Author Archives: avivayalla

Broken Age – Act I: Trust Between Puzzle-maker and Puzzle-solver

I played the first act of Broken Age this morning and I want to highlight a well designed puzzle in each character’s chapter. Vella: In the clouds (Meriloft), Vella’s goal is to get back down to the ground, and it becomes obvious that the only way to do this is to make one of theContinue reading “Broken Age – Act I: Trust Between Puzzle-maker and Puzzle-solver”

How I attended GDC for 7 days for less than $1000

The 2020 Game Developer’s Conference begins March 16th! There are many hot topic articles on why and how you should attend the conference (or even if you should), and I’m gonna add my experience with budgeting for the trip to your list of helpful reads as you prep yourself for an exciting and stressful week.Continue reading “How I attended GDC for 7 days for less than $1000”

Game Critique: Microsoft Studio Stacker card game

I usually like to talk about parts of games that are well designed, or how they could even be made better with simple improvements. But today, I’m going to critique one that I do not believe accomplished its design goals. I will also provide my solutions for the issues. Just before GDC 2019, Microsoft announcedContinue reading “Game Critique: Microsoft Studio Stacker card game”

Group Identity and User Connections

I have recently been researching and teaching myself more tools to polish my user experience skills and be more connected to my players. Earlier this week I realized that the stuff I’ve been reading and trying out on my own is showing up in my work and I feel even more confident in my designs.Continue reading “Group Identity and User Connections”

UX Design Challenge #2: Identify my skills

My next challenge is to focus on what skills I do have that go well with UX, and what I skills I need to grow and how I can do that. Currently my area of expertise is game design, but there are a lot of skills that crossover. It’s difficult for people to analyze themselvesContinue reading “UX Design Challenge #2: Identify my skills”

UX Design Challenge #1: Spot the Good and Bad

Today’s challenge has a focus on seeing what’s intuitive or frustrating about a website or app I normally use. I’ll be using the budgeting app EveryDollar. To start, I want to highlight that the goals of this app is for budget tracking and seeing at a glance where your money is coming from and goingContinue reading “UX Design Challenge #1: Spot the Good and Bad”

Games for School

I provide child care for a few families in my area, and recently one of the 5th grade kids was doing homework through a game. He told me it was algebra, and it mostly looked like fractions using sides of a die. It seemed that the goal was to drag a static die to theContinue reading “Games for School”