Hello, my name is Ryan and I make games (hence the moniker).
I really can't overemphasize that point though. I've been interested in game design as far back as I can remember, long before I knew the term "game design". In elementary school I was fascinated by the many variants of playground four square. In middle school I spent endless hours making maps in the Warcraft III World Editor and forced my friends to play them with me. And in my junior year of high school I finally considered making a career of it. To this day I spend most of my waking hours thinking about games and how they are made and how they are experienced and how they differ from non-interactive forms of art and on and on.
I've wanted to write a collection of my many thoughts on the subject of game design for a long time, but I've never had a place to start. I always feel like I want to add to an existing body of work, but never had one to add to. So today I've decided to start one, and this is it. A blog of my very own. I don't expect anything I write to be revolutionary, and this exists mostly as a place for me to get these thoughts out of my head in a productive way, but I hope these posts end up helping someone else on their own path someday.
Incidentally, if you are just starting out, I recommend Jesse Schell's The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses as a good place to start reading.
I also want this blog to be a living portfolio of my past work, including the terrible Warcraft III maps and GameMaker prototypes. I anticipate that reviewing those older projects will be unpleasant, but I promise the games get better eventually. Hopefully as I analyze my own work I will start to understand my own biases or gaps in my understanding. There is always more to learn.
Let's get started!