Radiator Blog

"Thanks for injecting me with 500 cursed Black Knight Ultra Greatswords" for Rock Paper Shotgun

2026-03-12T12:34:00.006+13:00

I have a new piece up at Rock Paper Shotgun about Dark Souls 2 (2014), but no prior Dark Souls experience is necessary to read it.

It's about when I got hacked in Dark Souls 2. Basically a malicious multiplayer PvP invader can "inject" invalid items into your inventory, causing the game to crash if you try to open your inventory screen. In my case, my hacker injected me with 500 cursed swords, like truly cursed, more powerful than any intended in-game mechanic or lore.

A really skilled player could probably finish Dark Souls 2 without opening their inventory ever again, but I'm not a really skilled player, so I had to figure out a way to unhack myself -- and the only way out was through the abyss.

All this actually happened to me back in 2024, and it's been marinating in my brain all this time. Now in 2026, I've even tracked down my hacker for this story and interviewed him. I think letting those years pass also helped me see the story from a different angle: empathy, forgiveness, and a depraved sense of shared fallen grace.

There's one thing all the cheaters and anti-cheaters I interviewed can agree on: the DS2 codebase is a total shitshow. I was surprised to learn about FromSoftware's history of poor engineering practices and lax attitude to user security. Why don't they just fix this stuff? From my understanding, fixing inventory crashes is a pretty easy fix -- just clamp the item upgrade level properly. It's bizarre behavior for a very successful studio that definitely has the resources to maintain a still-popular catalog of games.

The whole article kinda goes all over the place -- from personal memoir to cyber security reporting to hacking tutorial to dark fantasy lore analysis to nostalgic retrospective. It's a bit of an adventure, and it was fun to write. Thanks for reading!

The future of public game arts festivals and non-commercial games culture

2026-02-13T12:20:00.003+13:00

Freeplay Parallels in 2024 in Naarm Melbourne, Australia

This year the oldest living art games non-profit in the world, Freeplay (Australia), announced they were like a year away from shutting down, so they're running a survey on what to do. They have some money, enough for one last conference, or one last showcase? Or should they do something else?

It's easy to see this as part of a broader global discourse about the future of non-commercial game arts events around the world. There used to be many more events, but now there's not. What's happening?

A lot of discussion happened on Bluesky, where it was instantly lost and forgotten in the churn of the feed. So I'm writing this post to archive / preserve some of that Discourse. I also want to add some of my own thoughts as an extra-special non-Australian outsider who visits occasionally.

someone playing a game at Freeplay Parallels 2024

First, here's Brendan Keogh's reactions, Dan Golding's reactions, and Leena van Deventer's reactions on Bluesky. Also here's recent Freeplay co-director Mads Mackenzie's blog post about event running and Freeplay board member Darcy W Smith's reactions. Some common points:

Freeplay was an anti-institution that has "won" and thus has become an institution itself.

If its mission is accomplished, then maybe it should end.

If Freeplay got so big that volunteer labor feels exploitative, then maybe it's too big.

Can Freeplay return to being a smaller ragtag thing? Maybe not.

Let a thousand smaller events grow from Freeplay's ashes?

I see Mads' blog post as a data point for that last bit: while getting 10-20 people into a library meeting room is easy, it's much harder to grow from "smallest" to a "small" 50-100 person event.

Mads call this "The $1000 Problem": the event size / budget that is both too big and too small. For example it might cost $1000 to rent a decent-sized room with AV hookups, so to break even, you'd need 50 attendees to pay $20 each. But at that ticket price, everyone expects more than a room with folding chairs. So then you have to decorate the space, plan a schedule with a slate of presenters, or sell a lot more tickets in a bigger room, which will all cost more money, etc. Or run it as a series of many small events, but who's gonna plan and run all these events now?

Wonderville in Brooklyn, established 2019

One strategy: secure a space first.

Babycastles (RIP), Boshi's Place, Wonderville, Glitch City -- these game gallery / indie social spaces all operate(d) events out of a permanent-ish space with leases / diverse funding streams. So then the big event cost (the day's venue hire) drops to zero... sort of? In Melbourne, Bar SK (RIP) did the whole venue thing for a while, and now Sabby is going for it. LIKELIKE is the clever exception here, bootstrapped out of Paolo Pedercini's lovely garage, though he's also spoken on the strengths and weaknesses of his approach ("Can you be like LIKELIKE?")

Leasing a space seem to works OK for those 50-100 person sized events but if you're successful then you're also sort of trapped in that space too. If you want to grow bigger, you can't. Maybe that's OK. For reference, Freeplay runs much bigger events, with 1000+ people attending Parallels which costs about $100,000 AUD to run (huge venue + AV equipment?)

Big events, of course, have different space needs. Now Play This (London) recently wound down in 2025 (Holly Gramazio's wrap-up analysis blog post here) after a strong run in the colossal Somerset House. Even long-running events like IndieCade (Los Angeles) with its complex weekend invasion of Culver City have shifted to a mostly online-only format with occasional conferences at local colleges. Now A MAZE (Berlin) is maybe the last big physical game arts festival left. The future doesn't look great.

GAIA 2025 Scene Report (PDF) map of 2025 symposium attendees, with Australia / NZ blank

But there is a future, it will just take some time to form, and it needs all our help. Game Arts International Network holds an annual Game Arts International Assembly to discuss these kinds of problems.

~~Conspicuously, Australia (and its vassal state Aotearoa New Zealand) are absent from GAIN's global scene map.~~ EDIT: The map pins above show the 2025 symposium attendees, not a "full" scene map. But an Australian or Kiwi should still probably be showing up to these things!

As a somewhat recent expat / immigrant to this region, I feel a bit unqualified to provide an official "scene report" for Australia / New Zealand, but maybe someone from Freeplay should email them and start talking. Maybe host the 2026 symposium in Melbourne?

This is a bit of a global problem, so maybe the answer is a bit global too. Despite its problems, Freeplay is much more developed than most game arts orgs in the rest of the world, and probably has a lot to teach everyone else.

In return, well, Australia (and especially New Zealand) often crave international recognition, especially from the rest of the West, and so some diplomacy might help Freeplay with impressing the local government, and maybe secure some local public funding / weather local political headwinds...

"'Cultural heart' broken as arts bodies' funding axed", The Australian, January 3rd, 2026

Harrison Polites wrote "How Freeplay, one of Australia’s leading indie videogame orgs, missed out on government funding" linking Freeplay's problems to a wider Victorian (Australia) arts funding crisis:

"In its original grant application in 2022, for the Creative Ventures Program, Freeplay was competing against other grassroots arts organisations. [...] That grant, however, was discontinued, leading Freeplay to apply for the much broader Creative Enterprises Program. [... The] results of this latest grant process upset many in the broader arts community, as several other institutions that also banked on Creative Victoria grant funding also missed out."

Zainab Darbas explores further local game dev sentiment about the Australian game funding landscape in "Commercialisation, community, and culture: A production perspective on public arts funding for video games in Australia" (2025) -- here's a key quote:

“The big frustration there is that most of the good events stuff in games is the grassroots stuff. And there's this really annoying push-pull thing there where the grassroots stuff isn’t formalised enough for the government to want to fund it, but then formalising it is either out of reach without the funding or formalising it will kill it.”

(Note that "Formalization" is a strong theme in Brendan Keogh's The Game Industry Does Not Exist (2023) with its Australian indie context.)

Coincidentally, all this Australian games festival shutdown discourse is happening at the same time as another Australian festival shutdown discourse -- the Adelaide Writers Week -- which had an estimated attendance of 160,000 people last year, just a little bigger than Freeplay.

Adelaide Writers' Week when it isn't imploding

And also coincidentally, the co-founder of Now Play This and SUPER FAMOUS AMAZING BEST-SELLING NOVELIST Holly Gramazio recently wrote about the her unique double-experience of being both a local who loved this big giant writers festival, as well as an international guest anxiously backing out of the big giant writers mess. I'll quote the love part:

"Most of the events at AWW are free, and happen outdoors, in the parklands near the city centre. A little walk from the city library and the university in one direction and the train station in the other. It is so central and easy to get to. It is so straightforward to just wander along for an hour or two and see what’s happening. You can bring a sandwich from home or a pie from the shop in the station. You don’t have to buy their official vendor coffee, you don’t have to plan what you’re doing days in advance, you don’t have to feel confident or sure that you’re meant to be there, you can just go."

If Freeplay needs to change, here's my uninformed outsider tourist opinion: keep the recognizable brand and scale and knowhow, but try to morph into some other nonprofit games event thing that's big and hard?

What type of big events can only a big experienced formalized org like Freeplay do, besides Parallels or Angles? What new experiments can they try for $30,000 again, each year for the next three years, long enough to have another shot at the arts funding lottery?

Night Games at IndieCade 2015... running Killer Queen maybe? photo by Scott Chamberlin

What if Freeplay tried to scale super huge and super public and semi-normie like AWW, a constellation of "approachable" events -- a mix of big public stuff like Now Play This and Come Out And Play and AWW-style parkside dev talks, with IndieCade Night Games stuff after dark?

Or maybe it could become like an Australian MAGFest, a weirder gayer alternative to PAX with more music and performance? (This is one of A MAZE's key strengths -- linking games to a broader nightlife / music / performance scene. Comedian cross-over has been an emerging trend in commercial indie games too, where Earth Must Die got various big British comedians like Little Alex Horne etc. and Pro Jank Footy has enlisted Aunty Donna.)

"Killing GDC" is a long-held dream of the entire game industry outside the US. But you're not going to murder GDC by disbanding one of the biggest non-US game arts orgs. What would a less evil "~~GDC~~ Freeplay Festival of Gaming" pivot look like? As GDC changes, so must the anti-GDCs too.

***

... Well, anyway, it's easy enough for me to say all this shit. I don't live there and I don't have to do anything, except when Melbourne saves enough MP to summon me every few years.

Fortunately for all of us, Australian indies love to haul out all their messy problems for the world to see. Just the fact that Freeplay is being so transparent with its numbers is wild to me, like I don't think any other game festival would ever willingly invite all this discourse about itself. If this "leaked" at an American games festival, they'd all be treating it as a PR crisis.

So even if I don't know much right now, I'm sure I'm going to hear about it all eventually. "She'll be right." Everyone give Keogh good quotes for the next book, OK?

Notes on level design workflow for the 3D platformer Big Hops

2026-01-28T13:16:00.008+13:00

overview of the Ocean intro level

I made some levels for the 3D platformer game Big Hops by Luckshot Games, and it's finally released! You can now play it on Steam, Switch, and PS5.

So far the game is getting 7s, 8s, and 9s. Most players like the level design, though some kinda hate it, which is fair -- we went for a chill cozy-ish hands-off no-combat experience that won't hit for everyone, but the people who like it really do like it. I'd compare it to Psychonauts or Banjo Kazooie, with some Mario Galaxy / Breath of the Wild / Sly Cooper bits.

Despite the lack of complete universal adoration, I do think we figured out decent level design practices that worked OK for this scope / type of 3D action game. Some of these dev practices may surprise you; it certainly surprised me when I realized what we were doing. So in this post, I'll talk about some of our level design workflow for Big Hops...

SPOILER ALERT: I spoil some mechanics and levels, but not in detail. I don't spoil any of the story or the ending. Don't worry about it.

overview of the Forest intro level

You play the chapters / biomes in this order: Forest, Desert, Ocean, Mountain.

However, we actually made them in this order: Ocean, Mountain, Desert, Forest. (3, 4, 2, 1). The conventional wisdom is to make the beginning of your game at the end of your dev cycle, to craft a stronger first impression with the benefit of your accumulated regrets, and I think that proved true here.

Sewer layout planning

The first step is often the hardest. And the first world we made, the Ocean chapter, definitely took the longest. We had to figure out what "one unit of content" looked like, how "emergent" we were going to be, what a "boss fight" or finale looked like, and so on. Even though it was a bit painful, I kinda like how it came out, it has maybe the most free-form levels in the game.

Production on the Desert (you reach it after 2 hours, but it's the 3rd chapter we made) went comparatively smoothly, since by then, we had established a pattern for each world: a start level, a big town area, 3-4 item types, 3-4 levels to introduce each item, and an ending climax. We didn't have to debate the shape of a chapter anymore.

wireframe overview of the Desert intro level

Desert planning

To start work on a biome, the director Chris wrote and presented a design brief. It was just 1-2 pages outlining a general story premise, level ideas, and various mechanics to introduce in each level.

Then the whole team would get on a big video call and start picking apart his plan, but like in a nice way.

After some consensus-building, we'd all prototype and validate different items and mechanics simultaneously.

Cactus fruit pitch

For example, when we all started working on the Desert chapter, I started with a stealth prototype, Mickey did fire propagation, Eli made slingshots and rope ballistas, etc. and then we all played each others stuff and gave feedback. This is a big advantage of having a generalist indie team: we all know how to make stuff. Like Jonny was the main artist, but he also made some of the coolest levels too... and then I had enough art sensibility to follow the style guides when decorating other levels, freeing up Jonny for other tasks.

If an initial prototype wasn't an obvious slam dunk, sometimes we'd try to prove it out with a beat-driven pacing prototyping method popularized by Portal: we'd make a big "beat zoo" test level playground, and then fill it with little gameplay chunks / situations / puzzle-beats. I use lowercase-p "puzzle" very loosely here, to refer to any designed situation that asks for more than the core traversal moveset.

Blockout test level with various beats: "cart bomb", "protect the cart", "cage match", "minesweeper"

We settled on this directed puzzle-beat approach after a looser open-ended sandbox design approach wasn't playtesting great for us. I'm sure someone has the perfect holy grail subtle systems design to scaffold big toolboxes elegantly for all players, but we went for a traditional level design solve: most of our puzzle-beats have a fairly specific "ask" / critical path solution, and everything you need is usually nearby. Yet we do have one redeeming design twist: we don't care if you bring a weird item to sequence break something, and some players (especially speedrunners) really like doing that.

But still, we mostly designed for a canonical solution / critical path. When prototyping puzzle-beats, I found it helpful to try to name each beat with a pithy 3D text label in the game world to try to sell the "parti" / concept.

another beat zoo

Like "Bomb Aquarium" was a big zero-gravity area full of mines, and "Scary Train" was a soulslike pastiche with a giant minecart trying to run you over, etc. If you can't name something, then it might be too complicated or confusing. These beat callout labels also make discussion and feedback clearer too ("Bomb Aquarium felt broken, but Scary Train is funny")

Some challenges shipped in the final game are just art-passed versions of the best beat prototypes. But making bad beats is important too, because it's how you know which parts of the possibility space to avoid. I must've made like a dozen minecart beats and many of them aren't in the final game, but the survivors were stronger for it.

Splines Rule Everything Around Me

None of this was possible without some very smart level design tool tech investments near the beginning of the project. At the time I thought it was just some silly math-boy nerd overkill, but it proved to be utterly visionary and essential...

Path Shape animated GIF

Specifically, Chris and Eli built out this cool fancy "Path Shape" construction system: 3D splines that we could curve, deform, subdivide, invert, and even carve each other arbitrarily. Each Path Shape has various tiling UV presets and bevel / contour presets, and you can even voxel paint on them to blend different terrain texture types.

For big wide areas like the open desert or the ocean seafloor, we used a modified version of the Unity Terrain tool. But for the other 99% of the level geometry, we used these Path Shapes for cliffs, ponds, cities, interiors, mountains, caves, tunnels, train tracks, pipes, clouds... if it's not foliage or furniture, it's probably some type of Path Shape / spline mesh.

It was my first time on a big project with a parametric / procedural workflow, and I had a pretty fun time. I think the key to this workflow was maximizing artist control and modular configs, vs. clever programmers trying to automate everything and make assumptions.

metrics test level by Chris I think

One big surprise about level construction: we were pretty casual about level design metrics. Usually you'd expect a platformer to rely intensely on metrics, but for us, it just wasn't a big concern. Chris made some metrics test levels, sure, but those were more for testing (his really good) player controller, they weren't a design bible to obey.

I think your attitude toward metrics depends on your mechanics. In our case, we were making a chill platformer with generous climbing and ledge grabs. We had very forgiving "soft metrics", versus a tile-based 2D precision platformer with "hard metrics"?

The project team was also small and flat enough that we could "vibe out" the metrics together. We communicated about metrics subconsciously while playing each others' levels, etc.

Not that I could've measured much, since Unity doesn't have a built-in ruler, and I never asked for a custom one. Usually I just eyeballed distances and heights as I blocked out levels with first pass art, subconsciously using textures and props to guess the scale, and then I'd do short quick playtests to run through it and adjust as necessary. Measuring is actually kind of slow, and maybe even a waste of time if you're already playtesting the metrics frequently anyway.

