Design Analysis & Dev Diaries

How open world games stop traversal from becoming a chore Every open world team hits the same wall eventually. You have a map. You have content scattered across it. And somewhere in the middle of production, someone plays a build end to end and says the thing nobody wants to hear: getting to the good parts isn't fun. That's the whole problem in one sentence. Traversal is the connective tissue of an open world, and it's usually the last system anyone budgets properly for. Comb

Told through the moments it produces. A narrative designer's wet dream and nightmare 1. Faction disposition, and the fact that nobody tells you the number You come back to the counting house eight days after the salt job. Amachi does not look up. "Sit." You sit. Last time she made you stand through the entire briefing and used your full name twice. "There's a second thing," she says, still writing. "Off the books. You can hear it or you can leave before I say it, and I'd thi

Systems, levels, enemies. In roughly the order I do them. I trained as an architect before I started making games, which for a long time I treated as a slightly embarrassing detour. Four years learning to draw buildings nobody was going to let me build. It stopped being embarrassing the first time I had to explain to my fellow level designer why his room didn't work(career risking move, i know) . He'd built a beautiful arena. It had four entrances, a mezzanine that saw everyt

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