With Adobe ending support for Flash in just a couple of days (!), I’m finishing up my series on the Flash games I’ve developed today with As I Lay Dying! The previous two articles can be found here and here.

As I Lay Dying! was a radical departure from my previous games, and that wasn’t an accident. After spending more than a year working on Xaat Disi, I was burning out on it and looking for another project to work on. As I Lay Dying! filled that role nicely. It’s a puzzle platformer with a morbid sense of humor and ended up being a lot of fun to develop.

Play As I Lay Dying! (keyboard and traditional mouse strongly recommended).

With the imminent end of support for Flash by Adobe, I’ve decided to revisit my old Flash games before they disappear.

After my last article about Arachnophilia, some friends kindly suggested that the games might not be lost after all, as stand alone Flash players will still be available and some websites, such as Armor Games, might even be converting their games so they are still playable in a browser. Despite this, I’m going to continue with this three part series because I think the games will be less accessible in the future, even if they are technically still available, and it’s been a rewarding experience for me to revisit some of these old projects that I poured so much of myself into. So, on to Xaat Disi!

Before I even finished Arachnophilia, I was already imagining the next game I’d make. I was still so excited after releasing Arachnophilia that I pretty much started my next game right away, building on the underlying framework I’d just developed. But the vision of the new project was too grand and ultimately I never finished it, despite putting in many, many hours of work. Here’s the story of the game that got away.

Play Xaat Disi.

People start designing games for many reasons, but a big one is freedom. You see all sorts of games, but notice a striking omission, and think you could make it yourself!

Throughout the tabletop hobby there’s a view that a new game is a totally blank slate and that game design is a liberating creative outlet. But this is far from the truth. In reality designers must deal with countless constraints when creating games, both externally imposed and self imposed, sometimes subconsciously.

That might sound like a bad thing. After all, freedom is usually seen as a positive, while we avoid restrictions whenever possible. But constraints can actually be very helpful. They can give you guidance, they solve many problems you probably didn’t even realize were problems in the first place, and they can lead to creative new ideas by forcing you to approach a problem from a new perspective.

Today I’m going to discuss constraints in game design. I’ll start by looking at the many types of constraints all designers have to deal with, then discuss how constraints can be helpful, going over the ways constraints helped shape a design I recently worked on: the Owl Bear for Birds of a Feather.

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