Lastly, I think metrics depend on your construction methods. If we were using Quake-style brushes or tile-based modular construction, we probably would've had to measure a lot and stay on grids. But instead we had this magic stretchy Path Shape tool that could cover gaps and deform for any space.

everyone likes a custom play mode button!

I do have one general tip for anyone making any sort of 3D action / exploration game in Unity: add a custom "Enter Play Mode at Scene View Position" button to your editor tooling, similar to Unreal's "Play From Here" functionality. Conceptually, your editor code should wait until after you enter play mode, then grab a ref to your player object somehow (find something tagged Player?) and teleport it to the scene camera's position. Because you waited until play mode began, the teleport won't persist, it'll just be a temporary thing for that play session.

In general you should always try to make quick playtesting as easy and painless as possible, so that you do it more. And in my experience, this button makes playtesting specific parts of a level so much easier, vs. manually moving player objects every time you want to test something... and then afterward forgetting to move it back to where it's supposed to be? Argh!

I made our custom play mode button using the Unity Toolbar Extender package on GitHub. If you're using Unity 6.3 or later, you can probably rig up something similar without that package, using the new built-in MainToolbarElement API -- which is very limited, but it can do a button at least.

***

Overall this was a fun project and I learned a lot on it, and I want to thank the game director Chris Wade for bringing me on and letting me into his world.

This probably won't be the last of my level design thoughts about Big Hops -- it made me think about a lot of design / theory stuff, especially since it wasn't the typical realistic 3D first person shooter stuff I usually work on. But that theory stuff will take a little longer for me to write and ponder, so I'll save that for a future blog post.

Again, you can play Big Hops on Steam, Switch, and PS5. Tell your friends, etc. And for god's sake leave a nice Steam review if you do buy it!!

new Quake map: "One Need Not Be A House" for Quake Brutalist Jam 3

2026-01-04T12:14:00.018+13:00

"One Need Not Be A House" is a large non-linear concrete bunker island / brick brutalism map that I made for Quake Brutalism Jam 3 -- a huge single player mega mod for Quake 1 with 77 (!!!) modernist-inspired levels made by the community.

You can download and play it for free here, as part of the QBJ3 mod at the Quake community hub Slipseer. This time the jam organizers even made a 100% free standalone download with no Quake purchase required!

(BUG REPORT, 13 JANUARY 2026: there's some reports that sometimes my map crashes Ironwail v0.81, which is the engine packaged in the standalone download. Sorry. As a workaround, you can use vkQuake instead. Or just skip it, there's 76 other levels to play anyway!)

In this post I talk about my inspirations, intent, and what happens in the level.

This is your last SPOILER WARNING: if you care about spoilers, play the level for yourself first.

Kahn's "brick brutalism" masterpieces in Bangladesh and India

My main architectural inspiration here is the work of Louis Kahn, specifically his "brick brutalism" masterpieces: the National Assembly Mosque / Presidential Plaza of the National Parliament House in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad, India.

While Kahn isn't the first architect you'd associate with brutalism, his unadorned brick monoliths are very brutalist, showcasing the raw material and brick's unique affordance for archways. It also embodies a critique of orthodox Western brutalism's concrete fetish -- a truly global brutalism must adapt to diverse climates, materials, and cultures.

Kahn was friends with Luis Barragán, the main design inspiration for my previous Quake Brutalism Jam map "There's A Certain Slant Of Light." Both Barragán and Kahn developed their own distinct takes on brutalism, paying greater attention to materiality and light. It's a sunny contrast to the grimdark concrete megastructures in most of the other QBJ maps. Studying these architects also forces me out of my comfort zone, to build in ways I wouldn't usually build.

the first thing I built: brick tower with spiral staircase, and near-final texturing and lighting

I began by prototyping a round brick tower in Quake, and then painstakingly cut away a circular window with a careful trim around the edge. If this wasn't a Kahn study, I wouldn't have bothered. Making a thin round subtractive shape that curves on 2+ axes is pretty annoying. Even though TrenchBroom is the best Quake level editor around, there's still no magical modern modeling tools to do this for you -- this is still 1990s era low poly tech, you still have to drag each vertex into place, by hand.

It also shows how blockouts in level design are a bit bullshit, because from the very beginning, texturing and lighting heavily influenced my core shapes and metrics. Makkon's excellent chunky brick textures and trims worked best with a wall thickness of 32, and my daylighting tests showed I needed a fairly steep sunlight angle to brighten up anything behind the massive tower. Without near-final textures, I would've defaulted to a wall thickness of 16, thus requiring an expensive rebuild. Without near-final lighting, I wouldn't have realized the towers block so much sunlight, thus requiring an expensive rebuild.

In this way, the layout and blockout were dependent on the texturing and lighting.

shadowy spiral staircase interior of the tower

Inside the towers, you climb these big long spiral staircases to the top.

The conventional wisdom in Quake mapping is to avoid spiral staircases. They're tricky to build. Steeply sloped spiral staircases cause weird quirks with Quake Engine player camera and traversal -- see 3kliksphilip's video about the cursed spiral staircase in de_dust2. The inconsistent sloping and "vibrating step" jitter feels bad (and the Quake norm is NOT to clip stairs into invisible ramps). Lastly, smoothly "slicing the pie" at a constant rate around the spiral is a mildly annoying input, requiring small frequent mouse-look nudges.

But mother, I love him!! I love spiral staircases anyway!! I love any big long continuous stretch of stairs!! See my previous map Taught By Thirst which ends with a big fight up a pyramid, or my earlier map The Close And Holy Darkness with a big staircase courtyard.

I like how big long stairs afford "free verticality": players can treat the entire staircase as one continuous sloped floor plane. Contrast this to a traditional boxy stairwell with frequent landings and orthogonal turns. Yuck! I argue breaking continuity is worse than any spiral stairs discomfort -- a discomfort I mitigated with a thick central pillar, wider steps, and a shallower rise.

early work in progress screenshot; notice the 4 big cylindrical shapes in the middle

I like these towers with spiral staircases so much that I anchor the entire map layout around this "square" of 4 tower-spiral-staircases. Everything else flowed on from this early design decision.

How do these tower-spirals relate to each other? Do you climb each one separately? Or do you enter one, and then use bridges to access the others? In any order?

The Silent Cartographer,
from Halo: Combat Evolved

Around this time, the Halo 1 remake announcement discourse was happening, with much ire aimed at the desecration of its iconic island level The Silent Cartographer. I adopted a similar concept: a true island map where you can follow the shores all the way around. But I also wanted a looser more non-linear flow than The Silent Cartographer, to let players climb up to the middle from multiple places, or duck in and out of the center as you explore and make your own path.

It's tricky to reconcile non-linearity with current Quake community encounter design norms, where tight progression and fight scripting are more of the fashion. But I don't have the time nor skill to make a non-linear masterpiece like Tears of the False God that seems to anticipate your every possible move. So instead I think I'm OK with letting players feel like they're getting away with something, to ambush mobs and "break" encounters by approaching the "wrong" way with different weapons and powerups. I use zero monster teleport ambushes: all my monsters are "on the page", all my fights are "fair." It's more of a Dark Souls attitude than a Quake attitude.

"rafts and rockets" section with a line of rocket soldiers facing away from the main approach

Here's one early example of my non-linear encounter design, the "rafts and rockets" area pictured above:

FROM THE BOTTOM: Many players enter from the rocks. You'll have to platform across these vulnerable wood rafts that bob up and down in the poisonous ocean. Before you jump, you'll likely snipe the unaware rocket soldiers -- but if you're not quick enough, they could blast you into the poison water. (Here I also placed an invisibility ring, a dare to sneak underneath without sniping.)

FROM THE TOP: Or if you approach from the beach, you'll be busy fighting some knights -- and that's when all the rocket soldiers start firing at you. The beach isn't safe, but it's the best place to fight the knights with a close range weapon, so you have to juggle the rockets until you have a spare moment to snipe back with the pistol. Or maybe you found the nailgun already.

FROM THE TOP-LEFT: It's also very possible to sneak to the stairs. The rocket soldiers might be lined-up perfectly for you to take out all of them in one shot with the Rebar Gun or Invoker.

editor screenshot of some of QBJ3's new monster types and weapons

"Rebar Gun or Invoker"? Huh? The QBJ3 mod has added so many new weapons and enemy types that it's basically a whole new game distinct from Quake. It was a challenge to the mapping community to try to figure out how to use all the new mechanics within the jam's 7 week time limit. They even made a tutorial level just for the level designers AND it was really difficult!!

I tried to maximize my use of new QBJ3 features. I placed quite a few "vampirism" powerups, which makes kills drop little red health orbs. It's like Doom 2016, encouraging you to rush to stay alive. It also turns big mobs into big healing opportunities and messes with target priority, where sometimes it makes more sense to mow down low-threat enemies first to cash them in for health.

I also love the new fodder monster types, like the "rocket soldier" is dangerous long range fodder, or the "swarmer" and "sploder" are super-fast melee fodder good for ambushes and chaos. But maybe my favorite is the "amalgam", a big flying concrete monolith made of mouths -- it's useful to have a slow tanky flyer, but also its caltrops don't aggro other monsters so it's a great support enemy too.

a small courtyard with a tree; notice the monsters hidden in the shadows in the back

Again, doing art and lighting early in the design process was important for figuring out monster placement and gameplay stuff. If I didn't like how dark an area was, that meant I had to punch some holes in the ceiling or move some walls, so the sun could shine through. Then once I saw where the light could not reach, I knew I could safely hide some monsters in there.

This entire level has only one main light source: the sun. If this is truly an abandoned overgrown place, then there should be no random inexplicable electrical lighting. This also follows the tradition of levels like Half-Life 2: Lost Coast, emphasizing natural light and committing to worldbuilding via lighting.

(Did you know the original Quake 1 lightmap baker didn't even support sunlight / global directional light? The mod community only added this feature later, when Tyrann updated his popular TyrLite tool on December 14, 1999. Imagine... more than 26 years ago, some random Australian nerd invented the sun.)

the back garden area / another variant on the spiral staircase

While there's a lot of freedom to make your own route throughout the entire level, the overall map progression has three general stages / objectives:

Beachheads: get up to the wharf -- either through the central pipes, or by climbing up near the aqueduct pipeline, or by sneaking up a ladder from the back beach. Get Flak Gun, Rebar Gun, Grenade Launcher, and maybe Invoker.
Wharf: find 1-4 silver keys to unlock stairs and shortcuts. Get Nail Gun, Rocket Launcher, and maybe Invoker.
Towers: find 3-5 gold keys to unlock the aqueduct pipeline to the exit tower.

gold dome from Riven

I was worried about whether players could find all the gold keys in this big sprawling non-linear map, so on Easy you only need to find 3 gold keys, on Normal you must find 4, and on Hard+ you must find all 5.

I also added big floating golden orbs that hover above every key location, which I never tutorialize nor explain, but hopefully some players figure it out if they need it. I was playing Riven at the time, so some of the big golden dome design likely bled into my subconscious, as well as its postmodern steampunk feel in general. If only modern Quake engines could render some nice specular shininess! Maybe in another 25 years...

aqueduct pipeline with giant golden orb floating in the sky

After you get enough gold keys and unlock the pipeline atop the aqueduct, you approach the final tower that sits alone from everything else.

I wanted to end with something surprising. Not just another big mob fight or something. If I had more time, I would've built (yet another) spiral staircase that leads down, all the way down, below the ocean, into a big surreal subterranean arena or something, Dark Souls style.

But I didn't have much time, so I opted for a smaller ending: an old wood house.

Given this map jam's architectural theme, I thought the ending should invoke architecture. Brutalism was a response to modern materials enabling new ways of building, it requires something to react against, a status quo of traditional vernacular architectures. Modernism requires a pre-modernism. And that's what this house symbolizes: the spiritual weight of pre-modernist architecture haunting this entire place.

the ending teleporter, atop the last tower -- an old wooden house

As usual, my map title ("One Need Not Be A House") comes from an Emily Dickinson poem:

One need not be a chamber — to be haunted —
One need not be a House —
The Brain — has Corridors surpassing
Material Place —
Far safer, of a Midnight — meeting
External Ghost —
Than an Interior — confronting —
That cooler — Host —
Far safer, through an Abbey — gallop —
The Stones a’chase —
Than moonless — One’s A’self encounter —
In lonesome place —
Ourself — behind Ourself — Concealed —
Should startle — most —
Assassin — hid in Our Apartment —
Be Horror’s least —
The Prudent — carries a Revolver —
He bolts the Door,
O’erlooking a Superior Spectre
More near —

This poem is fairly straightforward. She's saying you don't need to be a house to be haunted, because your brain is so fucked up it's like a haunted house already. At least in a physical haunted house though, you can run away from the (physical?) ghosts. Unfortunately you can't run away from brain ghosts.

There's a bit of dark irony in the last stanza. Dickinson invokes a revolver, obviously useless against any ghosts outside your brain. However, the "superior specters" inside your brain, though superior and unfleeable, are actually quite vulnerable to guns, if you think about it. So your worst Assassin... is yourself. Again, a surprisingly dark and Quake-like sentiment of Miss Dickinson.

***

You can play this map and MANY MORE brutalist-inspired levels in the Quake Brutalist Jam 3 mod, available for free here at the Quake community hub Slipseer. There's even a 100% free standalone version available, no Quake purchase required. (But if you're even a little bit computer savvy, the Quake mod release is strongly recommended instead, it just requires a little more setup.)

If you need help finding my map entrance in the hub, it's in the Main Gallery, second to the right of the mazu-ladder.

Some general advice though -- QBJ3 was built for experienced Quake players, because that's mostly who still bothers to play Quake now. So if you're new to Quake or don't play boomer shooters often then you should probably start on Easy mode.

Life notes (2019-2025) + Sweet Sixteenth (16th) Blog Anniversary Mega-Roundup

2025-12-22T11:56:00.009+13:00

I haven't done one of these end-of-the-year blog roundups since December 2018. This blog is now 16 years old. Maybe now's a good time to catch up over the past 6 years of my life??

Here's my "greatest hits" / notable blog posts since 2019, along with some commentary with the benefit of substantial hindsight.
⭐ = Gay game release / artist statement.

2019

Thick skin: complexion, realism, and labor in games is still a good one, comparing the tech art of layering multiple texture maps in modern 3D game materials to Lucian Freud's fleshy painting.
Radiator European Tour 2019 (London, Berlin, Milan) + Lessons from Europe: field reports from EGX Rezzed, Now Play This, and A MAZE Berlin provide a snapshot of the pre-pandemic games festival circuit in Europe. Flying back-to-back weekends between New York and Europe sounds glamorous but it was actually a mild nightmare and it made me realize I didn't have the energy / desire to try to become a "real artist" and all the travel it'd require.
State of the design blog is when I officially started blogging less. Little did I know that 6 years later, it'd be the year of the blog!!

2020

The powerful presence of non-presence in "Out For Delivery" is my last VR-centric post, about a remarkable piece of VR filmmaking in Wuhan just as the pandemic was beginning. I think it might even be the last VR thing I ever played?
My fy_iceworld feature for Rock Paper Shotgun is probably the best thing I've written for RPS. Read the comments in part 2 for a possible tantalizing conclusion to the mystery too -- though without evidence, it's impossible to confirm anything. Thanks to editor Graham Smith for believing in it.
⭐ Hard Lads as an important failure. Personally I think this is one of my better gay games / masculinity simulators, and it doesn't even have any explicit nudity. It also happens to be one of my better artist statements / essays too. It's my only game to get reviewed in Art in America -- again, I was on the cusp of entering the art world, and I had to decide whether to commit to it or not.
I got burnt out on streaming and I started making Quake maps. I can't find a blog post for my first Quake map, but #2 is Smell It In The Street and #3 is It Will Be Summer Eventually. I wouldn't say they're good levels, I was still learning TrenchBroom and figuring out my Quake design voice, but they play OK enough.
The year of changes - kia ora Aotearoa. And the big one: I announced I was leaving New York City and moving to Aotearoa New Zealand, where I still currently reside today. (You can't get much further from the art world than this?)

2021

⭐ We Dwell in Possibility as queer gardening simulation was a Manchester International Festival commission and represents the height of my fine art dabbling. I still feel a bit cheated by the pandemic here -- it would've been great to attend MIF in-person and experience it firsthand. At least the game turned out pretty good! One art critic said it was surprisingly subtle and open, compared to my other games -- I forget his exact words, but it was something like -- it's my least American game.
Three more Quake maps: #4 is Daughter Drink This Water, #5 is Tell Me It's Raining, and #6 is When There Were Wolves. I believe Daughter is regarded as one of my better maps, an adaptation of Hang 'Em High from Halo 1 that gradually unfolds itself. It represents the point when I finally became proficient and fluent enough in TrenchBroom and Quake mapping, culminating in my Quake Renaissance series for Rock Paper Shotgun.
Open world studies: for some reason this is the year I wrote big design analysis blog posts about big meaty open-ish RPGs -- Deathloop, Enderal, and The Forgotten City (2021).

