I was briefly very curious about GUN, the Neversoft game.
The original announcement of the game only revealed the title and an ominous tagline on a black background: "Pull the Trigger. GUN." And, to someone immersed in the video game dialogue, how provocative is that?
Popular games, following the sea change caused by Wolfenstein and Doom, have been about the power and allure of the firearm. Firing guns at living targets encapsulates the two biggest psychological draws of video games: being able to do something you otherwise can't in the real world, and a sense of power and control over a chaotic situation. I expect most people who play shooter games haven't actually fired a gun in the real world, much less killed, or even badly injured, another person. It's unthinkable on some level, but on the other hand it has the appeal of the taboo-- I can't actually shoot someone... but what is it like? It's an experience that is familiar to the audience via film and television, but even then still only secondhand; games deliver the visceral sensation of actually doing. Games play out the audience's illicit love affair with the firearm. And not just America's, but Japan's and Europe's. A fascination with instant death.
I've fired real guns. Admittedly, my motivation was game-related-- I'd virtually shot so many guns in my life that I felt a need to have the real-world experience to back it up. After a trial shot or two, I was actually rather good; games had taught me to line up the sights and adjust for recoil. I've only gone shooting once, in a quarry with some friends and some beer cans. And midway through our session there, I pictured actually having another person in front of the gun when I pulled the trigger. And it's just terrifying to even imagine, once you know what the shooting itself is actually like. Once you've gained first-hand knowledge of how it feels to fire a real gun, it's easy to construct the rest of the scene.
It's horrific. It's not like in a video game where a blood decal appears on the bad guy's shirt and he peacefully ragdolls into a floppy pile. In games, if anything, shooting someone is simply about neutralizing them, not actually hurting them; enemies shot non-fatally don't express pain, and fatal wounds silence the target instantaneously. It's the sterilized version of the act. The ideal killing. And it happens a hundred times more in any given shooter game than in all the action movies of a year combined. Never has so little screentime been devoted to so much gun violence.
So the teaser for GUN held an enormous amount of promise. The title alone--GUN-- begs a game about the gun itself: about our relationship to it as entertainment consumers and game players; about the presence of the firearm in our society, about the implications and effects of gun violence, the power of the gun itself and the lives it affects. A deconstruction, an analysis, maybe even a meditation. A game that acknowledges all the things that shooters normally take for granted, and asks the player to consider them anew, through their own actions and decisions.
Then the tagline-- "Pull the Trigger"-- adds another layer of reflexivity to the prospect. In most shooter games, pulling the trigger is a foregone conclusion. The game begins with a gun in your hands, and never asks if you're going to fire it, but where and how often. Could GUN be a game wherein the gun itself is an element of the world that isn't grafted to the player's hand? Where the decision to even pick up a gun, much less fire it, is an actual decision, with gravity and import? In the vast majority of films, aside from such as Predator and Rambo 2, the simple act of picking up a gun is meaningful, foreboding, and dangerous. The entire dynamic of the film changes at that moment. This character might kill another person now. And an actual shooting-- again, in a film with humanity-- has impact and sobriety to it.
Consider the following scene from Taxi Driver: the climactic gun battle in the flophouse, immediately before the ending of the film.
In some ways, the setup is much like that of an urban shooter game: the heavily-armed lone hero storms a nest of criminal activity and cleanses it through the barrel of a gun. But unlike in a game, it's not "cool" or clean or fun. It's harrowing and bleak, filthy and gory and frightening. Only three people are killed, but the scene has more impact than all the combined hours of gun violence I've played out in video games this year. Why is that? Why do games only glorify the gun, without addressing the ugliness and the aftermath, or the compulsion to kill? Could this mysterious "GUN" game actually question our assumptions about the gun's role in the modern video game?
No, as it turned out, GUN was just a cheap GTA-alike set in the old west. It could hardly be less high-minded if it tried. Neversoft continued its financial success by carrying the torch of the Tony Hawk and now Guitar Hero series, and GUN faded into obscurity.
Hopefully, somewhere, the spirit of the game that GUN could have been is still alive, waiting. It's just too bad that the perfect title is already taken.
*note: images used are from Larry Clark's photo series Tulsa.
