#how to get a job in the game industry

[askagamedev]

Your recent reblog about game writing made me curious: how much would the skills of game TRANSLATION transfer to game WRITING. Because I'm already a translator in the games industry, and I feel like I already have to do a lot of that stuff? Dialog with multiple character voices, tutorials and tooltips with UI restrictions, working within other people's settings obviously, etc etc. All while trying to keep things both snappy and entertaining for the players. Honestly you are making it sound like these sorts of nuts and bolts writing skills that a translator needs are more useful than coming up with ideas, which a translator does not generally do

Yes, absolutely. Localization devs do a great deal of the same kind of work that narrative designers do. The creative elements of coming up with story and narrative bits that will work within the constraints of a word budget, screen space, and even linguistic and cultural context is excellent (and transferable) practice for building narrative game content. If you so desire, you can absolutely use your localization work as examples of past narrative design experience. If you want to be a narrative designer, you should go for it. You're already farther ahead than many applicants.

In all reality, coming up with ideas isn't what game designers do either. We craft experiences for players to enjoy. We do this through a variety of tools and choices that work together to evoke certain feelings within the player while working within the technical, artistic, scheduling, and budgetary constraints. This is often done through creative use of tools, but it's the player experience and the skill of crafting it that matters. It doesn't have to be a brand new idea as long as it serves its intended purpose.

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[hsslilly-blog]

first half of 2016 is interesting for claire. she’s having to retake classes and visit admin every other day because she thought dating her professor was a good idea. it was not. he’s out of a job and it doesn’t look like she’s graduating in may! she thinks it’s stupid because it’s not like she was using the relationship for grades. rolling eyes emoji. and then addison is not on speaking terms with her because #fuckclaire and her stupid selfish hypocritical self. and then they’re cast in a movie together and they have to act as if they’re best friends. did i mention the cult? claire is having a bad time and you know what happens when she’s having a bad time. a weird man is always there to prey on her and this time he calls himself her benefactor, and claire loves a title. maybe things will get better now #TRUST. oh also addison’s mother dies and sebastian is here too.

[translucio]

i will say that seeing all those (former) titles in the credits, like half of every core development team, is a gut punch. especially as a game dev who was just recently part of a layoff myself. im glad they were still credited, but it is fucking carnage out there.

[manicdragondreamgirl]

Nothing can make a bitch more hateful than a SINGLE hour —the FIRST HOUR OF A DAY—at a job where everyone pretends they can do her job better than she’s been doing it because they read something in the news recently

[marklikely]

whatever maybe im being too hard on him specifically maybe the other execs in that article are right that he's just an easy target because he's the one passing on changes from all of them. but even so what kind of insane defense is that. "no this one guy isnt bad at his job! the employees are just mad at him because hes the point of contact for the rest of us, who are all bad at *our* jobs!"

[fantasiac]

and you can guarantee that the ads they would put in would have little to no quality control, letting random people send in the most mind-rotting, disgusting, dangerous ads on the whole damn planet, ads that genuinely hurt the product as more people would avoid it because of the evil marketing, and they'd definitely be targeted towards children as "video games are for children" so it'd be awful shit like this;

imagine having a life-changing experience watching Arthur Morgan die at the hands of the people he loved his whole life, only for it to be interrupted by ads for games that don't even exist, or something that dances around age restriction.

and you can be certain that adblockers just wouldn't work, so I can't even run to UBlock Origin after nearly having a seizure bc of a cool Live Wallpaper App (THAT STILL HASN'T BEEN TAKEN DOWN DESPITE ME REPORTING IT)

[ame-to-ame]

life is fine you just learn to not send the things you would've sent before in a heartbeat

[addelaidesupreme]

I'm watching a video essay about a game ive been interested in playing. The creator of the video, who has crossdressed multiple times, makes a "women arent funny" joke, and i suddenly realize ive never witnessed him acknowledge a woman in an uplifting way before.

I'm on a dating app for lgbt+ people. I've stated multiple times on my profile that i would rather lose an arm than recieve nudes without consent. I will be sent five dick pics for every 2 people i talk to that night.

I'm talking with my dad, who informs me he's been trying his best to learn about trans issues. He says the same things steven crowder brings up when trying to ridicule trans people. I gently but firmly correct my father and get told that ive been fed propaganda.