2022

Four more (!!!!) Quake maps: #7 is Heart Like a Bird's Nest, #8 is The Close And Holy Darkness, #9 is Breakfast Under The Balloons, #10 is There's A Certain Slant Of Light. This year I was also volunteering as the maintainer of Quaddicted, the main Quake 1 community map archive. In retrospect, 2022 is probably the year I did too much Quake stuff and burned out a bit on it.
⭐ Logjam as mourning wood is one of my weaker gay games, but I still like it. I wanted to try making something smaller and simpler after WeDIP took so long, and maybe even embrace arcade aesthetics more. You can draw a throughline from this one to my new gay fishing game I just released last week, where Logjam is my first gay game that really lets the numbers in.
⭐ Zugzwang as a pole dance upward into heaven is my most complex and difficult game, and maybe the least playable because of it, confusing even hardcore gamers who should be well-equipped to decipher it. It's also the most explicit, with several sex acts that literally dissolve men into puddles of ejaculate. A German museum recently chose this one for an exhibition, and my first reaction was, "uhh are you sure?"... I still like this game though. It's fitting that my most esoteric game is the one about occult sex magic.
⭐ That Lonesome Valley as cowboy coin crusher is my first gay web browser game. Similar to Logjam, it's partly a reaction to making WeDIP, where I tried making a 2D web game with more arcade aesthetics. Here I learned a lot about the technical aspects of making Unity WebGL stuff -- this 2023 Unity WebGL tips blog post still gets a fair bit of desperate search traffic.

2023

This was the year I made no Quake maps and released no gay games. I was busy starting up a level design contract for the upcoming indie 3D platformer Big Hops (now launching on January 13, 2026 on Steam, PlayStation, and Switch!!)
Double Fine PsychOdyssey recaps / viewing guide, episodes 01-17 is the first half of a viewing guide that I never finished, oops. PsychOdyssey is still a remarkable and brave thing today, when some game developers documented their awkward pain in meticulous detail and let everyone judge them for it. Just some incredible vulnerability on display here.
Design review of Redfall is my analysis of the last game ever by Arkane Studios Austin. At the time, there was still some hope they'd get a second chance and Microsoft would be a forgiving owner. Today, we now know that Microsoft has definitely drank some of the vampire juice and pivoted to pure evil. Let's all pray for Arkane Lyon and Double Fine to survive the villainy.
The joys of the anti-farm sim: "Before the Green Moon" is about one of the most underrated indie games of all time by the greatest indie devs of all time. It's absurd this game didn't become super beloved and popular throughout the entire world. It's very good and it does so much. A massive injustice on a cosmic scale, God is dead and we have killed him, etc.
new web game: "Where's The Beef?" is another mini web game experiment. It started as a very silly thing but then became surprisingly interesting to make and play as I explored the design space. This type of thing returns again in 2025.

2024

This was the year when I blogged the least, with a grand total of four (4) blog posts the entire year. I suspect I was very busy with the Big Hops contract.
One new Quake map: #11 is Taught By Thirst, a decent adaptation of de_aztec for Remix Jam. Usually I don't bother much with designing map secrets, but this one has the best designed map secret I've ever done, harkening back to de_aztec's evolving history over the years. It's one for the real level design sickos.
On "Sudden Death" is about a queer Southern hemisphere sports-themed visual novel, which perhaps predicts my current interests / main project right now...

2025

It's the year of the blog, baby!! However my blogging momentum has definitely petered out in the second half of the year. At least V Buckenham and Joe Wintergreen are still going strong!
This is the year I announced my first big long term commercial project: Tryhard, a sports RPG set in Aotearoa New Zealand. It also comes with A Sportslike Manifesto calling for new types of sports games. I'll have a lot more to say about it in 2026.
I don't actually have a blog post for this one, but I've started a new level design contract, helping out with the upcoming stealth action game Sleight Of Hand. ("Wishlist on Steam now!")
Space is not a wall: toward a less architectural level design is my most popular blog post in recent memory. It adapts some of my GDC 2025 talk about the difficulties of teaching level design / writing The Level Design Book. I think it tracks with how much more level design I've been doing since the 2020s -- maybe the more level design you do, the less you're able to confidently define what it is.
new web game: "Don't Rank Cuomo" is another quick mini web game experiment in the same vein as Where's The Beef, this time with some bonus 2000s era game studies discourse about political game design! This one centered "fun" more than the average NEWSGAME (TM) though, and also cemented the notion of non-architectural level design in my mind.
I started TikToking this year. At first I thought it was like the opposite of blogging / thinking, but now I realize all the supposed spontaneous immediacy is more often a careful performance. Currently I think I'm doing too much editing, I'm still trying to figure out the equivalent of shitposting / triangulate my "TikTok persona."
⭐ Rainbows Are Carnivores is a gay fishing / aquaculture romance game. Personally I think it's one of my better games -- better than any of my 2022 games.

It's also my first public 3D web browser game, since Apple finally improved its iOS WebGL support. Maybe it's because of their XR push, or maybe it's a side effect of the Epic lawsuit, where Apple sort of argued Epic could've shipped Fortnite on WebGL, and so finally the iOS Safari / WebKit team had to make WebGL support seem just barely plausible.

I made a Quake map for the upcoming Quake Brutalism Jam 3, but the actual public release will likely be next year since it's such a massive community project that needs a lot of QA and testing.

new game: Rainbows Are Carnivores, a gay fishing / aquaculture romance

2025-12-12T23:56:00.004+13:00

Rainbows Are Carnivores is a gay fishing / aquaculture romance video game about using your pole to catch some high quality hogs.

"Hog” is, of course, angler slang for a big fish, like a rainbow trout. It could also refer to the many rainbow men who happen to inhabit this video game lake.

You can play the game for free in your web browser, on desktop or mobile. Though I must warn you, it's a bit difficult, so be patient. It'll take 10-20 minutes depending on your luck / prior aquaculture expertise.

CONTENT WARNING: the game is rated-R, but this post is mostly PG-13. There's a butt.

SPOILER WARNING: this post SPOILS the gameplay and ending. Play it first if you care about spoilers.

This game is about a fisherman daddy who's fishing for slippery sexy men. You click / tap to cast your fishing rod, then hold to reel in whatever you caught. Usually you end up catching a naked man.

The fisherman grades each catch. However the traditional way of grading fish, by weight / length, feels a bit weird to apply to humans. So instead the fisherman rates each man with a vague visual heart-shaped percentage; perhaps this represents overall compatibility, attractiveness, or quality. I leave this exact meaning ambiguous.

The game doesn't explain how to get a better catch. The player must guess how to make the heart fill up better. Since this looks like a fishing game, maybe it's all about your fishing technique? Do you have to wait before reeling in? How do you know when to reel?

screenshot of a shirtless fisherman with a decent catch - but not quite good enough yet

Most fishing games depict fishing as a complex skill that requires timing and patience to master. Different fish have different behaviors to learn and understand. There's an intimacy there.

Men especially romanticize this intimacy through the culture of homosocial masculine fishing. Father and son fishing trips, camping and “living off the land", TV shows about dangerous yet lucrative manly fishing expeditions -- exploiting the world's endless natural resources requires copious masculine skill. "Teach a man to fish and you’ll feed him for a lifetime!" We pair this romance with abundance: "there's plenty of fish in the sea" -- but somehow it's never reassuring, is it?

A 2024 UN report notes only 62.3% of marine fisheries were biologically sustainable in 2021. North Sea countries lowered 2026 cod catch quotas by -44% (ignoring scientists' advice for a zero-catch quota for cod to truly recover). Fish stocks will decline further with continued overfishing and climate change. Aquaculture will intensify, stressing water systems and dwindling freshwater. There's never been fewer fish in the sea (so far).

artificially-stocked lakes by Alex Brown, from "The Fish That Climbed A Mountain"

The mythical homosocial romance of wilderness fishing clashes with the stark industrial reality of fish farming. Alex Brown examines this dissonance in his article “The Fish That Climbed A Mountain” for Longreads:

"[...] I had joined my dad, brother, and some family friends on a backpacking trip in the Eagles Nest Wilderness in Colorado. After we made camp by a lake, I walked down to the shoreline and assembled a small fishing rod. [...] It was a trip that changed something in me [...]

[...] What I do know—now—is that the trout in the lake were dumped from an airplane by Colorado Parks & Wildlife. That the first salmon I ever caught, on a river along Lake Michigan, was a species that didn’t exist in the Great Lakes until 1966. That the rainbows I pulled out of Green Lake in Seattle, the fishing that kept me sane during the pandemic, reached their impressive size after years of being fattened in a hatchery. My treasured memories, I’ve learned, are all subsidized by a massive Fish Industrial Complex..."

aerial photo of Chalk Cliffs Trout Rearing Unit operated by Colorado Parks and Wildlife, which produces 700,000 trout per year; one of 19 hatcheries across the state

So in my game, this is why the player's fishing technique has zero influence on the quality of the catch.

From a wildlife management / industrial aquaculture perspective, it doesn't matter if you're a master angler or a beginner googan. You're just another number to be managed, a farming input with your so-called "skill" abstracted away. Fishers are maybe even the weakest input in the entire factory chain -- a laughably slow and inefficient way to harvest fish.

Thus, Rainbows Are Carnivores is an experimental fishing game without traditional fishing sim genre mechanics like bait selection, aiming, or line tension management. It is more about what fishing means and represents.

This acts as an implicit critique of the fishing game genre: don't just take the same attitude toward fishing all the time! Fishing isn't just one thing! When we make the same type of fishing game over and over, we ignore all the other aspects of fishing.

bite-centric screenshot from 2011 re-release of the classic Sega Bass Fishing (1997)

The first clue that this game doesn't care about fishing technique is in the game camera: it doesn't follow your hook, it always stays fixated on the fisherman. The game camera never moves. The most dramatic moment of traditional fishing games, the bite, always happens off-screen.

Since I never show the bite, I hoped players would realize that reel timing doesn't matter. But in playtesting it proved difficult to deprogram players. Some players would simply stare at the screen and do nothing, as if waiting for a divine sign from the Fishing Game Gods to start reeling. Thus I had to compromise and add some half-hearted fish bite UI indicators and game feel juice to prompt players to start reeling. Hopefully the uniformity and lack of responsiveness teaches players to take the bite for granted, as intended.

The second, more significant clue that your fishing technique doesn't matter: all the fish farming management gameplay.

various technical diagrams and data tables from "Manual For Rainbow Trout Production On The Family-Owned Farm" (1991) by George W. Klontz

To research the fish farm gameplay, I studied the notorious aquaculture masterpiece "Manual For Rainbow Trout Production On The Family-Owned Farm" by George W. Klontz written in 1991.

I was struck by the sheer amount of statistics and lookup tables. The optimal water temperature for a trout, how much oxygen it needs, how much space... it's like fish are made of numbers.

In the game I carefully pace the introduction of these numbers. At first there's no numbers or text because it's all about the fantasy of fishing as "natural" or "wild" intuition and skill. But then after your third catch, a vague blinking button inexplicably appears at the bottom of the screen.

Pushing that button suddenly reveals a dense aquaculture dashboard with a dozen unexplained water quality and fish feed factors. Paolo Pedercini’s admirable "no exposed numbers" game design methodology anti-inspired me to over-expose these numbers. I sought an indecent exposure / mental math flood, designed to overwhelm and obliterate your prior romantic notions of the fishing system. (To soften the violence, the dashboard has a bit of gentle Wii Shop inspired elevator muzak by my spouse Eddie Cameron.)

the aquaculture dashboard with (hint) pretty good settings that'll likely win the game for you

Fish and water are surprisingly complicated. I simulate only 12 factors:

Water Quality: Temperature, pH, Oxygen, Alkalinity
Pollutants: Calcium, Ammonia, Nitrite, Nitrate, Phosphate, Suspended Solids
Feed: Fish Meal, Fish Oil

Each factor has a hidden ideal number range, based on all the trout farming manuals I read. If you have some prior knowledge already, you can guess the ideal closely enough: cold-ish temperature and neutral-ish acidity, high oxygen, a little alkalinity, and minimal pollutants.

Also note this is a very simplified model. My sim factors don't interact, e.g. water temperature does not affect dissolved oxygen capacity. My fish can also survive near-zero oxygen and Superfund magnitudes of polluted waters -- homophobic players cannot engineer a mass die-off of queer men in the lake.

How do you figure out the best numbers? Most players will run their own repeated trials and experiments by making random adjustments and then catching a fish to measure improvements. To help track progress, the dashboard graphs your last 7 catches, or you can take notes like a real-life aquaculturalist.

The game gives a big (but subtle) hint by showing the initial settings give very low quality. Change everything to its opposite and you're almost there. Of course, subtlety was lost on all my playtesters, who were often reluctant to press any buttons at all -- I had to make each row of buttons blink AND I had to double / triple the numerical impact of each button. As a fail safe, you also accrue hidden bonus points when you make a correct adjustment, amplifying correct signals and speeding up game completion.

Gay Fishermen

All this help is unspoken / secret because I want to casually torture my horny LGBTQ+ audience. To win at seeing dick, you must calibrate the ideal water alkalinity for salmonids. Horny gays use "breeding" as sexual slang, but here I challenge them to earn that slang, to literally breed these fish men to a high agricultural standard.

What does a high quality man look like? I bet it has something to do with those guys who post fish pics in their dating profiles -- you know the stereotype. Men who love going outside, men who can afford to go on a fishing trip, men who can provide for their family / twinks.

But remember, these hot fish pics aren't possible without the artificial abundance made possible by industrial aquaculture and professional water managers.

Straight Fisherman

Unmanaged illegal trout dumping cause fish to multiply out of control, compete more, get leaner, and make for worse photos. To avoid disappointing anglers, state wildlife agencies must methodically farm, fatten, and airlift millions of "big unnaturals" to each lake every year.

The fish are a waste byproduct of masculinity farming. The vast majority of stocked trout (85% in one study) die off within months - partly by design, because remember, fisheries don't actually want these fish to survive and get leaner.

Despite this astronomical cost and waste, I support it. I believe all gender-affirming treatments should be subsidized by governments, no matter how many helicopters it takes.

screenshot of a shirtless guy fishing while a rainbow-flagged Boeing CH-47 unloads men

In the game, I imply the cost and scale of this industrial gay fish stocking program in a few ways.

Every few catches, a rainbow-flagged Boeing CH-47 "Chinook" tandem-rotor transport helicopter will fly in the distance to dump hundreds of fresh live men into the lake, replenishing the depleted stocks for your continued enjoyment.

Later in the game, the aquaculture dashboard shows a running debt that increases as you press buttons. You could view this large debt as a casual leaderboard stat to minimize, but there's no penalty for spending billions of dollars to generate the perfect fish.

Note that I haven't researched which aircraft the fisheries actually use, or how much all these trout farming programs actually cost, because I don't care that much. I mostly just think it's funny that everyone pretends this vast expensive systemic intervention is so natural, sensible, and effortless. Why stop there? Let's remove even more friction from the experience!

screenshot of fisherman on his phone while the fishing pole automatically reels in a man

In the second half of the game, you unlock an "auto fishing" feature: the fishing pole will automatically cast and reel without your input, and the fisherman will idly scroll on his phone.

Auto fishing was originally my dev-only feature for automated playtests. However when I saw (human) playtesters struggle a bit too much, I decided to turn this debug cheat into a mechanic, transforming this game into an incremental / idle game. Here the abstraction of fishing reaches fruition. The game admits the input loop of casting and reeling is vestigial and unnecessary. What matters is results.

Canny players will keep the dashboard permanently open while the auto fishing rod collects new data. Now you can optimize your aquaculture factors without all that pesky fishing and nudity getting in the way! This is maybe my deepest joke: by the end of this sexy fishing game, you'll ignore the sexy fishing to contemplate nitrate levels.

Despite this endgame emphasis on economics and efficiency, I wanted to snap the ending back to romance. Yet a horny ending felt so predictable. I know it's difficult to imagine, but what else can two men do by the lake?

a sexy film still from "Stranger By The Lake" (2013) directed by Alain Guiraudie

Recently I watched a fantastic French film called Stranger By The Lake (2013). It's about a bunch of queer men cruising for sex by the lake... and one of them is a murderer. It's an amazing modern gay thriller that doesn't need an essay to inflate its queerness. Everything is there on the screen. It's truly one of the best movies I've seen in a while. The ending made me scream. It artfully mixes sex and violence.

If we're honest, every act of fishing has an inherent violence to it. Fishing is a metaphor for romance and sex, but given the choice, fish (and people) generally do not consent to being fished.

