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Shift to Infrequent Updates
Posted on | April 16, 2009 | No Comments
One of the original goals I had while developing GeekStack would be that I would make my actions public as I made progress. This worked when I was doing basic things like setting up the website, planning, researching, etc. I’ve transitioned to a different mode now that’s not as suitable to blogging.
Over the last few months since I decided that GeekStack would definitely be a game, I decided to learn how to make games. I found tons of resources across the net but two stood out in particular. First was David Sirlin‘s website. I found his great article on designing the game Kongai and found a wealth of resources on his site.
The other, much larger resource was on the Magic the Gathering website. They have years worth of columns about designing and developing the game, hundreds in total. They were written by the people that make the most successful trading card game and one of the most successful games in history, so I felt the need to read it. All of it. Every last article. Hundreds of thousands of words.
I ended up learning a ton about making games. There’s a wealth of information there but it’s not laid out to be educational. Many of the best nuggets were hidden in seemingly unimportant articles, or were important lessons that were driven home by repetition over several years. Obviously the best way to get a game design education is to design games for years, but reading several years of a running diary by the people who do it for a living is a decent substitute.
Many thanks to David Sirlin, Mark Rosewater, Aaron Forsyth, Devin Lowe, and others from MtG for sharing their experiences. You taught me well but reading all your work was such an intimidating task that I shut down my blogging (and much else) in order to get through all of it in a reasonable time.
The other thing keeping me from blogging is the nature of the work I’m doing now and when I’m doing it. I’m writing the software for the playable web-version so I can have a larger group of people for playtesting. I’m building a platform I can use to quickly iterate over game ideas so I need to make it very general and flexible. Unfortunately this means that there’s not going to be any game related news for a while. The other problem is that while I do have steady, consistent time to work on the site, it’s 30 minutes on the train, twice a day. Five hours a week with no continuous stretches to build up momentum (and no internet). This means I have to focus on exactly what’s most important and blogging about non-visible progress usually doesn’t cut it.
So the short summary is that I’m still here and still working, but there will be fewer blog posts. I’ll make sure to give at least a monthly status update, plus special ones when there’s juicy progress to report. So stay tuned, I’m still here even though I’ll be running quieter for a while.
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