I'm on instagram, under the comments of a post ridiculing someone for being a misogynyst. Someone's left a comment saying "it must be hard being a woman on the internet" and i respond "it is." I will have every aspect of my appearance scrutinized as a reminder that no matter how well i pass, it will never be enough for someone with bad intentions.

I'm back on that dating app for lgbt+ people. I'm messaged by an attractive looking person, but i can see their partner prominently displayed in all but their main photo, oftentimes striking what im sure they thought was a very intimidating pose. Their bio says "looking for a third for our anniversary." I know that even if I did feel up to it, the gruff partner wouldnt approve of me because i don't pass.

I'm at a job interview for a clothing store. I tell the gracefully-dressed woman interviewing me that ever since i began my transition, i've discovered an interest in fashion, and that this job would allow me to dip my toes into the industry in a safe way. I'm told that i've reduced womanhood to a stereotype, and i can tell by her tone that i lost any chance at the job the minute she realized i was trans.

I'm at the same hospital i got facial feminization surgery in, trying to figure out what's wrong with my bowels. When the person behind the desk gives me a wristband with my patient info on it, i notice a single, lonely, letter M. I ask a nurse in private why it would say that despite me having changed it nearly a year prior. They say they have no clue, and bring in paperwork for me to fill out and have it re-changed again.

I'm living with my mom at the time. I'm new to transitioning, and decide to try my hand at voice training. It feels a bit off, but otherwise im feeling neutral toward the whole thing. I try speaking in this new voice to my mom and she laughs. Now, when people ask if i intend to voice train, i find speaking at all difficult for minutes after.

I didnt have some sort of grand message to convey by this. I just had a thought and then that thought spiralled into whatever the hell this became. Some, okay most, might call it complaining; they are right to do so.

[jennaflare]

So Disco Elysium is the only game you've ever really liked

I get it! It's a phenomenal game with superb art and writing, and its themes are consistent and deeply explored. It sets a high bar for video games. But there are other really, really fantastic games out there. This is a list that is 100% my own taste of things that aren't necessarily similar, other than the fact that they're really fucking good. (A lot of these are on sale for the Steam Summer Sale until July 11 2024!)

In Stars and Time

In Stars and Time is a time loop game where you play as Siffrin, the rogue of a party at the end of their quest to save the day by defeating the King, who is freezing everybody in time! But something is wrong: every time you die, you loop back to the day before you fight the King. You're the only one who remembers the loops, so it's up to you to figure out why it's happening, and how to break out.

In Stars and Time is a heart-wrenching dive into mental health, friendship, and love. It's about feeling alone, and how awful it is when the people who love you don't notice (and how awful it is when they do). It's about falling deeper and deeper into your worst self and your worst tendencies, and how to come back from it.

The creator also did one of my favorite Disco Elysium comics ever, which is only tangentially relevant but worth mentioning.

Roadwarden

In Roadwarden, you play as the titular Roadwarden for an undeveloped and "wild" part of the kingdom. Monsters roam the forests and roads, and it's your job to keep people safe. On paper, anyway. Your real mission is to find out what is of value in the area, and how to take it from its people. How well you perform this task is up to you. It's an oldschool text-based RPG, and I take a lot of notes by hand when I play.

Roadwarden explores exploitation and industrialization by making you look in the face of your potential victims. You can only learn what your bosses want you to report on by getting close to the residents, after all. There are mysteries to be solved, secrets to be gathered, and hearts to win.

The Longing

The Longing is an adventure-idle game where you play as the solitary servant of a sleeping king. Your task is to wait for him, for four hundred days. Time in the game passes in realtime (for the most part). There are caves to explore, books to be read, and drawings to make.

The Longing is about loneliness and depression. It's about whether or not you decide to stay in that hole, and if you do, what you do with yourself while you're there. Maybe you'll wander. Maybe you'll stare at a wall. Maybe you'll just sleep until it's all over.

Papers, Please

Papers, Please casts you as a newly hired customs officer in a country that is rapidly tightening its borders as its fascist government tightens its fist. This game is stressful. Sometimes you intend to help out the revolutionaries when they asked, but then you got so stressed out trying to make your quota so you can feed your family and pay your bills that you didn't notice the name of the person they were hoping to contact while going through their papers. Sometimes someone puts a bomb in front of you and expects you to defuse it. Sometimes someone suggests you steal people's passports so you can get your family out, and with the horror you see daily, the idea tempts you more than you'd like.

