Krystian Majewski

Krystian Majewski was born in Warsaw and studied design at Köln International School of Design. Before, he was working on a mid-size console project for NEON Studios in Frankfurt. He helped establish a Master course in Game Design and Research at the Cologne Game Lab. Today he teaches Game Design at various institutions and develops independent games.

Website: http://www.krystian.de
Lunar Flight – A Benchmark for Oculus Rift

Lunar Flight – A Benchmark for Oculus Rift

Partly inspired by my previous experience woth the Oculus Rift, I decided to get the Development Kit to do more experiments with the system. I am still very excited about the hardware. I think it’s safe to say that this might be the singe most important gaming peripheral since the Wiimote. Before developing anything I [...]

TRAUMA LEGO Panobot

TRAUMA LEGO Panobot

During the development of TRAUMA I build a robotic photo tripod out of LEGO. I ended up not using it for production but I always wanted to document it before disassembling it. It ended up lying around for years. Recently I finally did it. Here is the result:

Download the *.lxf file for the LEGO Digital Designer

Perhaps I [...]

Occulus Rift Impressions

Occulus Rift Impressions

Recently at GamesCom I was able to try the VR headset Occulus Rift for the first time. I was lucky enough to try the new HD Prototype. From what I understand, this is very close to the final product that should release in 2014. I played a couple of minutes of Hawken. Here are some [...]

Zen and the Art of Euro Truck Simulator 2

Simulation games were big in the 80ies and early 90ies. They went away together with adventure games and real-time strategy games. But now they seem to be on the rise again. The first mainstream gaming reaction to games like Farming Simulator was ironic in nature. 360 NO PLOW has turned into it’s own meme. But [...]

XCOM Classic Ironman

I recently got into XCOM. I saw Day9 playing it and it made me catch the XCOM virus again. It was a good thing too. The game came out around when my dad passed away. I bought it when it on release, played a map or two and forgot about it. I was glad to [...]

Trauma Making of

Trauma Making of

A really short post today. I wanted to share with you a GDCE talk I gave a year ago about how I made my game TRAUMA. It has been just released on GDC Vault for free!

Click here to watch the video.

I basically go over some of the influences and assumptions I had going into TRAUMA. I also [...]

The Polarization of Pacific Rim

The Polarization of Pacific Rim

There is something interesting about Pacific Rim. It has spawned a lot of very divergent reactions among critics. Take this merciless takedown by The Jeff and Casey Show for example:

And then compare it to this commentary by Mythbuster Adam Savage

While Jeff and Casey call it the worst Blockbuster Movie ever (even worse than Transformers), Adam seems to [...]

Re-discovering Muramasa

Re-discovering Muramasa

The recent re-release of the Wii game Muramasa on the Vita is a good opportunity to re-discover this hidden gem.

I bought the game back when it came out on the Wii. After a cursory glance, it has been sitting in my backlog ever since. So I used the pretext of the recent release to double-dip on [...]

UFO Postmortem Observations

I wrote yesterday about some of my observations on the Myst Classic Game Postmortem. I wanted to follow-up today with the UFO Classic Game Postmortem.

Full disclosure: I never actually played that much of UFO. I played a couple of missions. But most of my UFO experience comes from the sequel X-Com: Terror from the Deep which [...]

Myst Postmortem Observations

Myst Postmortem Observations

One of my favorite GDC sessions are the Classic Game Postmortems. These are presentations where the creators of famous old-schools games tell the story of how those games were created. The postmortems are great because they tend to reveal surprising facts about those often pivotal games. They also great because they often show a historical, [...]

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Game Design Reviews is a Blog used by a group of game designers from Germany to publish and discuss their thoughts on various games. The blog consists entirely of reviews of games. Each review focuses on the important game design ideas and concepts of that particular game. We also run a second, more informal Blog called Game Design Scrapbook.

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