Game designer, creator of RimWorld and founder of Ludeon Studios, and author of Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences. Worked on BioShock Infinite before going independent. Writes occasionally about design method at tynansylvester.com.
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3 of Tynan Sylvester's claims fit 3 mental models. Most often: Feedback loops, Power laws, The map is not the territory.
Shorten the loop between doing and finding out; whatever a loop rewards is what you become.
Their wordsIt’s my strong belief that in games dev, speed is quality.
In many things a few cases account for most of the result, so the average misleads and the outlier decides.
Their wordsthe final experience often comes down to just a few key pieces or insights.
Every model, word or plan is a simplified map of reality; useful when its structure matches, misleading when mistaken for the thing itself.
Their wordsThe concept of narrative is not absolute. It is merely a label for a cluster of emotional triggers which games happen to share with certain traditional media.