Papers, Please is all about hard choices and testing your moral fortitude. Everything you do has consequences. Being a good person in this game is hardly ever rewarded, but not in a way that feels overly cynical. Papers, Please asks you what kind of person you want to be and what you're willing to sacrifice to get there.

The Return of the Obra Dinn

From the creator of Papers, Please, The Return of the Obra Dinn is a game where you play as an insurance investigator for the East India Trading Company. The ship the Obra Dinn has just floated back into port, its entire crew missing or dead. It's your job to figure out what happened aboard the vessel. For insurance reasons.

I don't know how to go into the themes of this too deeply without giving away too much, but the mechanics of the game itself make the game worth playing. You have a magic stopwatch that allows you to go back to the moment of a person's death, allowing you to try and figure out who (or what) killed them, and how. And the soundtrack is extremely good.

Outer Wilds

In Outer Wilds you play as an unnamed alien, and it's your first day going to space! Your planet's space program is pretty new still, so there's still lots to explore and discover on the planets within your system. There are ancient ruins from a mysterious race that once lived in your system, long before your species began to record history. Why were they here? Where did they go? How are they connected to the weird thing that keeps happening to you?

The fun of Outer Wilds is in the discovery and answering your own questions. The game never tells you where to go, and it never outright tells you anything. There are clues scattered through the system, and it's up to you to put them together and figure out your next steps. It's about the way that life always goes on, no matter what, even when it seems like the end of everything, forever. I'd recommend NOT reading anything else about this game. Just go play it. Seriously, the less you know, the more fun this is.

If on a Winter's Night, Four Travelers

In If on a Winter's Night, Four Travelers, you explore the circumstances of the deaths of four individuals.

This is a short one that took me about two and a half hours to play. If for no other reason, play it for the stunning pixel art. The game explores sexism, racism, and homophobia in the Victorian era and leans heavily into horror themes. Best of all: it's completely free!

Pentiment

Pentiment takes you to the 16th century, where you take the role of Andreas Maler, a journeyman artist working on his masterwork in the scriptorium of an abbey. When someone is murdered, Andreas takes responsibility for finding the culprit.

The game is set over 20~ years and you get to watch how Andreas' actions affect the village in various ways (who's alive the next time you come by, have people gotten married and had children...). It's an exploration of how the past affects the future, and what parts of that past we choose to keep or discard. It has beautiful art, and fans of both Disco and Pentiment often compare them.

Other games you might wanna check out

Night in the Woods, Dredge, Oxenfree, A House of Many Doors, Inscryption, Slay the Princess, Citizen Sleeper, Chants of Sennar, Loop Hero, The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood, The Pale Beyond, Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, Elsinore, Her Story, Before Your Eyes, Pathologic (not delved into above because the venn diagram of Pathologic fans and Disco fans is basically a circle)

[starkeyisthelastname]

Okay, but, how would pornstar!Rafe act if reader gave him the same treatment? Said she was busy because of a scene and blew him off for the whole day. Bet his ass would be just as jealous.

you know he does 🙄 got him blowing up your phone as if what he’s saying is normal (thank you bae for sending this! 😚)

Rafe had always prided himself on never getting too attached to any girl he either hooked up with on a random occasion or the ones he fucked on camera. You were starting to occupy his mind though 24/7, and he found himself holding back the urge to text you on the days he wasn’t shooting a scene. He just couldn’t help himself, it now being mid-afternoon and you had yet to text him back. He thought about just going over to your place, but felt his phone buzz in his hand.

‘I’m busy shooting today. Sorry :(‘

He read it a few times, his head feeling funny as he wasn’t sure he liked that response. Why he felt this why, he had yet to figure out. Surely he wasn’t jealous, he was Rafe Cameron. His mind kept going back to you though, wondering what limp dick was trying to fuck you. He was starting to think your pussy was too good for porn, and maybe he wanted you to himself. He just didn’t want to admit that out loud right now.

‘Did he make you cum?’

‘Can’t wait to see whatever bozo “pornstar” try and fuck you like I do.’ 🤣

‘Does he know Rafe Cameron’s massive cock has ruined your little whore holes?’

Rafe’s texts were nasty, full of a jealous rage the more he sat there and the more you didn’t message him back. He had been in the industry long enough to know, no fucking porn shoot lasted all day. He didn’t know what kind of game you were playing, but his ugly jealousy was about to get your cunt all the way fucked up.

