Things are changing.
* Hotel lobbies that were normally bustling were empty.
* Walking through Yerba Buena Gardens made me a little sad. Some crap music festival thing taking up space. Fewer crowds of cool people talking. Remainder forced into the outskirts.
I really enjoyed GDC. Saw some good friends. Had amazing conversations.
I know there's also a conference; but that's an excuse. It is really 100% about the people and community.
This is a very important quote from the interview that I hope every single company hoping to capitalize on the gaming industry reads and internalizes. Games are a unique market, and you can't just apply strategies from other industries and find success. This has been proven time and time again.
Amazing work. Your images have been living in my head/heart for a long while. ❤️
It has a little ribbon bookmark thingy. And I use it. I mean seriously when was the last time that happened?
Got my Mileships copy today by @ianmcque.bsky.social and @rossignol.bsky.social.
Oh my goodness. Far more than I expected. A right tome of a book full of hundreds of illustrations + delicious world building. Gah, my heart
www.kickstarter.com/projects/ian...
Mythmatch's the type of game I'd encourage devs to check out, even if you think it's not your genre
The merge & movement mechanic is so fluid, it's so cool to see how this game takes a regular mobile game mechanic and really recontextualize it
Loved all of these
schedule.gdconf.com/session/rule...
schedule.gdconf.com/session/flav...
schedule.gdconf.com/session/soft...
schedule.gdconf.com/session/mean...
"The Tension": Designing for Discomfort in Wanderstop
Rules of the Game 2026
Building a Critically Acclaimed Licensed Game in 18 Months
Creating Player Expertise
Supporting Junior Talent & Why The Industry Needs Them
Corgispace
Supporting the Party
'Pacific Drive' Under The Hood
in our latest developer blog, our design team sat down to talk about upcoming changes to the housing system in Spirit Crossing. 🏠
if you're intrigued by what the inner workings of that process might look like in the Alpha stages of a multiplayer game, it's a good day! ↓
spryfox.com/developer-bl...
✅ As a busy business apparatchik, drip is my suit drink of choice!
The atmosphere is such that no one is willing to say much publicly. I witnessed an entire AI ghost conference at gdc. The key topics are not mentioned at all in these write-ups. Fascinating to observe.
Lady at airport cafe handed me a 16oz coffee instead of 12oz. She then encouraged me to live a little.
It is an epic talk. BTW, looking at the slides, he managed to edit down 80% of information he had in the early drafts. Wonderfully dense.
I've heard zero buzz about good talks at GDC. Which is rare! What have folks enjoyed?
If you're a Polaris alum, check the Discord! We've announced this year's dates, venue, and also are asking for folks to nominate new attendees.
I agree with all of that! One way of normalizing it is to feed cost of living in a given region into the total metrics. It is mildly complicated and not perfect, but a vast improvement.
A reorientation of values is at the heart. And then tune the metric accordingly.
Games are created by human artists. Who need to live. The real winning condition is less about hypergrowth, investor value or megahits. Instead: Can we continue to make games as a life-long practice?
Does the ecosystem support this end? And to what degree? Maximize that KPI.
When platforms post developer stats, the one I would love to see is "How many developers earn a living wage?"
Mythmatch! 24 hours to go!!! 🤩🏹✨
Wishlist! Tell a friend! Hug that dog!
store.steampowered.com/app/1778050/...
"All's well that ends well" said the man who survived.
industry that still hasn't admitted women are a market says it's losing to onlyfans
This is what I'm talking about: Cozy Grove gets a sequel. New bears. Pet snails. Wishlist!
You know what the world needs more of? Cozy Grove.
Hey I'll be at Courage XL tonight showing off Arcane Eats! Come say hi!
I once tried to put a whole egg into my mouth.
A cool thing we added to Spirit Crossing recently is ✨emissive clothing ✨! All in game clothing is dye-able (with the exception of a few very special items), but there's a set of Mythic dyes that give your outfit glowing neon details and it's been really fun to see players be creative with it!
Our players are incredibly cool.
So sayeth the internet.