On page 8, Klontz's 1991 rainbow trout farming manual states, “based on their food preferences, rainbows are carnivores.”

I've appropriated this surprisingly poetic phrase for my game title. It's funny to associate these intangible illusory symbols of hope and pride -- with meat consumption. But it also informs the direction I took with the ending: a bit of violence.

animated GIF of the ending "climax": the fish forces the fisherman to take a knee

So here's the game ending: after the fisherman catches his ideal 100% quality fish / man, the couple shares a hot makeout for a moment. Then the fish's own heart meter appears, but stops at 17%, as if the fisherman himself is incompatible or poor quality. The fish's heart breaks, but the fish can't throw back the fisherman, so instead he knees the fisherman in the groin and then swims away. (This is less gruesome than what happens in Stranger By The Lake.)

When the fisherman resurfaces, the fish is gone for good. He treads water alone while the credits appear. Off in the distance, a rainbow-flagged Boeing CH-47 Chinook tandem-rotor transport helicopter dumps hundreds of fresh live men into the lake.

Then the fisherman's heart appears again, but smaller, and maybe more fragile. Yet no matter how many times you click / tap, you can't break his heart. Maybe he's still in love with the man who hurt and rejected him? There's no point in fishing anymore. He will forever yearn for the one who got away.

screenshot of the game ending: a lonely fisherman treading water, pondering the one who got away

We obsess over numbers and metrics because it gives us an illusion of control over our lives. But numbers aren't reality, numbers guarantee nothing. Even if fish are made of numbers, those numbers still can't make a fish love you back.

Maybe it's a commentary on dating and romance in the app era. If we are the "plenty of fish in the sea", we're also using technology to overfish ourselves -- industrializing romance just like we've industrialized fishing, with diminishing returns. Dating pools enclosed by dating apps are like artificially abundant lakes where most relationships die off by the end of the season like farmed trout.

You gotta change your perspective, bro. You're not a temporarily embarrassed pro angler nor an elite industrial aquaculture manager. You're actually a fish, just like the rest of us. Go outside and touch water.

Rainbows Are Carnivores is a free experimental gay fishing game playable in your web browser on mobile / desktop. It'll take you 10-20 minutes to play, depending on your luck and prior aquaculture expertise.

How Dread Delusion structures its side quests

2025-11-07T14:00:00.023+13:00

talking to the "Inquisitor" at the beginning of the game

Dread Delusion (2024) by Lovely Hellplace is a retro-style indie first person RPG about exploring strange floating islands and talking to the NPCs who live there. It takes about 15-20 hours to complete.

inventory screen

Many compare it to The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind, with its emphasis on charming low poly 3D world design and worldbuilding. It also shares Morrowind's weightless combat -- but it's not as bad as failed dice rolls to stab a rat. It just treats combat with the contempt it deserves; there's no real benefit to killing stuff, no XP to grind. Pacifist builds are not only viable but very OP. (In the last dungeon, I just ran past everything at 50 MPH.)

So I want to focus on Dread Delusion's great strengths, specifically its world region / quest design. I've tried to write this for a general gamer audience to unpack what the game does. Consider this your last SPOILER WARNING: I'm going to talk about what happens in this game and what you do in it.

endgame world map

(Lots of info and images from this very good sidequests Steam guide, which is much more comprehensive than the now-deleted subreddit and very unfinished wiki.)

There are 4 main regions:

Pwyll: grassy starting area
Hallowshire: central grasslands
Endless Realm: pale graveyards
Clockwork Kingdom: snowy steampunk gulag

Each area has a central town and a "major side quest" that settles the region's central conflict / affects the ending, and that's the focus of my post here. Technically they're not required, but they definitely feel important.

You also need to factor in this project's dev cycle: it started as an Early Access demo in 2022, added main quest and dungeons for Hallowshire and Endless Realm in 2023, added the entire Clockwork Kingdom region in January 2024, and then launched the 1.0 release + Pwyll (redesigned starting area) in May 2024.

This is why I don't focus on the "main quests": Hallowshire and Endless Realm were designed without main quests!... so you'd expect Clockwork Kingdom and Pwyll to be the best parts, designed with the benefit of all the feedback and template-setting from the first 2/3 of dev time? And indeed, I think that's the case.

the big mushroom tree dungeon at the end of "Secrets and Spores"

cute mushroom inn

Here's the flow for the major side quest "Secrets and Spores" in Pwyll, a mushroom farming village, the starting area of the game:

On the way in, talk to the mayor's son, who intros Pwyll.
In town, talk to the weighmaster, who says to investigate the inn for cultists.
Talk to inn NPCs, who say to sleep at the inn to advance to night time.
At night, follow a masked cultist to a secret cave under the village with a dead god! (Twist!)
Talk to the weighmaster again, get a key to the big mushroom tree to stop the cult ritual.
At the top of the tree dungeon, you find the cultist / mayor's son (twist!) sacrificing himself to the dead god to try to save the town's mushroom harvests. Choose whether to let him sacrifice himself and maybe save the town, or to force him to live yet definitely doom the town.

This quest does a lot. It teases cultist / anti-cultist factions, and also worldbuilds how gods work. The plot takes some twists and turns, and the final dilemma evokes a compelling bleakness. It also tutorializes the day / night system, inns / sleeping, as well as dungeon and questing expectations.

the (disappointing) royal crypt you visit repeatedly in "All Good Things" in undead zone

In comparison, the major side quest "All Good Things" in Endless Realm (the undead zone) is relatively flat:

On the way in, talk to a zombie who intros the earthquakes and the dead king.
In town, talk to the queen, get a key to enter the king's crypt to talk to the dead king.
At the crypt there's (another) locked gate inside. Talk to either faction leader (mage or duke) for another key to unlock the inner crypt.
At the crypt, talk to the dead king: actually the queen's soul (twist!) who refuses to stop earthquaking.
In town, talk to the queen again to get her sad necklace, talk to the mage to get a happy vial.
Talk to the queen's ghost again, choose whether to give her sad necklace to guilt her or the happy vial to drug her. (Twist?)

This questline does less than Pwyll. You walk back and forth to talk to NPCs, get 2 keys, with no fun gimmicks or systems use or location discovery. Although I liked the concept of drugging a ghost.

The main twist (it's not the king's ghost, but the queen's ghost) has no real stakes. Who cares which ghost it is? You can ask the queen, "why didn't you tell me it was your ghost, why did you trick me?" Her bored lampshade answer: something like, "I dunno, I'm depressed or something." (Some zombie queens will do anything to avoid therapy!!)

getting kidnapped at the beginning of "Madness of the King" in the clockwork city

Now here's the strongest part of the entire game, "Madness of the King" in the Clockwork Kingdom (snowy steampunk gulag) -- it's also a very long quest:

On the way in, talk to a smuggler who warns you to trust no one.
In town, some guards kidnap you without warning. (Twist!)
Talk to the Clockwork King, a decaying steampunk robot god who talks in weird symbols.
Get a note to talk to a whistleblower at night to get a key.
In town at the old house, read about the king? (I don't remember)
Talk to the whistleblower at night again, get a junkyard badge (key).
At the junkyard, listen for haunted phone booths and talk to them.
Talk to the whistleblower yet again, who says to get an implant to translate the Clockwork King's language.
At the lab, talk to the doctor to get an implant (key).
Talk to the whistleblower (for the 4th time!) to get a radio music disc (key).
At the radio tower, talk via radio to... the smuggler?! (twist!) who says to find the saboteur and don't trust the whistleblower.
Talk to the saboteur to get a punchcard.
Talk to the whistleblower (for the 5th time!) to get another punchcard.
Talk to the Clockwork King, choose a punchcard to sabotage or to fix him. (Or betray both of them.)

the Clockwork King

Previously I condemned "All Good Things" repetitive talk, but here I think it works well. Maybe it's less about what you do, and more about how you do it:

Framing: talking to the whistleblower 5+ times is OK because she's investigating a complex mystery, and you're her Watson
Key skins: it helps when keys don't look like keys (radio music disc), it's even better when keys are framed as upgrades (badge, implant) so you can share a key to unlock multiple situations
Outgoing keys: keys unlock new places to explore, not just rooms in the same place
Pacing variety: some unique beats (kidnapping, junkyard listening) for variety
Callback to trailhead: bringing back the smuggler (when you're expecting a radio god) is funny

(Interestingly, the Clockwork Kingdom basically abandons the game's faction system. There are no formal factions or faction points, even though this 3-way end dilemma implies 3 factions. I suspect the devs discovered that faction systems just aren't that interesting, and always end up being a bit boring and flat to use, much like fire propagation or other game dev darlings that sound cool at first.)

the noticeboard shrine for the start of "Missing Persons" in the clockwork city

Many players confuse this quest with another called "Missing Persons":

In town, read a poster about a missing child at a (very prominent) noticeboard.
(If you haven't been kidnapped already, you'll get kidnapped on the way to the dad.)
Meet the dad who gives you a locket (key) to show at the library.
At the banned library, meet the librarian, read about child and a secret project, learn about a camp.
At the camp, meet the child-mutant (twist!) and show the locket, but you can't understand their language?
At the lab, talk to the doctor (if you haven't already) to get an implant.
At the camp, talk to the child-mutant again with the language implant... find out they have the same name as the whistleblower (TWIST!) so the child is the "original" in a secret cloning project! Choose whether to give the dad's locket to the child-mutant.
Talk to the dad, who gives you a candle to leave at the noticeboard in memory of the original child.
(optional, if you did both quests) Tell the whistleblower they're a clone created by the Clockwork King. She reaffirms her belief in fixing the King instead of destroying it.
(optional, if you did both quests) Talk to the Clockwork King, learn how the clones were created to fix the King itself. But is the output of a failed machine doomed to fail too?

Aphra (whistleblower)

Players confuse the quests because these A and B questlines / storylines converge so well. It also requires an open world structure to work best; both quests are hours long, require multiple trips back and forth, and even share the same midpoint gating (the implant). When you experience them simultaneously, it's like a detective story where two seemingly unrelated cases resolve each other at just the right time.

I also enjoyed the optional extra "coda" dialogues. Previously I wrote about the Skyrim mod The Forgotten City which creates a "bushy" structure with lots of optional branching -- except here, instead of being bushy in the middle, these parallel quests are a bit bushy more at the end, to reward your engagement and address dangling implications.

(My only nitpick: cloning isn't intrinsic to the steampunk trope, so it feels a bit weird for this quest to suddenly rely on it, without laying prior groundwork for it? Maybe the initial farming area could've had a short cloning-related quest.)

***

Some overall side quest design lessons:

Make trailheads memorable
Longer and fewer side quests are better than shorter and many-er side quests?... More marinating, more simultaneity, more opportunity to share gates and systems
Parallel side quests that converge are very cool
Your quest giver should probably care a lot about their own quest
Make keys that don't look like keys, or even cast them as player upgrades and unlock multiple situations with the same "key"
Most keys should take you to new places, not to the same place
Multiple quest codas are cool
Callback to your trailhead

the legally-distinct-evangelion uber-god "angel" at the very end of Dread Delusion

Lastly I want to address a "controversial" topic among Dread Delusion fans: the "good" ending.

It's basically the same dilemma as always: banish a god and live with the miserable decay of the status quo... or take a cosmic risk to merge with the god to try to fix the universe, but also probably destroy the universe. This speaks to the "delusion" in Dread Delusion: anyone with delusions of good intentions can easily fuck up everything even worse, and indeed this is what happened in Pwyll, Hallowshire, Endless Realm, and Clockwork Kingdom, and also the ancients who meddled with the universe. History suggests that a better world isn't possible. The centrists are right.

Although I had promised all the NPCs that I'd banish the god, I suddenly decided to take a risk and merge with the god. And the result was literally a "perfect" ending? (TWIST!) For once, you don't fuck it up. You rescue and fix everyone. You save the universe. An infinitely better world is realized by your hand. All is forgiven. Good things can still happen. It's hilarious and it works perfectly.

I think what a lot of the ending-haters miss is that this final dilemma hinges on you, the player character. In all the prior dilemmas, you're choosing whether to help an NPC use godlike power for flawed reasons.

But now this one is on you. Do you have the "hubris" to think you can learn from them, and become a better person? Maybe the real "delusion" was all the learned helplessness we gained along the way. Truly a game for our times.

YOU MAY ALSO ENJOY: my quest design review of "Diamond City Blues" in Fallout 4, or my design review of indie open world-ish farm sim Before the Green Moon

Postcards from TikTokland (month 1) + comparing TikTok to Bluesky

2025-08-08T00:03:00.009+12:00

So I've now been playing the weird MMO known as TikTok for more than a month, and I thought I should reflect on my time there.

In contrast to my first week on TikTok where I posted every day, I've now been uploading videos every 2-4 days. Which is much better. I highly recommend not posting every day, everywhere.

I've been making more local Australia / New Zealand game industry event vlogs. Here's a vlog from when I attended Wireframe conference here in Auckland, and here's another vlog (and yet another vlog) from my time at the Freeplay Angles festival in Melbourne. I tried to keep these pretty light and casual since I imagine most people aren't really sure what a game conference is.

I've also been making some more outdoor waterway videos. Here's a progress update on the backyard stream, a comprehensive review of the water fountains at the Auckland Domain Winter Gardens, and a waterfall walking tour. While I realize this could've been a savvy content strategy to try to capitalize on my most popular video, it actually wasn't a conscious strategy, I just like recording water and talking about it.

***

(Context: this Australian
restaurant didn't have coffee
so I had a beer at 11 AM.)

And now some overall thoughts: since my previous blog post, I've doubled my follower count to well over 500. Not bad for something I don't really understand!

However, followers do feel a bit pointless on TikTok, like a forgotten 2010s feature that makes no sense in 2020s automated content aggregator apps.

Every TikTok user just stays on their endless algorithmic For You Page, which shows videos from their followed accounts only occasionally, if at all. Some people even avoid following their favorite accounts, to dodge the sense that TikTok paradoxically buries followed accounts in the feed. Either way, you still have to pay TikTok to reach people, even if they're already following you.

So TikTok followers have only one real function then: to count. At 1000 followers, supposedly I’ll be able to post a link to my website! (But who’s even going to see that link anyway?)... And at 10000, maybe random companies will start sending me "missions" to advertise their products. (Yep, this is definitely a video game.)

Let's contrast TikTok to its polar opposite -- the hopelessly unpopular, deeply uncool, painfully millennial, old fashioned text-based social app that foolishly lets anyone post links whenever they want: Bluesky.

On Bluesky, the act of following matters a lot. It matters so much that you have a weird responsibility to your followers: you’re supposed to spread out your posts and retweets. If you retweet 5 things in quick succession, your followers will encounter those 5 things filling up their entire screen, in that order. You’re basically spamming / monopolizing their feed. It’s a bit rude.

What a quaint website. How strange to punish over-engagement! How funny to preserve context! It’s like one of those weird old timey post offices delivering an entire letter (booo!), instead of shredding the letter and showing random parts to random people for several months (yay!)

***

For now, I think I'm going to continue making random little videos. At this rate, maybe I'll have 1000 followers by the end of the year, even though I'm still not sure what the point of all this is?... Maybe in 5 more months in December, I'll finally learn the true meaning of Christmas / TikTok. I'll be sure to report back as the moral slowly dawns on me.

If you're allergic to my TikTok page for whatever reason, I cross-post videos on Bluesky (click the "Videos" tab) most consistently.

I also cross-post to my Instagram and my YouTube, but more randomly / less consistently.

I'm keynoting Freeplay Angles 2025 in Melbourne, July 31 - August 2... + support the Australian indie game hub Sabby!

2025-07-13T12:02:00.006+12:00

In about 2 weeks, I'll be giving a keynote at Freeplay Angles 2025, an indie video game festival in Melbourne, Australia, running from July 31 - August 2, 2025.

I'd give a hint for what my keynote's about, but I'm still in the middle of writing it, so you'll just have to wait in suspense a little while longer. (It'll probably have some sex in it I don't know)... For now, some logistics: I'll be keynoting the first festival day on Thursday, July 31, but there's also two more keynotes + full slates of interesting talks planned for both Friday and Saturday, August 1-2 too.

Full schedule and tickets are available on the Freeplay website. Ticket prices are on a sliding scale, from $20 AUD for those on a budget, to $150 AUD for those who can afford to pay more to keep it cheaper for everyone else.

Submissions are open for the WIP Night (July 31) to show off your work-in-progress projects for free -- tables, chairs, and power are provided. Submissions are also open for the Night Market (August 2) with free vendor stalls to sell your games, arts, and crafts -- tables, chairs, and power are provided.

I should add that in 2025, it's a remarkable privilege to keynote a public art-oriented indie games festival.

