Soon, (very soon), we are actually going to start posting gamedeveloper.com pieces on Co-host, to a real, live Gamedevdotcom official account! I'm excited about that, because this has quickly become my favorite social platform, especially to talk about game design and development, and I want to really engage with other devs and writers on here through that.
But until then, I am going to keep sharing some of my favorite pieces right here on my own account. And we had some absolute bangers this week, so I'm excited to share. It has obviously been a very, very grim time in the industry (layoffs upon layoffs upon "execs at TK media company will now use AI to write articles"), and I've said it before, but some of the pieces we've published lately have honestly helped me get through the day. Thoughtful, interesting, engaging work is still being done, despite waves hands at the world all of this.
Here are a few of the features this week that have especially caught my eye and stayed in my brain:
Bryant was VERY stoic not to make a "filling the dead space" pun here:
In 2008's Dead Space, the game is divided into a number of different chapters, each acting as a standalone level. Players advance from chapter to chapter by using an internal tram system on the USG Ishimura.
When EA Motive set about to remake the game, Robillard explained that it was a design goal to have that tram feel like a natural part of the whole ship. And when Motive laid out the full map design of the original game, there was plenty of empty space to be filled.
Since the team was very interested in having the game be playable in a "single shot" (much like Sony Santa Monica's God of War from 2018), that meant plenty of space had to be filled for a tram system to feel real. That gave Motive an opportunity to create new, fresh encounters for fans of the original game.
The team also created an entire "Intensity Director" not unlike Left 4 Dead's director, to keep fresh encounters throughout the game. I'm really excited to play it (I've somehow never played the original... YET).
Bryant also wrote an awesome retrospective feature on Devil May Cry 4, as part of our ongoing Flashback 2008 coverage, looking at games from 15 (holy shit, right?) years ago:
I think the Devil May Cry series may have secretly benefitted from one underrated part of its Resident Evil roots: because early Resident Evil games were set in such confined locations, the franchise was blessed with the sense of "exploring a haunted house," and the haunted houses just got bigger. DMC4 is the first game to not keep things in one "haunted house," and it feels lesser for it.
DMC5 would later bridge these two level design philosophies nicely. Though it's set in a big, sprawling location (a city ruined by a giant demonic tree bursting from the earth), things feel small and confined because the ruined city has flattened what might have otherwise been a more diverse environment. The haunted house is just city-sized now with interesting nooks and crannies to explore.
The net result of DMC4's cost-saving design direction might not greatly diminish the game's fun factor, but it definitely makes it a less memorable experience. I can almost mentally rechart the entire arc of DMC3 in my head, but when thinking back on DMC4 I can only remember some of the fantastic cutscenes with Dante.
Holly has also been on fire lately curating the Developer Insights section. We had a really rad retrospective on the cover art of the original Prince of Persia, penned by Jordan Mechner himself (the designer/creative director of the game):
I sort of love this bit about changing the cover princess' top to a... sports bra, lol, and Mechner's reaction to the change:
Marketing sent the painting back to Florczak for revision. I can imagine with what enthusiasm he duly added a green Persian sports bra to the princess’s decolletage. Personally, I preferred the original; but as I wrote in my journal on July 25: “There are battles you win and battles you lose, and in the big picture, this one is pretty meaningless.”
And yesterday, we had an absolutely delicious feature on how the Pentiment team evolved and developed the incredible art style for their game alongside systems design and narrative considerations:
In order to pull off the extreme stylistic flattening that we wanted, we decided early that restricting player movement to tracks was the right call. It provided more control over the camera framing in different scenes and also allowed us to play around with depth without getting too spatially confusing. However, tracks can end up being very time-consuming to walk along, and we were concerned by how much we would need to populate along a path in order to not make the experience incredibly boring. There are also angles that end up being particularly difficult to show clearly, like walking “up” into a scene to reach something further away. In the historical woodcuts we were referencing, people are almost always shown in front or ¾ view. We considered scaling the characters to represent distance from the camera to solve this, but I didn’t like how this would vary the weight of the character detail size against the fixed world around them, and just ended up avoiding paths laid out in that way entirely.
My team has been firing on all cylinders lately, including our news writers, who have contributed fantastic news analysis pieces on the State of the Game Industry survey all week long, as well as timely, context-filled news pieces on all of the goings-on in our space. I even blogged a bit on burnout and "self-imposed crunch" the other day. The IGF and GDCA award announcements gave me a little boost of hope too.
Also: I've been turning some of our "how-to" and "how we did this" pieces into shorty TikToks! I had fun creating this one, on Papercut Mansion's incredible style and the "reverse UV method" of creating 3D assets that look like papercraft:
So while, yes, I have been mighty, mighty depressed about what's going on in the world of games... I have also been eating this stuff up.

