Design Analysis & Dev Diaries

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

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

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