Category: Design
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Causing Attraction: Non-Dominant Foot Forward in Longsword Fencing
In ecological dynamics, the term Attractor or Movement Attractor shows up every now and then. Attractors can be seen as preferred motor pattern solutions in the current activity context. When an action is seen as intuitive or habitual, it might be the attractor at work. Habit and intuition can be nebulous concepts however, so to…
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You Suck At Writing Rules – Here Is How You Can Do Better
You heard me. If you’re reading this you probably suck at writing rules (documents).
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Why I Don’t Allow Gayszlen In My Tournaments
This is pretty simple to introduce, I don’t allow Gayszlen in the tournaments I write rules for. The reasons for this are actually pretty multifaceted, including: Before we start, I want to emphasize that any of these reasons alone is probably not enough. These types of one-handed strikes are probably not an egregious enough violation…
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Types of Training Games
All models are wrong, but some are useful George Box To say that you can easily classify training games would be a lie. You can probably come up with multiple different taxonomies that are all mostly accurate, and all have different strengths and flaws. The usefulness of such a model isn’t in the fact that it…
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My Journey to Right-of-Way
At this point in my longsword career, right-of-way is one of my favorite rulesets to fence under. Before you get disgusted and click away, hear me out – I wasn’t always like this, I used to be a right-of-way hater just like most of the HEMA community. It was a slow transition over the course…
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On External Triggers
A core tenet of the ecological approach states that fencing is mostly defined by a constant interaction loop between the two fencers: the decisions I make are based on my opponent’s behaviour, and these will in turn influence their next action. This obvious claim should not be news to most HEMA fencers (or at least,…
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6 Bad Games – Lessons From The Rondo
The following are the results of a game design challenge to design games which have the biggest discrepency between their apparent usefulness and their actual ability to teach sills. Sean FranklinGame List: 6 Games for a Complete FencerExplanation (and introduction to the challenge): 6 Bad Games – Lessons From The Rondo Tea KewGame List: 6…
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Breaking the feedback loop to make bad games
The following are the results of a game design challenge to design games which have the biggest discrepency between their apparent usefulness and their actual ability to teach sills. Sean FranklinGame List: 6 Games for a Complete FencerExplanation (and introduction to the challenge): 6 Bad Games – Lessons From The Rondo Tea KewGame List: 6…
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Game Design Process: The RPS Method
Designing a good training game is not easy or straightforward. But having a method to help guide the process makes it easier.
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Where is “Defend the Wall”?
Defend The Wall, Definition: The defender is standing in a fixed location and cannot move or attack – their only action is to parry the attacker. The attacker, as the name suggests, feeds attacks to the defender. There is no defined end, it goes based on the time or number of attacks specified by the…