The Quixotic Engineer

Like many people who love video games, I have a conundrum: I own more games than I will ever realistically have time to play.

The Last of Us Part II Remastered is out now on PC, and includes a small update for the roguelike survival mode No Return.

Last Thursday night, I got to attend The Game Awards privately knowing that we had a surprise announcement up our sleeves.

Like many other game designers with a systems bent, I have spent copious enjoyable hours this year with the breakout indie hit Balatro.

My daughter (age 6) is aware that her daddy makes video games, though with somewhat abstract notions of what that actually entails.

Wanted to share a bit of news about what I’ve been up to since shipping The Last of Us Part I remake in 2022.

Diagram via LoL Esports Back in 2011, a friend gently guided me through the steep learning curve of League of Legends, and I’ve been playing it on and off ever since.

At the beginning of 2022, I embarked on a project of drawing once per week for the entire year.

Back in 2020, I wrote about co-heading the accessibility effort on The Last of Us Part II and the incredible reaction to our expansive set of features.

As a longtime fan of the Halo series, I’ve enjoyed seeing its evolution over the years.

Eurogamer recently invited developers from Naughty Dog and Insomniac Games to share their thoughts on accessible game design.

Arkane Studios are one of my favourite developers.

Photograph by Jack Crossen, License CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 A few years ago I started making Twitter bots as a weekend creative coding hobby, developing a dozen or so through 2015-2016.

Earlier this year we wrapped up four years of development and shipped The Last of Us Part II.

Back in 2017, I gave my first talk at GDC about combat design and AI in Uncharted 4.

Last year, my friend and coworker Michael Barclay boldly declared that “level blockouts are art”.

There is a certain class of books (Understanding Comics, The Design of Everyday Things) that aren’t ostensibly about video games, but have still found their way into the informal game design canon.

While I was playing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild over the holidays, I kept thinking about Far Cry 2.

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

“Originally, Deadly Premonition was supposed to take place in Canada.

Clash Royale has been my go-to phone game lately.

On November 15th, I’ll be speaking about combat design and AI in Uncharted 4 at the Montreal International Game Summit.

“RNG gets your emotions really high and really low.

Austin’s independent games collective Juegos Rancheros hosted another game jam this summer, and this year the theme was “mystic western”.

To start off 2016, I thought I’d take a moment to write about some of the new Twitter bots I assembled last year.

For the last few months I’ve enjoyed following along with Liz England’s Game Design Book Club.

The podcast Radio Diaries recently featured an insightful interview with Bill Siemering, one of the founders of National Public Radio.

I was recently interviewed by Jason Johnson at Kill Screen about the intersection of two of my favourite topics: video games and Twitter bots.

Last year I made a little game for Space Cowboy Jam with my good friend Matthew Breit.

Since making @HoroscopeBot and @EveryBookBot, I’ve been on what you might call a bot-making rampage.

“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 c…

Since I released @HoroscopeBot earlier this summer, I haven’t stopped thinking about Twitter bots as a creative medium.

Last weekend, as a side project, I decided to create an oracle.

This weekend I committed to finishing a small Twine game I’ve been dabbling with intermittently for the last year.

Photograph by Daniel Schwen, License CC BY-SA 4.0 The interactive fiction platform Twine has been around for many years, but recently it’s been at the centre of the DIY game creating movement.

I’ve been feeling rather stealthy lately, playing through Dishonored and Mark of the Ninja over the last few weeks.

This week saw the release of Valve’s new beginner-friendly level editor for Portal 2, dubbed the “Perpetual Testing Initiative”.

A few weeks ago, the gents from the Moving Pixels podcast invited me to join them in conversation about League of Legends.

While I’m not typically a shmup player, lately I’ve been enjoying a great indie shooter called Jamestown.

SpaceChem is a remarkable puzzle game about fake chemistry.

If you follow me on Twitter or elsewhere, you may be aware that I moved from my native Montreal to Austin, Texas last year to work for a new studio called LightBox Interactive.

I’m still not quite sure what to make of Deadly Premonition.

Few online multiplayer games have become as habitual for me as Team Fortress 2.

Only ten months after promising that they were “coming soon”, the folks of No Fun Games (Kira, Renaud and myself) have finally finished porting our one-button real-time strategy game Pax Britannica to OSX and Linux.

Minecraft was my gateway drug.

Back in late April, the No Fun Games gang (Renaud Bédard, Kira Boom, and I) took the train down to Toronto to participate in TOJam.

If you pay attention to video game news, you’ve probably heard a lot of buzz these last few weeks about an indie game called Minecraft.

Indie Gaming Gallery is a semi-regular feature where I attempt to support independent game development by highlighting some outstanding titles that you should definitely check out.

Earlier this summer I took the annual trip up to my friend Thomas’s family cottage in northern Ontario.

This post is partly a (two month late) response to Chris Hecker’s GDC 2010 rant entitled Please Finish Your Game.