SHARE GAME DESIGN ARTICLES HERE!

I absolutely NEED to share this page on facebook. I shall do so manually! ♥
This is, like, amazing. ♥
(Though I've seen it a while ago, I've just commented now.)

http://www.gamesradar.com/how-to-make-a-game-longer-without-boring-the-pants-off-everyone/

Not that relevant but I thought it was worth a read.

There was a book where the guy talks about video game aesthetics and pixel art with a reference to FF6. Anyone know what I'm talking about?

Awesome articles about fully understanding the power of level design:

The Invisible Hand of Super Metroid (This game's design was already genius, now we learn why it's freakin' godly. More oriented towards Action genres)

Excerpt:
"Lower Brinstar acts as little more than a passageway to Norfair, but on the way there it hosts one of the game's most spectacular tricks - the mystery of Maridia. A short corridor that seemingly belongs to lower Brinstar, is actually described by the game map as a separate area. This corridor, which is incidentally placed in a chokepoint of a passage which will traversed and retraversed over and over before the game is over, is actually the only part of Maridia we will see for most of the game.

This is a simple yet extremely effective design to create curiosity. We suspect that Maridia is essentially a fourth of the world, but while the player slowly conquers Crateria, Brinstar and Norfair, Maridia remains a complete and utter mystery. The knowledge of Maridia keeps the player nailed to the chair, and ensures that she never assumes the world to be fully explored. As long as there's Maridia, there will be the promise of something significant left to find. It's actually strange how seldom you see this in games nowadays."

and Learning From The Masters: Level Design In The Legend Of Zelda (has 3 pages, easily applicable to RPG dungeons design)

Excerpt:
"Based on my memories of the game, one of my assumptions going into this experiment was that the rooms in the dungeons were laid out haphazardly. I always remember getting the feeling that I was navigating my way through the rooms almost randomly, spitting in the designers' faces and getting to the end only because of my mighty gaming talents!

After analyzing the flow of the dungeons, I quickly abandoned this notion. As it turns out, the dungeon layouts are very carefully planned and the flow is very cleverly executed.

First, I analyzed the critical path. The critical path is the shortest path through a level without using secrets, shortcuts, or cheats. Basically, it's the path the designer intends the player to take through the level unless she gets really clever.

It's worth noting that the critical path often doesn't require a player to complete 100 percent of a level; it just requires her to complete the mandatory objectives within the level.

For each of the dungeons, the critical path is almost always linear. There are very few instances where the player is required to re-traverse ground she's already seen. The only exception to the linearity rule tends to be two or three rooms at the beginning of the dungeons that allow you to choose between a small subset of rooms."

Oh mario galaxy 2, I really hate those green stars, only like 5 were a challenge, all the other were waste of time for me u.u.

More of a blog post than an article, but it is related to RPG making, specifically in regards in to GUI/presentation with a little bit of statistics talk at the end:

http://secretartsgames.blogspot.com/2012/03/rose-by-any-other-name-would-smell-as.html

Here's an article by Adam Strong-Morse about how to come up with ideas for a game and create a storyboard and outline to help you turn those ideas into an actual game, and then start working on them. It's basically a tutorial on design process.

http://www.choiceofgames.com/2010/05/planning-a-choicescript-game/

OokamiKasumi took this article, reorganized and reworded it to make more sense to an RM designer (and also just to make more sense in general) and posted it on his blog.

http://rpgmaker.net/games/4305/blog/8136/

This sounds like it would be full of basic, trivial, useless stuff, right? But I actually found OokamiKasumi's version in particular extremely great and totally worth reading. The original is much harder to read and geared more toward text-based choice adventure games, but OokamiKasumi's rewrite is applicable to any game with enough of a story to have characters and events in it. (Yes, this is in his blog. It's not submitted as an RMN article because he didn't write the original. But after reading it, it was good enough that I felt it needed to be more visible, so I'm mentioning it here.)

Dunno if this is already on here. Reverse engineering of game mechanics, character balance, and plot/script of FF6.

Reversing the Design: Final Fantasy 6.

Less Talk, More Rock. A Superbrothers article (presented by Brandon Boyer) about the language of games.

Unfortunately, although the article is beautiful and fantastic at explaining why to do what he says, it makes no attempt at all to tell you how.

But even so. Read it.