The Quixotic Engineer

Clash Royale has been my go-to phone game lately. I didn’t pay it much attention when it launched early last year; I just assumed it was Supercell’s latest entry in the “shouting man icon” mobile game genre. But it kept popping it when I was searching for new deckbuilding games to play, so I decided to give it a shot.

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On November 15^th, I’ll be speaking about combat design and AI in Uncharted 4 at the Montreal International Game Summit. My talk explores how we navigated the extremes of combat design philosophy (tightly authored vs fully systems-driven) throughout Uncharted 4‘s development, and how we found our best results with a hybrid approach.

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“RNG gets your emotions really high and really low. It makes you really feel. Sometimes when I play a game I’m just going through the motions and I’m not getting those highs and lows, but in Hearthstone I get them all the time. It makes me want to come back and play more.”

– Mike Donais, Hearthstone senior designer

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Austin’s independent games collective Juegos Rancheros hosted another game jam this summer, and this year the theme was “mystic western”.

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For the last few months I’ve enjoyed following along with Liz England’s Game Design Book Club. Though I’ve only been participating intermittently, it’s been really valuable as motivation to read books that are often cited and highly praised in game development circles. It has also pushed me to explore certain topics that I may not have chosen on my own.

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