Category: Communication
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Before Players Do
We had been working on the multiplayer match flow for months. The pieces were complex — menus, matchmaking, lobby states, loading sequences, onboarding moments — and getting them to work together technically was going to take significant time and even more effort from a lot of people. At some point we looked at what we…
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I Don’t Know Is A Complete Sentence
I’ve worked with a lot of interns over the years. Two of them illustrate something I’ve been thinking about better than any abstract argument could. The first came in the way most good interns do — uncertain, eager, and honest about both. When they didn’t know something they said so. When they got something wrong…
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The Centerist
The games industry tends to have two words for the kind of people on a development team. Specialist — someone with deep expertise in a specific discipline, hired to do that thing and largely only that thing. And generalist — a word that, if we’re being honest, most hiring managers read as “mostly useless.” You…
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No One Argues About The Reactor
In 1957, British author C. Northcote Parkinson described a fictional committee with three items on their agenda. First: signing a £10 million contract to build a nuclear reactor. Second: a proposal to build a £350 bicycle shed for the clerical staff. Third: £21 a year to supply refreshments for the committee itself. The fictional committee’s…
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Vibes
We were watching a cinematic sequence that wasn’t hitting. Everyone in the room understood what it was trying to communicate — the intent was clear, the performances were there, the edit was technically fine. But something was off. It didn’t feel right. It felt like it was moving too fast, too sharp, cutting through moments…
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Prove It
I used to pester the user research team every time I heard a playtest was scheduled. Can you ask if they understood the narrative? Can you ask if they prefer the way this gun sounds or that one? I wanted feedback from people who weren’t on the project team badly enough that I made myself…
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The Pillars Will See You Now (Part 2)
In Part 1 we talked about what game pillars actually are — rules to test decisions against, not directives or mood boards — and the three traps that tend to make them useless: too many, too obvious, and too vague. If you haven’t read it, it’s worth starting there. This is the part where we…
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Everything Should Be Fun (And Other Useless Pillars)
I was brought onto a project as part of a co-development arrangement. My whole team went through an onboarding process that included a presentation of the game and its pillars — the foundational principles that were supposed to guide every decision made on the project. I remember sitting there trying to get my bearings on…
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The Game Nobody Was Making
I was in early. The studio was the kind of open space floorplan that the industry fell in love with at some point — no walls, sight lines everywhere, the ambient noise of other people’s work as your permanent soundtrack. The Executive Producer for the project was already there, playing an extraction shooter at their…
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The Fastest “Team” In The Room
Let me be upfront about something before we get into it: AI is one of those topics where I think nuance tends to get flattened fast. I completely understand why a lot of creatives — artists, musicians, writers, developers — have strong and formal objections to AI tools, particularly around generated art and audio. Those…