Gamedev

In the final issue of Game Developer magazine (June/July 2013), editor-in-chief Brandon Sheffield did something the publication had spent two decades asking of other developers: he wrote an honest postmortem of his own operation, a few months shy of its twentieth birthday. What went right: Print prestige — contributors would rather be published in print than on the sister website, and Sheffield is clear-eyed about why: it is the same instinct that “we grew up with it, so it must be better,” the one that sends indie games to consoles that sell worse than the alternatives. Annual state-of-the-industry reports — the Salary Survey and Front Line Awards ran for over a dozen years and remain the only contiguous data on developer pay and tool rankings. A hardcore crew — from around 2005 the magazine was produced by two full-time people plus part-timers, shipping 52 to 96 pages a month with multiple edit and art passes. A frank, honest tone — the postmortem format itself. Sheffield treats that as the magazine’s main public good: the industry has few places where developers are encouraged to be honest with each other. What went wrong: ...

“Game designer” is the vaguest job title in the industry, which is exactly why Liz England wrote this field guide in 2014. The same title covers wildly different work depending on studio size, genre, platform, and whether a studio even has a design department. Her map runs in four bands: Generalists — Designer, Junior/Associate, Senior, Lead, Creative Director. The larger the studio, the more specialized the titles get, and the Creative Director is the closest thing to “the idea guy” — the keeper of the vision, working like a film director. Levels and missions — Level Designer owns architecture and moment-to-moment play inside a space; Multiplayer Level Designer handles the same job against competitive and co-op constraints; World Builder works in open worlds and MMOs where one area has to serve many purposes; Mission Designer handcrafts gameplay in space that already exists; Quest Designer covers the smaller secondary story content. Systems — Systems Designer owns global rules across the whole game (combat is a system, throwing grenades is a mechanic); Combat Designer owns enemies, weapons, bosses, ammo, difficulty; Economy Designer owns the sources and sinks of in-game currency; plus Multiplayer, Puzzle, and Narrative designers, the last concerned with how the player interacts with story rather than the prose itself. Crossover and not-designers — Monetization Designer (design plus business), Technical Designer (the engineering/design bridge), UI Designer, Writer, and Design Support, a low-level role that does the grunt implementation so seniors can keep thinking. Meanwhile Graphic Designer, UX Researcher, Sound Designer, Software Designer, and Game Architect all carry “design” in the name and sit outside the design team entirely. The taxonomy is useful; the framing questions are the real payload. A level designer asks whether the player gets there by elevator or ladder. A systems designer asks how many pieces of intel exist and how they are spread across the whole game. A puzzle designer asks what new mechanic this puzzle is teaching. Those questions define a role far better than any title does. ...

The setup is deliberately small. A guard puts a key in a drawer, the player moves it to a cupboard while he is away, and later he needs the key. If he walks straight to the cupboard, the player calls bullshit — he never saw the move, so he should check the drawer first. That is the inversion at the centre of this r/gamedesign thread: the author wants an NPC that goes to the wrong place, because being wrong is what proves he is not cheating. ...

Gabriel O’Flaherty-Chan spent his early years on frameworks that handed him a Camera that “just kind of worked” — and admits he lacked the vocabulary to even search for the camera behaviour he wanted until he wrote lower-level graphics code. So he wrote the missing explainer, with interactive shader examples you can drag. The whole thing starts from one line: x' = x / z, y' = y / z — with y up and z forward, that is a 3D point projected into 2D Points that differ only in depth march toward the vanishing point at (0,0): (2,1,2) → (1,0.5), (2,1,4) → (0.5,0.25), (2,1,8) → (0.25,0.125) The same division handles size: radius = 0.5 / z is why the demo ball shrinks as it orbits away It scales to “geometry” — a rotating cube is 12 line segments, each with both endpoints projected the same way Then the honest part. The naive trick only works for camera-relative points in simple scenes. Once you need camera position, direction and field of view, the practical answer is the perspective projection matrix — parameterized by FOV, aspect ratio, and near/far clipping planes, which double as the test for what is in frame and what can be culled: ...

