The Quixotic Engineer

Like many people who love video games, I have a conundrum: I own more games than I will ever realistically have time to play. It’s a problem that has accumulated slowly over many years, compounded by Steam sales, charity bundles, and subscription services. It’s of course a wonderful predicament to be in, as it reflects the richness of a vast creative form¹. But the fact that I would seemingly never catch up weighed on me, and it invited reflection when I was setting goals for 2025 in January.

Three years ago, I experimented with a structured weekly sketching practice and managed to maintain it for the full 52 weeks. Each sketch took about an hour, which proved to be doable even with a busy schedule. What if I applied that same method to sampling the games from my backlog?

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The Last of Us Part II Remastered is out now on PC, and includes a small update for the roguelike survival mode No Return. We’ve added four new maps to the rotation, and two new playable characters from Part I: the gruff loveable smuggler Bill and the Firefly leader Marlene. I’m really thrilled with how these new characters fit into the mode, and wanted to unpack a little bit of their design process.

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Last Thursday night, I got to attend The Game Awards privately knowing that we had a surprise announcement up our sleeves. As the “one more thing” before the show wrapped up, we dropped our first trailer for Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, a new sci-fi adventure from Naughty Dog. The live reaction in the theatre was incredible, and I’m thrilled that I could be there for it.

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Like many other game designers with a systems bent, I have spent copious enjoyable hours this year with the breakout indie hit Balatro. It’s usually described as a “poker roguelike”, which is a perfect logline for onboarding curious new players. Framed this way, it makes sense that it often invites comparison to Slay The Spire, another hugely popular deckbuilding roguelike.

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My daughter (age 6) is aware that her daddy makes video games, though with somewhat abstract notions of what that actually entails. She has often asked if we could make a game together, which led me to research various child-friendly gamedev tools. On a whim I picked up Game Builder Garage, a game-making toolkit released for the Switch in 2021. I hadn’t heard much about it since its release, but generally trusted Nintendo’s ability to appeal to young children.

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