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Crawford On Making Balance Of Power

Posted by simoniker on from the glasnost-an-awful-party-pooper dept.

Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing to GameDev.net's excerpt from the new Chris Crawford On Game Design book, in which the famed strategy game creator and writer of The Art of Computer Game Design discusses the development of his classic '80s cold-war strategy game Balance Of Power, from initial concepts ("A game, like a story, must have a conflict") through execution ("Polish, polish, polish! Take a minimum of six months after alpha for polishing.")

2 of 15 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Blood Sweat and Tears by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting
    What else has he done, apart from Balance of Power? This is an honest question, not a troll.

    Balance of Power didn't sell very well, but this guy writes so many articles. Why should we believe he knows what he's talking about?

  2. Re:Wanted to love Balance of Power by MightyTribble · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I agree. BoP was a great idea with tonnes of potential, but hideously flawed in it's execution. Your opponent would always chose to escalate over the most trivial of things, and you'd either blow the world up or lose badly on points (by basically capitulating every time your opponent objected to some policy of yours).

    I remember that, when I played as the US, I could blow up the world by objecting to the invasion of Afghanistan (fair enough). But when I was the USSR, the US would also object if I invaded Afghanistan, and blow up the world. I.E. the computer player could get away with stuff you couldn't do in the same position.

    Which, to me, is bad game design. So gee, he wrote a book on it. Good for him. I'll pass, and learn my lessons from examining his works.