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There are rebellions that were and weren't intended to be part of Red Faction Guerilla, Volition and THQ's well-reviewed destroy-everything open-world game. Kotaku talked to the game's designers about the possibilities and politics of what they made. More »
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Gamasutra has a fabulous postmortem up — easily one of the best I've read — on Tale of Tales' The Graveyard. More »
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Gamasutra has published a postmortem for the hugely successful Bioshock; nothing contained within is particularly shocking (though comments have groused that they left out some big snafus), though I think it's always interesting to see what participants in the creation process have to say about the success (or lack thereof). The article goes beyond game elements and gets into things like how design teams were organized. But where does Alyssa Finley, project lead, have to say about the problems the Bioshock team ran into?: More »
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Kieron Gillen has a nice 'rise and fall' article over in The Escapist's 'Post-Mortem' issue, which isn't looking at games so much as the industry .... Mucky Foot was a little studio started by three former employees of Bullfrog, who found that being absorbed into Electronic Arts just really wasn't working for them: More »
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I never liked group projects as an undergrad, and that was just for boring things like presentations — the idea of having my graduate thesis dependent on a whole team of (interdisciplinary) people besides my dissertation committee makes my blood run cold. Matt Korba has an interesting postmortem of his The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom, intended to be his graduate thesis for an MFA in Interactive Media Department at USC. Beyond issues that usually crop up in postmortems, Korba takes a look at some of the challenges that come with designing in an academic context: More »
]]> http://kotaku.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=376514&view=rss&microfeed=true If you're like me, whenever you read a Gamasutra postmortem, you just immediately scroll down to 'What Went Wrong'. Kotaku readers know as well as I do that the real fun of things is to be had when someone fucks up. It's as depressing to read a Gamasutra postmortem about a good game like System Shock 2 as it is riveting to read one about a bad game like Trespasser. That one in particular is great: what should have been a Gormenghast trilogy sized "What Went Wrong" bullet list actually has a sizable "What Went Right" portion that is just precious. Go read it. More »
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GamersInformer has a postmortem up looking at the design process for the XBox 360. More »
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The comment thread for a post of an Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion thread yielded an interesting proto Post Mortem from an artist on the title. Actually, it's one of the most passionate things we can remember having come out of a game designer's mouth in recent memory... the words of a man who takes excessive pride in his work and, as an artist, considers the most important thing to entertain and even move his customers. More »
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To coincide with the imaginary release of the best polka game ever made, Gamasutra has posted a hilarious postmortem of Accordion Hero, the game where you "polka your way up from Der Rathskeller to Oktoberfest in Munich!" More »
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