10.29.2007
Gun
10.11.2007
Ideas
I've heard variations on the sentiment: "The least valuable commodity in the games industry is ideas," "ideas are a dime a dozen," or "ideas are like assholes..." But I think this is a fallacy. People who believe the above are thinking of video game ideas wrongly. The kind of ideas that have no worth, and maybe the kind most common, start out such as: "You're a space marine, and an evil galactic corporation has taken control of your homeworld..." or "I've got a great idea for this game that's like GTA, but in feudal Japan..." They're narrative or setting ideas, vague framing concepts for the artifice that props up a game. But they're not ideas for a game. When we look at the popular landscape of video games, we see derivative mechanics and stale dynamics. We don't see new ideas for what a game can be or how a familiar genre can be approached in a unique way, and when we do see a spark of something new that works, it gets copied and rehashed by half a dozen minor studios without ideas of their own. So I disagree with the aforementioned "truisms." I think one of the most valuable commodities in the games industry today is truly unique and feasible ideas for new gameplay mechanics.
The example here is the newly released Portal. It's a compact "big game" the history of which is fairly well-known now: Narbacular Drop was the senior project of a group of students at Digipen video game college. It was a first-person perspective game wherein the player was required to solve puzzle rooms by placing and rearranging pairs of interconnected portals on surfaces at their choosing, allowing them to pass otherwise insurmountable obstacles. Valve saw the team's work and brought them on internally to continue developing their game concept into a full product. What we come away with is an extremely polished, cohesive, and advanced version of Narbacular Drop, in the form of Portal. And I'm confident in saying that the three or four hours I spent completing Portal (and two or so more playing it again with Developer Commentary turned on) were some of the very best hours of gaming I've ever experienced.
The point is this: the Narbacular Drop team was adopted into Valve because of the idea they came up with, not for a setting or story (which were ditched from the original version) but for a truly new mechanical concept, one which they were able to demonstrate was novel, feasible, and led to a wide range of engaging gameplay dynamics, and was therefore worth building a big game around. The key to this entire saga was the idea itself behind the point-to-point portal mechanic, and its application to a familiar framework, the first-person perspective action game. Embracing and investing in these kinds of ideas is the only way that big games will be able to overcome the widespread rut of killing a thousand grunts in slightly different ways. And as Portal proves, when an experienced, skilled and dedicated crew of developers pushes a novel gameplay concept to its fullest potential, the results can be absolutely astonishing-- a big game literally unlike we've ever played before.
I think I'm in love with Portal a little bit. It shows how things can be done right.
10.09.2007
Demo
The playable demo for F.E.A.R.: Perseus Mandate, a standalone expansion by TimeGate studios, has been released!
I was responsible for creating this demo, but most of the content isn't mine. I grabbed large sections from one level created by Shane Paluski and another by James Kneuper, a nightmare sequence from one of Sam Villareal's levels, stitched them all together, cleaned up some elements, added more of my own (including the final room,) did a bunch of bugfixing, and voila, there we have it: one playable demo that is truly a team effort.
I'm happy with all our work on the demo. It's a fun little playthrough, looks nice, and does a good job of illustrating what Perseus Mandate is all about. I hope that if you're a F.E.A.R. fan looking forward to the expansion, or just a gamer who happens to try it out on a whim, that you enjoy the experience we've put together.
10.05.2007
Harvey
There's a candid, and very interesting, interview with Harvey Smith up at gamasutra right now. Smith talks about his upcoming game, Blacksite: Area 51, as well as a range of political, business and general design issues with the very engaging interviewer on the piece. Harvey Smith was lead designer on Deus Ex and Deus Ex 2: Invisible War, and Blacksite will be his first game for Midway Studios Austin.
The interview touches on a couple of subjects that I've taken interest in myself: he explores the idea of games as a vehicle for subversive political statements and the appeal of using residential and everyday spaces as settings for games in ways that are quite thoughtful, as well as being lent gravity by his long and influential career.
Whenever I've had a chance to read Smith's thoughts online or see him speak in person, I've always been impressed, and felt that he wants a lot of the same things out of games that I do, and thinks about these issues deeply. I wish he kept a blog!
10.04.2007
Ubermensch
What is it like to be a mafia crime lord? Judging from the film The Godfather, it involves ruthless business dealings behind closed doors, cigar smoke-enshrouded conferences with your consigliari, the pain of exchanging your own humanity for the good of the Family, suddenly losing your loved ones to a hail of bullets, sending out hitmen to do your wetwork, and only occasionally getting your own hands dirty.
