Updates

Plainer language, and a clearer way to start a game

Designers in the closed alpha told us two things about their first hour. Game Designer talked like the software underneath it rather than like the craft, and the very first step — starting a game — assumed everyone begins the same way. They do not. Some arrive with a finished rulebook they have been revising for a year. Others arrive with an idea and a blank page.

So Game Designer speaks plainly now. Where it used to name things the way the software files them away, it names them the way a designer would: a board, workers and actions, resources and economy, decks and cards, turns and phases, scoring and ending — each with a line saying what it is for and what you would do there first. The kinds of game you can pick from are described in a sentence each, in ordinary words, and each one says honestly how much of that kind we structure today rather than implying we handle every game equally well.

Starting a game now asks which of those two designers you are, in those words, before anything else happens. Choose to start from scratch and you are asked for a name, the kind of game you have in mind, and what you want to work on first. Choose to bring a rulebook and you go straight to the place that reads it. Neither choice locks the other out: a game begun from nothing can take in a rulebook later, and one begun from a rulebook can be shaped by hand from the moment it lands.

We also fixed a handful of small, irritating bugs around naming — Game Designer no longer keeps showing you the name of whichever game you opened last.

More of this to come. The alpha is small on purpose, and this is the first release shaped almost entirely by what came back from it.