Game Design

The Price of Redemption: When Bad Games Go Good

Phantom Liberty, the recently released DLC for Cyberpunk 2077, is great. The story is compelling and lengthy, a masterclass in how to seamlessly add post-ship content into the middle of an existing narrative. The 2.0 patch for the game, which launched shortly before the DLC, overhauls and improves many of the game’s core systems, including …

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Equal Measures Tragic and Creepy: A Starfield Love Story

Warning: spoilers for the midgame of Starfield, including some companion details. The first game I can remember playing where I cared about a player-centered romance storyline was Bioware’s Baldur’s Gate 2: Shadows of Amn. The romanceable companions each had a deep storyline that ran in parallel with the main plot. Though there were a few …

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Berries on the Hill: Lessons in Procedural Game Design

For my entire career, I’ve been an advocate of procedural systems in games that generate endless content. Procedural generation has been a design pillar of some of my favorite titles – going all the way back to my early days playing Nethack and the original Civilization, with its evocative random maps. From a production perspective, …

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The Familiar and the New: Design Takeaways from Baldur’s Gate 3

I can’t help myself – I have to spend another week’s worth of digital ink on Baldur’s Gate 3.  (This blog is spoiler-free, minus whatever the screenshots give away.) After 25 hours of play with the full version, I’m confident in saying Baldur’s Gate 3 is the masterpiece the hype suggested it would be. So …

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Barriers Tumbling: AI and the Future of Game Development

My stepfather is one of the smartest people I know – an engineer and a mathematician, a polyglot descendent of a Scottish poet, and a whiz with computers long before they were in every household. I’ve written before about how he first introduced me to games; to no small extent, I owe my career to …

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Fumbling Toward Fun: Game Design and the Great Unknown

A while back, my dad sent me a quote that I immediately stuck on the wall next to my desk. It’s applicable to his long career in geotechnical engineering, but it’s attributed to A. R. Dykes, who was talking about structural engineering: “Engineering is the art of molding materials we do not wholly understand into …

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