(You'll probably want to read parts one, two, three, four, five and six before starting this).Elements are an RPG design trope: but appear initially to be a useful one. There are well designed games which have a huge, nay, exhaustive list of different element types: fire, cold, metal, grass, wood amidst the 17 different types that the Pokemon series has featured over the years. Angband has ‘about’ 15 different elements, from the obvious, to mysterious ...

The smudged schizophrenic bird's nest of a graph to the left (click here to download a hi res copy) is the Graphviz output of a technology tree that I've been building. I'm in the early stages of designing a Civilization like game that incorporates a whole lot of my thinking around invention and progress, and I'm doing so in the same data-driven design methodology that I've used so successfully in Unangband, which is to come ...

Feel free to carefully peruse the publicity shot of Halo Wars to the left. Then notice the jarring cliche of laser beams fired with discrete bolts, as opposed to a beam connecting the firer to the target that hits virtually instantaneously.I blame Star Wars and the rubbish Industrial Light & Magic special effects for starting this - a movement that crescendoed in the original Transformers movie which features a long shot of a metropolis at ...