Bruno Dias is a game designer and writer. Previous credits include Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, Neo Cab, and Pathologic 2.
People writing about blockchain technology are usually proponents or boosters of the technology, or at least “neutral parties.” This means that they engage in “technological realism,” in which they describe the tech without contextualizing why it is the way it is and what it’s really for. Meanwhile, people writing critically about the crypto space often lack any technical grounding on how the…
In a live game, adding more and more powerful items tends to lead to the overall power level of the game to slowly creep up, eventually breaking the game’s original design assumptions. Different games have approached this problem in different ways over the years. It’s a somewhat cursed problem – holistic solutions come with their own set of problems, and mitigating the problem requires a constant…
Whether your game surfaces its numbers to the player or not, odds are it has underlying systems that rely on them, and you use functions to determine how those numbers affect each other. In other words, a mathematical function is usually at the core of the answer to a bunch of frequent game design questions.
This year, I took some time to better articulate some criticisms of GDC that I've hinted at on Twitter and elsewhere.
At the root of all of GDC's problems is the profit motive.
GDC relies heavily on unpaid and underpaid labor from attendees, and that's obviously terrible.
Hosting GDC in San Francisco highlights where UBM's priorities lie. Spoilers: it's not with devs.
How GDC's byzantine system of expo and conference passes betrays the stated purpose of the conference.
GDC uses its "advocacy" category not to promote social movements, but to contain and coopt them.
Last year, I wrote for Dim Bulb games’ Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, which came out this Wednesday (February 28th). It’s a narrative game built as an anthology, in which you travel the continental United States, carrying stories across the land. It’s massive; there are over 200 “vignettes” (small stories you collect as you cross the land), of which I wrote about 30, and sixteen major…