Back in the day, Battle Royale games were all the rage. The world of gaming become infatuated with PubG and its step-child Fortnite. Everyone and their grandmother were coming up with new game concepts built around the premise of Last One Standing gameplay. As Nick Cave says, some things we…

If there is one thing that I wish I knew as a high school kid it would be the following. Knowing how to sell your ideas is one of the most important skills in life. By “selling” I mean, being able to convince others that things you have in your…

NOTE: Medium doesn’t display subscripts or superscripts and makes formulas hard to read. You might want to take a look at this text as PDF which is better formatted. In game design, the term matchmaking denotes the process of selecting two or more opponents to take part in a single…

Summer is a time for lighter activities. Instead of delving deeper into the secrets of game design, in today’s text, I want to share with you a simple game that my son Toza and I designed a while ago. I can’t believe that an entire year has passed since we…

Intro One of the most typical tasks in game design is balancing some sort of a progression vector. For example, you might need to come up with a set of values, a number of points that a player needs to collect to advance to the next level. Another example might…

In my previous series of texts, I have been talking extensively about the live service of free-to-play games. Limited-time events have a central position in any live game strategy. In this text, I will focus on practical examples of planning a live event calendar for a year of a typical…

In case you have missed it I have spent the last several weeks talking about the live service of free-to-play games. This text is a condensed version of the previous five longer stories. It was created entirely using ChatGPT. I still recommend reading the longer version, but if you don’t…

Advanced Monetization Features — This text is the fifth and final part of a new series of texts about metagame design and live service monetization of free-to-play games. You can read the previous parts on the following links: Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV. We finally made it to the last…

The Live Events — This text is the fourth part of a new series of texts about metagame design and live service monetization of free-to-play games. You can read the previous parts on the following links: Part I, Part II, and Part III. Layer 3 — limited-time events Limited-time events are the bread and butter of live service. Coming…