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A humble game development blog.

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Hello and welcome to my game design blog!

My name is Waldo Rodriguez, as you probably guessed. I’ve been working as a game designer for four years where I started working at Animus Interactive on Avalon Lords, an MMORTS. Since then I’ve picked up a variety of skills and insights working on all sorts of projects in game design positions and I thought it might be helpful to share them with the world. Plus it’s always fun to come back and see how far you’ve come, even if I am starting a little bit late on that!

Why a blog?

A wise man once told me to start a blog serves two great purposes:

The first is to help you keep track of your progress. This goes for any sort of topic be it a hobby or your craft. You can go back through time and see how you struggled in the past and overcame those challenges or how what you thought was an optimal solution to a problem was just one of ten you could’ve applied. It’s important to see how far we’ve come. Whenever a challenge seems too daunting we can look back at prior obstacles and see we’ve been in this spot before and we can push through it again.

The second is to help others see your thought process. This is particularly important for game designers trying to get on a team of any scale. It could be a little indie team of three or a big huge AAA team of hundreds, they’re going to want to see how you think. You may say, “But that’s what interviews and skills tests are for!” but a blog they can skim through makes it that much easier for them to call you.

What can you expect to see on this blog?

Having worked on indie teams and solo projects I have worn many different hats as a game designer. This blog will reflect that by covering a wide array of topics from combat and narrative design which are my jam to level design. I will also do breakdowns of games that catch my eye. Kind of like a game review from a more design-focused perspective. Of course, if one specific feature stands out to me that’s going to get a dedicated post because my ramblings on that one feature will take up too much space otherwise!
 
I’ll also be writing about my past projects as a sort of postmortem dev blog. Younger me was like: “Pfft. I don’t need to write dev blogs! They take time away from actual development.” So I’m correcting that! Even if it is fairly late, I still remember a lot of what I was thinking for those projects along with mountains of organized notes to inform those posts.
 
Future projects as they come up and as I’m able to talk about them will certainly be getting posts here as well. Obviously, if I join a team and there’s an NDA I gotta be hush-hush about things so don’t expect any leaks! Currently, I have a solo project in the works that’s in the early planning stages so when that gets to a more solid state I will start up a little dev blog on that!
 
But wait! There’s more! Having worked across several different teams and lead several of them, I’ve learned a lot about the importance of soft skills. This was something I struggled with early on being a shy, awkward kid and something I had to overcome when I wanted to tackle the fun challenge of leading teams.

When's the next exciting post?

The plan is to pump these out once a week on Mondays. If life happens to get in the way of that I’ll post on Twitter, but if it’s something planned it’ll probably have its own blog post.
 
My first real post is going to be on something I’ve noticed is very hit or miss on a lot of games I’ve played. The art of dodging. The more I thought about the topic the more I think there’s going to be a whole lot to talk about so I may break it up into a multipart series otherwise it’ll be less of a blog post and more of an essay on my thoughts. So that’ll be fun!
 
Until then, have a nice day.

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