Studio Head and Game Director of Fantastic Pixel Castle. We are making an MMO!
Previously: Riot, Blizzard, Ensemble Studios, oceanography
Jan 7 • 12 tweets • 2 min read
I finished The excellent Play Nice, Play Fair by @jasonschreier back in December. One of things that was striking to me was how similar the journey was of Riot to Blizzard (which perhaps should not be surprising given physical proximity and the talent overlap). 1/
Both studios had early success by deeply understanding the gameplay of the genres in which they wanted to innovate. But then both moved on from that success to focus so much (overly much imho) on polish. Polish is enormously expensive, like 9 year dev cycles expensive. 2/
Dec 30, 2023 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
I’ll share a Bobby Kotick story. I have a few. I cannot 100% verify this happened since it came to me from a dear friend, but I have no reason to doubt its veracity. It stars donuts.
My friend led a group on the WoW team. One of the things they would do for team morale was to invite executives to come visit their team in a casual setting. Usually this was someone like Mike. But one day they invited Bobby.
Dec 6, 2023 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
One of the first real implementation tasks (as apposed to ideation) that I did as a baby game designer was script the random maps in Age of Empires. I did most of the maps in Rise of Rome, Age 2 and its expansion, AoM and Age 3.
It was immensely satisfying because it was a perfect intersection of making something aesthetically beautiful that also led to good gameplay.
Sep 30, 2023 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
The big risks, in my mind, about talking about our game so early are:
1. Keeping the community excited for a long time. This is why the traditional model is to announce at a con that your game is almost done. We just want to get feedback early enough that we have time yo react to it.
2. Making sure players aren’t disappointed when we pivot on a feature they thought was cool. This can happen even in shipped projects of course, and we think the mitigation is to build up as much trust as we can.
Sep 9, 2023 • 34 tweets • 6 min read
Innovation in MMOs, a thread/rant
To start with, we want to make a game that is loved by people who love MMOs. I understand the appeal of a studio making some crazy new genre that is maybe an MMO or maybe something new. I hope there are studios that take that shot. It won't be ours.
We are a new studio, new team, new IP, etc. We can't afford the risk of making a game that has a 10% chance of being awesome. I hope there are studios out there that take risks, because as a player I want to play those games, even if 9 out of 10 studios fail. I just don't want our studio to be one of the ones that fails. :)
Aug 1, 2022 • 25 tweets • 4 min read
One of the most common questions we get is why we announced the League MMO in such a weird way and when we will provide more real information. There was actually a strategy in place here!
The announcement was the idea of our CEO. We thought it made sense to low key announce to help with recruiting (we need a lot of MMO vets), to excite players, and because we thought it would likely leak anyway.
Jul 30, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
There is a story circulating on social media about how 90% of plankton in the Atlantic are gone. This is poop. Something like 50-80% of Earth’s oxygen comes not from forests, but from plankton. We would all be dead from a 90% crash. The oceans are in trouble but not like this.
The cited study itself never claims of such a crash. It was a survey of the equatorial Atlantic, where plankton counts are always low because nutrients are low. Maybe they were even lower than normal, but still no cause for alarm.
May 3, 2022 • 14 tweets • 2 min read
A lot of the comments we received (thank you!) were about "artificially" increasing the time you have to play an MMO. A quick thread...
I put "artificially" in quotes, because the entire product is pretty virtual at the end of the day. :)
Jan 15, 2021 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
WoW healing stuff: I thought some of you might find my journey back into raid healing after a 7 year break (!) to be of mild interest, so here is some of that. 1
This is not advice on how to raid mythic or anything like that. On the other hand, I find that a lot of players look to the best mythic guilds to study how they should raid, which I believe is often a mistake for a couple of reasons. 2
Oct 25, 2020 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
More WoW:
Finally had the nerve to try out my priest. She had been my main for several years, still logged out after what ended up being her final Siege of Org raid. (Despite popular memes, my mage still isn’t max level.)
1. First, the character upgrade was not kind to her. I don’t honestly remember what she looked like, but this was not it. Her face was so new that it changed her personality in my mind. I fiddled with the barber but don’t know what I am going for. Wish I had an old screenshot. :(
Oct 23, 2020 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
More WoW:
Made a warrior to relive Pandaria. Some thoughts for those interested:
1) Fixing the weird time streams with Chromie is something we wanted to do for years. Glad the team finally tackled it and using that for alternate leveling experiences was clever.
2) MoP Alliance used to begin with the shipwreck quest, which felt really un-epic. The whole Horde battle was added pretty last minute. My memory is a little fuzzy on all this though.
