Today I am a professor at Miami Dade College in a new program called MAGIC (Miami Animation & Gaming International Complex). This spring will mark the first time our students will pitch capstone projects and I recently gave a lecture on creating game design documentation as part of their pitch. If a student had me
Author: mmittner
What Makes a Good Game Designer?
I’m between jobs right now, looking for the right fit. Consequently I’ve been taking a few design tests. On the last test I took there was a section devoted to game design philosophy. Questions like, “What is game design?” or “Where does design fit in a game development pipeline?” so on and so forth. One
Another Blog
Until recently I was not allowed to post to my blog by a very strict contract with Shiver Entertainment. However that has all changed recently. I am going to pick up writing here again, however I have been asked to write for another blog called I’m a Social Gamer. The content will primarily be about
My Favorite iPad Game: Crimson Steam Pirates
I didn’t grow up playing D&D, and while I am familiar with all the concepts and a huge fan of RPGs I only recently got into it. My roommate Ross loves Paizo Pathfinder and I am now participating in two campaigns. One is being DMed by Ross every couple weeks at our place, and the
Continue reading My Favorite iPad Game: Crimson Steam Pirates
Moving Forward with Web
After paper prototype testing I’ve decided to move forward with Web (I’m going to come up with a better working title soon). Given the complexity of testing with paper prototypes it has become apparent to me that this is a game best suited for digital. This revelation isn’t really anything of the sort, but one
Teaching Video Game Design
I spent the last nine weeks teaching video game design for Galileo Learning. It’s a summer camp in the bay area; sort of like summer school in that there are classes and kids have a major they attend. Each week I taught a class of around 16 kids either an introduction to video game design
New Interfaces in Radiology
I’ve said before that I consider myself a generalist. I don’t limit my design ideas to games. So, today I would like to talk about Radiology. During my last semester at Carnegie Mellon I was fortunate enough to get my hands on a zSpace. I ended up attending zCon 2013 and seeing all the cool
Trimming Down the One Page Design Doc
I have been working on trying to cut down the design of Web. Obviously features will need to be cut, but as a first step I really wanted to see if I could streamline the overview design doc into something significantly more digestible. It is clear from the amount of text of the previous docs
What’s in a name?
R.I.P. Iain M Banks, you will be sorely missed. – 6/9/13 I recently changed the name of my blog again. I had changed it to “The Designer of Games” as a tribute to one of my favorite authors, Iain M Banks, who wrote “The Player of Games” and recently announced he was retiring after finding
Initial Designs for Web
I was walking home with my roommate Ross a few days ago and he asked me, “If you were going to put a project on Kickstarter, what would you do?” My first thought was that I would get a team together and start making an RPG. I have some outlines, and art for one I’ve