Holiday is almost over and I have had a great one! With Queensday in the middle, I had an awesome time with my girlfriend and some friends of her, relaxing and thinking of how busy I would be after this wonderful time.

First of all, just before my holiday, I had a chat with one of the senior game designers at Guerrilla Games (old website though) in Amsterdam. It was about whether I could work at their company as an assistant game designer as part of my internship at the beginning of next year. The conversation was interestingly fast and the designer eventually gave me an assignment, which was making a Far Cry 2 map in 5 days (or 3 schooldays). The map editor of FC2 is very, very simple… It’s so simple that it actually restricts your design in terms of custom objects or houses, but I saw that as another challenge. Because the editor was so simple, I could (almost) completely focus on the design, rather than figuring out how the tool worked.

I literally canceled everything I planned the days following. I worked quite hard, almost non stop, from 9 to 9, for 3 whole days. I played the game for many hours, watched tutorials, tips and tricks, tested a lot of things in the editor, asked classmates for critique, got 2 other players to help me test my map and wrote a design process document during the whole process. You can find the final document here: Three Islands Design Process. I’m quite happy with the result and I already learned a lot from this experience.

Another thing worth mentionning is that I started reading Game Design Workshop by Tracy Fullerton. As I’m writing this, I have finished chapter one and believe that this book is going to inspire and motivate me a lot to do my own projects and make my game design better. I already have the feeling that what I’m learning at school is not enough and not complete. Books like these are perfect fillers. It’s totally going to work for me!

With this reading going on, I have decided not to go in to deep into definitions for a while, let them be what they are and leaving it up to the brilliant headed to figure them out. Maybe, when I’m done with this book, I am going to make some articles of my point of view, how I learned from the book and how I have adopted the playcentric approach. But that would be a perfect ending… We will see how it goes.

I’m starting to become more and more excited to make some friggin’ awesome games, dammit I love designing!

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