Around the world, similar amazing indie game festivals like Now Play This are winding down. I remember back in 2010, it seemed like every city was starting something new, but now in the 2020s everyone is struggling and nonprofit community game festivals are increasingly rare.

On that note, I should also mention the membership drive at Sabby in Melbourne -- they're literally one of the few remaining indie game galleries / community collectives in the world. But they may not remain for much longer. They need to get 100 co-op members by August or else they're going to shut down forever! Memberships start at only $5 AUD / week for those on a budget, to $20 AUD / week for those who can afford to help it grow extra. That's cheaper than one of those fancy Australian cafe brunches we always talk about here in New Zealand!!

It's vital for all of us to support our local nonprofit games community initiatives that already exist -- because without support, anything WILL burn out -- and in 2025, there's a higher chance that something new may not necessarily emerge from the ashes. Sometimes stuff just gets lost forever. You really can't take anything for granted.

So this is especially important if you're Australian or Melbournian! You're lucky you still have local indie games shit to attend! SHOW UP, even in the dead of Southern winter! Even if you miss my talk on Thursday, go on Friday and/or Saturday at least! Use it or lose it, Australians! Don't let everything get as pitiful and neglected as your national rugby union teams!

new web game: Don't Rank Cuomo

2025-06-24T23:56:00.057+12:00

Don't Rank Cuomo is a free short web game about not voting for / not "ranking" Andrew Cuomo, a corrupt disgraced neoliberal New York politician who's unfortunately running for mayor of New York City. (For more info, see the Times Union's June 15th op-ed: "Don't rank Andrew Cuomo.")

I made the game in an afternoon, after getting bombarded again with NYC mayoral race discourse on Bluesky even though I moved away years ago. And when I saw those words "don't rank Cuomo" for maybe the 999th time, the game idea suddenly emerged fully formed in my brain, and so I did one of those praxis solidarity things that people used to tweet about, and did something to show support.

Here's what happens in the game...

SPOILER ALERT: this post will spoil what happens in the game. If you care about that, then play the game first -- you can play it for free in your browser, on mobile / desktop. It'll take 2-4 minutes.

The game is short and simple: across 10 levels, you click / tap any non-Cuomo ballot option before the timer runs out.

If you click / tap on Cuomo, or you run out of time, then you get a fiery apocalyptic "game over" screen and a button to retry the level.

The timer (the yellow bar near the top) is there to make you panic, but it also mirrors the urgency: the primary election day is literally today as I write this (June 24th)!

Then between every level, there's a splash screen with a simple message, repeated over and over at a WarioWare pace, as if encouraging you to chant along: Don't! Rank! Cuomo!

One player critiqued the interface: you don't have to actually click on the individual bubble columns to rank candidates coherently. Instead you can just click anywhere on the row, and the game will automatically fill in the next rank bubble for you.

This critique is fair, since I clearly go for realism with a faithful paper ballot layout... But this fair critique is also clearly wrong. The game is called "Don't Rank Cuomo", not "Carefully Rank Everyone In Order Of Preference After Considering Each Of Their Platforms." What's important is the not-ranking and the not-doing. The power of a refrain like "Don't Rank Cuomo" relies on a simple ask, and that's the spirit that this game embodies.

The game is surprisingly fun to play. It was also surprisingly fun to make. I got into the non-architectural level design, thinking up different variations on the ballot mechanic and how to pace it. Here's my level design beat sheet:

Level 1: rank 5 of 10 candidates, avoid 1 Cuomo

relaxed tutorial with generous 60 second timer
players must learn to just click anywhere on the row
plausible ballot featuring all the candidates

Level 2: rank 3 of 7, avoid 4 Cuomos

teach that there can be multiple Cuomos

Level 3: rank 1 of 10, avoid 9 Cuomos

maximum Cuomos

Level 4: same as Level 4 but with less time
Level 5: same as Level 4 but with less time

I repeat the same simple beat 3 times to speed it up / establish a rhythm

Level 6: rank 1 of 2, avoid 1 Cuomo

kind of like the the thesis statement of this game
very easy level to sensitize you before the hardest levels

Level 7: rank 5 of 6, avoid 1 Cuomo but English names are hidden

you have to read the Chinese names and guess which one is Cuomo
most players fail a few times then realize Cuomo's Chinese name still has his middle initial "M"
miraculously, some players read Chinese, and have no need for special language tricks
a reversal of Levels 4-6, which make you think it's all about speed, and now this feels like a funny brick wall that turns into a slow panic puzzle

Level 8: rank 5 of 10, avoid 5 Cuomos -- but all the options keep moving and swapping places every 0.5 seconds, so it's easy to accidentally select Cuomo

this is now a reversal of Level 7, where it's all about speed and reflex again
probably the most punishing level of the game
but also maybe the funniest level

Level 9: rank 1 of 3, avoid 2 Cuomos -- but options swap around every 0.1 seconds, and also everything is in Chinese

even if you didn't learn the language trick with Level 7, by process of elimination you can guess the "odd one out" is the non-Cuomo option
ridiculous silly level where you rely on luck

Level 10: rank 4 of 10, avoid 6 Cuomos -- but the non-Cuomo options are just subtle typos of "Cuomo"

at first it just looks like 10 Cuomos and you're briefly flabbergasted
reversal of Levels 8-9, less about speed and more about reading / figuring out the puzzle

As for the response, it's gone mildly viral on Bluesky, thus helping to perpetuate the onslaught of NYC mayoral discourse that lowkey annoyed me in the first place. It's the circle of life and it moves us all.

Writing for Aftermath, Riley MacLeod argues that the game's challenge acts as a deeper commentary on the difficulty of voting against an establishment candidate. It's a valid generous reading.

But I must confess, my main design goal here was purely instrumental: to be a fun and useful excuse to say "don't rank Cuomo", to make the act of don't-ranking Cuomo into something fresh, funny, surprising, and entertaining -- and give yet another opportunity for New Yorkers to take up more space and oxygen by talking about don't-ranking Cuomo.

Academics might call this a newsgame. I made this game a few days ago, and it has an expiration date of... today, right now. Timeliness, freshness, and disposability make this game rather experimental?

Overall, I'm happy with this little web game and I'm glad to do my part for progressive politics from afar.

Good luck sorting out all your shit New York City!! Don't elect a shitty mayor for once! Don't fuck it up!!

UPDATE, 25 June 2025: NYC didn't fuck it up.

Postcards from TikTokland: week 1

2025-06-21T23:39:00.019+12:00

A week ago I threatened to make some TikToks. I set a personal goal to make one TikTok a day, just simple basic daily vlog stuff of whatever I was already doing.

And now it's been a week and I've done it. I now have a modest following and a TikTok profile page (@radiatoryang) with a full grid of videos. I feel a lot more capable with the video editing tool now, and sometimes I even have a little fun when making videos.

Here's a recap / post mortem of my first 7 videos and what I've learned from making them...

Vlog 1 was a straight vlog of my day walking around Auckland, the modest New Zealand city where I live. It was OK but maybe not terribly interesting. Not even kiwis care for Auckland much, honestly.

For Vlog 2, I decided to try documenting one of my chores -- pruning the banana trees in our backyard. I don't think of myself as much of a gardener, but I imagine most millennials haven't had the opportunity to fiddle with their very own home garden, so maybe there's a vicarious / exotic component to it. This is also the video where I figured out my personal tone as a narrator, explaining things in an upfront yet slightly strange way, and using cheeky video titles to slip past censors.

In Vlog 3, I stayed with the outdoor chore theme, documenting our wood pile. This too probably felt a bit exotic to the average urban millennial, who likely hasn't stacked firewood for survival. If you told me back in 2020 that this would be my life, I wouldn't have believed you, but now 5 years later I'm a guy who cares about his wood. This is also where I've started saying stupider / sillier things in my videos, a natural byproduct of improvising without a script while also awkwardly trying to time my narration to each shot, channeling a bit of John Wilson / Nathan Fielder in the process.

Vlog 4 is a return to the city, where I went to Antony Maday's talk at Auckland Makes Games, our local community indie game dev meetup group. Antony's talk was good and useful, maybe too useful, so I edited the clips into a silly absurd nonsense talk that reflects contemporary indie dev malaise about money. This one has been my most popular video, perhaps reflecting a local NZ interest in game dev, or maybe it's just been my funniest / weirdest one.

Then Vlog 5 was about Pippi, a dog whom I adore. Unfortunately it was hard to get good shots with Pippi, she'd rarely look at the camera and she almost seemed actively suspicious / allergic to my promises of TikTok fame. Working with animals is actually really hard! It made me appreciate all the pet TikTokers a lot more. I probably won't try to make another dog video again, I'll leave it to the professionals.

So for Vlog 6, I went the opposite direction and I made a video about rocks. Rocks wouldn't run away from me! I think my love of the rocks is a bit too pure though, I didn't have anything interesting to say besides, "I like these rocks, look at these rocks." In a perfect world, that would be enough, but unfortunately we don't live in that perfect rock loving world. It's much better to talk about this stuff from a position of expertise, as I did in Vlog 2 and Vlog 3.

... And now Vlog 7 just happened to me this morning! I was putting on some gumboots to do some more outdoor chores -- when a fucking wētā (a large native cricket) hidden inside the gumboot bit me on the toe! To be fair, I was sticking my foot into its home, but still, I was quite distraught and I made a scene. However I'm told finding a weta in your gumboot is a quintessential New Zealand experience, so as a public service, I'm sharing my amusing pain on video.

This last video came together pretty easily until I uploaded it... and TikTok flagged it for moderation. When this happens, they don't tell you why, you just get a vague scary error popup about the video being unavailable and "under review." If I had to guess, it was because I say the words "don't kill [the wetas]", and the word "kill" is forbidden by the automated moderation system. Eventually it seemed to get approved... but at what cost? Both the crime and punishment are secret.

I've seen other TikTok videos where they use strange coded language like "unalive" and dismissed it as teenage nonsense, but it turns out, sometimes the teenagers are correct. The stakes for getting flagged seem somewhat high: if they deleted my video, would I have to re-edit it from scratch? Or even if they give you a second chance, is this video stained forever / shadow banned? Their goal is a chilling effect -- for you to police and censor yourself -- and it works. I'm now much less likely to say the k-word again. I guess this is what being a teenager today feels like.

***

Overall, I've enjoyed this week. Making short little videos has been a welcome distraction.

But the fast pace of making a video every day felt a bit unsustainable in the end. I found myself working overtime for TikTok, wasting my lunch hours wondering what my next video should be, and yet I'm also an old person whose life doesn't even revolve around this app. I hear the real TikTokers have to post 4+ videos a day? Yikes.

For the next month or so, I'm going to ramp down to a more relaxed rhythm of 2-3 vlogs a week. I'll blog about it again around then.

Also, if you happen to despise TikTok for whatever reason, I also cross-post my videos (for now) on Bluesky (click the "Videos" tab) and Instagram too.

A foray into TikTok / notes on social media aesthetics

2025-06-15T22:33:00.011+12:00

So I've finally done it. I've made a TikTok account (@radiatoryang). Forgive me.

I still prefer text over video, and I certainly don't intend to "pivot to video"... but it was feeling increasingly foolish to lack the video skills / cultural context of virtually everyone under 30 in the entire world.

Now I'm not a total stranger to making video. I used to do weekly level design streams called "Level With Me" on Twitch, where I gained a decent sized following with regular viewers and even some paid subscribers, but the lockdown-era gauntlet of remote teaching marathons quickly burned me out and irrevocably soured me on what used to be a fun hobby.

For this foray into TikTok crafting, I'm approaching it somewhat slowly and methodically...

I have to confess I'm actually not a total stranger to TikTok. I've been lurking in the shadows for years, quietly cultivating a respectably depraved For You feed.

Here I'm most encouraged by how some popular TikTok meme cultures (like Jiafei / FlopTok) can feel so aesthetically experimental and embrace messy shitty incoherence. Bluesky users like to think of themselves / ourselves as sickos and sometimes the label feels true, but most of the time, the strange diversity of TikTok makes Bluesky feel like LinkedIn.

I like how on TikTok it's lowkey embarrassing to post cleanly-shot videos with textbook studio lighting. Send all that wannabe TV shit back to Instagram! Everyone can smell you! No one is fooled by your desperate appeal to production values!

So what am I going to make on TikTok? First I have to overcome the obvious technical skill gap, and learn how to make short basic videos with my phone... probably by making a bunch of short basic videos. Already just from making one little daily vlog, I've learned a lot about planning shots, editing clips, and recording narration. (I forgot to figure out how to generate captions though. Oops.)

As for the longer term, I don't really know what videos I'm going to make. I'm not a celebrity, hot guy, nor dancing child. Do the teens want to see more Quake mod fan cams? Perhaps I'll revive my Twitch-era level design beat, and record short level design commentaries? I also need to figure out how to market our upcoming game Tryhard (WISHLIST ON STEAM NOW) in a sensible authentic way. It's hard to predict anything because I just don't know what TikTok audience I'm going to end up with, if any.

Or maybe, just maybe, I'll finally emerge from the desolate cocoon of my life, and blossom into the hunky hip hop real estate life coach I was always meant to be.

"After School" - from LAN Party (2024)

2025-05-31T10:42:00.079+12:00

photo of a random 2000s era US cybercafe

(This personal essay was written for LAN Party, a nice photo book about LAN gaming culture curated / edited by merritt k, along with many more essays like this one. You should buy the book and give it nice reviews. For this blog post version, I've made a few edits and added some pictures / links.)

After School

Sometimes on Fridays after school, a bunch of us would meet up to play video games.

We went to a cybercafé called CyberLab, which sounds like the generic yet clearly evil corporation in an 80s action movie. But no fancy cyber word reflected the reality of this place: a dingy room filled with surplus office furniture and overheating computers. It was probably more than a little smelly. Yet it was ours.

photo of a random strip mall

Our parents were immediately suspicious. Why were we handing over our lunch money to sit in a small dark smelly storefront in the old strip mall behind the gas station? Was it sex or drugs or both? But after a brief onsite inspection, they were satisfied with how pathetic it all looked and left us alone there. It was cheaper for them too; this way they didn't have to buy expensive gaming computers or fast internet. For just a few bucks an hour? What a bargain.

Like many teenagers, we mostly just needed somewhere to hangout away from our families. And at the time, teens were hanging out in a multiplayer shooter called Counter-Strike. The military realism was pedantic enough to attract the gun nerds, and the constant sudden death gameplay was fresh enough to hook the normies.

Neither of those reasons explained why I played it. I didn't really care about the guns nor the competition. Instead I was a little weirdo trying to hide how gay I was from the other boys. I was there for the fantasy.

screenshot of the original cs_assault in Counter-Strike v1.6, in an anachronistic 16:9 aspect ratio

My favorite map in Counter-Strike was cs_assault, a totally unbalanced setup where a SWAT team besieges a big warehouse full of freedom fighters who've taken hostages.

As a young rising avtoritet of the Phoenix Connexion trusted by all my men, it was my solemn duty to begin each round by executing all the hostages, thereby shocking the other team and buying some extra time for me to hide in the corner and prepare a tactical ambush. When the cops inevitably breached the doors (probably because I was hiding in the corner and not covering the doors) that's when I would sneak behind them, drop a smoke grenade, and "spray n' pray" all over their backs with my trusty little MP5.

Unfortunately no amount of brilliant psychological warfare metagaming could compensate for my terrible aim. My ingenious strategies rarely worked. But when I did occasionally score a lucky headshot, I would listen for a delicious sound from the other row of computers across the room -- an annoyed groan of disbelief. If I was extra lucky, there'd even be a knowing moment of shared eye contact. It was very homoerotic.

I was playing virtual cops and robbers. I was also playing as a straight boy in that room together with other straight boys. Together we crossed the no mans land of our petty arguments and school cliques, declared a truce, and then shot each other in the face. Sociologists call this "homosociality." It's when dudes feel gay for each other but are too scared to do stuff.

screenshot of fy_iceworld, from my article "The legacy of fy_iceworld" for Rock Paper Shotgun

The biggest danger to my fragile sense of masculinity was a painful little map called fy_iceworld, a claustrophobic snowblind box with nowhere to hide, nowhere to set a masterful ambush, no space for fantasy. No spray nor pray was possible in this sexless godless little freezer. And besides, why would the Phoenix Connexion deploy in the arctic? As avtoritet, I had to protest. This was not our way.

What if I could fix this, what if I could make a special map just for our LAN clan? I would make a map better than fy_iceworld, filled with weird corners and ambushes and stories for me, as well as constant action for the other boys in the room. They would laugh and cry and remember my gift, earning me their approval and masculinity forever.

To forge a more enduring love, I decided all the inside jokes and shared references had to remind them of our bond in the real world -- that is, our school.

screenshot of cs_ppc, a "school map" that lovingly recreates a German school

Now in 2002, there were two kinds of maps you didn't put in first person shooter games. First: no September 11th themed maps, obviously. Second: no school maps.

