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

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

I have sat in the meeting where somebody asks what genre the game is. It is never a design question. It is a question about which shelf the store puts you on, which competitor set the publisher benchmarks you against, and which two words go at the top of the deck so that a person who will never play your game can nod. I have watched a good vertical slice die because the answer to that question was three words long instead of one. So when I read a taxonomy of shooters, the nea

A parts list, from someone who has had to build them Every time I've pitched a stealth feature, somebody in the room has asked what a stealth game actually is, and the meeting has died there. It dies because the honest answer is that nobody agrees, and the dishonest answer "you know, like Metal Gear" will get you six months into production before anyone notices you were all imagining different games. So here's the parts list. Not a taxonomy for its own sake. The organs, what

The first stealth space I ever built got solved from a balcony I forgot I'd made. It was a warehouse. Two floors, four patrols, a crane gantry running down one side that existed because I needed a way to get the player from the office up to the catwalk and the gantry was the cheapest thing to block out. I'd spent most of two weeks on the floor plan. Patrol timings tuned to the second, a nice little overlap where two guards cross and open a three-second window, a shortcut thro

An open world genre study, written from the designer's chair I have spent most of my working and student life building spaces that people walk through, and a good chunk of it watching them refuse to. What follows is not a review round-up. It is what the genre looks like from behind the glass in a playtest room, and from the meeting where someone asks how many square kilometres we are shipping. I want to start with the number, because the number is where the trouble begins. --

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