Viewing profile — i_c_b

There are a lot of properties that game mechanics can have that make people invest in games. Legible rules, clear feedback, deterministic and discrete cause and effect, clearly und…

(I'm a game designer, so I can't help but respond to this as a designer first, and not primarily a player) I wonder how much of the issue here is the rise of the abstraction of "ga…

I worked on a couple of high profile FPS games during the era when designers really started trying to make these Potemkin village spaces off in the distance of levels to suggest la…

Back in the late 90s, when I first entered the video game industry to work (when it was quite scruffy, countercultural, and populated by some pretty odd people), one of the first t…

I really try to avoid anything about politics here, but I recall there already being a controversy about this back in May of 2024. Specifically, there were public comments from the…

"But that's not how real life works at all, right?" How real life works is always a plausible interesting goal, but it's very often at odds with a bunch of other valuable goals for…

A few years ago, I was feeling dispirited about being middle-aged and had come around to the conclusion that, at least when playing games, my general dissatisfaction and "meh" resp…

I'm probably saying something obvious here, but it seems like there's this pre-existing binary going on ("AI will drive amazing advances and change everything!" "You are wrong and …

I was in the game industry when we originally transitioned from C to C++, and here's my recollection of the conversations at the time, more or less. In C++, inheritance of data is …

Hey, thanks! I ran myself ragged on that project, so that's nice to hear. And yeah, I think we really did nail a particularly kind of visceral experience.

I was knee-deep working as a technical game designer + engine programmer on Soldier of Fortune when Half-Life came out. I can't put into words the impression that the opening that …

I went to college in 1995, and my very first week of school, I was introduced to the internet, usenet, ftp, and netscape navigator. A few months later, I was downloading cool .mod …

I never loved the original Far Cry as a player, but I did deeply appreciate it as a game designer. I was working as a game programmer and technical designer on a big budget FPS bac…

Ah, yeah. If you go through the code there, Bryan had to change that file in quite a few places to implement crouch sliding. Nick Maggoire is an animator. Super nice guy. No inside…

Thanks! That's really cool to hear, 20+ years later. I actually did all the effects work on the weapons (muzzleflashes, smoke, explosions, bullet holes and surface sprays, and all …

Thanks! I've been thinking a lot recently about maybe getting some of my own stories down. The late 90's were a really fascinating time to be in games. And I loved Masters of Doom,…

I ... hmm. My memory is really, really dusty on that. I remember I had a handful of conversations with Bryan Dube during development about Q4 deathmatch. He was a super sharp game …

Well, as I say, I'd been meaning to look into this in more detail because it's something I'd been long curious about. But I don't think I have time right now to dig into it.

Wow. This post gave me emotional whiplash. I opened the collection of links, which is quite good if a bit old. But then I had a subconscious mental itch, and thought, wait... where…

I'm not exactly up-to-date on current techniques (I've been out of AAA game making for a while now), but here are some general observations that might be useful. Way back during th…

Andre LaMothe's prior book, Tricks of the Game Programming Gurus, was literally life changing for me. I was in my late junior or early senior year of high school when it came out. …

For anyone who wants to give LOGO a try, there's a really nice browser-based, javascript-implementation live at https://calormen.com/jslogo/ . Source for it can be found at https:/…

I think there's a couple of orthogonal issues here. One of them is the nature of interactivity in the levels themselves. There's a spectrum between having a game grammar made of di…

You can read Carmack's .plan archive from 1996 here, if you're so inclined: https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive/blob/mast... It's a _fascinating_ snapshot into Quake…

That's sort of how things ended up, but I don't think it was the intention. Doom and Doom2 were (and are) magnificent single player and co-op games, if you like that sort of thing,…