Road trip sketches; notes on extracting and visualizing Half-Life 2 levels in Maya

So I'm working on (another) article about level design in Half-Life 2. I chose the d2_coast03 map of the Highway 17 chapter, which is the first real "coastline" road trip section of the game, and is probably the most successful. Look at how big and open it is. Would you believe this is a map in a game celebrated as a meticulous roller-coaster? In my mind, it's contemporary with a lot of vehicle-based first-person open world game design trends that started around the same time in 2004, and they even pulled it off in an engine architecture that's still kinda based on Quake 1.

Teaching, Fall 2017

As mentioned before, I'm going full-time with NYU Game Center starting this September. For this upcoming fall semester, I'm going to be teaching three classes and advising an independent study:

• Intermediate Game Development (2 sections). This is a required class for the BFA Game Design major where we focus on using Unity in a 3D context, refine C# code fluency, learn about using Maya and Substance Painter, and become less scared of using Git.
  
  This is my fourth year of teaching it. This year, I've changed the final project to focus on studying and cloning a game. In the past, the final project asked students to collaboratively formulate an original game design concept, but I noticed students would get into endless debates about the game design instead of focusing on project architecture or collaboration workflows. Since we already have dedicated game design classes that offer more support for those debates, I now feel comfortable removing some creative freedom from this class -- so we can focus more on building-up "technical freedom."
• Intro to VR. This is a new VR-focused class we're running for undergraduates and/or people who aren't so familiar with code and 3D. At Game Center we remain cautious about investing too much in something still fundamentally unproven like VR / AR, but we still want to support students who want to explore it. Unlike our graduate-level VR Studio class which assumes technical proficiency in code and Unity, this class will offer more of a scaffold into working in 3D and VR. We'll also dip our toes into talking about VR culture and critical theory as usual, but probably stop short of discussing Baudrillard and phenomenology.
• Level Design (independent study). Years ago I used to teach a modding class with a level design focus, but one day I noticed students hated using the Source Engine, and we never identified another decent engine / toolset for level design. We also needed a good base game to design more levels for, which is why we can't switch to Source Engine 2 -- DOTA2 isn't exactly relevant for learning generalized level design practices. At least half of our students also use Macbooks, which basically wither and die under Unreal 4, so that's out of our reach too.
  
  But then a few months ago, some students approached me to advise an independent study on level design. This format is more like a seminar / reading group instead of a full production-oriented studio class, and we will focus more on theory than construction. Hopefully this will work out better than the Source modding class!

StoryCode August 2017 Forum at Film Society, Lincoln Center, NYC

Next week on August 22nd, I'll be giving a presentation for StoryCode, a local community group focused on immersive media and storytelling technology. As one of the few game designers invited to present in their lecture series, I thought I'd try to explain how video games conceptualize narrative, interaction, and expression, to an audience that maybe doesn't play that many video games -- or at least, they don't play what we consider to be the state-of-the-art narrative games.

I'm also being required to talk about my games and present them as case studies, even though my games don't fit neatly into the "narrative game" genre. I think I'll probably just open my actual project scenes in the Unity editor and mess with my scene setup and code, which usually entertains people well-enough? It'll also be a short primer in foundational ideas like immersive fallacy / procedural rhetoric / platform studies, and the idea that production value and paratext amount to their own kind of "story."

The presentation is free and open to the public, but I believe you're encouraged to sign-up and RSVP via this Meetup page or something.

Tuesday, August 22, 2017 @ 7:00 PM
Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center @ Film Society of Lincoln Center
144 West 65th Street, New York, NY (map)

Go West young Slime Rancher, and grow up with the country

This post spoils some mechanics and game systems in Slime Rancher.

One in-game day in Slime Rancher, I found a rare "quantum slime", a creature that pooped out "quantum plorts" that I could sell for a lot of in-game money. To make a huge profit, I intended to raise a few on my ranch in captivity, and then collect their precious poop to sell in the market.

To maximize your slime poop plort yields, you're supposed to feed your slimes as often as possible. Every slime has a certain diet (vegetables, fruits, or meat) and a specific favorite item. Quantum slimes eat only fruit, but prefer a special fruit called a "phase lemon". To get phase lemons, you have to bring back a phase lemon from the wild, plant a phase lemon tree, wait for the fruit to mature, and then shoot a different fruit at it (like a cuberry, or a mint mango) to pop the phase lemon into existence. Compared to other crops, it's unusually labor intensive to cultivate and harvest phase lemons.

This is where Slime Rancher's other big system comes in, a cross-breeding mechanic that allows you to merge two slime types together. If you feed a slime with the poop from another slime, it will become a hybrid "largo" slime that inherits both types' diets and other properties, and it will poop out both types of plorts at once when it eats something. Two poops for the price of one! When you do this on purpose in Slime Rancher, you feel like a genius.