I'm the kind of person that believes its critical to find little ways to enjoy yourself at work. The kind of things that don't hurt anyone, but instead bring you great joy. But despite my best intention these almost always come back to haunt me.
For example, when I was first starting up at Bungie, I set up an automatic email signature.
I decided that in between my first and last name I would add lyrics of a song as a hidden message in a font so small that it was invisible to the naked eye.
It was something no one ever saw, but these silly hidden lyrics still gave me a little joy every time I wrote a mail.
I had them in my signature for a little over a year, until I finally realized that if you used the outlook app on your phone it normalized my signature and SET ALL THE FONT TO THE SAME SIZE.
I realized this not when some kind coworker warned me, but instead when the founder of Bungie sent me a mail saying. "Uhh, I'm not sure what this means...do you still want to meet?"
This was strange because what I thought I sent him was, "Sounds good Jason
Joe Blackburn"
but what he read on his phone was..
Sounds good Jason. Joe WHAT WOULD YOU DO IF YOUR SON WAS AT HOME CRYING ALL ALONE ON THE BEDROOM FLOOR, 'CAUSE HE'S HUNGRY AND THE ONLY WAY TO FEED HIM IS TO SLEEP WITH A MAN FOR A LITTLE BIT OF MONEY, AND HIS DADDY'S GONE Blackburn
Anyway I write my signature manually every time now.
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A hopefully short thread on how to make encounters feel better using workout patterns as a framework.
A trap a lot of people fall into is to make fights with waves and waves of baddies where each wave is slightly harder than the last. If we graph out the difficulty, it looks something like this.
It makes sense. The encounter gets harder as it goes on. The hope is cranking up the difficulty makes it more and more exciting.
In game design, knowing what you need is a lot more powerful than knowing what you want. Here’s an example from a raid we made in Destiny.
We were working on Wrath of the Machine— a Mad Max inspired adventure. In several encounters we were going to have something new to Destiny, balls you could pick up and throw at things.
Since these balls were going to be in a bunch of different places in the raid, and we needed a device to make them appear.
Here’s a stupid thing I did in college that I hope I’ve learned from.
I was working on my minor in writing— taking a short story class.
These classes all follow the same general pattern, every session a few people turn in stories, the whole class then takes them home to read and write up feedback.
So I get a story about a teenage girl who was in love with some boy who had super natural powers. (He might have been a vampire? I’m not sure...it’s been a long time)
I hear a lot of people say, "I like BOTW, but it isn't a good Zelda game." As someone who has a pretty massive Zelda tattoo, I couldn't disagree more.
Almost every Zelda before BOTW is built on a super hard lock and key model. The games were a series of puzzles where the devs had made sure only one solution works.
There is a strong temptation for game designers to make sure the players have to do "the right thing." You spend A LOT of time making any puzzle, and you want to make sure players get to experience the cool thing. That they get their money's worth.