Alex Duran: Object Systems: Features, Trade Offs & Pitfalls

In 2016, I posted up some slides from a Doug Church talk about Object Systems (with examples from Thief) from around 2003 or so.

I've now found another great talk called "Building Object Systems: Features, Trade Offs & Pitfalls" by Alex Duran from GDC 2003.  Alex worked at Looking Glass on Thief 2, and later at Ion Storm on Thief 3 and Deus Ex 2.

The talk focuses on his experience writing the Object System for Thief 3 and Deus Ex 2, which is largely based on the earlier Thief Object System, work done by Marc LeBlanc and Doug Church, etc.

For the ease of following and understanding this talk, I have assembled a video that combines the audio and the slides together in one place.  Enjoy!

Notes:

The original AUDIO can be found here on the GDC Vault.

The SLIDES that accompany the talk can be found here.

It was hard to find the slides, so I've presented them together here in a cleaned up format, for people to enjoy!

Doug Church: Object Systems, Immersive Sims

Here's a presentation by Doug Church (Looking Glass, Valve) from about 2003, about designing Object Systems for games.  

I've reformatted it a bit to make it easier to read, and included it here because I love the Thief games, and thought others might be interested in it too.

It is written (I assume) with an eye towards immersive sims, and other games where you want rich interactions and emergent gameplay possibilities.

Here's the Google Slides, and here's a PDF.

I wish I had an audio recording of the presentation, but I don't think any such thing exists.

Enjoy!


PS: Here's a little preview of a few of the slides from the presentation...