Design Analysis & Dev Diaries

Most writing about Bloodborne focuses on its lore — the Great Ones, the cosmic horror beneath the gothic surface, the thing that's looking back at you when you look at the moon. That's fine. The lore is extraordinary. But it has overshadowed a quieter achievement: Bloodborne is one of the most precisely engineered pieces of level design in the medium, and almost none of what it teaches is labelled. I've been studying it closely while working on Punk_Noir — a souls-lite ARPG w

Every designer's first instinct when building a reactive world is to add a morality meter. It makes sense on paper. You want the player to feel the weight of their choices. You want those choices to matter. A bar that fills or empties is clean, readable, unambiguous. It tells the player: you are becoming something. I built one for Koel. Then I deleted it. The Problem with Meters Morality meters don't measure morality. They measure optimization. The moment a player sees a met

The video game industry has an unusual relationship with death. When a movie flops, the sets are torn down. When a social network dies, its servers go dark. But when a game shuts down, something valuable often remains behind: years of art, animation, code, sound design, and world-building. In rare cases, developers choose not to bury these assets. Instead, they release them to the public and allow others to build something new from the remains. This practice is digital necrom