‘You got me completely fucked up if you don’t think I won’t kick your fuckin door down, and force a goddamn answer out of you.’

‘You are at my beck and call, remember whore? I’m giving you 10 fuckin seconds to reply to this before I come over and completely ruin your life by wrecking your holes so hard you’ll have to find a new job.’

[askagamedev]

How is the process of learning In-house game engines once you get into an AAA studio? Do they immediately put you in production to learn as you go, or does it take some weeks before allocating you to a project?

The onboarding process is a little of everything you say. Whenever I start a new job, there's the new hire administrative tasks I need to get done like signing paperwork and doing harassment/DEI/office safety training and there's the actual "this is what they hired me to do" learning process where I learn how the workflow works so that I can start being productive. We'll ignore the administrative stuff and focus on the productivity onboarding.

The first thing that any new hire has to do is get the project synced to the latest safe build and get the game running. Without being able to run the game, we can't make or test any of the changes we will inevitably need to make. This often entails fiddling with a bunch of workstation and network settings in order to make sure all of the files are where the game expects them to be, all of the necessary software is installed and ready, and so on. Getting an in-development game running can take quite some time (I've seen whole days lost in some cases) given how much disk space these games can take (and therefore how long it takes to download all of those files from the depot) and how complex the workflow can be.

Once the new hire has the game up and running and has familiarized herself with the game's controls and such, it's time to start reading documentation for the internal tools and workflow - how the content is made, how the work is done, what the working process is, how to check your work, who to contact in case of questions. At this point, the lead usually assigns an introductory task or two to the new hire - a small task for her to get her feet wet and to provide some guidance while looking through the system and making some actual changes.

After this initial process of learning > making changes > testing > submitting the fix, the process repeats with newer and more complicated tasks as the new hire's lead deals out new assignments. As the new hire completes more tasks, she learns more about the tools, the workflow, and the team. That knowledge and experience is then considered when increasing the scope of her tasks until she's reached the level of productivity expected of a dev in her role.

If you think this sounds a lot like the [minimum competency for joining a team] post from a while back that I wrote, you're absolutely right. We use this exact process to bring a new hire onto our team because it's the same goal - we have someone who (we hope) is dedicated to working on the game and helping us carry it to completion.

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[vexwerewolf]

If we talk about the aesthetics of technology in Lancer, we can divide each of the Big 4 along lines of form and function.

IPS-N: Pure Function

IPS-N cares only what a mech does. It doesn't need to look good or pretty doing it - it only needs to be able to do that thing well. It's notable that the Raleigh, arguably the most form-oriented of the IPS-N frames, is also considered to be the company's biggest commercial failure - they strayed from their core design principles and got punished for it.

Harrison Armory: Form Follows Function

Harrison Armory still leans pretty heavily towards the functionality side of things, but it isn't satisfied with doing a good job alone. Yes, the mechs have to perform well, but they also have to look good doing it. There's no practical application for the Sherman's sleeveless coat or the Tokugawa's dainty little tassels, but they don't hinder combat functionality and they make the mechs look dashing. In comparison to IPS-N's coarse, industrial, almost unfinished look, HA mechs look stern, austere and imposing. There's a smoothness to them that you just don't get on IPS-N frames.

SSC: Function Follows Form

SSC is where we start to plunge into aesthetics-forward mech design. The Death's Head isn't six-legged because it's a sniper - the Death's Head is a sniper because it's six-legged. SSC came up with a mech design and asked: "what would this do best?" A six-legged chassis provided a more stable firing platform for precision weaponry, so that was what it did. Shapes and appearances are invented, and then a use case is discovered for them.

HORUS: Pure Form

It might seem weird to classify HORUS as "pure form" when their mechs largely don't have a consistent visual identity outside of the examples in the book. However, if we look a little deeper at the definition of "form," the explanation becomes clear: in some ways, HORUS is in the business of making statements, not mechs.

For anyone who's actually played a HORUS mech in Lancer, you may have noticed how awkward they are to actually pilot. Their statlines are, on paper, often very poorly suited to the sort of work they have to do. The Gorgon is built to attract attention and draw fire but has no armor. The Manticore is meant to be a front-line fighter but is quite slow. The Minotaur is meant to be a tech platform but has a low sensor range. The Pegasus' one functional trait doesn't apply to any of the weapons in its equipment package!

