Getting the QA bug report on a Friday afternoon #gamedev #indiedev

This gorilla with machine gun hands could help the world prepare for bioengineered threats, according to the umbrella corp. researchers who made it. #ResidentEvil

How your email finds me.

I learned that conservation of ninjitsu was a major design inspiration for z-targeting in Ocarina of Time. The issue? Players had a hard time following multiple enemies. One of the devs noticed something similar happened in martial arts movies. Why not copy them? 🧵👇 #gamedesign #gamedev #Indiedev

I'm listening to a Magic the Gathering podcast about the design of alpha and they got to the boon cycle. We joke about how horrible healing salve was compared to ancestral recall, but the interesting thing is they knew it too! They purposefully chose rule of cool over balance. #gamedesign #mtg

Making things feels exactly like this right now. #gamedev #indiedev

One of the more interesting game design conversations I've had recently is about Basketball being "solved" and if we should adjust the rules. It's solved in that statistically 3 pointers and layups are the most efficient and effective strategies. So why do something else? #gamedesign #gamedev

Our favorite example of how much psychology can change your play experience: Essentially the same (blocks are in the same place) psychologically it feels more dangerous. An efficient trick to increase difficulty in a level without making it mechanically different. #Gamedev #indiedev #gamedesign

Can't find the citation but, when I was working at USC, I was told new designers at hasbro are put in charge of those Monopoly re-skins you see everywhere. I have mixed feelings about the sheer number of reskins, but I can appreciate the idea as a design challenge. #gamedev #indiedev #gamedesign

Years later it's still crazy that Aliens: Colonial Marines was crippled by a spelling mistake in their ini file The surprising thing is that it went through QA and cert so it had to have been a last minute edit. Don't push to prod, folks. #gamedev #indiedev

I am both impressed and annoyed by the changes that Magic the gathering has had to make to game mechanics because of how people play it in real life. Shuffling for example, makes a lot of sense for gameplay, but can grind things to a halt irl. So what was the fix? 🧵👇 #gamedev #gamedesign

Early TCG power scaling was really funny. Magic: Uses single digits Pokemon: Uses multiples of 10 Yu-Gi-Oh: THOUSANDS!!1!!! Real spinal tap energy. #gamedesign #gamedev #tcg

Cool. A creepier way to interact with spiders. "Necrobotics" But also, can we not show this to the tech bros right now? Thanks. Contemporary #cyberpunk #necrobotics

Game design is hard because you really need to solve problems without creating more problems And nobody has ever done that

The show I worked on for PBS Kids, Skillsville, won 2 Telly awards!

This is seriously embarrassing. Wow. gizmodo.com/the-worst-le...

Solo devs be like

When your marketing person wants to talk to you about your game: #gamedev #indiedev

Donkey Kong Country 2's map design is exceptionally elegant in that it uses each of the game's 13 level themes exactly thrice each, without using any of them more than twice in a row. This is accomplished via several clever uses of the environment.

The answer for this week's sample question is... Vape! Meet the Vap-o-gatchi! Real talk, though, there's already a push to ban this kind of stuff: news.ucr.edu/articles/202... Welcome! To the world of TOMORROW!!

"How can people be so cruel?" I say as I quick save my sims game and install a pool with no ladder.

I'm delighted to announce the forensic recovery of the original single-stroke font data from Vib-Ribbon (1999) — exhumed from Playstation ROMs — and now part of my archive of procedural skeleton fonts for #p5js: github.com/golanlevin/p... #mediaArchaeology #typography #plotterArt #creativeCoding

Numbers in games are funny. If this card was printed with "death touch" and "if this creature deals combat damage that player loses the game" I'm not sure it would have made as much news as "+9999 when attacking". People have strong emotions about numbers. #gamedesign #gamedev #indiedev

I'm late to the party on this one, but a former Nintendo developer has stated that "Mr. Miyamoto... views games as ‘products,’ not ‘works of art.’" I suspect that Miyamoto isn't as hard nosed about this as the quote suggests, but I'm curious what you all think. #gamedev #indiedev #gamedesign

The programming equivalent knowing that the sun will blow up.... in 5 billion years.

Choose your own adventure books now have maps!?! I'm not sure how I feel about this. Kinda feels like cheating or yellow paint. At the same time everyone is competing for time, so if this gets you going faster or helps completion, great? What do you all think? #gamedesign #narrativedesign

bank of america thinks take-two should charge $80 for grand theft auto 6. counterpoint: nobody should care what bank of america thinks about anything

Has anyone written anything comparing original 60 card Pokemon card games to 20 card tcg pocket? I would imagine that the change to the variance would matter quite a lot, and that the smaller decks lend themselves to quicker games and less deck building... but less strategy?

After almost 30 years ask.com is shutting down and with it, ask Jeeves. Of all the search engines etc that I thought would have succeeded with natural language search and LLMs, ask would have been at the top. Instead, it was allbirds, apparently.

I just watched a video about the philosophy of classification using trading cards ( #MagicTheGathering, #yugioh #pokemon) that cited Kant, Nietzsche, and Foucault. I can only guess that this existential crisis was triggered by the author trying to logically sort their bulk.

Ridiculous news in horrific times. Check out this week's Headliner puzzle! "Titanic exhibit at Volo Museum ____s on anniversary of famous ship's sinking" #gamedev #indiegamedev #indiegames #crossword

The most interesting thing I learned today is that it's costing companies money if they're being mean to AI. Each request takes money/context (tokens) so if you're mean to an IA it: Says sorry (more tokens) Is more conservative about what it generates (more tokens) Be nice.

"Hey boss, how do you want me to fill the dead space in the display?" "... say that again."

We ended up cutting this mechanic off at the knees. We didn't think it had any legs.

Pencils down! The submission window of Chimera Jam has closed. Now play cool Chimera games and vote for your community choice pick! itch.io/jam/chimera-...

Oh god, Horse Armor is within the Ask Historians 20 year rule for historical content 💀

Environmental storytelling. #gamedev #indiedev #gamedesign

I had a lot of fun working on this. One of the biggest design challenges was signaling player progression without directly telling players what to do. To solve, we made the world around you cleaner and brighter as you collected and built things. One of our major inspirations was Mario Sunshine!

New pokemon just dropped!

Asking friends and family to play the latest build of your game (3rd time this week). #gamedev #indiedev

Me agreeing to a new project knowing full well it’s gonna add stress 🇲🇽

I'm working on a Mech game and, folks, exclusive leg upgrades feel kinda dumb. Arms: can hold things (weapons + shields), can grip things, arm mounts, gloves. Legs: so many... shoes. #gamedev #gamedesign #indiedev

Calling the shot right now. Given that people are having a really hard time determining if student work was really made by the student or by an AI people will make another piece of tech to bandaid this issue. The result will be somehting like worse google docs that disables cutting and pasting.

Flash was everywhere. Now it's gone. Sound familiar? Flash is just part of the story of VANISHING CULTURE, a new book exploring the fight to preserve our fragile digital history. 📖 Join us for the book launch! 📅 Apr 23 🕠 Doors 5:30 PM 📍 300 Funston Ave, SF 🎟️ www.eventbrite.com/e/vanishing-...

For folks who work with network code. UDP be like: #gameprogramming #programming #networkcode #gamedev #indiedev

There will come a time in your game development journey where you will feel the need to make a Kaiju or Mech game. It is natural and beautiful. #gamedesign #gamedev #indiedev

> "Trust me bro, this new tech startup isn't a pyramid scheme" > Looks at codebase: