{"id":69,"date":"2009-09-18T08:47:16","date_gmt":"2009-09-18T14:47:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/handyvandal.com\/?p=69"},"modified":"2010-02-23T22:19:29","modified_gmt":"2010-02-24T04:19:29","slug":"colin-northway-on-game-design","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/handyvandal.com\/wphv\/2009\/09\/colin-northway-on-game-design\/","title":{"rendered":"Colin Northway on Game Design"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/handyvandal.com\/wphv\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/09\/fantastic-contraption.png\" alt=\"Fantastic Contraption\" title=\"Fantastic Contraption\" width=\"500\" height=\"354\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-70\" srcset=\"https:\/\/handyvandal.com\/wphv\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/09\/fantastic-contraption.png 500w, https:\/\/handyvandal.com\/wphv\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/09\/fantastic-contraption-300x212.png 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>At the Austin Indie Summit, game designer Colin Northway &#8212; author of the remarkable <em><a href=\"http:\/\/fantasticcontraption.com\/\">Fantastic Contraption<\/a><\/em> &#8212; outlined several key principles for aspiring designers:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><strong>1. Make your game in Flash<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Northway draws a fine distinction between &#8216;Flash games&#8217; (games where you &#8220;launch kitties into a spiky thing&#8221;) and &#8216;games written in Flash&#8217;, but he&#8217;s an evangelist for the platform more than anything because &#8220;the content discovery problem has been solved&#8221; compared to consoles, the iPhone, etc. Forums, emails, all pre-existing internet communities will do the work of keeping your game&#8217;s name in front of other people, whereas, say, with the iPhone, &#8220;making money is hard to do if Apple doesn&#8217;t spray the money hose on you.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><strong>2. Make your game &#8220;live online&#8221;<\/strong> &#8230;<\/p>\n<p><strong>3. Leverage &#8220;pride based marketing&#8221;<\/strong> &#8230;<\/p>\n<p><strong>4. Make a free game that gives players &#8216;a tote bag&#8217; if they pay<\/strong> &#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Via <a href=\"http:\/\/www.offworld.com\/2009\/09\/austin-indie-summit-fantastic.html\">Offworld<\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At the Austin Indie Summit, game designer Colin Northway &#8212; author of the remarkable Fantastic Contraption &#8212; outlined several key principles for aspiring designers: 1. Make your game in Flash Northway draws a fine distinction between &#8216;Flash games&#8217; (games where you &#8220;launch kitties into a spiky thing&#8221;) and &#8216;games written in Flash&#8217;, but he&#8217;s an [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,17,15,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-69","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-game-design","category-marketing","category-physics","category-video-games"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/handyvandal.com\/wphv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/handyvandal.com\/wphv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/handyvandal.com\/wphv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/handyvandal.com\/wphv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/handyvandal.com\/wphv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/handyvandal.com\/wphv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":695,"href":"https:\/\/handyvandal.com\/wphv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69\/revisions\/695"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/handyvandal.com\/wphv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/handyvandal.com\/wphv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/handyvandal.com\/wphv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}