A Unity Asset Store publisher who sells Editor tools asked r/gamedev where the AI disclosure line should fall. His own workflow: occasional code generation, optimization suggestions, code reviews, testing, and docs — while he designs the tools, reviews the implementation, tests everything, and maintains what ships. His framing is the useful part. When the thing a customer buys is the generated artifact — an image, a track, a 3D model — disclosure tells them something real. When they buy software, they’re buying functionality, reliability, and accountability. Unity’s rule, which labels an entire asset if any part of it was generated, is what pushed the question. ...

Jakub Kasztalski was prototyping a management sim about public restrooms when he hit a wall: the simulation worked, but balancing it was impossible. His variables were correct for the code and useless for the person turning the dials. The problem, he argues, was naming conventions — not the system. The fix in each case is the same: invert the formula so the variable is the thing a designer can actually picture. ...

In 2008, Raven Software designer Manveer Heir played the original MSX Metal Gear to completion as part of his “Design Lesson 101” column — pick a game, finish it, learn something about design. What he found was a difficulty curve running backwards from the modern convention. The opening is the hardest part, and the game gets progressively easier. His argument is that this does more than lower the stakes. It changes which skill the game is actually testing. ...

The re4 project decompiles Resident Evil 4 on the GameCube into C/C++ that recompiles to byte-identical binaries. The target is the G4BE08 debug build — the “Nov 25 2004” prototype, both discs — and the build reproduces main.dol plus all 114 REL overlays exactly, verified against a SHA-1 file on every build. It is 1,083 objects, 15,641 functions, ~555k lines of C and no assembly files. What it took: The original compilers, rebuilt: SN Systems ProDG 3.9.3 (GCC 2.95.3), Metrowerks CodeWarrior 2.4.7 for the CRI middleware, CodeWarrior GC/1.2.5n for the Nintendo SDK. Zero-code search first: prototypes, object size and ordering, rodata/vtable gaps, statement and declaration order, inline boundaries. Tagged levers only after that — 644 // COMPILER-DIFF: comments (dead tests, asm anchors, register pins), and not one of them emits an instruction, which a lint enforces. An asm-removal pass that deleted roughly 200 hand-written asm sites in favour of real C, keeping assembly only where the target bytes contain instructions the compiler cannot emit from C at all: paired-single kernels, GQR setup, a few cache and SPR intrinsics. The matching notes are the real artefact. Every observable difference is mapped to the compiler pass behind it — loop-hoisting thresholds, gcse pseudo numbering, local-alloc quantity ordering, reload register tables — and then to the source shape that reproduces the original bytes. ...

LucasArts’ internal puzzle document for Grim Fandango is dated April 30, 1996 — about two and a half years before the game shipped — and it is 54 pages of a designer thinking out loud. It resurfaced on Hacker News this week, where it drew 317 points and 70 comments mostly arguing about how fair the puzzles ever were. The document is credited to Tim Schafer with Peter Tsacle, Eric Ingerson, Bret Mogilefsky and Peter Chan. It is not a feature list. For each of the game’s four years it leads with a Puzzle Structure chart, then a room-by-room Location Layout, then the cut-scenes and puzzles with a Solution: block under each one. ...

Josh Bycer wrote this one after bouncing off Arcen Games’ The Last Federation and not understanding what he was supposed to do. His argument: what a game really teaches is informed decision-making — playing with a complete understanding of what your actions will affect. Mastery is the move from clicking buttons turn by turn to reasoning several moves ahead, knowing that X sets Y in motion which advances plan Z. ...

Louis built a turn-based combat engine from scratch at a startup, and the problem that nearly broke it wasn’t rendering or netcode — it was designer velocity. Abilities were being tweaked several times per playtest, and hardcoded implementations meant the designer waited on him to write and test every change. So he flipped the question: instead of “what does character #123 do?”, ask “what are abilities made of?” The answer was three primitives: ...

