Guest Talk: Game Design at Otto von Guericke University
I gave a guest talk at the Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg as part of Dr. Maria Freese’s Applied Game Design course. The talk was titled “Game design & development from a practical perspective” — 45 minutes of presentation followed by 45 minutes of Q&A.
It is hard to condense years of tacit knowledge into broadly applicable insight, so I just focused on a few very simple heuristics that will result in something decent. I have also noticed again that so much of what I find actually insightful and practical in my game design is incentives, economics and behavioural psychology. The nuts and bolts of the craft is what you practice when you implement and is different for each project, but the abstract thinking and frameworks I mostly get from different more developed disciplines.