This is because HORUS mechs are designed purely as a testament to a certain discipline of technology. I remember expressing irritation with a friend's NeoGeo-for-X-Box emulator once, that you couldn't reconfigure the controller mapping so that it was easier to play with the X-Box controller. He remarked that it was meant as a historical preservation tool that perfectly duplicated the functionality of the NeoGeo, and that the only reason you could even play games using it at all is because that was a function of NeoGeo arcade cabinets.

That's how HORUS mechs are - their usability as chassis is broadly a side-effect.

[cosmosluckycharms]

Showtime☆

pt 1

Little Miss

Your momma was just a regular lady. Despite not being rich she gave you everything she could.

She'd take you out to parks with your cousins, she'd drop you off at your grandfathers house when she had a job interview, she'd listen to you talk about your nonsense, and she would bake for you and help you bake! She wasnt rich by any means but she tried her best! You knew she'd give you the clothes on her back if you asked!

Momma wasnt anyone important to others. A mere fling by Bruce from back in his Brucie Wayne days. but she was important to you! Momma didnt hide your father. She wasnt emparrassed. She said it was amazing to have "such a ball of sunshine" with her!

She never told you she was glad you werent broody like your father

Despite never meeting your father, you wondered what he was like. Was he as sweet as momma? Was he kind like momma? Would he take you out for ice cream like momma?

You never fully had time to wonder though, Momma was always dropping you off at your grandpas house whenever she had a job interview. Which was basically every other day. You didnt mind though! It gave you more time to get closer to your grandpa!

You both had similar personalities! you both liked music, games, themeparks despite how you could only go once at 5 years old. your grandpa and momma had to save up for 8 months and a half, walking and talking and baking and, and, and-

Youre 7 when your mom dies. She died from not getting her Pneumonia checked out. You wanted to beat yourself up for not noticing, you wanted to cry and throw up and blame it on yourself, but the truth was no one knew besides her.

You felt something was off because the months leading up to her death her smile was fading. Momma didnt want you to worry and snitch to your grandpa and put more on his back so she kept quiet and never told anyone.

She couldnt even tell a doctor, she couldnt afford the medical bills and she'd rather die then tell bruce

You always were very observent. You mourned for a while, as much as you could anyways. You couldnt mourn for long, you had to keep going, for momma! You kept smiling, for momma.

You and your grandpa tried your hardest to keep going for her, to keep her memory alive. You held onto the art projects she started but never finished, onto the books she never released, onto the movies that never made it in the industry.

Youre 7 when your grandpa dies. He died from accidental overdose from his off-brand medications.

You tell yourself he isnt dead hecantbedeadhecantdieandleavepleasedontleavemecomebackplease

Everything was a blur from there. You decide to creamate him, like momma.

You space out for what feels like hours. Its been a while when you stop dissasociating and realize you're at a police station where theyre taking dna tests on you to see if you have any other family to take care of you.

Its a shock to others when it points to Bruce Wayne being your father, and it shocks them more when you immidiately say you already knew and how you immidiately brighten up and go on talking about the things your momma said about him.

After what feels like hours, someone who definitely does not look like who your father picks you up.

He says hes your fathers butler, you didnt even know those were real! You thought they were made up for movies!

He keeps trying to talk to you in his fancy car, you try to keep the conversation going to distract yourself from how you really just want your momma.

hi im new at writing pls be nice sorry for the mistakes

tags:

[ninamodaffari]

hey artists I just wanna say something that I kinda wish someone had told me when I was struggling to find a job related to art.

It's okay to get a non-art related job.

Like seriously, you aren't a failure if you do. I remember thinking I would be but it is such a fucking tumultuous time right now (especially with game dev) that honest to God I wish I'd also taken a trade skill alongside my art. People will always need electricians, HVAC, welders, mechanics.

obviously you can still do your art on the side - take commissions, contracts, etc. I want to emphasize that often with art related jobs you will LOSE THE DESIRE TO DRAW AFTER WORK IS DONE FOR THE DAY. it's exhausting. Fulfilling? Most times, but there will be a lot of bureaucratic nonsense that leaves you feeling dead tired and just wanting to space out after work.

I didn't realize this when I first became a fulltime concept artist. I genuinely thought I'd have the energy after drawing all day to....draw all day after work. I hardly do. I usually want to mellow out with a videogame or do something mundane like the dishes or cleaning. It's exhausting.

