You Licensed It, You Did Not Buy It
I remember sitting in a dark room three years ago, staring at a “Purchase Complete” screen for an indie title I’d been eyeing for months, only to watch a server shutdown notice pop up a week later. It wasn’t just a bummer; it was a realization that the math of our hobby is fundamentally broken.…
Buy to Play and Where the Money Actually Comes From
Everyone loves to talk about the “fairness” of a pricing model, but most people miss the actual conversation happening under the hood. They treat it like a math problem—comparing subscription fees to microtransactions—when it’s actually a question of intent. When I’m looking at how buy to play compares to the endless nickel-and-diming of a free-to-play…
Sound Tells Players Things the Screen Cannot
I remember sitting in a dark room at 3:00 AM, staring at a bug report for my own prototype that made no sense until I finally turned the monitor off. I was chasing a logic error in the code, but the real problem was that I hadn’t realized how sound design carries information in a…
Settings Menus Are Design, Not Plumbing
I remember sitting in a dark room at 3:00 AM, staring at my own build, trying to figure out why my playtesters were spending ten minutes just trying to equip a basic sword. It wasn’t a bug in the code; it was a failure in the logic. Most people think UI design is about making…