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Author Archives: Adam M. Smith

Game Design as a Science

By Adam M. Smith | Published: July 30, 2009

In my recent PhD thesis proposal I described how I am going to tackle game design as a new domain for automated discovery.  A key piece of this is figuring out game design might be explained as the kind of knowledge-seeking effort you might expect from science or mathematics.  With successful systems performing discovery (such […]

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Game Designers Design Players Too

By Adam M. Smith | Published: June 18, 2009

I’ve got a whole philosophy of game design I’m sitting on here, but today I’d like to share just one little provocative tidbit: game designers design players too. Imagine you thinking through the design of some cute little dungeon crawl.  You are going to have caverns connected by twisty passages, a hero/jerk who is capable […]

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You Have To Mine The Ore

By Adam M. Smith | Published: June 16, 2009

Here’s a nice, simple game prototype that explores the core movement, inventory, and timing mechanics of Motherload that took just 10 minutes to design and 60 minutes to program using our new design tool.  Rather, this is the half of a nice, simple game prototype that supports human play testing, but there is more to […]

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