Since the first modern school shooting at Columbine High School in 1999, countless parents have feared their teen outcast fail-sons rehearsing fully automatic revenge in a creepy digital recreation of their school. Contrary to the rumors, there's no evidence the Columbine shooters ever made their school in Doom. Online archives show that the furthest they got was throwing together a few random boxy rooms, a pretty mediocre amateur attempt.

I proved to be a mediocre amateur as well, and my school map also never materialized. Turns out our school resembled a few big blocks with long straight alleys and nothing in-between, much like fy_iceworld or perhaps a maximum security prison. No fantasy of shared boyhood was possible in the real world school nor the virtual one. I would've been creating a world I hated.

I also discovered that making a school map was actually a lot of work, probably more than public education ever prepared me for. To measure every wall, count every window, remember every detail, you have to study your school to a degree that suspiciously resembles love. Imagine spending weeks (outside of school!) crafting this obsessive 3D love poem to this place that no one particularly cares about.

And then when you're done, what, you really thought you and all the other boys were gonna sit in a small dark smelly room and hangout in this virtual play school? On a Friday afternoon?

***

Eventually everyone got bored of CyberLab and stopped going. The gun nerds preferred the hands-on feel of realistic-looking airsoft guns, and the normies moved on to the drama of kitchen table poker games. Yet I wasn't quite masculine enough to shoot at people in real-life, nor was I butch enough to stare down boys over cards, so instead I just sat alone at home and watched anime.

CyberLab permanently closed down soon after. Sometimes I still hangout there though.

I measure every wall, count every window, and remember every detail of this awkward copy of the real world -- where being one of the boys was easier when we had screens between us.

screenshot of heavily fragmented 3D scan "TU CG lab" by pongsason, under CC-BY license

(Again: this personal essay was written for LAN Party, a nice photo book about LAN gaming culture curated / edited by merritt k, along with many more essays like this one. You should buy the book and give it nice reviews.)

Upcoming game dev events in Australia and New Zealand, June - August 2025

2025-05-23T12:00:00.015+12:00

Down here in the other hemisphere, Australians and New Zealanders are approaching winter... which means it's time to leave the beach and attend some game developer events.

I'll be participating in a few public events this season:

June 7-8, 2025: Frosty Games Fest @ online. We'll be premiering some Tryhard gameplay footage at this upcoming fresh new exciting Australia / New Zealand themed online games festival, featuring demos and trailers from AU / NZ designers and studios. If you're a streamer / video creator / journalist, fill out the form on their website for access.
July 19, 2025: Wireframe @ Auckland, New Zealand. I'll be giving a short level design talk at the local game development conference here in New Zealand's largest city. You can check out the Wireframe speaker schedule here. There's also a planned games showcase for locals to submit their games. Join the Auckland Makes Games discord for info and updates.
July 31 - August 2, 2025: Freeplay / Angles @ Melbourne, Australia. I'll (probably) be around at Australia's longest running indie games festival. Last time I was in Melbourne in 2018, I got the opportunity to make a gay AFL-themed alt ctrl game, and this year I have even more to say about sports games and sexuality. Speaker applications for 15-30 minute talks are still open, the submission deadline is June 3, 2025.

Lastly, if you're interested in keeping up-to-date with the Australia / New Zealand game dev community, sign up for the Indie Dev Digest newsletter by Meredith Hall. She also maintains a list of ANZ games events and a list of ANZ game funding initiatives too.

Space is not a wall: toward a less architectural level design

2025-05-11T08:02:00.019+12:00

(This post is adapted from my micro talk "Teaching and Rethinking Level Design" at the GDC 2025 Educators Soapbox session. That's why it mentions "students" in the slide above.)

People want to do level design. They grow up playing games like Minecraft, Roblox, Fortnite — all 3D games with 3D worlds. And to create 3D worlds, supposedly you need this thing called “level design.” Then when you search YouTube, you'll be told that level design is about implanting secret lines that "guide the player" into walking down hallways. Such is the power of ARCHITECTURE!

But this is not how architecture works, nor how level design works. Imaginary invisible shapes cannot mind control players, and even if they could, no one needs to be mind controlled to walk down a hallway.

No one plays games like this, but why do we think we do? What's going on here?

It starts with a shred of truth: level design often has architectural aspects, and architecture can influence behavior.

Our main duties as working level designers often involve making game spaces by drawing layouts and building blockouts (simple rough draft 3D levels), which both resemble floor plans and architectural models. This also reflects the basic division of labor in most game studios, where level designers design and environment artists decorate.

So from there, it's reasonable to assume that good level design requires an architectural understanding. We're doing so much work that looks like architecture. A better layout drawing and a better blockout model = a better level?

Here the typical level designer skill progression tends to follow this viral meme image below:

Here the (supposedly) BEGINNER level designer spams disorganized shapes everywhere, while the (supposedly) INTERMEDIATE level designer organizes intentionally but adheres to an axis-aligned grid and room-hallway-room pattern. Then the (supposedly) ADVANCED level designer adopts minimalism and elegance, making efficient use of walls and verticality, to plan spaces that flow into each other. And so on.

This popular meme image represents a very real phenomenon in level design culture: ideally, your level resembles a plausible real-life building.

I know this because, dear reader, I am the one who made this meme.

But I now regret making it. Even if it's real, it's wrong. It's like some sort of secret imaginary invisible line that's mind controlling us, misleading and misguiding us along the wrong corridor...

For instance, the so-called ~~“BEGINNER”~~ level design works great in Stalker or Fortnite, where a systemic chaotic world matters more than individual room design. Maybe less organization facilitates more improvisation, like this gameplay is operating at a different scale.

The supposed ~~“INTERMEDIATE”~~ level design is great for Fallout vaults, which adopt boxy grids for a clean retro bunker kit aesthetic. If you want a space to feel more mechanical, more prefabricated, then a visible grid helps bring out that modular vibe.

And the ~~“ADVANCED”~~ level design makes sense for Halo / Destiny multiplayer maps with sleek elegant sci-fi spaces that push constant smooth flowy movement. (Conversely, I sort of hate these layouts in something like Stalker, the clean chokepoints often expose the AI's limitations.)

Don't let architectural envy do your thinking for you. Organization, realism, and minimalism are just tools. Instead, think critically about what your specific game experience needs, and design for that.

Because that's the true material that level designers are actually working with: game experience, possibility, and space. Not floors or walls, but concepts and ideas and behaviors.

Why must level designers stop at doing bad architecture? We can also do bad economics, bad military tactics, bad wedding planning, and bad comedy! In levels, this looks like planning out quest arcs, pacing setpiece beats, balancing spreadsheets, and choreographing battles.

These non-architectural level design tools are often more effective than architecture at shaping player behavior.

What sounds more effective for pulling the player to the exit of a non-linear level?...

(a) scripting, pacing, combat, economy: have an NPC brief the player on how to find the level exit, then place a ranged enemy turret, valuable item, and side-quest destination near the level exit
(b) the raw power of architecture: rotate a rock, pray the player approaches that rock from a direction that coincidentally forms a secret imaginary invisible line that mind controls them into hallucinating a path toward one of three skybox mountains in the far distance

"Ceci n'est pas un niveau" ("This is not a level") is a play on "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" ("This is not a pipe") from the famous painting The Treachery of Images by Rene Magritte.

I'll call this the architectural fallacy of level design: the over-emphasis of architectural aspects of level design (layouts, blockouts, view composition) over non-architectural aspects of level design (pacing, encounters, economy, scripting, storytelling).

Pulling back from architecture is the best way for level designers to refine our thinking -- and thus, ironically, become better architects.

Because when we emphasize an architectural end product, people seek fast shortcuts to that architectural end product, and then we end up with those "speed level design" videos on YouTube where people race to smash together assets in Unreal. These are fine as art tests or fun asset jams, but don't call it level design! Levels need context. You can't make levels for a game that doesn't exist.

I'm certainly guilty of perpetuating the architectural fallacy myself. I thought I could flush out fake architectural theory with better architectural theory, and I wrote about 100,000+ words about it. Honestly, I still sort of believe that, I still believe in learning from architecture... but maybe just... slowly, carefully... and eventually.

For now, let's step back. A level is a space. What is that space made of?

I don't know anymore. But I know this: space is not a wall.

***

(In my original GDC 2025 talk, this is where I start talking about The Level Design Book and its strengths / weaknesses. I'll save that for a future blog post.)

(For a lovely non-architectural level design talk that's contemporary with this one, and actually grounded in real level design examples, see Steve Lee's GDC 2025 talk -- Level Design Summit: The Unusual Level Design of 'Tactical Breach Wizards', free to watch with no paywall.)

Tryhard dev log - Cutscene and Game Scripting with Yarn Spinner v3.0 beta

2025-04-07T11:43:00.044+12:00

In our upcoming game Tryhard, we have cutscenes and dialogue and level scripting like many other RPGs. This dev log is about how we’re implementing some of that stuff in the game.

(Note that I'm writing this post mostly for fellow Unity game devs, but even if you don't happen to be a dev, maybe you'll appreciate this technical behind-the-scenes look anyway? Just let all the game dev words and lingo wash over you like a summer rain.)

We’re using the free open-source dialogue system plugin Yarn Spinner v3.0 beta 2 as our main scripting and story plugin. I’ve written about Yarn in the past and I'm finding this fresh new version 3 to be a great upgrade with useful features, even while in beta. For more info on these features, see the Yarn Spinner docs "Coming in v3" page.

Here’s how we’re using some new YS3 features for some cutscene and scripting stuff in Tryhard:

Tryhard editor screenshot of Yarn controlling a Cinemachine camera

We’ve been enjoying the new "async" support in Yarn Spinner v3.

If you’re unfamiliar with async / C# tasks, it lets any method easily act as a cancelable multithreaded coroutine, even outside of a MonoBehaviour since it's a C# thing instead of a Unity thing. (It gets more complicated of course. Here's a more comprehensive intro to async. Also note that many prefer UniTask vs. Unity's Awaitables. YS3 will adapt to whatever it detects you're using.)

For Tryhard, Yarn interfaces with our CameraManager as if it were just another Yarn dialogue presenter. When the Yarn Dialogue Runner feeds it a line, it looks up which NPC is speaking and then points Cinemachine at the speaker -- which all takes place in async land:

public class CameraManager : DialoguePresenterBase {
public override async YarnTask RunLineAsync(LocalizedLine line, LineCancellationToken token) {
// FindSpeaker() & CinemachineLookAt() are custom, not built-in to YS
var speaker = FindSpeaker(line.CharacterName);
if (speaker != null)
await CinemachineLookAt(speaker);
}
}

Since everything is async, we can easily update this with fancier camera blocking and it'll "await" for our Cinemachine async function to finish all the same. Imagine a cinematic sweep or a slow dolly / zoom? Best of all, this will interact with all the other dialogue presenters pretty cleanly, since async lets Yarn easily track multiple dialogue presenters and pause dialogue advancement until they’re all complete, or even skip / cancel all of them gracefully. It's pretty great and it's much cleaner than sorting through the typical Unity IEnumerator coroutine soup.

But that's not the only control flow update here. Now in YS3, Yarn scripts themselves have a new “detour” command which lets you jump to a different node and then return back after the node completes.

In practice this jump-and-return detour is basically subroutine support; now you can sort of reuse Yarn nodes as if they were mini functions.

As an example, we’re using it for scripting our game tutorials, which all require a similar setup scripting routine. Instead of copy and pasting the same setup commands at the start of every tutorial node (or coding a custom Yarn command just for tutorial setup) now we can just call <<detour TutorialSetup>> and it runs the same TutorialSetup node at the beginning of every tutorial beat:

title: Tutorial1
---
<<detour TutorialSetup>>
// TODO: do a tutorial beat
<<jump Tutorial2>>
===
title: Tutorial2
---
<<detour TutorialSetup>>
// TODO: do another tutorial beat
===

title: TutorialSetup
---
// always run before each tutorial beat
<<cleanUp>>
<<reset>>
<<respawn Player>>
Coach: Let's try this new drill...
===

But maybe the most hotly anticipated feature in YS3 is the "storylet" support, which lets you easily write proceduralized story systems. You can succinctly write a Left 4 Dead inspired bark system where characters say their most specific line based on game state, or an 80 Days type of narrative where you get the most specific scene based on your personal game progress.

To plug your game state or progress into Yarn, you have to translate that data into Yarn variables, potentially hundreds or thousands of variables if you track every single thing a player does. To help you manage this potential variable explosion, YS3 has "smart variables" which are like variables made of variables. (Whoa!!)

slide from "Rule Databases for Contextual Dialog and Game Logic" (2012) by Elan Ruskin, an influential talk about proto-storylet bark systems in Left 4 Dead 2

Imagine you wanted to play certain dialogue if the player is winning -- you declare a smart variable called $isPlayerWinning that checks if $PlayerScore > 5 and $EnemyScore < 2 and so on. Now you use $isPlayerWinning as a convenient human readable self-documented shortcut for all that math! This setup also lets you easily refactor the math later on too.

Honestly we haven't made much use of storylets and smart variables in Tryhard yet. Maybe that'll be for a future post? We definitely want to do self-branching bark chains / impromptu conversations during the sports battles, and we expect that will rely heavily on these new storylet features. We're excited about the possibilities -- and if you've read all the way to the end of this post, surely you're excited now too.

Don't let the v3.0 beta label scare you! Unless you're about to launch a big high-stakes commercial project with zero tolerance for bugs, this beta version is probably stable enough for many devs to start using. The latest version (as of 6 April 2025) is v3.0.0-beta2 and you can read about it on GitHub. And if you hit any bugs, the best place for help is the Yarn Spinner Discord.

(Lastly, it wouldn't hurt if you wishlisted our game Tryhard on Steam... just sayin'.)

Yep I'm at GDC 2025 (links / presskit / dance card)

2025-03-16T22:00:00.055+13:00

Yep I'm attending GDC 2025. (For better or worse, I've made too many commitments to cancel.)

The best way to contact me is to @ me on BlueSky or email me ( yang.robert.w [AT] gmail ). You can also probably just find me lounging in the Yerba Buena Gardens on most non-rainy noon-afternoons.

If you're press / journalist / podcaster / creator / TikToker / YouTuber / writer etc. and you need content to feed the Machine -- contact me (see above) and I'm happy to talk about whatever to help you:

General video game opinions / GDC gossip.
For 2-3 years I've been contributing level design to Big Hops (check us out at Day of the Devs) and I've learned a lot about making 3D platformer levels

But for a demo / better sense of the game, contact the director Chris Wade ( chris [AT] luckshotgames.com ). A lot of the dev team will be hanging around GDC too.

I'm also speaking at GDC about the difficulty of teaching level design and writing The Level Design Book, now a top search result and community resource used in multiple schools and studios.
I'm also here as part of a New Zealand government trade group, with generous support from NZ CODE. It's funny to be part of a "foreign" delegation "visiting" my home country. I can talk about what NZ is doing at GDC, the local NZ game industry, or explain NZ in general (is it really like Lord of the Rings?)

I'm here pitching our upcoming game Tryhard, a tactics RPG about managing an underdog rugby club.
If you fund / publish games and Tryhard seems interesting / you just want to connect in general, email me ( yang.robert.w [AT] gmail ) and we can probably figure out a last minute meeting or demo too.

Below, my event schedule / dance card for the week:

SUNDAY: I'll be at Day of the Devs, where I've contributed level design to a featured game Big Hops.
MONDAY: I'll try to be at the NYU Game Center student / alumni / ally etc. social event... but there's a 50% chance I might just lazily settle for a random bar closer to Moscone.
TUESDAY: My "Teaching (and Rethinking) Level Design" microtalk is part of the Educators Summit: Educators Soapbox session. It's not for nice normal game devs -- it's for real sickos (educators / teachers).

I'll try to make it over to Slug World but my Tuesday is pretty packed unfortunately.

THURSDAY: I want to go to the boshi's place x Syzygy: FREE RANGE INDIE GAMES ONLY $2.99 event but I'm not sure when I'll actually be able to get over there though.
THROUGHOUT THE WEEK: randomly hanging out in Yerba Buena Gardens (assuming it's not raining)

Have a safe and pleasant GDC! Or a safe and pleasant not-GDC!

Tryhard devlog - about the setting, game world, and worldbuilding

2025-03-11T11:57:00.005+13:00

Now that we’ve announced our upcoming game Tryhard (... WISHLIST ON STEAM?) I can talk more openly about our design and development process for it.

Today's post is about the game's setting, world, and worldbuilding.

Like many RPGs, Tryhard has an explorable 3D town hub where you can talk to NPCs, visit shops, and randomly barge into homes to steal things. These RPG towns usually exist in a magical fantasyland of make-believe, but Tryhard's town is based on an actual real-life magical fantasyland of make-believe called Auckland, New Zealand!

