writer, programmer, trash dragon
can confirm: am puppy
28, ΘΔ
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??)
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. 😅 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... 😅
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. 😔
For number four, is the 40x9 = 450 thing a mistake? Or is it supposed to capture the idea that devs have messed up something simple and you're stuck working around it?
I was gonna say that the math was simply wrong but OHMYYGAWD that's exactly it!!
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
This is what narrative designers do???
... Should I stop writing software???
I don't know, do you like making money? Because becoming a narrative designer would make that come to a screeching halt immediately! 😂
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_.
These are the kind of prompts that make my brain come to a screeching halt. I appreciate what you do!
