The Arcade Artificer
JB OgerReceive regular in-depth game design analysis. Discover how the best games entertain their players and learn to do the same.
| Platform |  | Pricing | Only free issues | Publishes | Weekly |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Issues | 31 | Founded | 4 years ago | Last Issue | 5 months ago |
| Active | |||||
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jboger.substack.comLatest Issues
Games as Promises
I hesitated to write this because advice is cheap. Who wants to hear success lessons from creators who don’t have any success themselves? Now that Drop Duchy is out and doing well, I can confidently share the one principle that guided every...
No Scarcity, No Strategy
Drop Duchy used to be boring. Placing tiles earned you resources and units, but the loop didn’t hook. I tried to fix it by piling on more choices (a crime against design elegance), but it still wasn’t engaging. Then I came across a blog pos...
The Road From Reveal To Selling 100k Units
Hello and welcome back to this now infrequent newsletter, where I promise to write about things, and then it never happens because I’m already overloaded by work. This post is a follow-up to the previous one, “How I Started An Indie Studio,...
How I Started An Indie Studio
Fi-na-lly!
Finally, I can talk to you about the game I've been working on for the last year and a half: Drop Duchy, a hybrid roguelite mixing various recognizable influences into an original formula (trailer here). It has just been announc...
Intro to Systemic Design
Here’s a fun thought experiment: Take any successful game from 10 or 20 years ago and try to assess its chance of success if it were released on today’s market.
As I wrote in my last article about Skull & Bones (which was secretly more abo...
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Authors
The writers behind this newsletter.
Hi! I'm a game director with 7 years of experience in the AAA industry and I write about the design of video & board games.
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