Greg Street

Our new studio, FPC, has released a gameplay video for our upcoming MMORPG. See what 1 year of dev with 25 people looks like! youtube.com/watch?v=v5ZAFt…

@BenPielstick Agree it is presented in boring ways. The way they explained the why was like you were learning a language that you needed to talk to other scientists. You should just know the forms that nitrogen takes in water and the average absolute amounts of each

@Ghostcrawler Learning without purpose was my biggest complaint throughout school. Instructors could never explain why what they were teaching was important for me to learn besides learning for the sake of learning and getting passing grades. Content was also presented in the most boring ways.

I was a good but not great student. I skated by in high school by being able to write fast and well, but I never developed good study skills and that bit me in college. Entry biology (I had a double major in biology and philosophy) is all memorization, which I was bad at.

I think a lot about the nature of learning these days when most games are required to teach you how to play, and the best ones do it in a way that sucks you in rather than a big Play The Tutorial button. /thread

I can still identity hundred of plants, birds and fish, and perhaps thousands of species of marine invertebrates (crustaceans, mollusks and worms). For some reason that part of memorization clicked with me. But foreign languages never did and I remain frustratingly mono lingual.

@SandyofCthulhu @MacdonaldJonald I had to change from DeathShrimp to Ghostcrawler through a quirk of the Blizzard forums where your posting name needed to match your account name and someone had already claimed DeathShrimp (no doubt because of me)

@SandyofCthulhu @MacdonaldJonald Yes Sandy was my mentor (and friend) at Ensemble, which was my first job in gaming. We bonded over arthropods because I studied crustaceans and he arachnids. And we played a lot of board games at lunch.

@MagdalenaDK While I think M+ helped, the trend was already there from speed running easy dungeons for badges. Gogogo means there is no time to explain and since the tank needs first contact with the enemy, they end up setting the pace

@MagdalenaDK Two quick points. When speed trumps everything, it doesn't leave room for other roles to lead. This wasn't always the case. Second, we did some preliminary work that suggested that a dungeon party size of 6 (4 dps) might match natural ratios better.

Earthquake in NE Japan felt in Tokyo. I’ve lived in SoCal so not my first rodeo. (Some of the swaying is just me not being able to hold the phone steady.)

@DirtyEffinHippy I think it will recover somewhat, though I admit I thought it would be faster. The industry still produces a lot of revenue, which will make it eventually seem like a good investment again. Investors are learning not all AI bets pay off and even forever games don’t last forever.

It’s getting harder and harder for me to want to stay in gaming. The intrinsic changes happening that we won’t see the blowout for both with individual skills and evolution and with business impact are getting to be a pill I’m struggling to swallow. I’d love any encouraging thoughts from other devs

@LieNeverx About 5500 game developers were laid off last year. It was a blood bath for many people.

@Ghostcrawler Wtf happened to your other game lmao

I am excited / relieved / grateful to have found a really good new job - an occurrence which is vanishingly rare in the modern gaming industry. I can share more once I've signed the official paperwork. (No, it's not an MMO, at least not yet.)

@joaopopsick Like so many studios these days, our funding was pulled. It’s really hard to make games right now.

@Ghostcrawler Weren’t you just working on a game for like, years? What happened ?

@Collectorian Shippable art is one the most important differences. A first party studio can squint more, assuming everyone gets the art direction overall. We were technically a first party studio, so we didn’t focus on shippable art yet. That ended up being a mistake, but not an obvious one.

@Collectorian For example, if you are at e.g. Blizzard, you likely need a prototype to prove out the gameplay, but you aren’t going to be shopping that prototype around to outside investors. Investors or publishers need a different kind of demo than internal stakeholders.

I talked to 80 Level about some of the challenges of fundraising for our game in these challenging times.

@tr0ubledb0y Gemini in particular is obsessed with “since you’re…” trying to draw connections to other things you’ve asked about

@Ghostcrawler you mention one thing and it acts like you've been doing it for 5 years, i fractured my ankle, can't walk, many chats about it, apparently i'm doing 10k steps a day

Bizarre AI response where it said since you’re flying next week, and I said I wasn’t, and it said oh good then here is what we need to do this week, and it was just this random list of shit I had asked about, but had never indicated I needed to do this week, or in fact ever

@Puuma_Guy Thanks for asking. I might have found a (wonderful) job? Will share soon. No MMOs for the immediate future I am afraid.

@Ghostcrawler What are your plans and goals right now