i can't go to hell - i'm all out of vacation days. i watch space rocks and yell at computers for my day job. probably too old for any of this

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i think i might be burned out on internet social. it's hard to keep doing it. it's hard to even maintain the amount of attention i'm already giving it

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i am the cause of most of my own problems

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furthermore, capitalism must be destroyed

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birdsona: ?????

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๐ŸŒŽ Ontario, Canada


webbed site
egrets.ca/

mrhands
@mrhands

Forever thinking about this tweet thread with game writing exercises from Katie Chironis, currently a Principal Designer at Bungie, previously the Design Director at Riot Games. If you can do these game-writing exercises well, you are a God-tier narrative designer, and I will move Heaven and Earth to work with you.

(Yes, I'm doing narrative today, why do you ask??)


SomeEgrets
@SomeEgrets

FOUR: This NPC will ask the player to kill 40 forest wolves, 9 times. Write a short blurb that explains why this NPC needs the player to kill 450 forest wolves for some reason. Make it heartwarming, bleak, and memorable, but also keep in mind 98% of players won't read it.

in gonna be real, this one actually makes me really sad because i've watched enough people play games1 that i know it's probably true, and like, the unwillingness to take an interest or engage with what the game is trying to say or often even entire gameplay mechanics is just... yeah

like a lot of the time you can have five NPCs saying "go to the mine!" and a glowing path leading to the mine with an arrow pointing in the direction of the mine and a glowing red mark on the map where the mine is and a giant billboard with hollywood lighting that reads "GO TO THE MINE" in a font that takes up a quarter of the screen, and people will still get confused and upset that they don't know where to go next

i love this medium and the incuriosity just kills me

i used to want to make games, i taught myself to program to do it! but the state of the industry along with the realization that i just do not understand how other people think about things means i will probably never actually do anything about it2


  1. excluding speed and challenge runs because yeah, like, they've got other self-imposed priorities here

  2. it's been so long since i've made anything but command line utilities and services that i don't even remember how to do much of this and the last time i made anything was before GPUs were invented so any knowledge i have here is functionally useless anyway


SomeEgrets
@SomeEgrets

anyway the motorcycle gag is definitely that there is a subset of red ones that all look identical but have very specific names like "crimson," "scarlet," "cherry," "ruby" and that all of them are very exclusive and definitely different from each other

(people on reddit will get mad that this is "lazy" and publish my home address on forums)


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in reply to @mrhands's post:

currently Principal Designer at Bungie

entry TWO: 20 different motorcycles with an 80 word blurb, identical models

YEAH THAT TRACKS

no I'm not annoyed at the launch seasons of D2 being stuffed full of carbon copy sparrows and ships, why do you ask

(ed: I'm not blaming her specifically, mind you)

Yeah, this exercise hits a little too close to home for me too. ๐Ÿ˜… Many, many games face the "motorcycle problem" right before they go gold. E.g., game design figured out the progression loop sucks, and production already fired the art contractors. So in a Hail Mary, some designer duplicated the motorcycle 20x. And the only thing we can change is the color. But it's fine, narrative will figure it out!!

In that specific case, I always suspected the duplication/reskinning was artificial padding demanded by the Activision-Blizzard side of the equation in order to drive up the rarity of other items in the associated drop pool(s) at the time, rather than one put in place by Bungie themselves. But I've never dug into it too deeply to be sure, so I don't want to excuse bad management on Bungie's part (which has definitely been the case!) by blaming bad management on their then-publisher's part... ๐Ÿ˜…

Ah well, at least it's not as bad as it was with Anthem. Great concept and core gameplay, but one gun model per weapon class (with some greebles added, maybe) and all difference was in the textures. Such a waste of potential, that one. ๐Ÿ˜”

I am suddenly flooded with empathy for every game that features Fire, Ice, Water, Stone, Frost (different from Ice!), Ancient, Monster, Mutant, and Plant motorcycles

oh god that's only 9 we're not even halfway

uhhh... Space, Robot, Dark, Blessed, Cursed, Night (different from Dark!) Ghost, Magical, Gold, Ocean (different from Water!), and Standard.

The motorcycle one actually seems fairly easy because you could babble about how, for example, it looks identical to the lower tier one but this specific production line used higher-quality steel for the engine block due to some sort of logistical embargo and as such it has become legendary among collectors. It would read identical to how a lot of car nerds talk about the interests.

Referencing enthusiast detail and history was my first thought as well! It would require losing myself for many hours listening to nerds info dump an unfamiliar subject, but that's just Tuesday...

My dad has a car that was painted a specific color for a limited production run, so I could see some of the colors being styled as that. "This particular vermillion bike had only 1000 produced in 2025 to match the unusual sky color during the Solarclysm event."

Others could just talk about some of the design choices behind the colors ("Marketing showed clients felt red bikes went faster, despite no difference being found in testing") or even to distinguish knock-offs ("The actual Thundercycle never came in ecru, only the Eggworks knock-offs - visually identical but manufactured more cheaply abroad - did.")

Still, I wonder if I could manage more than 20 that way... XD

Me, the sort of person who will obsessively read ALL of that shit to later summarize in a fan wiki only to have edit wars about it with 7 specific other people for all of eternity, forming absolutely legendary bouts of hatred for people whose online handles are BillCat1928734 and TheLegendaryHero_.

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