players can perceive an AI to be "cheating".
Brenda Braithwaite (Wizardry series, Train) has a similar, seemingly modestly defunct blog that is worth reading regardless.
Edmund McMillen of Super Meatboy posted about difficulty: http://supermeatboy.com/13/Why_am_I_so____hard_/. There's a similar post somewhere on the blog.
Gama Sutra occasionally has useful things, but you need to filter a lot.
Without endorsing it overly, Less Talk More Rock (http://boingboing.net/features/morerock.html) is worth consideration. (For balance, http://sinisterdesign.net/?p=457).
When sitting down to prototype a game I usually find the first iteration turns out to not have the fun gameplay you had imagined at all. It's then a matter of how to think about the problem and what things you should try in attmpet to make it fun and challenging. Perhaps you could identify that the idea just stinks to being with..
Having not worked along side an experienced game designer I'm always curious as to whether they know of ideas and tools to apply that aren't commonly known or whether it is just instinct.
I feel like there must be a large catalogue of game design rules of thumb in the heads of successful designers that have not been written down and I'd love to know them :)
I'd disagree that this is the ideal. Personally, I enjoy games that mix luck and skill. Take Cribbage, for example-- the weaker player will still win about 45% of the time, by virtue of having been dealt better cards-- which is why tournaments consist of a number of games, to even out the luck.
I think it's great if weaker players can defeat stronger players, on occasion. It helps keep the game interesting for everybody.
Put another way: when I play chess with my children, I have to handicap myself-- otherwise, they'd lose every time, and quickly lose interest. When I play cribbage with them, they still win often enough to keep things interesting.
From this, you can take the idea that any game can be adapted for players of unequal strategic strength simply by adding chance components to it, or replacing some choice points with chance. What if, in Chess for example, you had to roll a die at the beginning of your turn to find out the maximum number of squares any of your pieces could move that turn? Or if, upon a bad roll, your opponent got to decide which of your pieces you must move?