I'm a game developer, professionally!

You may know me from things like: Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, The Museum of Mechanics: Lockpicking, Gone Home, Bioshock 2, or maybe something else.

Right now I work as a Technical Narrative Designer at Remedy Entertainment in Stockholm, Sweden

Perhaps there are other aspects of my personality that may also be revealed here on this website


Email
johnnemann@dimbulbgames.com
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Johnnemann

JuniperTheory
@JuniperTheory

The specific combination of like...

  • If you want to do gacha games or battlepasses or other modern live service systems, you have to have Special Rewards to keep people going
  • These rewards need worse rewards to compare themselves against; something bad to contrast the rare special prize with
  • They avoid gameplay rewards because people still dislike pay to win, cosmetic rewards are fine though

Has created a huge, huge number of... middling cosmetics. Every single live service game you play is packed to the brim with "uncommon" tier Random T Shirt that nobody wants. Who makes these? Is it demeaning to know you have to make "blue t shirt 3" when your friends are making the ultimate dragon king outfit? It's a flood of trash that no one wants but has to exist to keep the interesting stuff interesting, and there's nothing I find more interesting then a pile of trash that was all purposefully made by someone, somewhere.


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in reply to @JuniperTheory's post:

Unironically, that's why we hire juniors. They do the grunt work like modeling and texturing Generic Shirt #3 until either they move on to more interesting work or they find a way to improve the pipeline for everyone. And you get entirely used to the fact that most of your work on a game goes completely unappreciated after a while.

so I'd mention that a variant of this is probably true for most industries. certainly in my day-job it's true.
It sucks but it also makes a kind of sense, for various reasons.

  1. The work needs to be done, and tasks like this often require less skill or experience, so the juniors get put on it to free the more experienced staff for more challenging work
  2. Sometimes (not always!) the only way to become one of the experienced ones is by doing the mundane junior tasks over and over, until you get the slightly more difficult stuff, etc.
  3. micromanaging fresh hires makes middle management feel big and powerful, and this is very important

The thing that makes me a little sad is that you at least used to be able to play the game a bit more to start looking cool.
But even in many AAA games you pay to play - the best of the cosmetics are locked behind a paywall and the things you can get through playing the game are just boring.

It's why I feel the "it's fine if it's cosmetics" argument to not be a fair one because before you could just, like, get it through normally playing the game - and now they've taken access away from you unless you pay more.
It's in the game you just can't use it unless we flip this one bool to true.

"Who makes these?" me, I did. I made 1000 shit-tier clothing items(approx 40 base items x25 colour variants) in a month for a mobile game because the loot boxes were giving away too much good stuff.

"Is it demeaning to know you have to make "blue t shirt 3" when your friends are making the ultimate dragon king outfit?" yes and that's why I quit working in F2P mobile games

I mean idk if it's that interesting a story, but: I was the senior character artist on a fairly small mobile team. I won't mention the name of the studio or the game cause most of the people I worked with were lovely and it's not their fault the mobile market is what it is.

the main monetisation hook in this game(sidenote: I left before the game released, so it could be completely different now. idk, I haven't followed it) was unlocking clothing and costume items for your character. I love character customisation, so I was happy to be designing and making lots of cute stuff, and I was given pretty free rein with what I was making. we had a mix of relatively normal clothing items(tshirts and shorts, skirts, hats etc) with wacky costumes like unicorn, pirate, etc. you'd get a couple bits and bobs in a loot box and slowly build up your collection, try to complete the costumes, etc.

one day the designer comes to me like 'so we have a problem with the lootboxes: they're giving away all the really cool costumes too fast. we need to slow it down or people won't buy enough lootboxes 🤑(they were really fond of that emoji and it made me die inside every time) can you make some more plain clothes to pad out the drop table? how many can you make?'

how many can I make? man, watch me. I made a spreadsheet of items and colours, I modeled a few more basic pieces to fill out what we had and then I went to fucking town with a batch file and windows powertoys to automate duplicating and renaming. I still had to reassign all the material swatches by hand but I blasted the prodigy into my ears and ground it out. designer was hoping for 200 items in three weeks, I gave them 1000. and a document detailing how I did it, so even a more junior artist could do it next time. and they were like 'wow this is great, I can trickle out the costumes super slowly now! 🤑🤑 can you make even more??'

see, it wasn't so much 'making plain stuff is boring'. is kinda is, but there's a lot of far more boring tasks out there and I'd rather make a thousand plain tshirts than fill out a hundred goddamn JIRA tickets. as the above paragraph suggests, finding methods to churn out tons of Stuff can even be fun in its own way. but when the Stuff is literally just filler to stop people from getting too much 'Good Stuff', to bog them down so they'll feel pressured to spend money on some gacha shit, it feels really fucking bad.

it drives me crazy that games will have official grading of their cosmetics. whoop de doo dah look at who's discovered the objective measure of art. now if you excuse me, that uncommon sword is far less gaudy than that legendary one.

Interestingly, in plenty of games that have replaced their lootbox mechanics with battle passes, the item "rarities" have remained.

Battlefield 2042 and Halo Infinite, for example, both have items labeled common, rare, epic, and legendary, despite every item being either purchasable or obtainable through timed events. Their "rarities" really are just tied to how much they think players are willing to pay for them.

(funnily, all but one of the default base armor items in Halo Infinite are labeled epic or legendary, despite every single player having them)

I have never worked on anything that extreme, but that kind of work is usually handed to less experienced staff. I think the intent is that they train up on the unimportant assets, but the reality often is that they will have to leave the company to escape it. Thing is, if you don't get good at it, you haven't proven you should be promoted, and if you DO get good at it then the company gets what it needs by NOT promoting you.