Posts Tagged Game design
Design Roundup #8
Posted by The Management in design on February 7, 2012

- Super Metroid – An In Depth Level Design Analysis – Exactly what the title says.
- Redesigning Wild Ones – Overview of a design reboot for a popular social game.
- The Science of Sonic – A work-in-progress wiki that tries to tackle numerous facets of the Sonic the Hedgehog series.
Design Roundup #7
Posted by The Management in design on July 14, 2011

- Mass Effect Interface Fail – Krystian Majewski’s thorough drubbing of Mass Effect’s user interface (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3). A must-read for anyone interested in making games.
- Virtual Economic Theory: How MMOs Really Work – A look at the evolution of game-economies in MMORPGs and the pro’s and con’s of various trade systems.
- Guiding The Player’s Eye – An overview of subtle cues in Half-Life 2 (and its episodes) that serve to grab the player’s attention without subverting user-control.





Orange Box Designer Commentary
Posted by The Management in design on February 27, 2009
Valve first tried out designer commentary with the Lost Coast standalone demo. Apparently it was such a big success that they decided to do the same for all the games in the Orange Box.
Now Valve is a group of some very, very smart people, and it shows.
Escape from City 17 at the end of Half-Life: Episode One.
Generic behind-the-scenes specials tend to tell the same old story: the development cycle was hectic, but the team eventually persevered and released a great product (even if it was a little flawed and missing some features). In between all that you might come across an interesting tid-bit or two, but don’t expect any mind blowing revelations.
The commentary on the Orange Box, though, is full of pure-gold nuggets. In fact, playing through its four commentary-enabled titles will probably teach you more about various aspects of videogame production than any game design book. If you haven’t checked it out but are in any way interested in videogame design, I urge you to do so now.
Here are just a few segments I picked out:
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behind the scenes, design, developer commentary, episode one, episode two, Game design, games, half-life, Lost Coast, Orange Box, portal, steam, team fortress 2, valve, Valve Corporation, Video game
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