Simon Willison’s Weblog

“The Door Problem”. Delightful allegory from game designer Liz England showing how even the simplest sounding concepts in games - like a door - can raise dozens of design questions and create work for a huge variety of different roles.

• Can doors be locked and unlocked?
• What tells a player a door is locked and will open, as opposed to a door that they will never open?
• Does a player know how to unlock a door? Do they need a key? To hack a console? To solve a puzzle? To wait until a story moment passes?

[...]

Gameplay Programmer: “This door asset now opens and closes based on proximity to the player. It can also be locked and unlocked through script.”
AI Programmer: “Enemies and allies now know if a door is there and whether they can go through it.”
Network Programmer : “Do all the players need to see the door open at the same time?”

# 18th August 2024, 3:50 am / game-design

The Digital Antiquarian: Sam and Max Hit the Road. Delightful history and retrospective review of 1993’s Sam and Max Hit the Road. I didn’t know Sam and Max happened because the independent comic’s creator worked for LucasArts and the duo had embedded themselves in LucasArts culture through their use in the internal educational materials prepared for SCUMM University.

# 17th July 2021, 3:12 am / game-design, games, history

The secrets of Monkey Island’s source code (via) To celebrate the thirty year anniversary of the Secret of Monkey Island the Video Game History Foundation interviewed developer Rod Gilbert and produced this comprehensive collection of cut content and material showing how the game was originally constructed.

# 5th December 2020, 4:32 pm / game-design

Return of the Obra Dinn: Dithering Process (via) Lucas Pope (creator of “Papers, Please”) has a new game under development: “Return of the Obra Dinn”, a first-person adventure mystery game set in 1807 that is spectacularly rendered in a 1-bit art style. He has a development diary on tigsource.com, and in this entry he describes the extreme lengths he has gone to in order to develop the best possible dithering implementation for rendering his 3D world in 1-bit colour. “It feels a little weird to put 100 hours into something that won’t be noticed by its absence.”

# 23rd November 2017, 9:21 pm / game-design, games

Tuning Canabalt. Fascinating insight in to the game parameter tuning needed to make a game feel just right.

# 13th October 2010, 8:32 am / game-design, games, recovered, canabalt

The Pac-Man Dossier. Exuberantly detailed. Everything from how collision detection works to the exact pathfinding and target selection algorithms used by the four different ghosts. There’s even a tutorial for playing the legendary 256th level, where an overflow bug corrupts one half of the screen.

# 11th August 2010, 11:20 am / game-design, games, recovered, pacman

Just One More Grim Thing (via) Tim Schafer releases 72 pages of design documentation for Grim Fandango, my all-time favourite computer game.

# 6th November 2008, 7:51 pm / game-design, games, grim-fandango, tim-schafer