The Quixotic Engineer

While I was playing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild over the holidays, I kept thinking about Far Cry 2. Of course that’s not uncommon; I cut my teeth writing about games in ~2008, so I tend to see Far Cry 2 everywhere (game design pareidolia). However, rather than a vague impression, Breath of the Wild evoked specific ideas that director Clint Hocking explored in a 2009 GDC talk entitled “Fault Tolerance: From Intentionality to Improvisation”. I’d like to use that talk as a framework to compare the two games and discuss some common mechanics that are used to similar effect.

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A few weeks ago game director Bruce Straley announced that, after 18 years, he was going to be leaving Naughty Dog. He will be dearly missed.

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“Originally, Deadly Premonition was supposed to take place in Canada. However, when I brought the idea to game producers, they told me the story should take place in America, as it is the country that generates the most sales.” – Hidetaka Suehiro (aka SWERY)

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Clash Royale has been my go-to phone game lately. I didn’t pay it much attention when it launched early last year; I just assumed it was Supercell’s latest entry in the “shouting man icon” mobile game genre. But it kept popping it when I was searching for new deckbuilding games to play, so I decided to give it a shot.

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On November 15^th, I’ll be speaking about combat design and AI in Uncharted 4 at the Montreal International Game Summit. My talk explores how we navigated the extremes of combat design philosophy (tightly authored vs fully systems-driven) throughout Uncharted 4‘s development, and how we found our best results with a hybrid approach.

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