A solo dev building a roguelike on a free pixel-art tile pack from itch.io asked r/roguelikedev a question that is not really about art: if the same tileset shows up in other games — including low-effort or AI shovelware — does that cheapen his game’s identity? The pack is CC0, he likes it, he plans to pay the artist anyway, and he has seen nobody else using it. Nineteen comments later the thread had settled the licence question cleanly and reframed the identity one. ...

Stars! is a 1995 4X game written for 16-bit Windows 3.1, and it is effectively unplayable today: x64 Windows cannot run 16-bit binaries, so you need retro hardware or an emulation stack. Chris Wellons built Stars!VM instead — a custom 80286 emulator plus a Win16-to-Win32 bridge, shipped as a native 32-bit executable with a compressed copy of the original game embedded inside. One signed EXE, no setup, with a modern file chooser and 4K scaling. ...

The Digital Antiquarian closes out the Lemmings story with the question anyone who lived through 1991 would ask: how did a game ported to 23 platforms, outselling everything else Psygnosis ever shipped, end up remembered as a kitschy fad by 2000? Jimmy Maher’s answer is that no single decision killed the franchise — it decayed through a series of choices that each looked reasonable at the time. The chain of decisions: ...

BioWare’s postmortem for Knights of the Old Republic — first published in Game Developer magazine in December 2003, scoped to the combat system rather than the whole game — is about the least glamorous work behind a 60-hour RPG: making a D20 ruleset playable with a controller. The team’s stated approach was to build on what they already had instead of reinventing it. What went right: Senior staff had already shipped Baldur’s Gate and Neverwinter Nights, so KOTOR reused the personal round-based system — one action per three-second round per character Combat was choreographed in paired 1.5-second animation sequences in 3DS Max, with attacker motion and defender countermove authored in tandem, so round-based fights read as continuous on screen The first interface attached context menus to every button and confused casual players; watching newcomers struggle at E3 2002 forced a redesign into an explicit combat mode with an always-visible action bar QA filled out a per-encounter document — difficulty, credits and XP, tactics and Force powers used — reviewed weekly; testers optimizing for speed revealed the overpowered powers, which got nerfed What went wrong is the more useful half: ...

Tanya X. Short is a level designer by trade, and when Kitfox Games bet on procedural generation for Shattered Planet she was worried. Her stated fear is the specific one: a generator produces “a smooth blend of samey content,” destroying the only advantage proc-gen has over handcrafted levels — unpredictability. Her answer was to write rules for the programmers, not code. Three pillars shaped every rule that followed: intriguing, strategic, accessible. ...

A professional software engineer with years of pre-LLM experience describes building a 2D pixel-art MMO: agent-assisted from the first line, with paid artists and a level designer on top. He started as a skeptic, testing whether someone with no game-dev background could actually stand up a project at this scale with coding agents. Days in, he had a functional MMO proof-of-concept and decided to take it seriously. The stack, as described: ...

A long r/gamedev post by u/DoctorLunatic tries to isolate one claim from the AI backlash — that using AI is unethical on its own, separate from consent, training data, or deception. He concedes every legitimate objection first: cloning a voice actor without permission, impersonating an artist, misleading customers. Then he asks what principle separates AI from the tools the industry already uses to delete labour. The consistency problem he lands on: ...

Alistair Doulin wrote this in 2011 for a Game Developer featured blog, reposted from his own site. The premise: Robert C. Martin’s five class-design principles are standard vocabulary in business software and “generally unknown amongst game developers.” What makes it worth reading years later is the framing — every principle is paired with a “When have you got it?” smell test written in game code rather than design theory. The five principles, in his game-specific terms: ...

Yang Pulse spent three years on a top-down 2D space shooter prototype before shelving it for a card game, and the write-up is almost entirely about information rather than balance. His closing thesis: designers think they are struggling with how a mechanic works, when in fact they are struggling with how to convey the minimum the player needs to be taught. Every lesson below came out of a failed idea. ...