The reality is that these dev cycles are simply too long. Five years is too long to be working on one project, it's too long from a creative or conceptual standpoint, it's too long to move in step with the culture. This is a low interest rate phenomenon.

https://twitter.com/VGC_News/status/1668583889026031616

Most careers in game development aren't long enough to stick with a project like this from preprod through ship. Even for the minority of people who become actual industry veterans, you're talking about a huge chunk of someone's life working on one thing.

Two years ago I embarked on what was (up to that point) the most ambitious project I'd done for Fallen London, Mr Chimes' Grand Clearing-Out. A live event held over the course of a week, with an evolving story and twists and turns and broad player participation, etc We'd never done anything like it before in FL. When designing anything, but especially when designing something new, you really need to set goals (we often call them pillars or 'player experience goals'). Things you want to make sure that you deliver.

The thing about the new zelda is that 'physics-based games' are almost always games in which the physics are a joke, we've sort of been conditioned by the Garry's Mods and Goat Simulators and Gang Beasts of the world to think of physics systems as inherently slapstick And TotK does have plenty of slapstick but it's set apart from most physics-based games in that it actually expects you to do practical things by manipulating its systems, it expects you to have real grip over those systems.

I got some pushback on this saying that the people who are leaving Blizzard over their insane RTO policy are "easy to replace." Let me go over why that isn't really the case.

https://twitter.com/NotBrunoAgain/status/1656732306734710793

Video games are not standardized at all as an industry. Every game is different, and everyone has a ton of domain-, game-, and pipeline-specific knowledge. Two people can have identical titles (eg, Senior Gameplay Programmer) and very little skills overlap.

got to the fire gorilla monster in wild hearts and decided I'm not playing this game any more the quick building mechanic very quickly turned into a thing where enemy attacks can exclusively be countered with very specific sequences of inputs, which quickly turns into a nightmare of memorization

so when I was prompted if I wanted to play Metroid Prime on 'casual' difficulty I assumed that was an easier mode that Retro added in the remaster, because 'casual' is not a word from 2002 I figured I wanted to play the game mostly as it was back then, so I picked 'normal'

so does metroid prime actually expect you to get through that entire segment in phazon mines where you have multiple murder hallways that attrition your health away, then a fucking spider ball puzzle mixed with more health attrition... ...then more murder hallways, then a boss fight, then more murder hallway, then another pseudo boss fight with a weird thing that you can't use lock on targeting on, then a fucking super monkey ball maze with electrified walls, all without running across a checkpoint?

the games industry has systemic failings, perpetuated by its modes of production and organizational system, that make it really hard to hire junior people

but all individual actors operating within this system can justify why they specifically aren't hiring juniors

sorry! from the perspective of people trying to break into the industry, like, I'm going to level with you: even if we had a much more ideal ratio of juniors to seniors than we do, that would mean that it's 100-200 applicants to entry level job instead of 400-600

okay fine here's why weapon durability is important in BoTW:

For the game to work (per its vision) it needs to be really dense. You're supposed to be able to pick it up, play 15 minutes, and find interesting stuff anywhere in its world. This means that the game is really, really hungry for worthwhile loot. Making weapons into a consumable helps make weapons worthwhile loot when you pick them up.

DF pro tip: willow trees only grow near sources of fresh water like rivers or murky pools, but they tend to replace other trees in those places. Willow wood is the third-lightest wood, making its logs (and resulting barrels or bins) faster to haul. In good-aligned biomes you'll also find feather trees, which are the actual lightest wood that's perfect to reserve for bins and barrels.

I think it could be done well in theory but I've never seen it

https://twitter.com/StasisGame/status/1616336059658379271

no, wait: I think The Forgotten City had good graffiti

So I built my fortress next to a river that runs down a waterfall and into a narrow little canyon a couple of levels deep. This canyon provided a perfect place to build a nice, safe underground access to the river - for fishing, and to collect water. This underground access was a couple of levels above my fortress' main floor, but that's fine, as the corridor was still well above the water level.

Well. The water level *after* the waterfall, as the river filed into the small canyon.

an underrated factor in our current society-wide collapse of trust is how basically every new commercial enterprise of the last 10-20 years has ultimately proven to be a scam video streaming promised to be cheaper and more convenient than buying/renting physical media but it gradually degraded to the point of intolerability

uber is now in many places effectively a parasitic rentier that makes taxi/car services more, not less, expensive

A brief thread with some tools that I use in my daily narrative design practice. These are real tools that I really do use on a regular or semi-regular basis. Getting some obvious stuff out of the way: Jira, Confluence (organizational tools used studio-wide), Google Sheets (used to keep track of work, content, components of content and share that information in the team)

"sinking ships fleeing the rat" is actually kinda good. imagine getting owned this hard by Keir Starmer. like if you opened your fridge and the cucumbers roasted you like if a Sim called you mid

I jumped back into Elite Dangerous (I played it a little back around its release date) and... wow the on-ramp to that game is just not great like... game confusing me about whether I needed to buy an expansion to land on planets (you don't, but you used to, so the game says that you do)

Anyway I finished the main story in Legends Arceus and I can say pretty confidently that this is likely a #goty list game for me It's basically someone looking at the Pokemon franchise and asking, pretty mercilessly, "is this actually fun to do"

So something extremely funny happened in chess this week and I think it's worth sharing with non-chess people. Magnus Carlsen, the world champion and likely strongest chess player of all time, is currently grinding to try and achieve the record of becoming the first human with a 2900+ Elo rating in chess.

I haven't played enough of the new pokemon to really judge it but I will say that it is the first pokemon game in a long time where I'm enjoying the core loop It's very obvious that they wanted to speed it the hell up; literally everything in this game feels snappier than in any other pokemon game, and it's almost like a case study of ux design

so the thing about B/A/YC, cr/ypto, neonazis and white nationalists is that, like, obviously that stuff part of the idelogical soil out of which the entire cr/ypto movement grew? b/itcoin comes out of "sound money", Austrian, and goldbug type ideas, which very much are potatoes in the same idelogical soup as all sorts of Bircher nonsense, including neonazism

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.