Judging from The Godfather video game, it involves a one-man army systematically eradicating hundreds of rival gangsters to conquer every business in the city one block at a time.
The same goes for any other role explored through an action game-- what was it like being a soldier in WW2? You ran down streets killing dozens of nazis at a stretch, blowing up tanks, planes and bridges single-handedly while absorbing, and near-instantly recovering from, hundreds of gunshot wounds. What is it like being a New York police officer? You gun down dozens of heavily-armed criminals on an hourly basis (sometimes with the assistance of slow-mo abilities.) A secret agent? A ninja? A yakuza thug? A space marine? A refugee in an underwater utopia gone wrong? Hell, an MIT-educated nuclear physicist? They all frame the same hook: single-handedly destroy a constant stream of hostile cannon fodder through binary violent conflict. Be a force of nature that crushes his enemies by the truckload. Be an Übermensch, a being that has surpassed mere humanity.
There are generally two aspects of the player character that set it apart: The first is the very autonomy granted via the PC being controlled directly by the player, as opposed to the surrounding characters who all follow programmed behaviors within the gameworld. The PC is an extension of an external force, the human, while NPCs are extensions of the machine.
But the form of the second aspect is specific to each given game, and is a mechanic or set of mechanics that improves the player's chances of survival numerically-- a designed-in advantage that makes the player outright more powerful or hardier than his enemies. Sometimes this power is supported by the game's fiction and sometimes not, but regardless always functions to elevate the player character above his foes, allowing him to kill them off in droves. In Crysis, it's the super-advanced "nanosuit;" in Max Payne or F.E.A.R. it's the ability to engage slow-mo "bullet time;" in Half-Life it's the hazard suit; in The Darkness it's Jackie's demon shroud; in Gears of War it's the ability for the player to regenerate health and be revived by his teammates; in Halo it's Master Chief's recharging energy shield, and so on and so forth.
For most games it's the simple logical fallacy of the player being the only actor in the world capable of refilling his own health. Do you see enemies in any shooter or action game slugging down medkits or painkillers during a fight like the player is able to? Do enemies in the Half-Life universe ever use the med stations placed around the world? Why don't the enemies in Halo or Gears of War have recharging health like the player does? The closest I've seen is the enemies in BioShock running up and using health stations, but they still don't use portable medkits to recharge their health in the midst of battle the way the player does. This imbalance between the player's and enemies' abilities in most combat-based games is simply nonsense, but it gives the player the edge to survive, to rise above his enemies.
The need to cast the player as an Übermensch stems from these games' inability to make a clean break from their roots: the old-school arcade shooter. Let's look at Robotron 2084. In Robotron, the player is presented with a sequential set of rooms. Within each room are two general types of actors beside the player: hostile enemies, who wander around in set patterns, and innocent civilians, who also wander aimlessly. Enemies will attempt to kill both the player and the civlians; the player's goal is to touch ("save") the civilians before they can be destroyed by the enemies, and to clear all the enemies from the room in order to move on the to next. The player character's advantages, beside being an autonomous agent of the player, are the ability to rapidly fire projectiles in each of 8 directions, quicker and more nimble movement than his foes, and the ability to use extra lives to continue once killed. The fiction of the game explains the situation of the player facing a massive enemy force and having extraordinary powers this way:
Inspired by his never-ending quest for progress, in 2084 man perfects the Robotrons: a robot species so advanced that man is inferior to his own creation. Guided by their infallible logic, the Robotrons conclude: the human race is inefficient, and therefore must be destroyed. You are the last hope of mankind. Due to a genetic engineering error, you possess superhuman powers. Your mission is to stop the Robotrons, and save the last human family.
Single-player games have the potential to be something else. I don't want to be an inhuman, one-man army anymore. Games could instead couch the player as a normal person within a functional gameworld, an equal actor in parallel with all the other characters, an individual that isn't tied to a progression of power from pistol to machine gun to rocket launcher. When I say I want a "GTA with gravity," I necessarily want to play a truly human character. Not a superbeing that can instantly refill their life bar at will, or respawn, unscathed, at a hospital when they die. Not a Man on a Mission to destroy the droves of hellspawn that have invaded the planet. Not an invincible killing machine with a nanosuit and slow-mo powers, or the result of a genetic engineering error. Just a person. Games need to find their humanity.9.29.2007
Inhabit
A day or two ago I went on one of those great, all-morning voyages, starting at one blog then skipping from link to link, reading new articles and presentations I hadn't been exposed to before, downloading new games and demos to try, and just generally soaking in a flow of information that organically led from one node to the next. I started at Clint Hocking's blog, which led to Jonathan Blow's blog, which led to a great rundown of interesting indie games, the transcript of a Raph Koster talk on the spectrum of subject matter in current games, actionbutton.net which is a kind of nauseous Tim Rogers endeavor but had interesting game reviewing from other writers at least, the Realtime Art Manifesto by the team behind The Endless Forest, and more. A good day.
