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Nels Anderson

Nels Anderson has written 2 posts for Critical Distance
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Soren Johnson Discusses Sid’s Lessons

By Nels Anderson ⋅ May 4, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

Soren Johnson discusses a number of lessons he learned from Sid Meier during his time at Firaxis.
All four observations are good, but the third and fourth are especially resonant for me. Calls for thematic simplicity and “show, don’t tell” have grown increasingly loud as of late. When Jeff Kaplan says at GDC “we need to [...]

Vertical Spaces in Level Design

By Nels Anderson ⋅ April 21, 2009 ⋅ 2 comments

Rob Hale’s discussion of a Damnation making-of video raises a very interesting point. The top down diagram that most levels emerge from does not lend itself particularly well to creating rich vertical spaces. It’s possible to create verticality after the fact, but rarely is it significantly navigable. I’ve personally wrestled with this when designing tabletop RPG [...]