in tuft we trust

I've written about that before, so go there if you want to know more about this game!

Right now i'm just here to drop some cool pictures :)

LC 71 NY DZ 13 DW, Doug Wheeler (2013)

Yesterday I was deeply hungover after riffing at bars with my pal Fergus, so I took a 40-minute walk out to Copenhagen Contemporary .

Aftershock, James Turrell (2021)

The exhibits on show at the time were very focussed on space, light, a sense of deep physicality and of being within unnatural spaces (standing in a colour void, trying not to cough and as such ruin the sense of immersion for everyone else present). It was a great wee trip out, but almost as much as the works on show I was drawn so much to the construction of the spaces -between- the works.

I think about these spaces because they are so nakedly constructed as framing devices for the works ahead - to build anticipation and set the stage for what you're about to percieve. They are plaster walls and undecorated floorboards to be built up and torn down, real-world greyboxes with the same strange sense of scale being "wrong" that you'd get in an amateur Source map.

This stairwell mostly just had big Mirror's Edge energy.

I did also pop into the Kunsthal Charlottenborg later, when my phone had died after burning power on Gundam podcasts. It was a much more traditional gallery space, but with sharp divides between blacked-out video rooms and stark white halls. They had a room with NFTs that I couldn't tell was Pro- or Anti-.

Maybe it's the small part of my brain that still wonders where life would have gone if I went full art student back in the day. But while level design conversations often fuss around pacing and introducing mechanics, I strongly also feel like space and light are a part of the designer's toolset, not just environment artists down the line. It's why I struggle to "purely" greybox (or orangebox, as Source so often may be).

Copenhagen's train stations are also a whole vibe

Mood is a mechanic. Light is a tool, for setting the tone or guiding a player. A flatly lit set of cubes might get your playtesters accustomed to the raw, mechanical experience of progressing through your space, but games don't exist on a raw, mechanical level. You want your space to stick in their minds. You want your space to make people feel grounded, or awe-struck, or terrified, or oppressed, or.... anything but forgettable? Galleries have been doing this forever, modern art or otherwise, and I've a lot of lessons to take back from CC next time I fire up Hammer.

... that, or I'm just a hungover game designer thinking too much about some pretty lights she saw in a warehouse.

This is a little bit of a tangent but I wanted to write a post to recommend this game to you anyway, so why not do it here?

(For the record, 'liminal spaces' are defined as transitional places, places between destinations. but the places themselves usually aren't the destinations. hallways, tunnels (and you could argue elevators are also liminal spaces)).

INFRA (currently 75% off, https://store.steampowered.com/app/251110/INFRA/)
is exactly that. It's a source engine walking simulator game that's graphically so well designed that it took me a few hours in until I noticed it was actually a source engine game. If you thought Valve did a good job designing hl2 levels, INFRA shoves them out of the way and shows how powerful the Source engine actually is.