10 More Awesome Indie Dev Links

A while back I wrote an article listing 10 awesome articles I've read and videos I've watched, and I was eager to list some more. Why? Because they're awesome! I tend to read a lot about game development, and have pulled a lot of useful insight from the experiences of others - so it would be silly not to pass that knowledge on!

Game Design

Balancing For Skill (video) - Extra Credits

I really love the Extra Credits video series, and this one in particular is a highlight. It's about balancing the abilities in a game - focusing not on getting the high-level game to be well-balanced, but on creating a game that's equally satisfying for beginners as for expert players. It also deals with making sure that players constantly have reason to improve their skills, rather than settling for the easiest-to-execute abilities. Their video on intentionally-imbalanced systems is also very insightful.

The Puzzle of Designing Puzzles - Toni Sala

Designing puzzles isn't something I do very often. I tend to prefer working on the dynamic, self-generating puzzle-like systems like you see in Greedy Bankers, and that I enjoyed in Triple Town, rather than designed problems with known solutions. This article gives a great reasoning for why players like myself often find designed puzzles unsatisfying, and then goes on to show how great puzzle design can work around these issues. Top stuff.

A Year in Video Games: My Top 5 for 2010

2010 has been a great year for me in both gaming and game development. Being, as I am, perpetually late to any party, rather than list the best things that have been released or developed this year, I'm going to list the top 5 best things I've discovered.

Merry Christmas, a happy new year, and I hope you all discover something cool too!

5. Consolevania/VideoGaiden

I always have a "thing I'm watching when I should be going to sleep," and in January and February of this year, it was low-budget game review show Consolevania (and its BBC counterpart VideoGaiden). I love games criticism and it's creators, Glaswegians Ryan MacLeod and Rab Florence, are great fun to watch. It's got a very edgy sense of humour, so it's not for the easily offended, but these guys really know what they're talking about.

It goes back to 2004, and fizzled out around 2008, but if you enjoy looking back at cool stuff you might have missed when you were following the hype, this might pick up a few surprises.

Rab and Ryan are also pretty knowledgeable about their subject, as this opinion piece on violence in games shows, bucking the traditional gamers' view on the subject.