Max Nichols

I know for myself a lot of this feeling stems from being a game designer, who:
1) Wants to stay abreast of trends and boundaries being pushed.
2) Am surrounded by interesting discussion of many games. A zeitgeist.

But I see players who are not devs or professionals with the same feelings

I am not sure! I've spent my whole life in those kind of enthusiast/dev circles, so my perspective is super warped.

You hear people say stuff like “there are too many games on Steam”. That’s a widespread belief!

But nobody ever said “blockbuster has too many movies” or “spotify has too many songs” (other than as a criticism of the business stranglehold).

It’s obviously a very goofy thing to think or feel but it’s very widespread.

I don’t even listen to 0.1% of all the music that comes out and nobody would ever feel like anyone should, or feel buried by it.

I wonder why, culturally, game-enjoyers seem way more likely to feel like they “can’t keep up” or are “overwhelmed” by the number of games coming out.

In what other art form would we ever feel bad for not experiencing all of it? Why do so many of us have these feelings for games, and games alone?

It's funny because back in like, the late 90s and very early 00s that kind of thing WOULD happen. People like Miyamoto or Capcom's Yoshiki Okamoto would just casually mention stuff that they were thinking about or were in development.

But uh

That was more than 20 years ago

I can still hear his voice

But to be clear, I am not in the "all recurring meetings are automatically bad" camp. In the example I gave above I was still having just as many meetings, just not using a recurring timeslot to plan them. They're more purpose-driven and impromptu instead. A forcing mechanism for having an agenda

I’ve always thought standups were a sort of woefully inadequate solution to a few different problems at once. People use them for brass bolts work communication, social connectedness, announcements.

I think they’re kind of bad at all these things but they ARE easy, and often better than nothing

A Pivot of Designers

I realize this may sound like a nothingburger if you haven't worked in a big corporate game dev environment, but this is a big win I swear xD

This might not scale up if we were more than ~4-5 folks, or if we all had jam-packed calendars where it was hard to impromptu schedule things, and I do have to be pretty proactive about scheduling new ones, but

Overall very successful.

Did an experiment—

I ran some weekly meetings for my small team of designers. We always had stuff to talk about, and I'd cancel if we didn't.

I decided to end those and instead schedule meetings for specific topics as needed. We have about the same # of meetings, but they're _much_ more focused.

Damn it sounds like something I’d enjoy, maybe one of these days!

The cover of a fantasy novel with the name and author rendered in Cyrillic. It features a squad of five men in rough plate armor, holding short swords, with several bodies at their feet.

Ah I’ll have to see if there’s an english translation!

In a match-based multiplayer game we'd call this a sudden death mechanic. I haven't head that term used for SP games much but it might be a useful search term for you.

I wonder if they're bringing this guy

bsky.app/profile/maxn...

Yessss were you able to listen? I wasn't sure how many folks I know would end up hearing it, it's been fun to see Post Games subscribers pop out of the woodwork

In that setting people hire Witchers like you or I might hire a plumber: they have professional certification, you have a problem, they have the training and tools to fix it.

Much more than most action-adventures or RPGs: The Witcher 3

Geralt has a job: he is a monster hunter. He has to methodically review what monsters are weak to, and what they do, and prepare potions and elixirs and traps accordingly. (if you're playing on a high enough diff). It feels professional.

I would typically use excel or google sheets for something like this. LLM is unreliable.

If it's not enormous you could just use a free web tool, like:
pinetools.com/sort-list

This looks so fun

I tried to make a grid-based sandcastle sim/tower defense game in college but it was waaay beyond my capabilities back then.

This would make 21-year-old Max’s head explode

Oh man I can't wait to read this one, every time these two are in an interview together it's one of the all-time best, I'm sure this one will be too

I love that

Evidence that the Nier team approached some of this with the same mindset, which is very satisfying for me since I repeatedly come back to that game for examples like this:
bsky.app/profile/kohl...

HAH

This is so fun for me, since I used Nier Automata as a major example of exactly that once: changing the format of the medium to accentuate or direct gameplay
bsky.app/profile/maxn...

Wow, you're a real piece of shit

Astral Chain is probably my second favorite PlatinumGames title. Behind Nier Automata, of course. Just ahead of Vanquish.

I haven't played them all though, never did get into Bayonetta

YouTube video by BossRunner Astral Chain - All Bosses (No Damage, S+ Rank)

For example, it's pretty cool when you ride your demon cop-dog into battle against a cyber centipede in the astral plane while rock music wails, and then it swaps to I guess emo rock when you're about to earn the S-rank
youtu.be/_AueOE4G_cM?...