Jay McGavren's Journal

2023-02-22

Game Design Analysis - Roadwarden

Hopefully you’ve seen my game design analysis of Subnautica: Below Zero. Here’s another, for Roadwarden. It’s an important game to me, as I hope to publish a text adventure myself at some point.

I wrote this while playing, and some of it reflects the mechanics I hoped the game had, rather than what it actually has. No disparagement is intended; this is a rock-solid game and its author’s choices were likely necessary and correct, grounded in reality rather than my fantasy of the perfect game.

[Edit: I shared this post with Aureus, the game’s creator, and he graciously answered a ton of my questions himself! Check out the interview in this follow-up post!]

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2022-09-14

Subnautica Below Zero Game Design Analysis

Ever since I became serious about game development, I’ve been picking games I play apart as I go. Dissecting the controls, the menus, the progression gating. Subnautica: Below Zero is my latest obsession. Here’s a catalog of things I noted as I played.

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2022-02-13

Advice for New Developers

I had a new reader message me today, and I think my reply could help other beginning coders as well (whether in Ruby, Go, or any other language). So I thought I’d share it here.

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2020-10-31

My Ruby Notes from 2006

A coworker found her notes from very, very early in her Ruby studies and shared them with the team. I was certain I had some as well, but couldn’t find them at the time. I just stumbled across them today.

The file date (yeah, I kept these in a .txt file) was from March 27, 2006. So this was a few months after the original demo of Rails - that was what made me finally hop on the Ruby bandwagon.

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2020-04-10

Unity Cheat Sheet

I’ve been reading Unity in Action: Multiplatform Game Development in C# by Joseph Hocking in my spare time. Like most of the Unity resources out there, it’s great as a tutorial, less so as a reference book.

I keep remembering that I saw how to do a thing somewhere in the book, and flipping back and forth trying to find it again. This is true for even the most basic stuff, like instantiating a prefab or accessing components of a GameObject. And then there’s additional stuff I learned in the docs and on forums. I needed a place I could refer back to for a quick refresher on all this.

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