So, via that list above, I downloaded some indie games I hadn't tried before, including Knytt, which is a legitimately lovely, atmospheric little platformer in the vein of Metroid, but with a completely different tone. It's about a dumb little cat who gets abducted by aliens, then must explore all different parts of a surreal planet to collect missing spaceship parts and return home. I played through it in a couple of hours and it made me feel good.
But, all this made me think: Koster is right when he says that mainstream (hereafter referred to as "big") games currently draw from an extremely narrow set of influences 95% of the time (Jake and Chris and I went and saw a double feature of Total Recall and Terminator 2 the other night at the Castro, and we were noting how almost every big action game in the last 20 years has been trying to recreate the experience of these movies.) And I'm sure that Blow would champion indie games as one avenue that consistently explores new and innovative territory in game design. I've talked with friends in the industry about how we wish games could portray some interaction besides gun violence with the attention usually afforded combat, and certainly non-violent, or at least differently-violent, interaction is one trademark of indie games. I want games that do new and different things. I want games to progress, to convey a wider and more nuanced range of experiences. So even though I appreciate them in the brief time I give them, why aren't indie games what drive me?
Over my years of playing video games, I believe that I've come to a sharper and sharper understanding of what specific elements about all the games I've played most interest me. Playing a wide range of games over time is an ongoing process of exploration--exploring systems, exploring your own reactions to the overall productions--one which eventually allows you to delineate just what it is about games that makes you keep playing, keep paying attention. In my case, I can sum up what I want to do in a game this way:
I want to fully inhabit a single, human character within a believable and functional playable space, to express a complete and satisfying narrative arc by affecting change in the gameworld itself through my own meaningful decisions.
And the above, taken in sum total, I believe lies outside the scope of the indie game sphere. Not that I don't appreciate indie games at all, but in my experience their strengths lie in a number of specific areas-- expression of meaning strictly through inventive mechanics; conveying atmosphere via primitive visuals and sound; trying out new kinds of interaction that haven't been explored before, through highly abstract means-- that don't address the above. Indie games can be groundbreaking, freed from enormous financial investment and publisher demands, but they can't, as far as I've seen, provide me the fully-realized gameworld and inhabitable player character that a big game is capable of.
Which is to say that I can still enjoy indie games, but only briefly, or from afar, at least in their current state. But with the technology available today, indie games could also encompass my ideal core experience that I describe above, given the right approach. Tools are available, relatively cheaply or freely, to construct fully-realized functional worlds in true 3D, but low fidelity (outdated big game engines like the Unreal Engine 2, the Half-Life engine, old versions of Lithtech, etc. as well as open source 3D engines like Ogre.) The form of big games hasn't progressed in exceptionally significant ways since the turn of the millennium; there is nothing being done today, mechanically, that can't be accomplished with the engine technology of 2001. A small, dedicated team, with just the slightest amount of backing, could create a complete game on the scale of, say, System Shock 2, but with an indie outlook-- a setting and cast of characters that expressed an entirely different experience than what is usually encountered in a big game, an open-structure, believable world that exists unto itself, a unique set of mechanics leading to new, progressive dynamics, new forms of interaction, and so forth. By utilizing the technology of yesterday, but the forward-thinking design sense of today, indie teams could convey the "big experience" in ways that conservative, high-fidelity big games aren't allowed.
Beside an arbitrary adherence to exploring the "old-school" space, there's no reason for all indie games to remain 2D, or tile-based, or side-scrolling, or shoot-em-upping, or any other standards of that realm. And with digital distribution gone from a reality to practically the standard on PC, there's no reason for an indie team not to build something amazing that goes beyond the miniature scale of most indie games, and deliver it directly to an audience that would stand up and take notice. I want to love indie games. But I guess I want to love what they could be, not quite what they are.
