About Catreece MacLeod

Catreece MacLeod has worked as a writer, editor, video game designer, teacher, 3D artist and quite a few other roles. Her specialization is pre-production writing, most notably, world design and IP creation.

So you want to make a free to play game

South Park Freemium Cycle

Making a game is something you put your heart and soul into, yet in the end, to do so at a professional level instead of as a hobby requires that someone foots the bill for food, shelter, heating and so on. It’d be nice if we could just get the best people to make the best games, but reality dictates that we need to pay our employees. There are a lot of ways to do … Read More

What makes a game fun? Episode 003 – Snowballing

What Makes a Game Fun 003

Now, this’s a bit off the topic I’d been going to cover, but it’s pertinent to the first two episodes of the “What Makes A Game Fun?” series. So what’s the topic that I’m beating around the bush on today? Why, snowballing. No, no, not THAT kind of snowballing… ew. It’s also best if you don’t ask yourself why I know that term. No, I mean the kind of snowballing which refers to the effect … Read More

Meritocracy : Taking A Lesson From Gaming

meritocracy

We stand today at a point we’ve never stood at before, led here by a great many social movements, from the end of slavery, all across the annals of history to GamerGate.  This point is a crrossroads, and one which holds great promise, if we choose to pursue the path as of yet unchosen. The crossroads holds two signs, each facing an opposing direction, attached to a wooden pole in the ground, and we find … Read More

Deskercise #1: Nutrition

Deskercise featured image

We’ve all been there; “I wanna lose 5lbs.” It sounds so easy, too, doesn’t it?  And then you get hit with the barrage of fad-diets and people who want to change your entire lifestyle. Isn’t there some sort of middle ground?  Isn’t it possible to live your life a little more healthy without it taking over your whole life and cutting severely into your gaming time? Well, yes, yes there is.  And today, since gamers … Read More

What makes a game fun? Episode 002 – Choices

Episode 002

The most basic premise of playing a game is that you, yanno… play the game. If a player doesn’t have a direct control over the outcome of a game, then they may as well be watching TV instead of playing, because they’re not actually engaging in the gameplay aspect. This is the single most important aspect of what makes a game fun, and one which, sadly, is misunderstood by many developers, and hence we get … Read More

Do not go gentle into that good night

I am #Gamergate #notyourshield

Do not go gentle into that good night Gamers should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light. – Dylan Thomas, slightly edited #GamerGate began quite awhile ago, by the standards of pretty much any justice movement online – several months of intense misdirection, false claims, defensive reactions and hatred at being called out for poor behavior and a lapse of journalistic integrity have not gone unnoticed, and … Read More

Moframe Movember

Moframe

That’s right, you heard me right, the popular Free To Play (and awesome to play) game Warframe is kicking it up into a stylish high-gear by joining in for No-Shave Movember, a month-long “holiday” of sorts, where people are encouraged to not shave off mustaches or beards and donate to prostate cancer. https://warframe.com/movember?q=movember Men are known to die at a significantly younger age than women, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which … Read More

What makes a game fun? Episode 001 – Progression

agile-planning-whiteboard

So what makes a game “fun?” Several journalists have claimed that “fun” is in the eye of the beholder, and so personal that there’s no way to gauge it and as such we may as well stop trying to even consider if a game is fun or not when reviewing them. However, this isn’t exactly true… There are certain things which are inherently rewarding to players in a deep, satisfying psychological manner, and there are … Read More

Demigod – What Could Have Been

demigod2

A few years ago, MOBAs were just beginning to surface as actual games.  Defense of the Ancients: Allstars, the Warcraft III expansion custom multiplayer map had elevated the concept to a large enough playerbase to support an entirely new genre. At that time, quite a few started to spring out of seemingly nowhere, from Heroes of Newerth, to League of Legends, to DotA2.  The overall feel of each new MOBA was largely the same, however, … Read More

Evil Dead 2013 – Fit for Halloween, or trumped by Michael Myers?

Necronomicon Ex-Mortis, 1981

It’s nearly Halloween, and gamers everywhere are pulling out some cringe-worthy titles for the occasion; both in the comedic and the creepy sense.  I, of course, am no different, and noticed the remake for Evil Dead was available on demand, and my mother wasn’t at home to tell me it was too scary for the cat to watch.  Yes, the actual cat, not myself.  And no, this isn’t the first time that would have happened; … Read More