people outside the industry might not appreciate how absolutely insane it is for a game director to play a random video game and decide "our game should have this feature"
It's roughly as normal as a cruise ship captain deciding to change destination halfway through.
Really, it's like a cruise ship captain deciding in the middle of the Caribbean that the ship needs a fourth swimming pool.
Sometimes features get added halfway through development – but that should always be to respond to a specific need, to fill a void. Not in a whim.
A competent studio does a lot of careful planning and exploratory work to avoid having to throw out large amounts of work later. Creating the conditions for work to be thrown away is the *opposite* of a director's job.
Ofc, lots of industry failsons and fauxteurs do it often.
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This is a show where a middle school boy has a true crime podcast, gigantic vintage detective pulp posters on his bedroom walls, and also his mom is a murder detective
For the 12 Days of Christmas I am going to post some of my favorite Fallen London things from 2021 that I am proud of – either my own work, or something from the team that I really admire.
January: Moulin Station shipped, which was the first large piece of content I worked on. A lovely thing about FL was the ability to start experimenting mechanically off the bat. Some things about Moulin filtered down into future things we did later in the year.
February. I make no apologies and have no regrets.
game design tip: if you say “delta” instead of “difference” you instantly add +1 validity to your argument
further tips:
remember, you “uptune” and “downtune” things. buffs and nerfs are for amateurs.
instead of talking about storylets, branches, stitches, choice points, etc, experiment with calling literally everything a ‘node’
literally anything about your game can and should be an “economy”. try these phrases out: resource economy; action economy; time economy; motion economy; momentum economy; NPC behavior economy; social economy; and of course the ultimate one, “monetization economy”
MS Word is kind of crappy because it’s not particularly good for quick ephemera (where Docs’ collaboration tools shine) nor is it an actual competent desktop publishing software you could use to make an actual publication; it’s kind of an unhappy medium between the two
That Tweet Thread talks about using footnotes, which yes google docs can’t do but also jesus are you really using the footnote function in word? just learn markdown, latex, and pandoc, you fools
HOWEVER excel is a million miles ahead of google sheets. sheets is ludicrously underfeatured and the documentation is for shit
Economists talk about "downward nominal wage rigidity"; ie, it's institutionally hard for companies to give people wage cuts, so when they have to (either for global reasons like a recession or local ones like a single failing business) they instead tend to fire people.
It occurs to me that there's a similar phenomenon going on with those pictures of signs saying things like "DAIRY QUEEN IS CLOSED BECAUSE NO ONE WANTS TO WORK." The US (and other western economies) hasn't seen actual full employment or a real social safety net in a generation.
Those companies might not have the institutional wherewithal to raise wages (whether at an executive level or just when it comes to local dumbass managers) so instead they just fail to operate at capacity.
The atlantic piece is obviously extremely tendentious, because everything the atlantic prints is extremely tendentious; it's a rag that puts out a very narrow, specific viewpoint.
There is, of course, enormous uncertainty surrounding everything having to do with covid (and anyone claiming that we know for sure how any given public health policy would go is lying to you) but for the atlantic it's important to promote one particular viewpoint in all things
It's honestly just noise and no signal. The choice of sources an examples is laser targeted to promote a specific point, to claim there is a correct "scientific" level of worry to have