Hi, and welcome to my GDC talk. Your team needs a producer. Thank you for coming to my GDC talk.

Producer contributing to QA efforts like

in the spirit of not being able to leave well enough alone, an expanding bonus collection radius when you're going fast

Iron Lung the movie, good shit @markiplier.bsky.social and crew. The others in the theater for a Saturday afternoon matinee didn't seem the type to go watch movies in a theater, but they would watch a streamer. Like me, I bet they wished for subtitles. But like the film says, it doesn't matter.

I owe you an apology Cyberpunk 2077. I was not really familiar with your game.

Sometimes game dev is going outside to stare at your own car for a while. For research.

damn, this is kind of a fun way to get around

I'm currently working on a cartoon platformer and this image gives me whiplash because these are rarely the ones we discuss during design sessions... There are so many banger indie platformers out there guys you're just not bothering to look for them.

I'M OPEN FOR COMMISSIONS!! 🎉 I've got a light workload at the moment, which means my turnarounds are super fast! Feel free to ping me through anything in the bottom left corner! Throwing a rock with a note through my window will also suffice.

I can't believe this has to be said but if you see a woman working at GameStop just leave her the fuck alone and do not: 1. Make a fun game out of trying to figure out her deadname; 2. Badger her for her phone number four times before figuring out that no means no.

We were the man then, dog.

For GDC, I was on the West Coast for the first time ever, in San Francisco -- a city with a reputation that speaks for itself. I went on the BART as a frail white woman, of average size, by herself, and the scariest thing was the noise the yellow line makes when it's in the tunnels. Skill issue.

Just because I'm a hypocrite, doesn’t mean I'm WRONG

PSA: 1. If you are not silly, it is vital you become silly 2. If you are silly, you must stay silly 2. If you used to be silly but have stopped, you must make all efforts to return to silliness

GDC is a reminder that all my peers are some combination of hot smart creative unhinged neurodiverse theater kid goblins creating magic and fantasy using tools made from duct tape and dollar store staples.

@alexaray.bsky.social said that writers need to be weirder and thirstier and who am i to ignore her advice

This is #whatagamedevlookslike, and you should definitely find a person who looks like this and ask he or she for help. Either at GDC or not, your preference.

For anyone attending @lonestarfurcon.bsky.social this weekend, @cosmicrooibos.bsky.social and I will be running a couple Frankenfur-flavored panels and a demo + free play space on Friday! Super excited to be a part of the con's very first year and hope to see you there! 🦊⚡️

I think the most fascinating thing about E-Loon Mus/k brazenly trying to usher in a cyberpunk age is that he seems to forget that in all cyberpunk media, the system is the antagonist. He fancies himself Case, but he is actually Tessier-Ashpool with an addiction to social media.

The biggest waste of money I’ve seen in video game development, across many years and studios (not my current one - one of the reasons I wanted to work there), wasn’t on graphics. It was abruptly being told to throw out months or years of work bc one executive decided they didn’t like something.

Game Producers be like

The background art from Batman: The Animated Series taking absolutely zero prisoners.

Optimist: The cup is half full Pessimist: The cup is half empty UI: People are having a hard time understanding which part of the cup icon is full and which part is empty

A fun experiment for people who like to rage against reviewers to try is to take games you've already decided you're going to play and go on media blackout. Play the whole thing and write down your thoughts without seeing what anybody else has to say. Then check to see if your opinion is popular.

A poem for my last day working at the writing center for the semester (by Joseph Fasano)

Optimist: The cup is half full Pessimist: The cup is half empty Games producer: I'll cut some Jira tickets for whiteboxing one cup that is half empty and another one that is half full, then we'll do some A/B playtests and make a development plan for the one that tests better.

Saying that elden ring should have an easy mode in a room full of men just to feel something

I think this could heal the partisan divide

Every time I had to look up a word on Xitter it was an epithet I hadn't seen before. First word I had to look up from a Bluesky post and it gets added to my vocabulary.

prepare for hot girl summer by closing your (•_•) <) )/ hot / \ (•_•) \( (> girl / \ (•_•) 💻) )> JIRA tickets / \

i'm not trapped in here with me, ME'M trapped in here with I

I'm improperly utilizing my authority as lead of Tropical Heat Studios to force art director @sprech4.bsky.social to watch Captain Lazerhawk under duress with the excuse that it's required reading for our projects.

so I learned how to play Lorcana today

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Hello fellow Twitter exodus and #GameDev crew! I'm AJ Smith, producer/jira jockey/documentation disciplinarian. I worked on the recent Five Nights at Freddy's DLC and I own my own indie studio startup, Tropical Heat Studios, and bootstrapped my own card game, Frankenfur!