This is one of a few blog posts adapted from my Dissertation project about Rotatris, a tetris-like game I made in Swift and SpriteKit. In Rotatris, players try to build “shells” of squares around a central rotating block. You can read my full written dissertation here.

This post is, similar to the last, an excerpt from my dissertation designed to give some idea of how I deal with challenges and design decisions. It’s a bit dry, I’m afraid, since it’s all in the fancy academic format designed to make it dry and unentertaining.

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I’m now at the stage of designing levels for Neon Arena, and finding the process of leading players through an absolutely fascinating one. Where do players naturally go? How can we design levels to make the best of that – or how, when the design requires it, do we override those instincts?

So, this is a case study on how a couple of specific Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst levels achieve that, and some examples of how I’ve been using it in my own project so far.

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I’ve run into a technical hitch that can’t be solved until I get to a computer with 3DSMax, so I figured i’d scratch the itch for now by writing a post about the Wallboost mechanic I’ve implemented. Continue reading →

On the face of it, it should have been easy to make a sequel to 2008’s “Mirror’s Edge”, a gorgeous first-person parkour game set in a sparkling dystopian city. It fell short of perfection with several glaring flaws – mandatory torturous combat, dodgy collision detection, brain-dead plot – and surely all Mirror’s Edge 2 needed was to fix those and rake in the awards, right? Apparently so, since that’s what Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst (not a sequel, a reboot) started off by doing. I say “started off” because it was released fully eight years after the original, and for all of that time they just kept adding features: an open world, time trials, races, challenges, missions, a progression system: not all of it entirely welcome.

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