Game Design

menu, they are reminded that they are playing a game. If players can play through a game without ever having to explicitly save ...

interest while the dominant power tracks down and slaughters the opposition. Indeed, the less advanced country is not technicall ...

gameplay involved in some way, such as players planning out troop placement for the next mission, then it is not really a cut-sc ...

A Never-Ending List............................. Of course, this exploration of what players want could fill an entire book. I e ...

Chapter 2 Interview: Sid Meier.................... Chapter 2 Interview: Sid Meier...................... Sid Meier is certainly t ...

Your first published games were flight simulators. Eventually you drifted over to doing what you are now known for — strategy ga ...

So when you come up with your ideas for new games, you start with the set- ting of the game instead of with a gameplay genre. I ...

I’ve read thatCovert Actionwas one of your personal favorites among the games you designed. I enjoyed it but it had that particu ...

So how did you first start working onRailroad Tycoon? Well, it actually started as a model railroad game with none of the eco- n ...

makesCivilizationinteresting. You’ve got these fairly simple individual systems; the military system, the economic system, the p ...

[laughter] But in terms of actual ideas they were probably more from other sources than theCivilizationboard game. A lot of your ...

About halfway through the process we realized that, wow, this game really is a lot of fun to play. It was a pleasant discovery f ...

loading their muskets, shooting and wheeling in different formations, and doing all that sort of stuff that I had visualized as ...

interesting things about the path that you would take. I’m also a big fan of standard interfaces, so if I had that to do today, ...

we thought that the scenario system was the best compromise in trying to make it play- able but also historically realistic. And ...

the rule that says that things get twice as good every year, processors get twice as fast, et cetera, I don’t think that applies ...

Since you started in game development, development teams have grown from one or two people to a standard number of twenty or mor ...

hopefully you hadn’t even thought of, in terms of cool art or cool sounds or neat ideas. In a way you don’t want it to be so com ...

really cool. That gets the players into the game. In terms of the depth, that’s really because we play the games. The other adva ...

tried as hard as we could to fudge that situation. In many other situations we come to an idea that we think is going to work we ...