The section on development seems written by someone with little to no knowledge of normal game development. Almost all professionally developed games (3d shooter, puzzle game, hack n slash, or whatever), start with paper maps iterations. The "brush stroke tool" is one of the fundamental tools of most editors, and roughly boxing out the environment and making placeholder assets is one of the common uses of it. So the article is interesting, but reads more like a developer commentary from promotional literature since it makes their use of industry standard practices seem groundbreaking or innovative.