I’ve been in the mood to play a game just like this. 2D movement, careful and considered locomotion, single screen puzzles with no frustrating resets to far back in the level when a player dies.
It looks and sounds amazing, and I love the environment design. How’d they get those 2D boxes to have depth when it moves across the screen? That’s amazing!
I had the great fortune to work with Amy on a game project and she’s really one of the hardest working people and greatest managers in the industry. I hadn’t come across this talk she gave back in 2017 until today. Anyone who wants some understanding of managing game projects will get a lot out of this.
This bit got me, part of the great cycle of loving and hating working in video games:
I was like “fuck it, this is terrible. This is absolutely the most painful project I’ve ever been on. I’m gonna leave games, I’m gonna move to Portland, and that’s going to be the end of my life in games.” And something really interesting happens. A lot of you will know this, if you ever try to leave games, it’s like the mafia. You never really are able to leave, it sucks you back in. And I think one of the reasons for that is when you work in the games industry for any length of time, it kind of perverts your brain in a very specific way, such that when you try to live like a normal person, that just feels very weird and boring.
hi im triple AAA game studio. Welcome to our game gunshitters 7. this is a 70$ USD game that is not finished but you can buy the DLC at launch for 50$USD. also theres a seprate in game currency where you can spend 200$USD to get diamonds to buy cosmetics. look at our roadmap. dont you want to pay 30$ for our first season pass? you will unlock special epic gear that will never ever come back so you can get a nice healthy dose of FOMO. the next season pass is next month and is also 30$. also we are locking 40% of the entire game behind our fun new feature ‘present mechanics’ so you can gift the rest of the game to yourself for the low low price of 40$ and you also get an epic gun skin if you pay for the GOLD season pass for 60$. also you know how the game was unfinished at launch? oh haha were sorry about that. were releasing it now but you need to pay 20$ for it. fuck you. fuck you. fuck you.
guy in a duplex living off of nothing but bread with a computer from 2009: hi everyone im so sorry im late to announce this but my game honeydew mayhem where you can conquer the universe as a bee is gonna release a month late because i still need time to work on making sure that everything works properly and i also need to make sure that the free content updates i will release over time for the next 10 years will be on their way. i need to make sure that you can do absolutely everything you can think of in this game and i still need to polish 20 boss fights and finalize 40 more in-game areas to explore. im sorry you guys will have to wait a bit longer. also my game will be 25$ i hope that isnt too much to ask. if it is i promise it will go on sale soon for 9$. i love all of you and hope you are having a good day
I don’t know yet if Death Stranding does this, but I’ve come around to respecting Kojima and his teams for the sheer volume of background history they just dumped into their games, sometimes as optional text, often as unskippable exposition by people with no time to stand around and chat.
Like as a player and reader yes I will sit here and do this, but as a project manager type I’d be supremely annoyed to see that Hideo spent this sprint writing the complete history of the rise of the nanoclass instead of the dialogue required for the scene between Unquenchable Marmoset and President Mads Mikkelsen.
Creators on itch.io will be like “name your price I think $1.99 seems fair” and I’ll smack down $20 easy because making anything hard is and video games is really hard.
“Part of why they’re regaining popularity is because the world is a mess and we either don’t know how or don’t have the power to fix it.”
Games highlighted: The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, Elsinore, Outer Wilds, Undertale, Inscryption, The Stanley Parable, The Forgotten City, Twelve Minutes
“I eventually came to realize, if I’m going to do this all again, if there are few real consequences for failure… why would I play in a way that’s so boring?”
Games highlighted: DEATHLOOP, Dishonored, Hitman 3, Bloodborne, Twelve Minutes
“Every decision you make matters because you’re always spending your most precious currency: time.”
Games highlighted: Outer Wilds, Dead Rising, The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, The Sexy Brutale, Elsinore, Minit, Vision Soft Reset, Twelve Minutes, DEATHLOOP, Hitman 2, Deus Ex: Human Revolution