Anyways this ramble was prompted (specifically) because I know how hard it is to get art jobs right now. Especially with game dev, I will say very plainly that it is a very rocky time within the industry with layoffs happening left and right. I've known people who get hired and laid off within the same month.

So don't feel bad for not doing it fulltime. It can stay your passion hobby and still be worthwhile.

[badgertracksart]

Portfolio advice, from a lead who hires Concept Artists

(This was originally a twitter thread I wrote before the site self imolated, hense it's strange structure.) I wrote this after a weekend of portfolio reviews - 1. Like a maths exam, please please show your working. I want to see thumbs options, mid options and of course a final design.

2. Arrange your portfolio, I don't want to bounce about between subject matter and pipeline. Your portfolio's narrative should be as strong as your work... 3. Please make worlds that excite the viewer, make them want to go in and explore them, explain to them the interesting parts of the town, or the way the character's hat unfolds. How will this draw the viewer in? 4. As I've said before the majority of your project work is explanatory not mood, make sure your portfolio contains explanatory work. Explained here -

5. A lot of beautiful post apocolyptic paintings, , but 80% of realistic games and film, we just give the environment artists photo ref, they are capable artists in their own right. Different work in stylised where you do need to create rules for how things can be translated. 6. Production art contains call out sheets, material references and flat graphics. This doesn't have to be your final image, but it should support it.

7. Design characters on a swatch(es) of the environment they will be viewed in. Not on white. I make swatch backgrounds from screenshots, it avoids assumptions that damage readability. 8. Reverse of this, put people in your environments, show me the scale.

9. It's not a deal breaker for a review, but if you intend to get a job, please show me your work on a screen larger than a smartphone (print outs probably the cheapest option with the best battery life). 10. Please have your contact details clearly visible, and by that I mean email address, I will not pass your social media contact on, I cannot input your form into my tracking system. EMAIL ADDRESS emblazoned and bake it in, sometimes recruiters do funky stuff to pdfs

11. Your portfolio will never feel done, not to you anyway. You will have learnt from your latest pieces and want to apply it to older work. But we know art is a journey. Send your portfolio anyway. I've been in the industry 10+ years and my portfolio is still not 'finished'. 12. If you are applying to an environment centric Concept Art position then please vary your times of day! Golden hour is cool but show me some happy sunny days, looming overcast days, what about at night? Vary your weather too! Sunny snowy day? Rainy Spring day? Stormy night?

13. If you are applying for a character centric Concept Art role then please ensure your portfolio shows a variety of body types and ethnicities. 14. Designing characters for games? Please show back views and feet (!) Many potfolios contain only front views. This is a problem because:

You haven't shown you are considering the design from all angles.

In many games rear view is the main view.

Stop cropping feet.

15. If you are entry / graduating and looking at Portfolios to compare content and standard of yr own work too, look at hired grad/junior artists as opposed to seniors Seniors and leads often have old or personal work in their portfolio which isnt representative of the day job. 16a. Show clearly the intended use case for your Concept Art. Mention the game type in the description. Are these player character designs for a 3rd person adventure game? Then more back views please. Bonus points for diagetic ways of showing health / equipment / role etc.

16b. Are these designs for an FPS? Then really the player view of the gun needs to sell the player style/ choices, in an FPS your weapons are almost your character. Are these world designs? What's the view distance? For an RTS your shapes need to read from above & a distance. 16c. The lack of clarification means I am judging the design in isolation, which both harms the design (you might be considering the backview of a char as the main adventure character.) Or an NPC, their waist up expressions may be important for conveying exposition and mechanics.

16d. Concept art is not separate from gameplay, great concept art serves the game team before it is a good illustration.

17. Play games. A variety of games. Think about them. IMO to be a good concept artist you need to understand the common language & references used by your peers. Also understand the principles and common language your audience are used to. FPS design rules are v.diff from RTS.

