"I like an open world where it feels like stuff is going on around you," James Hague, Red Faction Guerilla's lead designer at development studio Volition told me in a phone interview earlier this week.

Red Faction Guerilla is a sprawling open-world action-adventure for PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 set on a Mars ruled under the tight grip of the heartless Earth Defense Force. The player is a miner-turned-revolutionary who shoots and batters enemies and buildings to help the just overthrow the bad.

What Hague was discussing a game that is loaded with opportunity and charged with the energy of an insurgent's rebellion against a military authority – the kind that, not intentionally, has parallels to those seen fighting on the news these days.

Let's start with the game design rebellion. The game Hague and his team made, the game that technical designer Luke Schneider maintains was not intended to be a "GTA on Mars," was made to feel like a more open open-world game than the average one. It was a game designed to enable rampant destruction and handle all of the gameplay consequences. Volition built their game, Hague and Schneider told Kotaku, on the premise that giving the player an axe and guns that can destroy every structure on the map is also a game that should open the player's options to do as much as they can imagine.

"We wanted people to play pretty much however they wanted to," Hague said.

There are signs of success. For example, the developers has learned that players are doing things the creators didn't expect. Take the destruction of a canyon-spanning bridge in the game's Badlands district. Some might take it down with explosives. Others might use the game's disintegration gun to zap one strut away at a time. Volition discovered that one player decided to attract military attention and then shot helicopters so they crashed into – and tore down – the bridge. Another player filled the bridge's lanes with cars then made them detonate in a chain. "When that was put in there, the goal was to put in something very large and allow the player a lot of choices in how to take it down. We're not looking to dictate how you do it."

What they pushed was emergence, a value celebrated by players and makers of open-world games at least as far back as the launch of GTA III.

"We were trying to go a little further out there in terms of emergent gameplay on the high level," Schneider said. During development, they went too far: "Players would just be completely lost." The developers said they wanted to make an open-world game that felt more open than gamers have been playing. Things in the world were just supposed to… happen. Convoys would drive through the game world at set times each game-day. Players could attack them or not. But some players of pre-release versions of the game panicked and felt that they'd be letting their guerilla movement down if they saw a convoy and didn't attack. Missions like hostage rescues that are now triggered only when a player goes to an icon on the game world's map – the classic way of starting missions in open-world games – used to instead be sprung upon the player as alerts they could choose to respond to. "We were trying to get a balance between letting you choose what you want to do and making the world seem alive," Hague said. "We tried at both extremes and I think the balance is pretty good."

They found the right amount of insurgency to make their game work. And if it resembles any current real-life insurgency, that's not intended, the developers say. "We weren't looking at the modern day situation," Hague said. "We were looking at stuff like the past wars in Afghanistan and so on. How do react when you have a superior force against you and you can't attack them head on? We weren't trying to make an Iraq simulator."

Yes, this is a game about being part of an insurgent fighting force, a game that rewards players who can sneak up and undermine a more powerful military maybe with a disintegration ray or maybe by blowing up a car in front of a building. But civilians are never targets. The enemy is only military and always armed. Early in the game, the hero of Red Faction tells his brother, "I'm not a terrorist," only to see his brother gunned down by the evil military rulers, the Earth Defense Force. "We didn't want people to feel like they were on the wrong side of this war," said Schneider, who said that wars as far back as the American Revolutionary War were studied for tactics. "We just wanted people to have fun blowing stuff up."

With both the politics of the game as well as in the gameplay design, the developers don't think they took their rebellion too far. Almost.

One mission, which puts the player in the turret position of a vehicle while a fellow freedom fighter sharpens knives and begins to viciously interrogate a captured military man, did make Hague briefly uneasy. "The first time I actually played that mission once we got it in place I felt kind of bad," he said. He remembered thinking: "The Red Faction really crossed the line here. I don't know if I believe in the same stuff they believe in anymore, but I've got to keep continuing because it's a good cause overall… I remember we were going to go with an interrogation fairly early on. It just wasn't until we did the final writing pass and recording pass that we could really hear it in context. Honestly, it came out a little more over-the-top and intense than I expected to be."

