Trent Kusters

I think about this take more often than I'd like to.

Live and drink, cardguy5.

I think about this Tony Benn speech much more than I used to

Crabmeat Next Fest Promo art

Catch Crabs, navigate the harsh waters of the Antarctic and defend your ship from the threats.

Play the Crabmeat Demo Today in Steam Next Fest 🦀

store.steampowered.com/app/3671850/...

such a delight watching this game come together over time, man. as someone who for whatever fucked up reasons keeps choosing systems-driven games to develop, I see you. solid work, dude! keep it up. Can't wait to play it.

Come and build an empire (aka; a sensible and sustainable indie development studio with creative practice at its heart) with me. 🫡📈🤙🏼

💯💯💯

This is "The Sauce". This is what the centrists don't have.

Stacking's 15 anniversary sharing continues! Today I'm sharing the Game Design Document I wrote for that game, all those years ago, which was part of our pre-production deliverables. You can download the PDF here: www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/8jk0e...

I’m sure this comes as no surprise.

I talk to these people, Mark, and I can tell you, most of them genuinely don’t have the faintest clue what builds success in games.

There are naturally those who do see the play from 100 yards out, but in my experience they are the exception, not the rule, and are in the vast, *vast* minority.

The even more insane part is the folks who are now pointing to Arc Raiders as proof it can be done, but failing to realise that game is developed by the team behind *checks notes* 25 Battlefield/front games, in the nation with maybe the highest density of PC/console live service success stories.

First Reformed up where it belongs too. 🫡

It’s honestly giving me life how fucking bad it looks. I can feel my health bar surpassing 100%

Over 50% of game developers now think generative AI is bad for the industry, a dramatic increase from just 2 years ago: 'I'd rather quit the industry than use generative AI' The latest GDC survey also found that managers are more likely to use generative AI than their employees.

"Our standing rule is: If one of us brings up using GenAI in any of our work, then it's safe to assume we've been assimilated by The Thing and should be burned alive by Kurt Russell," said a game design consultant in the US.

Lol

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAA

Absolute dogshit. Incredible how determined the powers at be are to jam this slop down our throats, and years on it’s still devoid of any heart and soul.

Pi was one of the films that opened my eye to cinema. What an insane fall from grace for Aranofsky. Scab.

💯🫡

Exactly 15 years ago yesterday I walked into a bank, opened an account called League of Geeks and put $40 into it. Weird to think about.

taleb also wrote ‘antifragile’ and he himself sees that book as a more complete perspective on the same idea. i tend to agree, but black swan was a bit more specific and applicable for me somehow

i still think about the ideas in that book every few weeks 20 years later. even though it’s not about game development specifically, it speaks to attributes of things with luck and chance that is applicable to game dev. like why to prototype & iterate, or what ideas to pick up, how markets work, etc

Organizational Culture & Leadership, 5th Edition, it's a textbook sorry

it's not specific to game direction because I don't think the industry-specific skills are nearly as difficult a challenge as the whole "how to navigate and lead and effect change in an organization full of people" problem

We're only just now starting to get decent contextual accounts of games as a medium, and I find that it's much easier to internalize lessons from related but external media. Someday Valve and Steam may be the subjects of similar documents, but we're still too much in the current moment to understand

"I Want My MTV" by Rob Tannenbaum and Craig Marks. It's a tremendous highs and lows accounting of how a dominant cultural movement began and how it shaped the art and world around it, in a way that can only be properly be understood after the fact.

That said--as someone literally handing over the reins right now--I made it clear when recommending reading that almost every business book I've ever read was 80% filler around fairly simple (even if novel) concepts. Just read a couple summaries & watch the TED talk.

David Graeber - Bullshit Jobs

black swan by taleb

Innnnnnteresting! Never head of it. Why would you recommend this book? 👀

Horrific, unspeakably violent greed.