Featured entries

Lindenbaum 2025: Working Ogre-Time (Jason Romein)

Posted by The Architect on March - 23 - 2025

The Lindenbaum Prize, a competition for short gamebooks, goes into its fourth year. This year’s contest has no less than seventeen entries from a variety of genres, with a wide range of creative approaches. It’s a great opportunity for experiments, and it’s always exciting to see what the authors come up with. If you’re interested  [ Read More ]

Lindenbaum 2025: The Last Song of the Homura (Elie Merle)

Posted by The Architect on March - 22 - 2025

The Lindenbaum Prize, a competition for short gamebooks, goes into its fourth year. This year’s contest has no less than seventeen entries from a variety of genres, with a wide range of creative approaches. It’s a great opportunity for experiments, and it’s always exciting to see what the authors come up with. If you’re interested  [ Read More ]

Lindenbaum 2025: Chirality (Jeremy Johnson)

Posted by The Architect on March - 11 - 2025

The Lindenbaum Prize, a competition for short gamebooks, goes into its fourth year. This year’s contest has no less than seventeen entries from a variety of genres, with a wide range of creative approaches. It’s a great opportunity for experiments, and it’s always exciting to see what the authors come up with. If you’re interested  [ Read More ]

Lindenbaum 2025: A Golden Opportunity (R.L. Gill)

Posted by The Architect on March - 11 - 2025

The Lindenbaum Prize, a competition for short gamebooks, goes into its fourth year. This year’s contest has no less than seventeen entries from a variety of genres, with a wide range of creative approaches. It’s a great opportunity for experiments, and it’s always exciting to see what the authors come up with. If you’re interested  [ Read More ]

Lindenbaum 2025: Scopes (A.E. Johnston)

Posted by The Architect on March - 11 - 2025

The Lindenbaum Prize, a competition for short gamebooks, goes into its fourth year. This year’s contest has no less than seventeen entries from a variety of genres, with a wide range of creative approaches. It’s a great opportunity for experiments, and it’s always exciting to see what the authors come up with. If you’re interested  [ Read More ]

Lindenbaum 2025: The House on Happy Hill (Andrew Wright)

Posted by The Architect on March - 10 - 2025

The Lindenbaum Prize, a competition for short gamebooks, goes into its fourth year. This year’s contest has no less than seventeen entries from a variety of genres, with a wide range of creative approaches. It’s a great opportunity for experiments, and it’s always exciting to see what the authors come up with. If you’re interested  [ Read More ]

How many does it take to party?

Posted by The Architect on June - 30 - 2024

“As many as you can fit, especially girls!” – yeah, dude, I guess that’s one possible answer. Although, wait, we might have something to work with here… I would assume that most home-grown developers, when confronted with the “party size” question, go with their instincts first, and probably never question the decision afterwards. For instance,  [ Read More ]

Puzzle Design Approaches

Posted by The Architect on May - 26 - 2024

That I’m a fan of puzzles should come as no surprise (see here, for instance). On a mechanical side, I like to be challenged in unusual ways, where combat after combat eventually gets stale; in terms of atmosphere, I find exploring mystical and potentially dangerous places so much more interesting if I happen upon something  [ Read More ]

On Possibility Space

Posted by The Architect on February - 13 - 2024

I’m pretty certain the concept already exists in the world of game design theory, probably under a different name; all I found on a (not too thorough) search was this (https://www.possibilityspace.org/tutorial-generative-possibility-space/), which comes close, but doesn’t quite fit. Especially not since I wish to address that topic from the specific perspective of a CRPG designer.  [ Read More ]

On Character Generation

Posted by The Architect on January - 27 - 2021

So I’ve begun setting up my new game, and one of the first matters I took a look at, as it’s usually the one you also encounter first as a player, is the character generation. Given that I want the player to create a whole party instead of just the main character (as has been  [ Read More ]