A scene like that wouldn't have been unusual in 24 or out of context in an action movie. It's an ethical boundary, pushed.

The rebellions of Red Faction Guerilla are set to continue. Development of downloadable content is underway. The two developers would not share specifics.

Is this as open as it gets? Of course not. But as far as they've gone, the makers of Red Faction Guerilla are happy with the result.

Considering the creators describe it as "more like an explorable painting than an actual game," this is no mean feat. They cover all the typical stuff (what went wrong, what went right), as well as download statistics, appendices featuring the people behind the game, and a section on reviews:

Overall, the reactions to the game (gathered from the articles, their comments sections and personal messages), fall into three categories.

Of course there is the expected response of the typical gamers whose desire for zombies whenever they see a cemetery is apparently insatiable. They tended to describe The Graveyard as "boring". Of course.

A little bit up the ladder of human civilisation, we find the people who were turned on by the idea but turned off by the actual experience. They were "disappointed". From what we can see, this was either caused by a failure on our part to maximize the qualities of the game or by certain expectations coming from the player.

Despite the fact that games are supposed to be interactive, many gamers still seem to be incredibly passive when it comes to the meaning of their entertainment. They expect to be spoonfed and don't seem to have any experience with literature, modern theater or fine art (or even art films) which require active participation, not just of thumbs and index fingers but also of heart and brain.

A final type of response was the simply "delighted" one. These people really enjoyed the game. And/or they were happy to see the experimentation that we're doing with the medium.

Ok, they sound a touch bitter at times, but it's a really nice piece on an interesting game — and worth wading through to read.

Postmortem: Tale of Tales' The Graveyard [Gamasutra]

Our goal when we set out to make BioShock was very clear. We wanted to get to the next level, moving beyond our suite of critically acclaimed games to make a blockbuster. A lot of factors aligned to make this possible: the commercial backing of 2K; the game design knowledge we'd acquired from building System Shock 2; the technological familiarity with our Unreal-based engine that we'd built with previous games. But we still had to figure out how to make it all big-blockbuster big.

A lot of our problems came from underestimating how big the task of making a triple-A product for multiple platforms and multiple regions really is. And other problems came from over-estimating our capacity to solve those problems using our existing procedures and staffing levels.

If there's an over-arching theme of our development, it's that we, like many other developers, believe that ultimate success in this industry comes from iteration. You have to build, evaluate (and have others evaluate) and be prepared to throw things away and rebuild.

It's not terribly long, clocking in at 4 pages, and worth a read — even if you weren't a particular fan of the game.

Postmortem: 2K Boston/2K Australia's BioShock [Gamasutra]

For [Fin] McGechie, staying at Bullfrog was becoming untenable. "The EA rule book was brought in. I remember Gary and myself getting told off for running in the corridors," he says. "That was it for me." In a pub - and Mucky Foot is a developer whose story seems primarily told in pubs - they decided to hand their notice in on a Friday. They'd had enough. "Then, on the Thursday, Guy decided he'd had 'even more of enough' and handed in his notice," McGechie says. "Then myself and Mike did it on the Thursday. By then, I think, everyone had realized." Diskett elaborates, "We'd actually put very little thought into it. It's like they say, ... you spend more time choosing a pair of curtains than you do choosing the house. It was like that setting up Mucky Foot. We went, 'Shall we?' 'Yeah, c'mon.' We went off in great ignorance of what it would entail."

Between '97 and 2003, they produced Urban Chaos, Startopia, and Blade II; like many before and after them, though, the games just didn't sell (or didn't sell enough). It's a nostalgic look at a company that was and a really fun 'interview.'

Footprints: The Rise and Fall of Mucky Foot [The Escapist]

Game courses in engineering schools tend to be focused on solving technical challenges, whereas design programs focus on the innovation of gameplay. To produce the best possible student game, these two forces need to collaborate.

