Some handy links

I've done some reading about game design and game publishing – and I thought I'd share a couple of the more interesting link before working my way up towards actual content.

A couple of years ago a man called Ian Schreiber ran a course talking about game design – it was mainly computer game focused – but since he encouraged paper prototyping the majority of the lesson were really useful.  It ran for twenty sessions – was hard work with two sessions a week – but I found it really useful.  If nothing else it really taught me the lesson that Dr Geof has been trying to teach by example for ages – Just Get On With It.

The pages are still up there – so you can work your way through them at game design concepts..

A year later he did another course – focusing on game balance.  This I found less useful because it seemed much more about computer games – and because the maths in at least one of the posts scared me.  I want to come back to it and go back over it again because I don't think I gave it the time it deserved.  It can be found over here at game balance concepts.

I've also found an interesting blog by the man behind the now defunct Riever games.  There's a lot of posts there about his problems getting his board game company working – before it ultimately folds.  Generally I think it's worth reading for anybody interested in this but there were two posts I felt especially interesting on the subject on money and publishing.

This post talks a lot about the cost of publishing – and specifically the difference between hobby publishing and business publishing or going between 50 to 100 copies to the thousands of copies.  He also provides actual rough numbers backed by experience on how much publishing costs - which is pretty much solid gold information as far as I'm concerned.  Large scale in this post and small scale in this post.

He also does a very interesting – looking back – what I did wrong post and that's really helpful.  Over here.

You might think it odd to take the financial advice from a man who failed –but to me it's better to learn from him and it's does seems sensible, reasonable and the frankly the best information I've found.