Category: Standard Rules Apply
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The Name On The Pitch Deck
I was once part of a company that got bought out. The new owners did what new owners often do — looked for ways to trim costs, pushed out anyone approaching retirement age, declined to renew contracts for people who asked for what they’d already been promised. Efficient, on paper. Sensible, probably, from a certain…
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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 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…
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Interpreting Thelonious Monk’s “25 Tips for Musicians” To Game Development
In 1960, saxophonist Steve Lacy was hired to play a series of performances with Thelonious Monk. During that time he wrote down a list of tips — things Monk said, observations he made, advice offered in the way that advice often gets offered in a working band: casually, in the moment, not necessarily intended to…
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Narrative Structure Is a Budget Decision (Part 3)
If you’ve read Parts 1 and 2, you now have a vocabulary for the distinct structures that tend to get lumped together under “branching narrative.” This is the part where I tell you how I actually use that vocabulary — and why the most important conversation about narrative structure usually happens in a budget meeting,…
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What Do You Even Mean By Branching Narrative?
There’s a conversation I’ve had more times than I can count, and it usually starts the same way. Someone — a writer, a designer, sometimes an executive — says they want a “branching narrative” for their game. Everyone in the room nods. Everyone thinks they understand what that means. And then, about three meetings later,…
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You Can Do Anything Except That
Some of the most disciplined people I can think of are fiction writers. To assign yourself the task of producing hundreds of pages of compelling original content — consistently, on a schedule, while also being your own harshest critic — seems like it would require not just a creative muscle but a kind of self-discipline…
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The Hypothetical Cost Of A Hypothetical Game
There’s been no shortage of conversation online in recent years about game revenue — new monetization models, rising prices, season passes, microtransactions, the economics of live service. What’s talked about considerably less is the other side of that equation: what it actually costs to make a game in the first place. Most publishers stay quiet…
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Sound High Level Thoughts
A few months back I was given the opportunity to put together and present a talk to the whole studio about game audio. Keeping it under twenty minutes meant staying deliberately high level — which was harder than it sounds, because audio is one of those topics where every thread you pull leads to three…