Ep 7 - Asymmetric Games

The Designer Jeans 2024 Games Review! Only 4 months late (I, Dragos, apologise). This episode discusses our top games of 2024, as well as some highlights we wanted to bring as came to the a close. Pacific Drive, Abiotic Factor, and two mystery games we did not tell each other about before!

Today we're talking co-op games, and the power of friendship. We'll discuss our distinct categories within the genre and some personal favourites.

Many games, from shooters to puzzlers, have guns, and those guns have ammunition! We discuss how different games treat ammo, its scarcity and variety, as well as the design choices behind reloading.

In team games and sport, every player is equipped with the same tools, and given the same missions. This episode we look into games that take a more asymmetric approach to their design and mechanics, and talk about the unique fun of playing wildly different roles within one game.

Potions, powerups, medkits and grenades - consumable items appear in all kinds of games. This week we talk about how limited resources can affect gameplay, and why we sometimes hoard items in our backpacks instead of actually using them.

From Solid Snake to Ezio and Agent 47, stealth has been part of many hit games over the years. This week we're peeking into stealth as a central mechanic, how different games handle it, and the trend of modern games sneaking stealth into other genres.

There are some games we love to play again and again, and some we don't - why? This week we're talking about the design of replayable games, the roguelike genre and what makes replays worthwhile.

It's been a while, but we're back! Stats in RPGs are a pillar of the genre, and let players customise their character. We've all heard of Strength, Dexterity and Charisma, but what are stats really for and do they need to follow the well known structure of Dungeons and Dragons, or even the separation of physical and mental?

We made it to the second episode! This time, we're talking about the puzzle game, a genre that defined early computer games, and one of the grandfathers of games in the genre - Myst.

The first, pilot, episode of the Designer Jeans podcast! We started out talking about procedural narrative design, inspired by Shadows of Doubt, and any other emergent storytelling that forms around procedural games.