Extrasolar postmortem: Game design at 0.0003 FPS

"Find the gem at the heart of your game, and set your core design values around that gem to let it shine through."

- Lazy 8 Studios founder Dr. Rob Jagnow encourages developers to focus on what makes their game unique at GDC 2014. Rejecting your players, long mandatory delays, antiquated monetization models and a remarkably generous demo -- these might all sound like terrible design ideas, but the team at Lazy 8 Studios made a conscious choice to add them into Extrasolar as gameplay mechanics. Inspired by a desire to bring a game with photorealistic graphics to a browser, Extrasolar was designed with an unusual set of goals and constraints. Lazy 8 Studios founder Dr. Rob Jagnow spoke about the team's guiding design principles and the challenges they faced in practically applying them to create a unique interactive story game during the Independent Games Summit at GDC 2014. We've taken the liberty of embedding the free video of "Extrasolar postmortem: Game design at 0.0003 FPS" above, but you can also watch it here on the GDC Vault.

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