The well-made tutorial of Zelda: A Link to the past

In my playthrough of The Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past, I realized how underappreciated the first 45 minutes of the game really are. You may call it tutorial, you may call it starting sequence that leads you into the game: it's the beginning of the story, at which Link wakes up in … Continue reading The well-made tutorial of Zelda: A Link to the past →

Sim City just stands out

SimCity is a fascinating game. Fascinating what it stands for, what it delivered and what doors opened for later games to go through. Released 1989 on Amiga and Macintosh, SimCity is a city building and management simulation built by Maxis. It was ported to numerous platforms, including DOS, Windows, SNES, PC-98, FM-Towns and OS/2. The … Continue reading Sim City just stands out →

In-Game Help in Zelda: A Link to the Past: Game hints in A Link to the Past

One of the things that I've recognized in my latest playthrough of Zelda: A Link to the Past is, that it also has a built-in help system. You might remember that particular design choice not as a hint system, but as the eldest from Kakariko, that you meet early in the game, and then later … Continue reading In-Game Help in Zelda: A Link to the Past: Game hints in A Link to the Past →

No more physical game copies

Sony announce that they don't want to publish any games for their in-market and future consoles after January 2028 anymore. All content for the consoles will then be delivery digitally. That's an interesting move - and perhaps what most investors would describe as a dream come true. If you are the kind of person that … Continue reading No more physical game copies →

What would (more) achievements in Zelda look like?

I have been wondering about why Nintendo haven't implemented a good achievement system to the Switch and the Switch2 consoles, similar to what their primary competitors Microsoft and Sony did for their respective consoles a long time ago. Microsoft with the Xbox 360 has been quite successful integrating that in the emerging online experience. Especially … Continue reading What would (more) achievements in Zelda look like? →

Difficulty sliders don’t work

I've been looking at difficulty settings in games for quite a while now. Different games solve the problem of keeping difficulty entertaining for their players in different ways and clearly there is also a lot of nuance of what difficulty means for games of different genres and different styles and the audiences that game designers … Continue reading Difficulty sliders don’t work →

Revisiting Zelda: A Link to the Past

Zelda: A link to the past is one of my favorite games of all time. I feel in love with it in 1993, when we had an SNES and I was able to borrow the game from a friend. I spent a lot of time with it, because the feeling of being on an adventure … Continue reading Revisiting Zelda: A Link to the Past →

C&C – AI progression over time

When we look at the progression of AI, specifically in the Command and Conquer franchise, we can see that across very few years a lot has happened to make the computer-based opponents more intelligent and more challenging, to better equip them with faster, strategic unit production, tactical attack waves and base building. All such that … Continue reading C&C – AI progression over time →

Game AI: Pathfinding

Looking at the source code for Command & Conquer Tiberian Dawn, pathfinding for units has an interesting algorithm. And that algorithm is, I would consider, fairly well balanced between how intelligent the units should find their paths versus how much compute and memory resources the game had at its disposal, when it was released in … Continue reading Game AI: Pathfinding →

Difficulty in games – and how Breath of the wild does it well

Designing your game for the right difficulty level is a challenge. We've all been at the point where we've played a game that was either too easy or too difficult. And especially in the beginning, when we don't know what to expect from a game and when we haven't grasped all the dynamics and mechanics … Continue reading Difficulty in games – and how Breath of the wild does it well →