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Early Access: 100 Games That Every Designer Should Play

🕑 Added 2024-05-15 13:27:20 +0000 UTC

Comments

Mario N.

It lasts two hours but I could have seen another two! Super well narrated and with good rythm. Congrats! I encourage you to do another 100 but not waiting another 10 years :P

Jonas Gawe

Mark, I'm more than happy to gush about how brilliantly Yakuza brings 'Kabukicho' to life in fictional video game format (and to help you with Japanaese pronounciantions!) Love the video btw, there's some classics in here I've never taken the time to play and would like to

Mr Jamie Le Fevre

There - finished it. What a wonderful 2 and a bit hours that was. So good to see glimpses of familiar, under-celebrated games as well as focusses on them too. Each point and each game was unarguable and well contexted (that's not really a word is it?). Well worth the huge effort of putting this together Mark. Thank you as ever.

Jeremiah Franczyk

Loved the list! Appreciate all the effort that must have gone into it. It was a very enjoyable 2+ hours, and many of the games would be on my own personal top 100 game design lessons list. Wanted to share one (of the few!) design lessons you didn't mention that stuck with me: Hearthstone Battlegrounds/DOTA Auto Chess: The power of micro choices - lots of moment by moment choices lead to highly engaging gameplay for the player. In Battlegrounds, players choose their initial hero, who has a unique ability. They choose whether and when to buy units in the shop, which units to buy, which synergistic strategies to pursue, when to level that shop for stronger units, and when to sell units for gold in order to buy new units. The game mode is mostly about these choices, and the high density of choices keep players engaged by never giving them a chance to be bored. Make some choices, get a result in the auto-battle combat section. Choice, result. Choice, result. Many highly engaging games use the power of micro choices and offer high choice density - think here of Balatro or Vampire Survivors - but I think autobattlers are a good poster child for the paradigm because the choices take center stage - the units literally fight amongst themselves!

Oliver Villar

I'll have to set some time aside for this one... but I'm sure it will be worth it!! :D

Stephen Dowling

That was a blast! A really interesting list and plenty to chew over. It's made me want to play a few games that I'd previously skirted around!

Mr Jamie Le Fevre

Absolutely excellent, Mark, a really enjoyable list and I'm only an hour in. What joy.

Willhart

I have played a ton of Clicker / Idle games, and the best one imo is the "The First Alkahistorian" trilogy. They are based on converting basic elements into other elements and making more and less stable feedback loops. You will unlock a nerwork of nodes all flowing material between each other. Kinda like a puzzle game. There is some story on the background, and the graphics are basic, but the ideas behind it are really fun to discover. The third (and currently the last) one especially took things to a whole another level, with each "branch" you unlock giving you like a tree of further tools, as well as ways to upgrade your old nodes.

Game Maker's Toolkit

Ah! I missed that entirely - thanks, I've put a correction in the video description.

Benoit Desnoyers

Spaceteams, game #60, is still on iOS (at least here in NA). However, it is now listed under its original creator, Henry Smith. It's been quietly updated throughout the years to offer more languages, more features and better network code. There's even a version aimed at learning English and French as second languages and an AppleTV version!