After a ten-day jaunt through mainland China, I’ve been living in Hong Kong since the beginning of September.

Hong Kong is a fantastic place for level design inspiration. It’s set among mountains and is full of very tall buildings, so it has an intensely vertical feel that I have never seen before. Different neighborhoods have totally different personalities. We have hyper-clean corporate boulevards, compressed parks made of packaged natural beauty, beaches surrounded by building-covered mountains, and warrens of market stalls where the sky is blotted out by a thousand glowing signs overhead. There are a lot of ideas to draw from here.

Unfortunately my computer access here is limited. I have no personal machine, so I have no way of playing UT3 (shocking!) or doing any level design. I’ve done some 3D art in the university labs but it can’t replicate the obsessiveness of the days when I had a PC in my room.