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Recommended posts, 2017-2025
November 26, 2025November 26, 2025 Game talk
It’s been over five years since the last time I gathered up recommended posts in one place and added them to the menu above. I figured I was due.

As usual this will include talks and interviews as well as articles. Just think of it as “my take on what the best stuff to look at on the site is.”

Previous collections of recommended posts can be found under the Blog heading on the menu bar or at these links:
- Recommended posts 1998-2012
- Recommended posts 2012-2017
Game design overviews

All of these posts are about game design in general and tend to cover big swaths of similar territory.
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Read More Recommended posts, 2017-2025
Looking back at a pandemic simulator
November 16, 2025November 17, 2025 Game talk, Gamemaking

It’s been six years now since the early days of the Covid pandemic. People who were paying super close attention started hearing rumors about something going on in China towards the end of 2019 — my earliest posts about it on Facebook were from November that year.

Even at the time, people were utterly clueless about the mathematics of how a highly infectious virus spread. I remember spending hours writing posts on various different social media sites explaining that the Infection Fatality Rates and the R value were showing that we could be looking at millions dead. People didn’t tend to believe me:
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Game design is simple, actually
November 3, 2025November 3, 2025 Game talk
10 Comments

So, let’s just walk through the whole thing, end to end. Here’s a twelve-step program for understanding game design.

One: Fun

There are a lot of things people call “fun.” But most of them are not useful for getting better at making games, which is usually why people read articles like this. The fun of a bit of confetti exploding in front of you, and the fun of excruciating pain and risk to life and limb as you free climb a cliff are just not usefully paired together.
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Read More Game design is simple, actually
Stars Reach visual upgrades
October 29, 2025November 3, 2025 Game talk, Gamemaking
2 Comments

For months now, we have been working on a big overhaul to the visuals in Stars Reach. This has involved redoing most of the shaders in the entire game, and going back and retouching every asset. We started by redoing all the plant life and flora, and we have hundreds of those assets that had to be redone.

Further, they all need to grow, change in response to seasons, be able to catch fire and burn, freeze, shed leaves and die, and so on. We don’t pre-design our biomes; we derive them on the fly from the simulation based on the environmental conditions. The right plants grow in the right places based on the temperature and the humidity and the soil types. (Yes, we even have a dozen soil types).
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New stuff on the site
October 25, 2025October 25, 2025 Game talk, Misc

I really have been neglecting the blog lately. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t been adding content to the site all along. I figured it might not hurt to do a little summary of items that have been added over the last year and a half or more. The last talk I posted up was my GDC talk from 2024!

So, here’s a bit of a catalog…

For folks who are interested in the history of Ultima Online, I finally gathered up the various snippets I have posted about why exactly the original ecology system didn’t survive to release. There’s a theory out there that it happened because players were like locusts and killed everything and caused it to collapse, and that’s not quite correct. Players were like locusts. But the ecology system came out of the game for economic reasons and for performance reasons. So if you’re curious, you can read the answer to “did players destroy the UO ecology?” here.
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Read More New stuff on the site

Recommended posts, 2017-2025

Game design overviews

Looking back at a pandemic simulator

Game design is simple, actually

One: Fun

Stars Reach visual upgrades

New stuff on the site

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Game design overviews

One: Fun

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