A game design blog by Matthew Gallant
Like many people who love video games, I have a conundrum: I own more games than I will ever realistically have time to play. It’s a problem that has accumulated slowly over many years, compounded by Steam sales, charity bundles, and subscription services. It’s of course a wonderful predicament to be in, as it reflects the richness of a vast creative form. But the fact that I would seemingly never…
The Last of Us Part II Remastered is out now on PC, and includes a small update for the roguelike survival mode No Return. We’ve added four new maps to the rotation, and two new playable characters from Part I: the gruff loveable smuggler Bill and the Firefly leader Marlene. I’m really thrilled with how these new characters fit into the mode, and wanted to unpack a little bit of their design…
Last Thursday night, I got to attend The Game Awards privately knowing that we had a surprise announcement up our sleeves. As the “one more thing” before the show wrapped up, we dropped our first trailer for Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, a new sci-fi adventure from Naughty Dog.
In returning to first principles on a deckbuilding roguelike, I believe Balatro’s design had a sort of convergent evolution towards a different game genre. A genre where players also seek synergies while drafting an evolving build, banking funds is rewarded with interest, risk mitigation is a fundamental skill, and the winner must survive multiple structured rounds with escalating stakes.
My daughter (age 6) is aware that her daddy makes video games, though with somewhat abstract notions of what that actually entails. She has often asked if we could make a game together, which led me to research various child-friendly gamedev tools. On a whim I picked up Game Builder Garage, a game-making toolkit released for the Switch in 2021.
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. I’ve had the privilege to continue in the role of game director on The Last of Us Part II Remastered. We added a whole slate of new features: lost levels with developer commentary, a guitar free play mode, new bonus skins, audio descriptions for cinematics, and much more. The one that is…
For many years, I’ve been casually following the competitive LoL esports scene, especially enjoying the Worlds championship tournament that caps off each year. Worlds 2023 has been particularly great thanks to a big change: Riot Games replaced the traditional “groups” stage with a “Swiss” format stage instead. Examining this change through a game design lens helps reveal why it has been so…
At the beginning of 2022, I embarked on a project of drawing once per week for the entire year. On Christmas day I completed my 52nd and final sketch. Among all the possible hobbies out there, why pursue sketching? I think on some level it’s an opportunity to revisit a beloved childhood hobby. Growing up [ ]
For The Last of Us Part I remake for PS5, we had a chance to integrate a decade of technology and craft improvements to modernize the gameplay. This of course included accessibility.
Twenty-two ways to use the grappleshot in Halo Infinite, discovered through playful experimentation and discovery.
Eurogamer recently invited developers from Naughty Dog and Insomniac Games to share their thoughts on accessible game design. I was thrilled to relate some anecdotes of working with our terrific accessibility consultants, and how novel features and mechanics emerged from our collaboration. I also got to express my viewpoint that accessibility is an exciting frontier [ ]
Arkane Studios are one of my favourite developers. Playing through Deathloop has made me realize that I’ve been playing their games the wrong way for years. I’ll get into the nitty-gritty of this revelation, but first I want to frame it within a general game design principle. It’s not enough for designers to provide players [ ]
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. I’ve more recently developed a keen interest / anxiety around climate change, and have been reading various popular books on the subject. Last weekend, I [ ]
Earlier this year we wrapped up four years of development and shipped The Last of Us Part II. While most of my work was on systems, combat, and AI, I also co-headed our effort to push the boundaries of accessibility. We established our goals early in preproduction. We wanted to build on the motor accessibility [ ]
Back in 2017, I gave my first talk at GDC about combat design and AI in Uncharted 4. A recording of this talk is now free and publicly available in the GDC Vault. Authored vs. Systemic: Finding a Balance for Combat AI in Uncharted 4 The title of the talk comes from the biggest quandary we [ ]
Last year, Michael Barclay boldly declared that “level blockouts are art”. He started the hashtag #Blocktober to celebrate the art form and encourage other developers to share screenshots of their blockmesh levels. The video above is an early prototype of the train combat sequence that was later developed for chapter 9 of Uncharted: The Lost Legacy.
Thinking in Systems covers a wide range of tools and methods for systems thinking, but I’d like to focus on one technique in particular and how it could apply to game design.
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild evokes ideas that director Clint Hocking explored in a 2009 GDC talk entitled “Fault Tolerance: From Intentionality to Improvisation”.
In the last few years before his departure, I was fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with Bruce on The Last of Us and Uncharted 4. Working under his creative direction made me grow tremendously as a game developer.
Four years ago, Canada’s video game industry surpassed the UK to became the third largest in the world. However, this fact would be easy to miss; video games are rarely permitted to be distinctly Canadian. Canada is where media is made, but hardly ever where it’s set.
While there’s a lot to praise about Clash Royale’s design, I’d like to expand on a small detail that caught my eye. It’s an ingenious design decision that allows the developers to efficiently reuse their existing content. It also opens up strategic options for the player without sacrificing simplicity.
On November 15th, I’ll be speaking about combat design and AI in Uncharted 4 at MIGS. My talk explores how we navigated the extremes of combat design philosophy (tightly authored vs fully systems-driven) throughout Uncharted 4‘s development, and how we found our best results with a hybrid approach.