18. There are many skills that are needed in concept art, please show them. For example: Graphic design - logos, liveries, typographic use etc. VFX concepts - Abilities, Ambience, motion concepts. Architectural knowledge - How buildings are built! & more but I'm out of space :O

[orteil42]

some undifferentiated thoughts about my Starfield playthrough as i have them. i am a game developer with a strong interest in procedural generation and i've enjoyed a bunch of other bethesda games so this might get pretty mean sorry

(this is a long one)

starfield dialogue is already exhausting me "oh you must've been living under a moon rock ;)" get it! because they're in space! this would've been too corny for the Jetsons

there's a kind of cheap dusting of space theme over everything. the food isn't salmon but alien salmon. it's not seaweed but alien seaweed. cooking alien stir-fry. come on

cannot get over how clumsily the theming is handled. books, board games, weapon names revolve heavily around space. these people have been living on alien planets for hundreds of years yet have this unending sense of novelty about it. the game takes itself completely seriously but feels like it's attempting to parody itself

people's EYEBALLS are CLIPPING THROUGH THEIR EYELIDS

a woman is speaking to me in french. her accent is about as believable as her haircut

these are some of the worst reflection maps i've ever seen

next to nothing is interactive. you can sit in chairs and sleep in beds and that is about it. can't even drink from people's toilets. disgraceful

game helpfully crashes 5 seconds after i decide i should get some sleep. very handy!

my character has not said a single thing since i started playing. not one peep. this is an unmitigated improvement over Fallout 4 i'm so glad honestly

the more i poke around the big city the more the NPC quips feel like something out of gen-1 pokemon. can't get enough of this coffee :) this city is where it's at :) spacesuits are comfy and easy to wear

very strange sense of altered reality from the quest dialogue too. has anyone at bethesda met a person before? i move on to some mission that has me scanning wildlife on a faraway planet hoping this will, somehow, feel less alien than human conversation

just as with No Man's Sky, every planet is uniformly dotted with equidistantly-placed points of interest that you slowly make your way to (no vehicles besides your jetpack) which always turn out to be some cave or building identical to those you've cleared before

unlike with No Man's Sky, the seamless exploration is faked and the biodiversity is nil. you do get an impressive amount of raw loading screens however

the prefab bases and power stations found everywhere on planets seem to have very sparse, very specific slots for spawning consumables, which results in encountering some giant industrial installation in the middle of nowhere with, i don't know, a loaf of whole-grain sandwich bread just casually sitting next to it all proper. there is no breathable atmosphere here. who is eating this

planetary traversal is a CHORE. i am saying this as someone who loved Death Stranding

heinous "hold to confirm" buttons sprinkled in various flow-breaking places throughout the interface

enemy AI is abominable. nobody is pathing their way to get my ass. "must've been the wind" taken to the next level. an infant playing peekaboo has more object permanence

hoisting yourself up on ledges when jumping is…nice

companions randomly nowhere to be found. persists through multiple fast-travels and loading screens until, just as randomly, they pop back up

storage space is now limited! unlike in Fallout 4 and virtually every other bethesda game, your containers now hold a finite item capacity. god forbid we let the player have fun

baffling inventory UI. i imagine there's a mod out there that completely overhauls it the way SkyUI did for Skyrim. this should not be needed! how are your UIs getting worse a decade later!

scanning the precious few species inhabiting some dusty planet; one of them is this arching red root i've already seen several times before. my job done in this biome, i travel (read: teleport with a loading screen) to the polar region to find some other species. the first one i catalogue is the exact same red root again but this time it's named "boreas root" todd howard is a genius

some alien horror comes at me full fangs out. i hop on a pebble. obscenely, i am safe

procedural terrain generation beyond dull, impossibly unimaginative. these people have not had one critical thought on what makes a procedural world interesting. beginning to feel validated in my belief that only i should be trusted with proc gen. along with perhaps tarn adams

jokes aside this is making me feel genuinely insane. there have been excellent procedural generation techniques that produce compelling explorable maps for decades now. bethesda absolutely has the budget and know-how to do miles better than this yet somehow they just…do not? the same way Pokemon has decided to just no longer bother with their mainline games despite being the highest-grossing media franchise in history? hello? what is for real going on

some of the most cynical breadcrumbing i've seen in years. approaching some random cave and this person in space gear, who in the vast immensity of the infinite cosmos just happens to be snapping pictures right here, tells me more-or-less verbatim "if you like this place, you should see this other place" [other random cave has been added to your map.]

i do not like how good this makes No Man's Sky's gameplay look. it depresses me how much i have to hand it to No Man's Sky for at least not fucking up this bad. please stop making me wish i was playing No Man's Sky instead this is grotesque

i think i've exhausted my interest and patience for this game at the moment. i'll get back to the main story at some point and try some other systems ie. crafting and base-building to see if there's any engagement to be found but so far, my god. my god