I don’t have any original thoughts that can fill out an entire piece this week, so this is going to just be a combination of various things I’m doing. Most notably to anyone that’s visiting this site and had permanent links to my old gallery: it’s broken. The database seemed to randomly go all corrupt over the weekend and I am in the process of uploading everything to a new location and this is both time consuming, bandwidth intensive, and my larger galleries cause my host to get angry with me and put my site on a CPU Quota Exceeded time-out. All of the old game screen shots will all be back in their place eventually, though. And eventually I’ll go through all of my old articles (at least the ones that get the most hits) and update the screen shot links. If that sounds fun it’s entirely by accident.

Regarding Magnetic Butterfly, I love the project dearly but the only time I can devote to the project is when I’m away. Whenever I make progress, though, I upload a build to its temporary home. I’ll write a more detailed piece about the design of the game and some of the ways I plan on encouraging a player to take chances in the scope of the game soon. My current task is implementing some of the more aggressive forces that will work against the player in the course of a game; my current plan is to make a single game of Magnetic Butterfly a rigidly-timed experience in an attempt to regulate the way a player experiences the gameplay. I’m not sure how, exactly, that will work out but it’s the intention I’m currently working under.

Over the last few months I’ve been getting back into level design through, primarily, Call of Duty 4 and Unreal Tournament 3. This is something I haven’t done full-time (and, scarily enough, I do enough of it in my spare time now to almost qualify as full-time) since DOOM 3 and Half-Life 2 were new, but it’s still as enjoyable as ever. I put up a level design page a few weeks ago that I update pretty regularly with new links, screen shots, and videos. The first release is the unfinished alpha of a multiplayer for Unreal Tournament 3 (gameplay video here) designed around the concept of an urban area surrounding a lab containing some kind of alien artifact. The map turned out alright for my first shot at UnrealEd, but it ended up a bit rougher than I would have liked. My primary effort, though, is a mission for Call of Duty 4 designed around a player who was taken captive by random CoD4 terrorists and wakes up in a small holding cell where someone has unlocked and opened the cell door and left a handy silenced USP pistol on a table. The first leg of gameplay is intended to be a short “stealth” sequence (early gameplay video here) as the player escapes the building he is being held in and then the level will escalate encounters from there. CoD4Radiant, the map editing tool that Infinity Ward has released for public use, is pretty archaic when compared to something like UnrealEd, but it’s still incredibly usable. The hardest aspect of working on single-player content for Call of Duty 4, though, is by navigating around the incredibly undocumented scripting system (a custom language primarily influenced by C), but it’s been pretty easy to pick up purely through contextual use through the scripts for the game’s retail missions.

One of my most enjoyable pursuits over the last few weeks is reading up on some of the basic fundamentals of architectural design. Classical Greek and Roman architecture was something I studied a bit in college, but reading up on more modern design fundamentals has been absolutely fascinating. One of my favorite resources thus far is Architecture: Form, Space, and Order which is an incredibly visually detailed introduction to fundamentals of architecture. The other was informally recommended by Tom Armitage in a guest post to Offworld: 101 Things I learned in Architecture School. This short, concise book is by no means a detailed or comprehensive introduction to architecture, but what author Matthew Frederick does is to introduce readers to a number of most important fundamental maxims of Architecture through a combination of visuals and a short text passage. You can check out some of the sample pages from the book at Frederick’s site for the book. If anyone has any other recommended architectural texts I would absolutely love to hear them, this is probably the most interesting and beneficial topic I’ve gotten into in a while.

Finally, my article for the test run of the Game Design Round Table got posted to GameDev.net and it looks so fancy and special over there. It’s also here where it looks so fancy, special, and blue! You can also take part in this week’s Game Design Round Table which discusses the role that death mechanics and failure states play in gaming and game design. After a mere thirty-six hours the thread is already at fifty-three replies; this means that my task for making an article out of the contributions next week will be… Time-consuming. I made a point early on to not contribute to the discussions since I had such a hand at starting (and ending) them, but the one occurring as I write this is pretty fantastic.