The Quixotic Engineer

Last year I made a little game for Space Cowboy Jam with my good friend Matthew Breit. Inspired by one particular scene from Cowboy Bebop, we decided to make a silly cooking simulator. He modeled some vegetables, I coded some menus, we wrote some goofy dialogue, and slapped together Stir Fry Blues in a couple of weeks.

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“The social experience of a cave farming run is amazing: the herding to get a team of Guardians all behind the line and firing in the right direction, the rush to grab the loot, the scramble when the panic wave starts, the beckoning glow from inside the cave. The speed at which the community organized around this activity was inspiring and humbling to us.”

– Destiny Dev Notes

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This weekend I committed to finishing a small Twine game I’ve been dabbling with intermittently for the last year. It may seem a little esoteric (and rather silly) if you’re unfamiliar with the game genre being parodied, but hopefully it’ll still convey the general idea.

You can play it directly in your browser by clicking the title below:

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I’ve been feeling rather stealthy lately, playing through Dishonored and Mark of the Ninja over the last few weeks. Playing them back-to-back has contrasted them rather sharply in my mind, though neither title suffers for the comparison. Rather, I’d like to highlight how certain elements of Mark of the Ninja’s design align perfectly with how I like to play stealth games.

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This week saw the release of Valve’s new beginner-friendly level editor for Portal 2, dubbed the “Perpetual Testing Initiative”. Many have praised this new software for its accessibility, and have advocated it as an entry-point for first-time level designers. I had a chance to experiment with it a little myself, and I’d like to explore some of the specific principles Valve employed to create this remarkably approachable editor.

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