Specifically, you live your RPG life in a unique IRL neighborhood known as Karangahape Road (pronounced like "ka-rawng-ah-hawp-ey").

"painting looking north over Auckland c.1840"

Karangahape Road has a long history. It even existed before New Zealand itself, when indigenous Māori people regularly walked along the ridge for hundreds of years before European settlement. It's had multiple names as local iwi (Māori tribes) have different traditions and claims, but Karangahape ("the place of the calling of Hape") is what stuck.

Later, even the English-speaking colonizers couldn't agree on what to rename it. Broadway? Elizabeth Road? Thankfully, none of those boring names won out, and if you couldn't say Karangahape then you nicknamed it “The Road." As if there's no other road.

After all, no other road in the country could compare with Karangahape's many theaters, dance halls, and shopping arcades. It was the center of daily life where you went to run errands and get things done, but also relax and people watch. At night it'd get so crowded that police would have to direct all the foot traffic.

K Road with crowded sidewalks, late 1930s

In 1965, a government campaign of “urban renewal” slammed a new highway through the surrounding neighborhood, displacing the local working class community and triggering the neighborhood’s “decline” into a red light district synonymous with sex work and the LGBTQ+ community.

Today, some of the city's few remaining strip clubs, gay bars, record stores, and vintage fashion shops are still here, making a heroic last stand against the forces of bland gentrification. Despite the many changes over the years, it still retains a certain queerness and honesty that makes it a strong and authentic center of culture and nightlife in the city.

For Tryhard we want to reflect this past and present of K Road / Auckland / Aotearoa New Zealand in the design of the RPG town hub itself.

photo of K Road at night; facade of St Kevin's Arcade with rainbow street crossing

(left) photo of St Kevin's Arcade on K Road; (right) WIP screenshot in Tryhard

Our virtual K Road will change and evolve as you progress through the game. Some stores will close, new shops will move in, and ongoing construction will reveal new areas to explore. We want to emphasize K Road as a place where people live and work and get things done, much like its heyday back before the 1960s.

But we also want to reflect the socioeconomic pressures around K Road and the city. Maybe halfway through your playthrough, a (virtual) inflation wave will hit (virtual) New Zealand, forcing limited shop hours with higher prices. Or maybe the (virtual) New Zealand government will defund (virtual) public transport, and now it'll cost you twice as much to travel to your rugby matches.

What if the worldbuilding for a game was simply the world we already live in?

Also I do believe in the old adage to "write what you know." I can't really make a game set in a small town because I've never lived in a small town. But I *can* make a game set on K Road in the 2020s.

I just have to slap some rugby on it somehow.

K Road doesn't actually have a rugby field though. So I had to imagine -- if there was a K Road rugby club, where would they play?

In Tryhard, you manage a fictitious club called Road RFC. (Some of the oldest rugby clubs started with names like "Town" and "Country", so "Road" hints at a similar primordial origin.) This fiction also helps to avoid offending an existing real-life club, while providing some freedom to imagine this club's worldbuilding and dramatize its struggle.

Behind the bright storefronts of K Road near St Kevins Arcade, there's an awkward car park nestled in the back. This is the fictional home of Road RFC. Gradually you'll learn about how this once prestigious club sharply declined in 1965 along with the rest of K Road, and about how the landlord decided to pave over its legendary grass field to convert into a pay-by-the-hour parking lot.

It's a terrible place to play rugby. And so this is where the game must begin.

But remember: under the pavement -- the grass.

PS: did I mention you can wishlist Tryhard on Steam, or even idle in our Discord too?

Radiator University, Spring 2025 course catalog

2025-03-03T14:05:00.003+13:00

Welcome back to Radiator University! Although it's been 7 years since we last offered any courses, we wish to assure you that we're absolutely open for business and/or scholarship, thanks to a fresh funding injection from Hegemony Capital, which will never compromise our academic mission in any way.

Here's a sample of our new course offerings for the upcoming Spring 2025 semester:

AG 3532 - FOLIAGE AND TERROR
What is the reality of a forest, and how do we reconcile this with the virtual plantations infesting video games? While studying forest ecologies, we will survey various digital foliage tools such as SpeedTree and TreeIt. Students will then work in groups to "plant" virtual forests; with each week, the virtual forest must undergo 10 years of simulated growth. Then in partnership with Landwirtschaftliche Rentenbank, students will spend the second half of the semester in Austria training as industrial arborists while studying the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. Even as arborist-poets, can we ever truly know the whole of the forest, across all time and space, virtual and material? As Rilke would say - every tree is terrifying. (2 credits)
($30000 USD lab fee, 50% deposit required upon enrollment. Work Study students ineligible. Prerequisites: Advanced Austrian German or equivalent.)

GAME 304 - ASSET STUDIES
This course explores fundamental game development skills, such as using an asset store. We will begin with a history of digital assets such as old 8-bit clip art drawings and WordArt fonts, learning how to excavate old floppy disks and CD-ROMs. The midterm project is to preserve these "lost assets"... by repackaging them for sale on asset stores. Students must earn at least $500 USD in revenue to pass. As a final project, we will cheaply renovate substandard housing stock in the gentrifying neighborhood surrounding the university campus, shielding our tangible asset from tax liabilities by gifting it to the "nonprofit" university under the guise of a final project in a course about asset studies. (3 credits)
(By enrolling in this course, students agree to forfeit any wages or ownership stake in their final project. Note that Work Study students are ineligible for this class.)

MUSIC 235 - WEEKEND WHIMPER WORKSHOP
Across every worldwide institution, experts agree: we currently live in an apocalypse, a revelation and revealing of the end of everything as we know it. Shall this world end with a bang or a whimper? Currently the bangs seem to be unevenly distributed, concentrated in developing economies -- for the rest of us, especially in rich Western nations, we must perfect our whimpers. In this intensive weekend workshop, students will sequester themselves in the fallout shelter underneath the music school to perform the apocalypse by whimpering repeatedly for an entire weekend. No other vocalization shall be permitted, though students taking this course for a Pass / Not Pass grade shall be permitted to wail. (1 credit)
(Prerequisites: none. Work Study students ineligible.)

***

We know you have many choices when it comes to imaginary speculative universities; thanks for choosing Radiator University. In these dark and uncertain times, may we all take solace in our school motto: "Caveat emptor!"

The year of the blog? + how to easily put a Bluesky feed widget on your website

2025-02-24T20:54:00.007+13:00

V Buckenham has declared that this is the year of the blog. I suppose I shall answer the call. It must be so.

I used to blog with shocking regularity -- at my peak (or my lowest point?) I was writing 2-3 posts a week. I can't imagine doing that now. But maybe I can commit to a 2-3 posts "every now and then"?

***

As long as we're strolling down memory lane: my most loyal readers may recall this blog used to have comments and a personal Twitter feed in the sidebar. I'm not bringing comments back, but I've gone ahead and added a personal Bluesky feed widget that displays a few of my most recent posts in the sidebar -- just like it's 2010. (If you're reading this on mobile, you'll have to switch to the desktop version to see the sidebar.)

Figuring out how to add a Bluesky feed widget was surprisingly complicated to figure out, but then very simple to execute. Useless google searches would have you believe that you have to sign-up for a weird widget scam service with a fake free plan, and the official Bluesky website only offers tools for embedding an individual post as a widget.

But if you can paste HTML, then you too can have a free and easy Bluesky feed widget on your website or Blogger or Wordpress or whatever. Here's my very authoritative guide:

Go to bsky-embed by Vincent Will (https://github.com/Vincenius/bsky-embed) and read the instructions to make sure I'm not scamming you.
Copy the HTML on that page. It will embed some JS that polls the public Bluesky API for you. It will look something like this:
<script async="" src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/bsky-embed/dist/bsky-embed.es.js" type="module"></script> <bsky-embed limit="5" mode="dark" username="vincentwill.com"> </bsky-embed>
Paste the HTML snippet into your website / Blogger layout "HTML/Javascript" block / Wordpress "Custom HTML" block. Save your changes and make sure the demo works.
Change the username to your Bluesky username. For example, mine is "radiatoryang.bsky.social" -- whatever is after the "@".
Customize the other parameters or styling. If you read the GitHub instructions from step 1, you'll see that you can display posts for a certain tag or feed, or even override the CSS styles to match your website better.

And you're done! See? That wasn't so hard.

***

"But I heard Bluesky is uncool." Yeah, on its worst days, it's like a slightly better version of Threads.

But hey at least people are posting a bunch of porn, art, and occasional weird shit -- which definitely helps when Bluesky has a genuine blue sky day.

Best of all, unlike Twitter now, you can actually post links and people will see your links and even click on your links!

I argue it's acceptable and tolerable, and these days maybe that's enough.

if you’re worried bluesky isn’t cool enough or something… don’t worry, you were on twitter, you’ve been deeply uncool for like a decade already, why stop now
— Robert Yang (@radiatoryang.bsky.social) Oct 25, 2024 at 7:21 PM

After all, if you're 30 or older and you're reading a blog, then you may have to consider the possibility that you don't actually have any coolness left to preserve. You might as well just join Bluesky and give up.

A bunch of us are here and we're posting. As if it's 2025... The fuckin' year of the blog!!

New game announcement: "Tryhard" + "A Sportslike Manifesto"

2025-02-11T09:20:00.010+13:00

Tryhard is an upcoming sports RPG about managing an underdog rugby club in New Zealand.

We're still quite early in development. But for now, it'd really help us if you wishlisted the game on Steam or idled in the Discord, mostly so we can show those stats to convince rich people to give us money to finish making the game.

If you're interested in why we're making this game / what's going on...

For long-time readers and fans of my games, it may come as a surprise that I'm making a commercial sports game. But I've been threatening to make a sports game for a while. And now since I no longer teach for a living, I thought I'd try an even more difficult way of earning money - why not try "going indie"?

So Tryhard is my attempt to sell out, yet on my own terms somehow. Like if I have to make some Combat Gameplay Loops With Numbers That Go Up, then at least let that combat and those numbers attempt something new and unusual.

For example, consider the basis of combat games: death. Death is usually (a) game over, (b) rare, or (c) strongly penalized. Because death is some serious shit, of course it needs some finality right?

This is where sports have solved a major game design problem: in most sports, defeated players do not die. And when defeat is not death, it opens up so many possibilities.

In Tryhard, when you lose all your Health, you just fall down -- and then you can get back up soon after. Characters might "die" a dozen times in a match. This is our version of rugby tackles.

And like many sports, rugby tackles don't earn any points for your team. Unnecessary extra tackles are often a waste of time and energy. Meanwhile, a dominant team will simply maintain possession of the ball, and spend less time on defense, and thus commit fewer tackles.

So if tackles are like kills, and a high tackle count is for losers -- then in a sense, a rugby video game would argue that killing is for losers. Which is a truth you wouldn't expect from a brutal contact sport.

I'm not the first person to think any of this, it's somewhat basic rugby theory. Yet I feel that the "basic theory" of most sports is still a pretty unexplored domain by the big sports game studios. (Not to mention the rather neglected rugby game genre, abandoned by AAA since 2008.)

I don't blame the devs, I'm sure they pitch fresh ideas every year!... But I'm also sure the executives shoot down all their fresh ideas every year.

Every sports gamer knows this: for whatever reason, the big sports game franchises have squandered their monopoly on sports culture.

Furthermore, I believe the sports game genre does not deserve its monopoly on sports. It has lost the mandate of heaven, it has desecrated its divine right. Leave behind your FIFA envy! We need bolder sports games.

This is the premise of "A Sportslike Manifesto", our new game design manifesto motivating the design for Tryhard.

Basically, if sport games have stagnated so much, then we should stop making sports games, and invent a new genre without the same baggage: sportslikes! It's like a sports game... but it isn't a sports game.

Sportslikes don't necessarily try to simulate a sport, or try to be a sport, or try to provide all the myriad franchise modes / career modes / licensed brands / microtransactions that seem to be obligatory in all sports games these days.

Instead, a sportslike is simply a game that thinks about sports and sportspeople. A sportslike is interested in any lens on sports -- culture, history, psychology, philosophy, ethics, physics -- anything that involves fresh thought.

I'm part of the huge casual / general audience for sports. I love shows likes Friday Night Lights, I've dutifully sat through shows like Ted Lasso, and I've binged sports anime like Haikyuu. These are all shows about sportspeople with distinct perspectives on their sports, and I wish we had more games that could do this too.

Like I can watch a casual football manager TV show like Welcome to Wrexham, but I will never commit to playing the hardcore spreadsheet-email game Football Manager.

And that's the key for me: I'd love something like a casual streamlined Football Manager aimed at clueless Americans who know to be vaguely afraid of the offside rule, but the big sports game industry has decided that people like me don't exist.

So in the end, Tryhard is a rather personal project for me:

helping me learn more about Aotearoa New Zealand
helping me learn about this local weird violent horny ballet called rugby
making the sportslike game I want to play

I'll be making this game with my spouse and collaborator Eddie Cameron, along with some talented friends and contractors helping out here and there. (New Zealanders might recognize the art style of Toby Morris, who did some character designs for us, and will hopefully do some more as we progress. And thanks to Ākau Audio for game audio too.)

We're currently in pre-production, and we've had some early funding from the fine folks at CODE NZ to support our prototyping -- but now we must brave the Worst Game Funding Climate Yet. Hence, this announcement and plea to "WISHLIST US NOW ON STEAM" and "JOIN OUR DISCORD"!

Thanks for reading, we can't wait to get this game out for everyone.

PS: If you happen to be a publishing / funding scout, email me at robert (at) grapefruitgames (dot) com and I'd be happy to send you a pitch deck and talk you through the game.

"What's on your bookshelf" at Rock Paper Shotgun

2024-06-17T10:44:00.006+12:00

Just a brief update here -- I recently had the honor of participating in Rock Paper Shotgun's "what's on your bookshelf" interview series.

It's one of my favorite gaming journalism things happening at the moment, full of interesting book recs and observations from smart people like Alice Bell, Josh Sawyer, and Xalavier Nelson Jr. Check out the full series listing here.

The implication is that I too am also a Smart One. And indeed filling out the questionnaire made me realize I mostly read non-fiction these days. I suspect an English literature degree turned me into a snob. I'm so disconnected from modern popular book culture (e.g. BookTok) where some game devs like Holly Gramazio are making new careers as authors writing fun books that people actually read. I'm jealous! I want to read and write fun things too!

re: the unannounced rugby project, it remains unannounced. It's intended to be a more commercial game, and in business-land apparently you're supposed to be careful about when you start talking about something. All I'll say is -- I've been interested in horniness and sports for a while, and embracing sport is probably one of the next big "trends" in queer culture. Hopefully this game won't miss the peak.

On "Sudden Death" by Cecile Richard, nat_pussy, and isyourguy

2024-04-27T13:42:00.011+12:00

As a fellow gay Australian Rules Football gamemaker, I am honor bound to write about Sudden Death by Cecile Richard and nat_pussy with help from isyourguy -- a 30-45 minute "romantic sports fiction" interactive fiction / visual novel about an underdog Aussie footy team doing crimes and gayness. Yet beyond matters of honor and gayness, there's still plenty more to recommend about it.

Sudden Death was originally released for Domino Club, an occasional month-long game jam with anonymous submissions. Eventually you're allowed to out yourself -- turns out the now-revealed Cecile Richard and nat_pussy have made lots of Bitsy and Twine-like works already, and all that experimental queer storytelling experience shines through here.

SPOILER WARNING: vague spoilers, nothing specific.

First, a mild content warning: may contains some traces of Australians.

Non-Australian readers may have a little trouble parsing some of the slang and context here. Much like one of those old-timey serious printed novels for adults, it's not going to tutorialize itself, and sometimes you'll just have to figure it out. Mercifully, the text does unpack some Aussie Rules mechanics, though even the most loyal US Bluey fans won't know what a "speccy" is. (Noun. A "spectacular mark", an especially acrobatic catch when jumping off the back of another player.)

But it doesn't take an Irwin to understand the core premise here:

On a low-tier loser pro sports team, there's these two players Mitch and Jordan. Mitch is the honorable captain of the team, while Jordan is a trickster hotshot star. They want to win, but they also want to fuck. Can they have it all??

Overall it does a lot in such a short runtime. There's some funny worldbuilding around the fictional Unlimited Football League and its own club system replete with thirsty fan commentators, as well as some apt sports-anime philosophical musing on the nature of luck and legacy. This story isn't just about the team, but also about how society has shaped athletes' lives and expectations. Later the narration even slips into a sort of metatextual screenplay mode, exposing its ambition and cinematic scope.

