Keith Burgun

I want to make awesome strategy games that you can live in!


Here's what I'm offering:

• Deep, fun original strategy games
• A monthly game design podcast featuring interviews from amazing game designers
• A daily game dev stream on Twitch
• A game design community 
• And a bunch more!

I love strategy games! Games that are hard, but also interesting. Games where I feel like I have a clear goal, but also make me feel like I can get there in my own way.

But I also want to help other people make more great strategy games, too. That's why I've run the Clockwork Game Design Podcast for about five years now. Just some of the guests who have been on the show:

• Raph Koster, designer and author of A Theory of Fun
• Greg Street, lead designer of League of Legends
• Rob Daviau, designer of Pandemic: Legacy
• Geoff Englestein & Isaac Shalev: board game designers and authors of Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design
• Frank Lantz, designer and head of the NYU Game Center

I make games!

When I find a fun game, I naturally want to keep playing it. But a lot of games, especially single player strategy games, often don't hold up for very long. Or even if they do, the way you have to play to succeed gets more and more constricted and boring.


Right now I'm working on Gem Wizards Tactics, a single player tactical war-game similar to Advance Wars or Fire Emblem. It has bright, colorful animated pixel art, and a cool soundtrack, like a lot of games do. But unlike a lot of games, it has a very original ruleset, and lots of smart procedural generation, a single-player Elo system, and endless support in the form of patches, new content and iterations, with the help of the community (that's you!).

Some other stuff that Makes Gem Wizards Tactics special:

• Deep gameplay that fixes a lot of problems with the typical turn based wargame!
• Seven different playable factions, each with a half dozen totally unique units and abilities
• You play as one of the factions, but there's a lot of inter-mingling of factions throughout a campaign, creating way more combinations and more mayhem!
• Charming, NES-ish pixel art with big expressive animations 
• Introduction to the Gem Wizards Universe, with the Business Demons facing off against the Potato faction in the first playable story mode.
• Designed as an infinitely replayable single player game! (But we may add multiplayer later on)

After my work on the critically-acclaimed Auro, as well as on numerous other small projects I've worked on over the years, I've learned a few things about how to make a great strategy game. Dragon Bridge, a two player card game I Kickstarted successfully last year, was a phenomenal design success that I'm extremely proud of.

I stream game development basically every day on my Twitch channel - come on by!

But I don't just make games: I also make game design theory, which manifests in a bunch of different ways.

More than just a podcast!

As I mentioned, I've run a podcast for five years now, and it's getting better every year. But my theory work manifests in a bunch of other ways, too:

• I run a very active Discord community, where we have many discussions about game design topics, a Game Design Book Club, and a lot more. Come hang with us!
• I write articles, both for my site and for other sites such as Gamasutra and Polygon.
• I write books on game design—I've written Game Design Theory and Clockwork Game Design, so far.
• I create videos on game design, such as 3 Minute Game Design and more recently, Game Design Theory & Practice.
• I moderate reddit's /r/gamedesign subreddit, which I also helped design.

All of this stuff takes a ton of time and effort. If you think what I do is worth supporting, please consider becoming a patron. By doing so, you will get access to some extra content, early builds of my games, and other neat stuff.

Check out 3 Minute Game Design's first episode below as an example of some of my theory work. Otherwise, find out more about my work at my site: http://www.keithburgun.net. Thanks for reading!