The Cabal: Valve’s Design Process for Creating Half-Life (1999)
Cabal. Design Bible. All grounded in the Single Source of Truth philosophy. With feedback from 200+ playtest sessions directly incorporated into the stream. And the result is the cohesive narrative vision in Half-Life.<p>Contrast this with "What Went Wrong with Cyberpunk 2077" exegesis from Bloomberg this morning and I'm still not sure anyone can point to a single reason beyond "we were too ambitious". I wish this breakdown were more technical in nature. Like a good GamaSutra postmortem. I suspect tooling plays an enormous role. UE4 Blueprints are phenomenal for visual development. But does it scale to teams of hundreds of designers?<p>Inside Cyberpunk 2077's Disastrous Rollout<p><a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-16/cyberpunk-2077-what-caused-the-video-game-s-disastrous-rollout" rel="nofollow">https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-16/cyberpunk...</a>