““I was deranged,” says Half-Life writer Marc Laidlaw of his decision to publish the plot of Episode 3 as fanfiction. “I was living on an island, totally cut off from my friends and creative community of the last couple decades, I was completely out of touch and had nobody to talk me out of it. It just seemed like a fun thing to do… until I did it.””
““Really good level design tells its own story. You don’t need NPCs popping up to tell you what to do if your visual grammar is clear enough. Then when characters do pop up, they can say lines of dialogue that make them feel like characters instead of signposts.””
“Half-Life’s continuous and consistent fiction left you with the sense you were passing through a cross-section of a larger world, rather than a set of fairly narrow levels”
“The narrative had to be baked into the corridors”