Ueda Coulda Shoulda: The Quest as the Shadow

  • Reading time:23 mins read

by [name redacted]

A somewhat edited version of this piece was published by Game Career Guide, under the title “Rock in His Pocket: Reading Shadow of the Colossus“; here is the article as originally intended. This version is also available, largely intact, in The Gamer’s Quarter.

Going by his two big brain dumps – Ico and Shadow of the Colossus – Fumito Ueda is a complicated guy to put in charge of a videogame: an ivory tower idealist, with only a passive understanding of practical architecture. As a dreamer, his ideas are too organic, too personal to fit the cliches that most of us take as the building blocks of game design. Knowing that, he sidesteps convention whenever it gets in his way – which is often. The problem is in those conventions which, though they mean nothing to Ueda as narrator, just as frequently get in the player’s way.

Rainbow Six’s Upton Talks Landscaping Game Worlds

  • Reading time:1 mins read

by [name redacted]

The final session of the final day of last week’s GDC 2007 was a cross-disciplinary take on level design. Brian Upton, a senior designer for SCEA and the lead designer for Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon, called on theme park design, landscaping, and city planning as parallels for level design, explaining that they all work under the same principles.

The main concern with all of these disciplines is human psychology – an understanding of how people orient themselves within, organize, and think about the space around them. Since theme park designers, landscapists, and city planners have been doing their job a heck of a lot longer than game designers, Upton suggested looking to these older fields not only for technique but for terminology with which we might describe and define level design.

( Continue reading at GamaSutra )