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Game Design Level Design Narrative Design Personal Favorites

The Dawn of The Metal Age: Part 2

The Dawn of The Metal Age: Part 1 So Garrett has just broken into the City Watch headquarters and framed Sheriff Truart’s second-in-command, I’m sure nothing bad will come of this for anybody involved.   “Ambush!”: The lack of a loot objective in “Framed” makes sense given how “Ambush!” starts. Even using New Dark the […]

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Game Design Level Design Narrative Design Personal Favorites

The Dawn of The Metal Age: Part 1

So, I guess we’re doing this. Join me as I continue where we left off and play through Thief II: The Metal Age. It’s my favourite of the series, but I’m sure I’ll find something to complain about. The first shot of the intro isn’t quite a match for the last shot of The Dark […]

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Game Design Level Design Narrative Design Personal Favorites

Journey through The Dark Project: Part 3

Journey through The Dark Project: Part 2 So… Constantine hired Garrett to steal a sword from Constantine’s own mansion to prove that Garrett was the right person to steal The Eye from the abandoned Hammer Cathedral. Unfortunately, the Keepers sealed the Cathedral after an undead uprising. Now in order to gain access to the Cathedral […]

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Game Design Level Design Narrative Design Personal Favorites

Journey through The Dark Project: Part 2

Journey through The Dark Project: Part 1 I obviously love this series for its level and systems design, yet I think I might actually love the way it handles narrative design even more. It manages to be incredibly rich with such economy; nothing serves only one purpose. Somewhat pretentious, but – film noir influences aside – […]

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Game Design Level Design Narrative Design Personal Favorites

Journey through The Dark Project: Part 1

So, it’s about time I finally did it. Join me as I play Thief: The Dark Project; I’ve never got further than The Sword before. Thanks to the No Spiders mod from Andy Durdin I hope to actually finish it this time. I’ll be playing Thief Gold, I have multiple copies of The Dark Project […]

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Game Design Personal Favorites

Preying On My Mind.

Playing the PlayStation 4 demo of Prey resulted in me quitting in anger, hurling my controller at the floor, and deleting the demo. Getting around to playing it on the PC, I have reached a point seventeen hours in where I encountered a bug that, though it didn’t prevent my progress, would result in a bunch of […]

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Design By Example Game Design Game Mechanics

Design By Example: Vertical Movement with Dishonored’s Blink.

In Dishonored, the first power granted you by the Outsider – the only one which you have no choice over – is the short distance teleport, Blink. What Blink offers is more than simply the ability to instantaneously move forward. If that was the extent of its power it would still be useful but it wouldn’t […]

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Game Design Level Design

Sneaky Bastards Issue One, now on sale.

The first issue of Sneaky Bastards: The Stealth Gaming Magazine is now on sale, available to purchase in either .PDF or print editions the magazine features 100 pages of full colour ad-free content on Arkane Studios’ Dishonored. Alongside interviews, a stealth focused review, and critical commentary, the magazine features 48 pages of level design analysis […]

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Level Design

Groping The Map: Book 1 – SAMPLE.

In order to promote my work on Groping The Map: Book 1, I have decided to release a .pdf sample of the first nine pages of the chapter on Nova Prospekt from Half-Life 2. Consider this a “vertical-slice” of the book, as you can see I have made some changes from the traditional format that […]

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Level Design Site Specific

The future of Groping The Map…

Since I started them in 2010 my Groping The Map articles have  proven to be some of the most popular work I’ve written. In those three years however I have only been able to complete my analysis of three different levels, this is both a significant reduction from my original goal and a personally disappointment. With […]