George Buckenham's blog
Another game made at the recent Tigjam. Some footage of it is available here: The rules: Make a wall of dice. Stack them overlapping like bricks. Make the top layer a different colour. Each player gets yet another colour of dice. And a spoon. First round! Try to insert your dice into the wall. You're only allowed to touch the dice with your spoon, and you're only allowed to touch the spoon with a…
A jam game involving cards or bits of paper for 3 or more players. Write at least (3 x numbers of players) words describing a person onto the back of cards of bits of paper. Shuffle them, and deal them out face down three to each player. Each player picks one, and discards the rest. Now the group decides on a person to share stories of, and commemorate their life. This is a wake. Raise a toast to…
So last Saturday I was at Rezzed. Amongst playing games at the show and going to the pub, I spent an hour making a card game, then was abruptly yanked on stage to show it to hundreds of people. Which was a bit terrifying, it turns out. So here how the game is played: There are three types of cards : attack, defence and surprise cards. Each player is dealt 2 Attack cards, 2 Defence cards and 1…
So a few weeks ago I made a game! It's pretty good, if I say so myself. Go play/download it here If you're interested, here's the updates I made as it happened Let's tell the story of it's creation first. Back when #7dfps was being discussed on Twitter, I had the idea. As I do when I get an idea for a game, I put it down on a Google Doc called "Terrible Game Ideas". Someday I should write a blog…
Bennett Foddy was bitching about tutorial sections on Twitter, and I wanted to respond but was too lazy to tweet. So, blog: Sometimes tutorial sections are necessary. If it's an explicitly multiplayer competitive game, then you might ultimately need or want a singleplayer section just to teach you the fucking thing before you waste your friend's time. Fighting game practice rooms. The "training"…
"You play a babysitter, you turn up and the baby is made of cardboard. Would you stay? I want games to start asking more ethical questions" -- https://twitter.com/#!/petermolydeux/status/143052751784525824 This is a game me and Alan Hazelden just sketched up at Molyjam London . I was trying to bully him into making a game, and we clicked througha few at random til we came across this, which seemed…
In what I think was the only part of the film that talked about game design[1], Jonathan Blow talked in Indie Game The Movie about how you should make each mechanic you put in have multiple effects, multiple consequences. Anything else is just inefficient. Which I can empathize with, as a game designer who also tends to think in terms of systems. And now I find myself playing Mother 3 again. I've…
This morning, I was in the shower, and I realized to my delight that I'd made a game which involves splitting your attention to multiple different places. It's called A Bastard , and you should probably go play it a little to see how it works before moving on with this post (although it's a two player game, so go find a friend). (You shoot automatically after each movement, the controls remap each…
There's a lot of arguing about story in games recently. There was this , then this , and then this . Each one kicks up a bit of argument, and then later someone come back with another tack. So here's me, butting in. So as I see it, there are two basic ways stories and games can happen together. Games can be used to tell stories. You can tell stories about games. The two can happen at the same…
Some people have asked me for advice on how to get started making videogames, usually in the context of the gamejam I'm organizing. (which makes me so happy -- one of the main reasons I'm organizing them is to get people who haven't made games making games). This is my opinion and not gospel, so if you find something else works better for you, do that instead! You should also check out…