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Overworld: How Design Connects Great Games

Overworld: How Design Connects Great Games

By: Overworld: How Design Connects Great Games
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On the podcast Overworld: How Design Connects Great Games, we are exploring the games whose designs changed the way we play. Our roadmap for this exploration is the 2025 Polaris List, which ranks the 100 most influential games according to a cohort of 167 professional game designers. Science Fiction
Episodes
  • [PREVIEW] World 3: The Return of the Obra Dinn

    [PREVIEW] World 3: The Return of the Obra Dinn
    Sep 14 2026
    Welcome to World 3: Return of the Obra DinnLucas Pope’s Return of the Obra Dinn is #52 on the Polaris List and is a definitive masterpiece in the mystery genre. I called it “Lucas Pope’s return of the Obra Dinn” because it was solo developed by Lucas pope who designed and programmed the game, and also did all of the art and music on his own. As far as solo-devs go, Lucas Pope is definitely in the category of auteurs with a distinctive style. Q: Have either of you played any of his games? Lucas Pope was born in the late 1970s and grew up in Virginia, and studied mechanical engineering at Virginia Tech where he got exposed to programming. I am not sure if he graduated and could not find a definitive source, but wikipedia says he dropped out, but there is no citationPope’s first game development projects were Quake mods, including the official Anaconda Quake Mod, and and in 1997 he was a founding member of Ratloop studios which released a Quake conversion mod called Malice Ratloop had a little success, but went dormant after a few years. In 2004, Pope joined Realtime Associates which primarily made licensed games. He worked on a game called Re-Mission, which was an FPS about fighting cancer??? Q: Have either of you heard of this? In 2007, he began working for Naughty Dog, as a tools programmer to help them develop user interfaces for programming and making games, which is extremely technical and detail oriented work.Q: Do you two know what a tools programmer does? This lead to him working on Uncharted and Uncharted 2, with Bruce Straley who he credits for teaching him how to make a game focus on a core concept Q: I haven’t played Uncharted, what are they like? Naughty Dog’s next game was Uncharted 3, but Pope and his wife Keiko Ishizaka left the company after their small game Mightier caught the attention of Valve, leading to Pope and Ishizaka moving to Ishizaka’s home town of Saitama Japan in 2010 to focus on indie developmentQ: I have also not played Mightier, but it has a really interesting gameplay loop where the player prints off a physical puzzle, solves it with pen and paper, scans it in with a webcam, and then that becomes a platformer level. Had either of you heard of this? Over the next five years Pope released six games including critically acclaimed Papers, Please which is #26 on the Polaris List and also has a unique and really tight gameplay loop, where you have to check peoples travel documents at a boarder checkpoint to determine if they should be granted entry. We will eventually talk about it on the podcast, butQ: have either of you played papers please? At the time of its release, 2018’s Return of the Obra Dinn was the game Lucas Pope had put the most time into, with at least 4 years of development. In Obra Dinn, you play as an insurance agent who is investigating the ship The Obra Dinn which has reappeared after missing for five years. You must use a magical pocket watch called the Memento Mortem to determine the identity and fates of the 60 people who vanished from the Obra Dinn during its doomed voyage by revisiting the moments of their deaths. The Return of the Obra Dinn has a unique for the time, 1-bit art style inspired by old mac games like oregon trail, turning to Schells Elemental tetrad, how would you describe the Aestheic of the game? Q: Q: What did you think of the sound design and music? The mode of investigation is really contrived, but it creates a really clean gameplay loop by enabling the player to perform the act of deduction by gather loose evidence from the frozen moments of someones death and then describe their death in plain terms. Additionally, it prevents players from brute force guessing by only revealing if answers are correct in groups of three. This was very groundbreaking for detective games, because a lot of games had you play as a detective, but don’t nail the gameplay loop of deduction, Q: What do you two think of the mechanics? Especially in comparison to pre-2018 games? The third part of the elemental tetrad is Story, Q: what did you two think of the story of The Return of Obra Dinn? Did you think that it worked well with the aesthetics and mechanics of the game? The last element is technology? Something really interesting to me about the Return of the Obra Dinn is that Pope had to develop a lot of tools from scratch for its development, but to make the graphics and puzzle solving work, and also to document his development. For example, he created an add on for Maya which is 3D modelling software which let him create a timelipse of the 3D modeling for the game by tracking actions in Maya instead of recording the screen. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90vqCKEEj3s) Q: What did you two think of the game technologically? How well did you think the four elements of aesthetics, story, technology, and mechanics supported each other? Bartles taxonomy … Who is this game for? On a scale ...
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    5 mins
  • World 2: Inside (2016)

    World 2: Inside (2016)
    Aug 22 2026

    In this episode game design professor Dr. Ada Wish, playwright Katie Coleman, and elite gamer Gia Szekeres discuss the design of 2016's Inside, which was ranked #92 on the Polaris List.

    Back us on Patreon at Patreon.com/OverworldPodcast to access our full show notes and the next episode two-weeks early.

    • Citations

      • The Playdead Unofficial Museum, created by TEN RAN 432

      • How Inside's levels were designed, by Alex Wiltshire at Rock, Paper, Shotgun

      • Three GDC talks given by the Playdead team including

        • Huddle Up! Making the [SPOILER] of 'INSIDE', 2017

        • Low Complexity, High Fidelity: 'INSIDE' Rendering, 2016

        • Temporal Reprojection Anti Aliasing in INSIDE, 2016
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    1 hr and 2 mins
  • World 1: The Legend of Zelda and Breath of the Wild (1986, 2017)

    World 1: The Legend of Zelda and Breath of the Wild (1986, 2017)
    Aug 22 2026

    In this first episode of Overworld, game design professor Dr. Ada Wish, playwright Katie Coleman, and elite gamer Gia Szekeres discuss the design of The Legend of Zelda (1986) and The Breath of the Wild (2017).

    Back us on Patreon at Patreon.com/OverworldPodcast to access our full show notes and the next episode two-weeks early.

    Citations:
    Super Nintendo, by Keza Macdonald (2025)
    Shigeru Miyamoto: Super Mario Bros., Donkey Kong, The Legend of Zelda (Influential Video Game Designers), by Jennifer Dewinter (2015)
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    1 hr
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