what your chosen design specialization says about you, a thread i cannot explain but simply believe: combat design/weapon design: you like to think you would crush it at evo but you literally wouldn’t make it out of pools and we all know it. sorry

a thread of the top questions i've seen asked at tech company town halls, in no particular order:

#1: "will (company) open a NYC branch? the ratio of women to men is better there than in SF, and finding a wife would be a huge company perk for a lot of the men here."

https://twitter.com/dantley/status/1628604242188713984

#2: "i don't eat the free snacks, but i see that some people eat too many snacks and seem unhealthy. can those of us who do not snack be paid extra for our health choices?" (the actual question was a lot more body shame-y, this is me paraphrasing so it's less triggering)

so godaddy runs a brilliant new scam where if your domain name expires, they purchase it, park it, and then pretend someone else bought it and make you bargain via a “godaddy broker” to get it back. their “suggested starting bid” for our indie game’s website was $2-4,000 I offered a hundred bucks. he was not amused. extremely funny notion that godaddy would pay itself an exorbitant sum to own a prestigious url belonging to (squints at notes) some college grads’ side project

it's grad season, & lots of folks are looking for entry level work. i often hear "i'm applying to full time roles listed on a website but never get a reply," so i'd like to point something out: most junior/mid roles w/ big studios are actually invisible contractor roles. (cont'd) i did a separate thread about why this is the case a while back, which you can find here:

https://twitter.com/kchironis/status/1349769636397473793

i wanna talk about my favorite elden ring/bloodborne encounter design thing because it's so simple but it forms the backbone pattern for like 50% of these games' encounter design.

i call it the triple zombie combo.

there you are, outside a room. you look & see an enemy inside. you go inside and kill the enemy. you feel like you got away with something because the enemy was probably like, crouched down or just standing there or something. maybe there's an item on the floor. you pick it up.

recently i've seen numerous pitches from new game startups in the vein of "we're gonna ship ambitious, incredible stuff to players but we're going to keep our company lean, under 100." in a truly self-contained startup with no publisher, i can think of 5 ways this happens: 1. you have the world's best tech and tooling. you can have like 2 and a half designers on the entire game but the tools are good enough that they can essentially channel raw vibes and manifest any piece of game content instantly. your team is like 87.2% engineers.

i opened up the journal at the start of edith finch and saw that edith was born in 1999. “ah, so she’s like 9 years old,” i thought, followed by “oh no” girl what do you mean your family’s 6 bedroom estate in the woods has just been sitting here untouched for years. have you never heard of zillow

have you ever:
- struggled to find junior roles with game studios?
- wondered how to find contract roles?
- been a contractor, been disallowed from attending a holiday party and not known why?

let's talk about the weird world of contract labor in the US games industry! 🧵 first, i want to give context for why the system works this way so that you aren't just reading this thread going "WHY?"

in 2000, Microsoft lost a lawsuit with contractors. you can read more about it here. this is where "permatemp" comes from.

nytimes.com/2000/12/13/bus…