RNG is often treated as a monolithic quality, but Hearthstone actually employs many distinct types of randomness in its mechanics. While each card interacts with randomness in a unique way, they can be broadly categorized by the set that they randomly pick from. We can use these categories to chart the evolution of randomness in Hearthstone through the years.
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. September’s selection was Challenges for Game Designers by Brenda Romero and Ian Schreiber.
Bill Siemering discusses the original NPR mission statement written in 1969; the document outlined their vision for non-commercial radio that would bring context, culture and humanity to the news.
I was recently interviewed by Jason Johnson at Kill Screen about the intersection of two of my favourite topics: video games and Twitter bots. Specifically, he wanted to explore the possibilities of using Twitter as a platform for games.
Last year I made a little game for Space Cowboy Jam with my good friend Matthew Breit. Inspired by one particular scene from Cowboy Bebop, we decided to make a silly cooking simulator.
Since making @HoroscopeBot and @EveryBookBot, I’ve been on what you might call a bot-making rampage. Here, briefly, are five new bots I’ve assembled over the last few weeks.
Destiny’s loot cave is a fascinating phenomenon that has captured the interest of many journalists, critics and players. From a design perspective, it’s a potent example of emergent gameplay: the often unpredictable consequences that arise from complex interactions between individual game mechanics.
Since I released @HoroscopeBot earlier this summer, I haven’t stopped thinking about Twitter bots as a creative medium. Corny “I could make a bot for that” ideas kept popping into my thoughts.
Last weekend, as a side project, I decided to create an oracle. His name is @HoroscopeBot, and he takes the auspices of Twitter to post a semi-coherent prophecy every twenty minutes.
This weekend I committed to finishing a small Twine game I’ve been dabbling with intermittently for the last year. I was intrigued by the notion of abstracting a game’s core mechanics into Twine as a form of critique.
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. Rise of the Videogame Zinesters heralds it as an accessible development tool for those without programming experience.
I’ve been feeling rather stealthy lately, playing through Dishonored and Mark of the Ninja over the last few weeks. Playing them back-to-back has contrasted them rather sharply in my mind, though neither title suffers for the comparison.
This week saw the release of Valve’s new beginner-friendly level editor for Portal 2, dubbed the “Perpetual Testing Initiative”. Many have praised this new software for its accessibility, and have advocated it as an entry-point for first-time level designers.
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. It piqued my interest with its colonial Martian setting and beautiful pixel art. However, the game’s lasting appeal rests in the strength of its peculiar Vaunt mechanic. When activated, Vaunt grants the player a seemingly arbitrary list of [ ]
SpaceChem is a remarkable puzzle game about fake chemistry. The game challenges you to build a factory in order to transmute the given input molecules into the given output molecules. While chemistry is the theme, on a mechanical level it has more in common with programming. The methods used to tackle challenges in SpaceChem are [ ]
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. We ve been requisitely tight-lipped about our project until this last Friday, when we finally unveiled Starhawk to the community. Starhawk is a [ ]
I’m still not quite sure what to make of Deadly Premonition. Everything you’ve heard about it is true: it has atrocious combat, compelling mystery, laughable graphics, memorable characters, inappropriate music, etc. The game is full of fresh ideas and has stuck with me for months, but I still wouldn’t feel comfortable broadly recommending it. I [ ]
Few online multiplayer games have become as habitual for me as Team Fortress 2. I’ve returned to it every few months since its release back in 2007, usually to plumb the strategic depths of a handful of familiar maps. In August of 2008, the Heavy update introduced Steel, a community map created by Jamie Fishbus [ ]
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. You can check them out at our fancy new website, or download them directly here: Mac Download / Linux Download [ ]
Minecraft was my gateway drug. It seduced my imagination with grand ideas: setting foot in a dangerous new world, gathering provisions from the wilderness, erecting meagre shelter and surviving on your cunning and creativity. Regrettably, these concepts quickly wane once you learn a handful of commonsense safety rituals. Late-game Minecraft becomes a different game entirely, [ ]
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. Over three days, we hacked together a silly game called Tea Time Quarrel. Since then we ve had the opportunity to present the game publicly at TOJam Arcade and the Mount [ ]
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. Ever since it caught the attention of gaming tastemakers Rock, Paper, Shotgun and Penny Arcade, my online social circle has been completely twitterpated. In fact, it has become so extraordinarily [ ]
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. Ancient Trader [XBLIG] It requires a bit of searching, but you can occasionally find a real gem in the unfortunate ghetto of Xbox Live Indie Games. Ancient Trader is [ ]
Earlier this summer I took the annual trip up to my friend Thomas s family cottage in northern Ontario. I relished the opportunity to disconnect for a while and enjoy the long weekend without the usual digital distractions. The cottage procedure prescribes reading, swimming, fishing and cooking. After the sun goes down, the card games come [ ]
This post is partly a (two month late) response to Chris Hecker s GDC 2010 rant entitled Please Finish Your Game. It also condenses some rough thoughts I ve long held about motivation and game making. It took some effort to edit it into a coherent form, so I apologize in advance if it s a tad rambling. [ ]