The more I do it, the more I realize I don’t have any great advice about game development…but here’s a thing.

You’re right about your boss being an idiot. So when you start making games people will warn you, that most of it is going to be bad. It’s the truth.

Next month, The Final Shape will be hitting one of its most critical internal milestones: a ritual we call the End-to-End playtest.

This ritual has been a key part of development since Forsaken. It’s multiple days of consecutive internal playtesting that not only generates incredibly valuable closing feedback on everything coming this summer, but also spiritually kicks off a shift towards bug fixing and polish work.

It's me, Joe, your local Destiny 2 Game Director, wading into the waters of the internet to talk about increasing the base difficulty of the Vanguard Ops playlist. This content specifically has unintentionally become less engaging compared to our Guardians' power over time over the last few seasons, and we want to course correct that in Lightfall.

New Twitter keeps showing me this. So I'm going to go through the list one by one here, and see if Destiny 2 has the trope.

We're pretty big now, so I'm guessing we hit at least 30. Yall can keep me honest.
pcgamer.com/50-sci-fi-game… 1. Floating rocks

Oh yeah. floating rocks rule.

I just wanted to step in and say: Heard loud and clear on the feedback with our current seasonal backbones. The team is excited to put some more creative risk in seasonal progressions, but there will be some time before the feedback catches up with the dev cycle. Preview: Coming up next is Lightfall and Season 20. While Guardian Ranks and Neomuna destination pursuits are going to shake things up- on the seasonal pursuit side our major focus is reducing complexity and improving the synergy between your seasonal pursuits and the rest of the game.

The team's been playing a lot of Witch Queen. Wanted to give some quick updates on where our head is at with some week 1 reactions. [1/13] First, aren't super happy with how unpredictable it can be to complete Report: Relic Data for the Evidence Board quest chain. [2/13]

So with a few sleepless nights before launch, I just wanted to take a moment and talk about how proud I am to be a part of the Destiny team. It’s become a meme at this point, but making video games is hard. Anyone that ships ANYTHING should be proud. But one thing we don’t often talk about is how unfair it can feel.

Ahead of the showcase this month, I wanted to take a little time to talk about Destiny PVP. Competitive modes are part of what makes this game special. I can’t imagine a version of Destiny 2 that doesn’t involve getting a sweet new gun and taking it for a spin in the crucible.

Delivering actionable notes to game teams can be very challenging. Screwing it up leads to frustration and lots of extra work.

One of our directors at Bungie introduced a method of separating our responses into three distinct categories that's really helped us give better notes. Two disclaimers.

1. This method is not one size fits all, but it has been so helpful to us recently, it seems selfish not to talk about it.

2. This is specifically a rubric for downward alignment, as two of the categories require the team to take action.

I'll bite on this! Quick thread?

https://twitter.com/BrendonShih/status/1394828789004136448

So entry-level in most AAA design at this point should mean no professional game dev experience, but absolutely does not mean no experience in the craft of game design

Something really useful a bunch of coworkers taught me over the last few years is how to stop asking for and giving milquetoast feedback. Especially in surveys, people will respond to a lot of areas they don’t have strong feelings about with “it’s okay.”

I'm looking at a lot of applicants recently, and one area where gaming is super inconsistent is role and level names.
Two roles named the same thing can mean very different things at different places. Here's a quick and dirty guide for things to watch for with design roles Junior or Associate.

Some companies say junior designer others say associate, but these are almost universally entry level roles. Even at top companies you shouldn't need significant experience to get your foot in the door.

I wish we talked more about the importance of buoyancy as a soft skill for game dev. Making video games seems to me a lot like swimming up against the ocean, periodically a wave will come along and beat the absolute shit out of you.

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.

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.

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.

I just wish I understood how Twitter in stream photo cropping worked

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.

There is a tester at Bungie that has the best method for teaching people raid encounters.

They tell people the one sentence description of the fight, then immediately pull. “This fight we have to go into portals and destroy oracles then we kill the boss.” Okay go!

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.

The number one piece of helpful feedback I hear really talented encounter designers give to new encounter designers is “Use less unit types at once.”

This piece of advice was given to me very early in my career and was very formative. Here are some reasons why. 1. You want your AI lineup to have specific strengths and weaknesses.

Most AI are good at some things, but bad at others. So, there is a temptation to use lots of unit types in order to create a lineup where you’ve covered up any potential AI shortcomings.

Don’t do this.