Gamer By Design

One of the things that I loved about my work on Eon Altar is it taught me a lot of other skills and brought to me many different experiences that I didn't really get to experience at a larger com...

http://talarian.blogspot.com/2018/02/developer-tales-aggressively-moderating.html

I'm starting a new job tomorrow, and am no longer the lead programmer for Eon Altar. For those who follow me on Twitter, this won't come as a surprise, but given I've been semi-documenting my ind...

http://talarian.blogspot.com/2017/11/indiedev-looking-back-and-moving-forward.html

So, that happened. I'll be honest in that I definitely wasn't expecting Blizzard to actually work on a Vanilla server, given the sheer engineering difficulties . I'm also not convinced still that...

http://talarian.blogspot.com/2017/11/how-might-blizzard-engineer-wow-classic.html

One of the earliest blog posts I wrote was on leveling and other advancement systems . And with it comes a fairly uncontroversial statement: > Leveling, among other advancement schemes, is...

http://talarian.blogspot.com/2017/09/wowahots-infinite-progress-bars-gear.html

One of the things that makes Alliance: Heroes of the Spire so deep is the serious amount of gear customization you can do. Six gear slots, with set bonuses for having matching pieces that can ser...

http://talarian.blogspot.com/2017/07/alliancehots-gear-set-bonuses.html

Last week I chatted about the start of Eon Altar's save system , why it didn't work, and how we fixed it. This week I'll go in-depth about Eon Altar's Checkpoint Save system.  Fast forward nea...

http://talarian.blogspot.com/2017/07/indiedev-checkpoint-saves-ugh-why-and.html

Persistence is possibly one of the largest drivers of repeated and extended interaction a game can have. RPGs persist campaign data between sessions; puzzle games persist how far you've been in t...

http://talarian.blogspot.com/2017/06/indiedev-nitty-gritty-on-save-files.html

Alliance: Heroes of the Spire--like many RPG-derived systems--has a number of statistic on each hero, and they're not really explained in-game. I've had the luck to chat with the developers (they...

http://talarian.blogspot.com/2017/05/alliancehots-stats-and-stat.html

I've been playing a lot of Alliance: Heroes of the Spire the past couple of months. It's a nifty Summoners War clone made by a North American company, which has been pretty cool because we get to...

http://talarian.blogspot.com/2017/04/alliancehots-theorycrafting-critical.html

7.2 (re)introduced the concept of Legion Invasions, and all-in-all the one that I did was enjoyable enough. A smattering of world quests in phased zones that gives the impression the Legion is le...

http://talarian.blogspot.com/2017/04/wow-invading-on-schedule.html

I've rather enjoyed Civilization VI for the most part. There's a few things here and there that are a little annoying, or just things I have to get used to, but overall I quite like a lot of the ...

http://talarian.blogspot.com/2016/12/civvi-warmongering-over-ages.html

Last weekend I was up in Vancouver hanging with some of my friends and coworkers. Some of these friends I've known literally since high school, and some of us work tightly together to create a ga...

http://talarian.blogspot.com/2016/12/innocence-and-game-development.html

Rohan at Blessing of Kings had a good post recently on what happens when you start piling on extra rules onto a system until they start contradicting each other. In his example, the personal loo...

http://talarian.blogspot.com/2016/11/wow-when-is-upgrade-not-upgrade.html

So I've been away from my blog for a while. We've been super busy with Eon Altar, including PAX West, shipping Episode 2, and I gave a talk at PAX DEV, which was super awesome (and well received)...

http://talarian.blogspot.com/2016/10/pax-dev-2016-talk-mobile-enhanced.html

Okay, so it's been like 2 months since I've done a blog post, and it's not for the lack of wanting so much as the lack of time. But let's talk about the launch of Eon Altar, and where we're at to...

http://talarian.blogspot.com/2016/08/indiedev-aftermath-of-launching-our-game.html

Okay, so you're playing Pokémon GO, and the game just throws you into the deep end of the pool with almost no explanations, and the UI is basically a whole lot of symbols that could mean just ab...

http://talarian.blogspot.com/2016/07/5-beginner-pokemon-go-tips.html

So for folks who've been following my blog, I've been doing the indie dev thing for nearly 2 years now--will be 2 years as of July 1st. Eon Altar has been my baby, and what a baby it's been! ...

http://talarian.blogspot.com/2016/06/indiedev-my-game-eon-altar-gets-release.html

Welcome to Part 2 of my posts on Eon Altar's combat design. You can find Part 1 here . Today I'll be talking about the myriad combat loops that we've built into the game and talk about the design...

http://talarian.blogspot.com/2016/05/indiedev-eon-altars-combat-loop-and.html

Eon Altar's combat systems have been iterated on over the past 2 years pretty significantly, but the core tenets have stayed pretty constant. When we first set out to make this version of Eon Alt...

http://talarian.blogspot.com/2016/05/indiedev-eon-altars-team-turn-based.html

I'm still playing FFRK, over a year after I started, which makes this the longest I've ever played a mobile game pretty well ever. The next closest would've been Puzzles and Dragons at 270 days. ...

http://talarian.blogspot.com/2016/05/ffrk-cagnazzo-u-and-relic-reckoning.html

Recently, Watcher AKA Ion Hazzikostas--a designer on World of Warcraft--crafted an illuminating forum post about the pitfalls of manual player feedback from an extremely diverse player base. A...

http://talarian.blogspot.com/2016/05/gamedevwow-player-feedback-forums.html

I love new Minecraft worlds. That feeling of limitless possibility: new machines to build, new landscapes to explore, new ideas to try. So for 1.9 I've reset my Minecraft server. My first goal ...

http://talarian.blogspot.com/2016/05/that-new-minecraft-server-smell.html

PAX East 2016 was a total blast. I could talk about how so many people told us Eon Altar was unique, or I could talk about how busy we were, or I could talk about the hiccups we ran into during s...

http://talarian.blogspot.com/2016/04/indiedev-how-three-strangers-won-pax.html

Just a quick update post, Eon Altar will have a booth with the Indie Megabooth for PAX East this year. I'll be headed out with the band to help man the booth, which is a super fun time. This wil...

http://talarian.blogspot.com/2016/04/indiedev-pax-east-bound-marketing-and.html

Wilhelm over at TAGN had a great post the other day on Blizzard's shutdown of the Nostalrius Classic WoW private servers, talking about the potential market and reasons why or why Blizzard might...

http://talarian.blogspot.com/2016/04/wow-classic-blizzard-run-servers-code.html