9.09.2007
Justification 5
Mafia
PC / 2002 / Developer: Illusion Softworks / Publisher: Gathering of Developers
Mafia is one of those games that I played through only once, but that single playthrough left a strong impression upon me, even years after the fact. Enough time has passed that it's no longer the specifics that impress me, but a general impression of the tone of the narrative and the gameworld itself. Mafia is one of those games that successfully used every element of the presentation and mechanics to reinforce both the setting and the character arcs woven through the central narrative, to achieve a rare sense of cohesion and gravity.
At the begining of the game, the player character is an undistinguished everyman, a cab driver in the fictional city of Lost Heaven, USA, during the thick of Prohibition and the end of the Great Depression. One night, he has a run-in with a couple of local mobsters, and helps them out of a tight spot. Eventually he is adopted into the Family, and through the game rises in the organization while completing missions in service of the Don. His conscience and allegiances are tested, and he eventually finds that no one makes it out of the Family clean.
The city of Lost Heaven, obviously a stand-in for Chicago, expresses the period believably throughout-- the architecture, cars, music, costumes, and general ambiance all echo what we've seen in pre-war film and more recent period pieces. Lost Heaven isn't outsized, and it isn't a cartoon, unlike the city settings in, say, the GTA3 series. The mechanics also present Lost Heaven as a real place: if a cop is around and catches you speeding or running a red light, you will be pulled over and have to pay a fine. The cars you drive accelerate and handle like the real cars of the period: slow off the mark, without a tight turning radius, and if you beat them up too much they'll grind to a halt. Mafia succeeds in placing the player in a believable space, one that acts like it should, that supports the fiction and creates a tone unique from other games.
Similarly, the characters come across as real people, with their own motivations and outlooks on life. One of your fellow mobsters, the DeNiro type, an enforcer like yourself, demonstrates that his first priority is always loyalty to the Family; another, the Don's personal accountant, has a wife and daughter, and his allegiance to his family and to the Family cause some of the central tension of the narrative; another, the Pesci stand-in, is more in it for thrills and the pay-off, but is endearing in his own way. The Don of the family is both fatherly and somewhat aloof, portrayed as slightly detached, but a figure that the younger mobsters can look up to in that anti-heroic way. The central conflict of the story revolves around the concept of Loyalty-- loyalty to whom, under what pressures, and what that means. What happens when the natural inclination towards compassion collides with the obligations of loyalty? When one is disloyal to the Family, can they ever truly outrun their past?
Mafia is somewhat like GTA, in that there's an open city, and driving, and shooting. But the game achieves an effect much more in line with my desire for a "GTA with gravity." It places you as a living actor in a believable city, wherein your actions have consequences, and the overall thrust of the game propels the player toward a comprehensive conclusion to a satisfying narrative arc. There are certainly more mechanical constraints on the player's actions in Mafia than in GTA, but that's what gives the actions performed impact, and maintains the cohesiveness of the setting. I remember thinking at the time that Mafia was the first truly "mature" action game story I'd ever played through, and while other games have tried admirably, Mafia still stands apart. It achieved this by consistently showing restraint instead of going over the top. Every developer should be so committed to fully realizing the game space they set out to portray.9.06.2007
Home
Official update: I'm moving back to San Francisco, and I'm taking my job with me.
It's been almost six months now that I've lived in Sugar Land, 2000 miles away from Rachel. Work on Perseus Mandate is wrapping up, and I need to get back home. Rachel and I have both spent enough of our lives in a long-distance relationship.
I told TimeGate I had to get back to San Francisco by September, and they said, "Why don't you do that, and keep working for us from there?" So, I move back on the 16th and immediately start working remotely for TimeGate from my apartment. I'll maintain all my responsibilities but submit my work online, and be flown on-site every once in a while to collaborate directly in the office.
I have high hopes for the setup. I think I'll be very productive at home, and that my communication online and over the phone with my cohorts back in Texas will be effective. I'll look forward to my occasional visits to the office as well-- as I mentioned to the people here, it will be much more realistic for me to have a long-distance relationship with my office than my girlfriend. That much I'm sure of.
In any case, it's been a good but difficult six months. Here's hoping that the next six are even better, and much easier to live with. San Francisco, I'm coming home.
7.28.2007
Benefit
So, what makes video games unique? What makes them special, as a form of entertainment? What does the player get out of playing a game that other pastimes can't give them?