For interdepartmental game classes to work, I feel the focus should always be on what is best for the project. Collaborative game development should be approached as more than a system of technical features. In the case of Winterbottom, learning to work on a team was more important to the student engineers than getting the recording features to work. Although learning to solve technical challenges is extremely important for students, in a class where the object is to make a good game, the focus should be on just that.

All of this makes me pretty glad I'm part of a 'lonely discipline,' where we're more or less turned loose to do our own thing. An interesting read and worth a look if you're interested in what goes on in the hallowed Ivory Tower.

Student Postmortem: USC's The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom [GameCareerGuide]

Unfortunately, Gawd's Museum of Dissected Games doesn't cover bad games. It doesn't have a 'What Went Wrong' section. But it's a fascinating third-party resource of postmortems about some of our favorite retro games. Gawd, a developer himself, hacks apart old games in his spare time and writes what makes them tick. It's a new site, so the only postmortem available is Carmack & Romero's Dangerous Dave 2 but it's a fascinating, if slightly technical, read into a game many of us old schoolers have loved and forgotten. And check out those awesome Dave death animations!

We hope someone will follow this up with a spoof site, 'The Museum of Dissected Gamers'. There's a couple Kotaku commenters Eliza and I would like to submit. Florian Eckhardt

Gawd's Museum of Dissected Games

While the original XBox had a design meant to "surge with power like the Incredible Hulk," Microsoft hired 20+ designers in different territories around the world to come up with a more understated look for the 360. If you believe the post mortem, the 360 is supposed to resemble Bruce Lee, inhaling, right before he karate chops you in the thorax. There's also some discussion on the user interface, including the challenge of trying to cram 10 times as many screens into 1/60th of the memory space the original XBox had, as well as the face plate system and HDtv design issues that needed to be ironed out.

All in all, an absolutely fascinating look at the over-intellectualized thought processes that can cause 20 people to design a system that looks like an overly large piece of tupperware.

Game Developers Conference: Xbox360 Design Postmortem [GamersInformer.net]

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.

I've been working on Oblivion since the end of 2002. Every day since then, I've looked at this game, thought about this game, and sweat blood and tears with this game for over 3 years of my 29 year life. My father was diagnosed with cancer, and passed away during the development of TESIV. I've moved 3 times since beginning to work on Oblivion. Heck, I've even moved my desk at work 3 times since production began.

I spent the entirety of last month - and I mean the entirety, working on downloadable content for Oblivion. I'm talking 12+ hours a day, 7 days a week for a month solid. This was just after crunch for TESIV too. Why? I simply want whatever work I do and put into this game, and any game, to be the absolute fucking best it possibly can be. You all deserve that without question, and no less. I certainly desire the same out of the games I am passionate about.

I just want at least one person - one person out there on this fucked up, wobbling piece of rock that loves games, that is fed up with all of the bullshit in day to day life, fed up with all of the assholes out there that climb all over each other to get 'ahead', or take their loved ones for granted, or can't see past their own nose to empathize with each other on a human, person-to-person level. I know there's at least one person out there who will see the hard work that we, and that other companies do while making these virtual worlds and sigh to themselves - At last, someone else out there understands.

We really love that passionate people like this work on games and we're glad to buy games like Oblivion to support them. Read the whole thing.

Artist comments on making Oblivion [ShackNews]

We could quote every other sentence, but since no one reads anything on Gamasutra Postmortems except "what went wrong", here's a lesson learned from the intrepid Schadenfreude team:

We should have used motion capture for the in-game characters, but we simply did not room for it in our budget. Thus the characters dance very badly, but that is all right — we Germans are traditionally known for our stubborn and fastidious natures and our fondness for zeppelins, not any innate ability to shake our groove things.

We love Accordion Hero. Hey, Sparky, thou sultry mynx - when are you going to get around to actually finishing your real game?

'Schadenfreudian Slips': Postmortem - 'A Tight Squeeze': The Making Of Accordion Hero [Gamasutra]