You don't need this blog to tell you that Overwatch has thoughtful character design. But maybe you can learn new approaches to ability design with me. :)
I first realized I was lacking some kind of design sense when I realized I held two thoughts in my mind simultaneously: A) Reinhardt's abilities make no mechanical sense together, and B) Reinhardt feels fun and cohesive anyway. It was an obvious sign that my design skills were amateurish in comparison to the folk at Blizzard, and so began my quest to figure out why things worked.
Read moreThe ability to remove poor draws from your deck is incredibly powerful. There's so many things we can learn from the power of deck thinning.
Read moreSubset Games' technique for bringing narrative into a tactics game is so simple, it's easy to underestimate how well it works. Basically, what they do for ITB is have the pilots say X dialogue in response to Y state occuring. Most of the dialogue just hangs in the air for a few seconds before disappearing, and you don't have to read it to understand the game. So it's completely out of the way of players who don't care (which is important for a game like this).
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