The interface and overall presentation are very well done, contrasting with a visual novel genre that often just reskins the same menu button layout over and over. Instead this feels like a grungey photocopied Metal Gear Solid zine, with clever use of audio and photos that climactically explodes into a stark Universal Paperclips Evangelion dashboard parodying a second-screen sports fan app. Again, very well done and very smart.

If there's any area to critique, it's the ambiguous ending act, where some key events are left more to the reader's imagination. Winks, even charming gay winks, aren't quite enough to distract from wanting to know what happened.

At least it's a good problem to have. The ambiguity works in its own bittersweet way. You'll get over it. Life sucks (you off) and then you die (suddenly).

Design review: Botany Manor as a quiet dark detective game

2024-04-12T13:35:00.055+12:00

Botany Manor is a 3 hour first person puzzle game about growing plants while exploring a big beautiful fancy house that smells like British Bake-Off.

The main design inspiration here is obviously Gone Home, with a central family-based ambient narrative, household duck homages, and gradually unlocked doors. Many would also compare this to The Witness' soft visual style and sprawling sunny gardens.

But when you actually play this, it turns out neither of those are useful comparisons. Gone Home anchors its story focus with voice acting, narration, simpler puzzles, and wry realism. The Witness fully commits to hundreds of puzzles at the scope of an open world game. Neither of these really get at the player experience in Botany Manor.

Instead, I think Botany Manor is most usefully compared to The Case of the Golden Idol / Return of Obra Dinn.

SPOILER WARNING: this post spoils the game's overall design structure / puzzle patterns, and spoils the general story and ending.

There are 9 puzzles. Each puzzle is a plant that you must grow under special conditions.

To figure out these conditions, you must walk around and search for clues. 80% of these clues are textual readables like signs, books, or papers. The clues will usually help you configure a specific machine (e.g. a heater) to grow the plant.

So like for the first tutorial puzzle, you have to grow a plant at the right temperature -- but to figure out the right temperature, you read one clue that mentions Sicily, and then consult another clue that lists several locations to see that Sicily is 50 degrees.

Thankfully, you can solve puzzles without finding all the clues. You can solve some by brute force, or even guess what the puzzle is about. Which means this isn't just a puzzle game. More specifically I think Botany Manor is a information game / detective game like the Golden Idol / Obra Dinn.

This type of investigation gameplay is about: (1) gathering clues, (2) filtering what's relevant, (3) to construct and test a theory.

Here's how Botany Manor handles its investigations:

1. Where are the clues?

Most of the clues in Botany Manor are text readables, usually books or papers on desks. Sometimes there's also visual pattern matching, like matching a bird in an illustration to a bird chart. Every clue's utility is obvious and every clue is always relevant to something.

The clue gathering is probably the biggest level design weakness here. It's random information scattered in random rooms. Find the coins in the Orangerie, find the pH analysis at a picnic table!... This isn't how people think, nor how people organize their world.

While the game does wisely stay away from "I can't believe I left my favorite soil analysis under my favorite rose bush" there's never any gorgeous brain leaps like "her evil mentor hid the soil data so it's actually in the opposite room" so overall it often feels disconnected from the characters and environment.

I'm disappointed, but I understand why the devs made these choices. It's not that kind of game, because the clue placement had a more important level design / pacing function...

2. How do we filter the clues?

After the tutorial chapter, you'll be juggling clues for 2-3 different plants at once. Which is for which?

First, there's a UI-based solution. If you correctly assign all of a plant's clues in your notebook, the game locks them to the page and removes the clues from the pool, allowing you to narrow down your choices. (This is especially helpful when the clue button label is just like "Newspaper" and you don't remember what it actually said.)

But there's also a more subtle level design nudge here. Consider some background: lead developer / studio founder Laure De Mey is a programmer and tech artist who worked on second wave ustwo puzzle games like Assemble With Care -- elegant minimalist jigsaws with minimal confusion and friction. This careful cleanliness permeates the puzzle design. 2-3 clusters of 2-3 clues, all in the same / neighboring rooms. To gate this further, you can't begin to do each puzzle until you find the corresponding seeds -- and the seed packet is usually tucked away next to an unrelated cluster of key clues. This helps promote complete exploration before you start sifting through your clues, which I appreciated.

3. How do we construct and test a theory?

Since all the clues always fit conveniently together, this is a botany-themed game, not a botany game.

Everything has a clean 100% correct answer with no lingering dilemma or doubt. This fits its branding and audience, I get it... But this isn't how scientists have constructed botany (or any science) which involves trial and error, uncertainty, and genuine mystery.

There are hints that the game used to be more systemic / experimental. The initial steps of every puzzle involve choosing a pot, filling it with soil, planting a seed, and watering it. You do this all at once at the workbench, but these steps are all very rote and don't really vary from puzzle to puzzle... except one of the final puzzles, where different pots + additives can result in different flower colors.

A more scientific game would get you to design an experiment, to perform your own science and collect data. What affects this plant's color? Is it heat, wind, light, acidity, soil sugar content, or any of the previous puzzle mechanics we spent the last 2 hours tutorializing? What if the game, for once, didn't spoon-feed us the answer? What if "failing" a puzzle still produces a pretty flower that we like?

So no, there's never any big picture puzzle systemization / climactic puzzle that utilizes the whole puzzle space / embodies the scientific method. All the puzzle mechanics are one-time one-off things.

Again, I get why they didn't make it more nonlinear and systemic: it'd be complex to design, time-consuming to develop, and maybe their target "wholesome games player" wouldn't appreciate the friction and anxiety. They were probably already getting enough complaints from testers struggling to remember clues for their already streamlined linear puzzle design.

But I still wish they took the risk, I still wish this nice-looking tasteful game had some friction, some anxiety -- some messy noise to contrast with the clean quiet. It would've embodied how science isn't a "pure" thing but rather something made by imperfect humans in conflict with each other and themselves.

The game we actually got -- it still works, but in a surprisingly sad and possibly unintended way.

Throughout the game, all these letters and books hint at a background narrative about a frustrated woman botanist kept down by patronizing misogynist male scientists. Men take credit for her work and deny her support at every turn. Well-meaning women in her life suggest that this is all for the greater good of furthering the field of botany, and anyway, she should really find a husband by now!

I'm not sure if there are multiple endings, but at least in my ending, this feminist protagonist fails -- sexist publishers decline to publish the herbarium book you've spent the entire game making, and none of the evil men get their comeuppance. Instead the player protagonist quietly finds personal peace in opening a manor house botany school for women, yet still likely doomed to obscurity.

In this sense, it's a subtle condemnation of incremental feminism: a quiet well-behaved game about a quiet well-behaved woman trapped in a beautiful prison. It hints at the darkness buried deep in every cozy comfy wholesome game.

new Quake map: "Taught By Thirst" for Remix Jam

2024-02-04T21:19:00.006+13:00

Taught By Thirst is a new Mesoamerican themed single player Quake map that I made for Remix Jam, a 3 week community level design event where we all adapted multiplayer maps from other games for Quake.

The definition of "remix" was kept loose on purpose, and anyway some of the fun is in figuring out where the map came from... although that's not the case with mine: I clearly adapted de_aztec by Chris "narby" Auty from Counter-Strike.

In this post I will talk about my inspiration and intent. I also explain what happens in the level. If you want, play it before reading this post. This is your last SPOILER WARNING.

***

de_aztec has a long history. It was added to the map cycle early on in CS Beta 6.5 (June 8, 2000) and began as a grayer de_dust with a central underpass, double doors, nice big ramps -- but with even more vulnerability and polarizing chokepoints, especially its iconic flimsy bridge suspended over a wide sniper alley river. Competitive players generally see it as CT-sided, which it probably is, but it has remained a fan favorite on CS 1.6 pub servers ever since.

Later the 2004 official remake for Counter-Strike Source had some great visual ideas. The temples break up the silhouette and skyline, adding much needed depth to the flat geometry. However the dark lighting and texturing transform much of the play area into an unpleasant mid-brown mess, and its reliance on Source displacements leaves it feeling a bit blobby and melty. Like a lot of Counter-Strike Source, it often feels more like a game engine tech demo rather than something for humans to play. And anyway it made minimal layout changes, so if you didn't like playing Aztec already, you definitely wouldn't have been converted here.

In 2012, the last official remake of Aztec for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive was much brighter and more readable with some very sensible layout changes (which I'll discuss later in this post)... but sadly that wasn't enough to rescue its tainted reputation. In 2017, Valve quietly removed Aztec from the current CS:GO / CS2 mapcycle, and it has since been permanently replaced by its more balanced modern successor Ancient.

So... Aztec is a flawed cult-classic ghost map that only lives in millennial gamer memory now... a perfect subject to rebuild and rethink for a boomer shooter.

Now, this is my 11th Quake map overall, but my 3rd multiplayer adaptation. My previous map Tell Me It's Raining adapts fy_iceworld from Counter-Strike, while Daughter Drink This Water adapts Hang 'Em High from Halo.

Since this isn't my first remake rodeo, this time I decided to try a different design strategy from my previous levels: this is a very "straight" adaptation. I painstakingly rebuilt the map from decompiled scraps to ensure an uncanny feel when walking around, and I preserved most of the existing combat cover, double doors, and other core flow.

Visually, my rendition is much brighter and warmer, but I did keep the same sunlight angle and even the exact wood planks on the famous bridge. And although I couldn't resist adding some colorful salmon-red rocks, I still textured most of the level in a similar mossy gray stone to mimic the original feel, with ample vines and swamp ambiance. (Thanks to Makkon's excellent textures, as always.)

Since the level design hews so close to Counter-Strike, my initial idea was to experiment with implementing some round-based gameplay in Quake.

You would've played on the same map across a series of rounds, each with different enemy placement. Your goal would've been to defuse a bomb, randomly hidden at one of the bombsites. It would've been an unholy Counter-Strike / Quake hybrid.

However, I realized I barely had the patience to test and tune one round of encounter design, let alone 3-5 rounds of different enemy compositions. The technical aspects of wrangling the entity scripting also would've consumed a lot of time that I just didn't have.

So instead this is still a somewhat traditional Quake map, with a start and an end and a bunch of monsters in between.

Crafting traditional Quake gameplay required some divergence from the original layout, but even so, I tried to keep my changes in dialogue with the original's ideas.

Like I start you in a sewer near the CT spawn, which the original map cordoned-off strictly as scenery -- the space was always there, I've just made it playable.

The bombsites don't function as bombsites anymore, but I still mark them with special floor dressing, vital weapons, and explosive stuff. They are still key areas for gameplay with major fights.

Or take the big wide river that snakes through the map -- on Normal / Hard mode I've filled it with poisonous slime, so it still functions as a dangerous no man's land that slows down your movement.

My encounter design also plays off common Counter-Strike player tactics. Monsters often camp atop the climbable stacks of crates, or wait in ambush behind the iconic double doors. (I had to widen the door gaps a lot to accommodate Quake's pinball pathfinding AI.)

But my favorite part of Aztec's combat flow is the bridge. I like it so much I block off other paths to try to make you use it. It's a thin flimsy looking thing that looks super unsafe, evoking its function as a dangerous chokepoint that leaves you very vulnerable and exposed to from nearly every angle.

Here I amp the bridge anxiety another step, filling the swamp river below with Spawns, terrifying fast exploding jumpers that every Quake player hates. The spawns can't actually reach you high up on the bridge, but hopefully the sight and sound of 5-10 of these scary jumping things is enough to melt some brains. (For reference, usually just 1 Spawn is enough to make players panic and hate the level designer.)

There's no easy way to neutralize so many Spawns, but you need the gold key they're guarding.

To honor the map's nonlinear multiplayer heritage, I try to support multiple nonlinear solutions since you can improvise different routes / tackle fights in different orders:

Snipe the Spawns from the bridge, maybe with Lightning or Grenades (expensive) or with all your shotgun ammo.
Grab a biosuit, jump down to get a nailgun, start spraying. (correct)
Find the invulnerability powerup and run in with guns blazing (secret canonical)

I'm particularly proud of the secret solution, since I usually neglect secret design in my maps. But this one has enough to unpack...

When Valve remade de_aztec for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, they made several changes. I include most of these tweaks (except the big pillar that ruins the purity of the underpass) but I want to focus on two big changes to the T side: (1) reverse the narrow T-ramp leading out from T spawn, (2) delete the hallway from T spawn to T-water (not pictured above... because it was deleted.)

These changes make a lot of sense. It was always kind of a silly fake choice anyway -- go to this fun important junction full of tactical possibilities, or trudge down this random boring isolated hallway to the sewer river?

So I ported these changes to my version as well, but with one big wink: the "deleted hallway" is actually still there, unused and filled with cobwebs, accessible by a secret door. Savvy players familiar with the original version of Aztec will certainly probe for the missing hallway, but I also heavily hint at the secret for those who don't play CS, with a glaring texture misalignment and peculiar item placement. (I err on the side of too-obvious because I want all players to find it, it's kind of a fake-secret.)

Once you grab the Gold Key guarded by the Spawns down in the poison river, you can unlock the central corridor and take the teleporter.

I rarely use teleports in my maps. They feel like ladders -- inelegant band aids to smooth over abrupt flow. If you want verticality, you should plan stairs for it, and give enough space to develop the flow there. Don't make spatial promises you can't keep!

But when faced with whether to make a major layout change, or to preserve the layout intact faithfully without a big new stairwell, let it be known that I chose faith. Adding some stairs up to the roof would've felt a little too heretical -- so a teleporter it is.

Teleportation strengthens the surprise and impact of this moment anyway. You may not be sure where it leads, or may wonder whether it's the level exit. So you step inside... and boom, a whole new level to explore, right on top of the level you just played.

Obviously in the original Counter-Strike version, you can't run around on the roof. In fact, each room had its own sealed-off sky, so you couldn't even lob grenades over walls.

My version unifies it all into one big continuous space. Adding this fully-explorable roof layer emphasizes this continuity -- which is only possible 25+ years later when framerate and map optimization is much less of a concern. On modern computers today, rendering this entire level incurs approximately the same processing cost as Nathan Drake's chest hair.

Yet some things never change, like Quake's terrible slope handling. I've learned my lesson from my previous map Breakfast Under The Balloons, where organic angles and slopes destabilized player physics as well as monster physics. Most of the slopes here are very clear 22.5 or 45 degrees slants, rising squarely along the grid, and crucial climbables have zero slope for maximum stability. In the end you have to map for the game physics you have, not the physics you wish you had.

To finally finish the level, you must fight your way up a giant Mayan-inspired step pyramid seemingly made of gold, resembling the famous Temple of Kukulcán at Chichén Itzá.

As a FromSoftian gesture, a shambler awaits you at the top with its back turned. There's very little cover around the pyramid and you would be at the mercy of the shambler's lightning hitscan attack, so placing the shambler like this is a level design signal -- make sure you're prepared.

To prepare, you can explore the rest of the rooftop area and stock up on supplies. There's a sneaky little side climbing route that takes you past the map start at CT spawn, as well as a large arena in the middle, and another big fight atop the T spawn. These fights don't have any shamblers, but there are plenty of melee and ranged monsters to dodge and clear, providing access to Super Nailguns and lots of Lightning Gun ammo good for shredding a shambler... and that's the end!

The map's title, as usual, comes from a poem by Emily Dickinson:

Water, is taught by thirst.
Land — by the Oceans passed.
Transport — by throe —
Peace — by its battles told —
Love, by Memorial Mold —
Birds, by the Snow.

Poetry-wise, it's a little blah. Yeah yeah Emily, absence makes the heart grow fonder! Tell us something we don't know! But even at her not-best, she's still doing cool language stuff: Dickinson sets up a pattern in the first line ("... is taught by...") that culminates in a haiku-like last image ("Birds, by the snow"). You know from context to read it as "Birds [are taught] by the snow", but that key phrase is itself absent, you have to remember it, which is what the poem is about! Presence through memory. Like teaching. Like some sort of impossible snow bird.

While it's a shame that no one taught Dickinson about penguins, it's an even bigger shame that no one taught her single player Quake level design. With her masterful use of patterns and implication, I think Emily Dickinson would've been an excellent level designer with strong insights about competitive map balance.

***

Thanks to playtesters JoyModulo and Spootnik for playtesting and feedback, and thanks to Fairweather for organizing and additional QA.

You can download this map and 29 other amazing remix maps (Rainbow Road! Blood Gulch! de_dust! Chiron! KGalleon! Facing Worlds! etc) at the Remix Jam on Slipseer.

If it's been a While since you last played Quake, you may need some help with setting up Quake and installing mods via the "New to Quake? Start Here" guide on Slipseer.

For a quick primer to Quake level design culture, also see part 3 of my Quake Renaissance series for Rock Paper Shotgun. Be advised that the install guide is a little outdated though -- most of the community's Quake engine of choice is now Ironwail.