There are obvious formal differences between video games and other types of analog games, and between video games and other forms of non-game entertainment. But, what does that amount to, from a player-psychological point of view? In understanding what a video game is, the question becomes: why is the experience compelling? What are the universal benefits across genres?
As I see it, all video games provide the player with two primary motivational elements: an artificial sense of entropy, and an artificial set of goals. In addressing these elements, the player receives a tangible sensation of control, and of accomplishment.
Any given video game drops the player into a situation with a high degree of entropy, in one form or another. Through play, the user brings order to the entropic situation. I believe that it's an inherent human psychological need to bring order to disorderly situations-- it's satisfying on some base level that we all share, whether it's straightening up an untidy room or weeding a garden. Every video game is in essence a disarranged sliding tile puzzle, or a Rubik's Cube, waiting to be set straight. Video games give this ageless conflict between order and disorder a wide variety of highly complex forms, and provide the player with tools to exert control over the chaos.
One clear, recent example of this aspect of games is Katamari Damacy. As the Prince of the Cosmos, the player is dropped onto the Earth, and told to gather up objects by using his katamari, to build huge clumps of mass that are then shot up into space and turned into stars. In practice, each level of the game is a large space populated with scattered detritus, clutter, and wandering critters, and the player is given a tool to gather up all this junk into one huge pile. At the start of the level, the space is highly entropic; through the player's input, order is brought to the space, consolidating the scattered bits into one central, manageable form. It's a satisfying sensation-- I've never met anyone who wasn't sucked in by the katamari.
But I think every single video game you've ever played shares this dynamic of allowing the player to bring order to entropy. In a corridor shooter game, the player proceeds down a path strewn with spaces filled by hostile NPCs. Each room filled with enemies is its own entropic arena-- upon entering it, the space is overrun by independent actors who act in a destructive manner, lending chaos and uncertainty to the room. By defeating these enemies and clearing the room of entropic actors, the player brings order to the space-- even if it is through the barrel of a gun.
The Civilization games place the player as a tiny force within an uncertain world filled by hostile factions, and challenges the player to bring order to the world by unifying it under one banner, by removing the fog of war from the map and ordering the globe with an interconnected matrix of cities and roads. Adventure games present the player with a series of unsolved puzzles and random objects sown throughout the gameworld, and challenge the player to gather the items together into his inventory, combine them in meaningful ways, and bring about order by resolving each waiting conundrum in turn. The Sims releases a handful of characters into an empty lot, and gives the player tools to order their lives into a working home, productive daily routine, and an interconnected social network. Tetris throws a randomized series of shapes at the player and challenges him to create orderly lines out of them, containing the entropy onscreen to keep his head above water.
The other, more straightforward aspect of video games that appeals to player psychology is the variety of goals they provide. These can be overt or implied goals, from an NPC telling you to bring him a certain object, to an enemy that must be defeated, to the knowledge that 100 pickup items are scattered around the world that the player will be rewarded for gathering, to there simply being a very high peak in the gameworld that the player decides he wants to scale. In completing these goals, the player receives an immediate and very tangible sense of accomplishment.
These sensations, accomplishment and control, are feelings that everyone requires, but that can be elusive in everyday life. There are limited elements of the day-to-day that we as individuals have direct control over, and real accomplishments can be long in coming, or muddled with compromise. All video games, in their myriad forms, provide a surrogate for these essential sensations, miniature worlds wherein the player can receive positive reinforcement through their own actions, cleanly and instantaneously.
7.11.2007
Announced
The project I'm working on at TimeGate has been officially announced. It's F.E.A.R.: Perseus Mandate, a new standalone expansion for F.E.A.R. Not much concrete info has been released yet, but I was responsible for the demo level that's going to be shown later this week during E3, so my work will be the first public face of Perseus Mandate. Like the earlier F.E.A.R. demos, this one is a compilation of bits and pieces from the single-player campaign, grafted together into one continuous level, with a little polish and additional content provided by yours truly. So, most of the core content was created by my fellow LD's here at TimeGate; I just chose, arranged, and finished parts of their work to act as a showcase for what's new in this expansion.
I haven't got a whole lot else to say about it at this point, beside that I'm proud to have been given the responsibility of debuting our product to the world, and that I hope its public reception is positive. Unfortunately I won't be able to show much of my own work on the project until the game ships, but I'll try to give some sort of behind-the-scenes look at the demo creation process once it's been shown to the press.
F.E.A.R.: Perseus Mandate-- my first title as a designer!