Max Nichols

Too bad he was a genocidal monster

I backed off from that because while a subset of what marketing does could rightfully be called game design, it has a lot of other goals and priorities separate from that. So it feels incorrect to me now to say that the discipline is GD.

Of course, some decisions, like choice of IP or association with past works of a brand or company, can set expectations more powerfully than any marketing can overcome.

And not just in a "man I wish they marketed good" way. I mean in a "personally training your marketing teams on the design pillars" and "giving targeted, specific feedback on the details of marketing campaigns" kinda way.

I'm no longer quite on board with my old opinion that marketing IS game design, but I do think that marketing is _extremely important_ to the game experience, and thus designers should care about how their game is marketed a LOT.

Just thinking about this again these past two days

The exact same game can succeed or fail based on whether the people jumping in are getting the game they expected

A lot of the wrong players -- players that won't like it -- jumping in to play is really gonna color perception of that game.

There is a tiny little stool with four bronze legs. The stool is round with a green cloth cover. The top of the stool seat if off, revealing a hidden storage chamber. Instead sits a white cat, almost perfectly filling the space. He is cute.

I set it down nearby in the donate pile and was like “wait a sec…”

Whoa! I had no idea you had scanned these in the first place!

Well fucking done

Ah I didn’t realize you were already a Fromsoft history an expert! I’d have worded that initial post differently at least.

I haven’t actually played any of their pre-Dark Souls stuff, quotes like this make me want to

"By the time we got to KFII, the game was much larger, and we agonized over the world design. The biggest struggle with King's Field II was not being able to capture the atmosphere of the first game. "What exactly is ‘atmosphere’?", we asked ourselves. The first King's Field was very rough in terms of graphic quality, but I think it had more atmosphere as a game. By KFII we had more know-how and could create prettier graphics, but conversely, that made it look too polished--they looked like graphics created in a program rather than organic parts of a natural environment."

Maybe even intentional, hahah. By King's Field 2 the dev team was already talking about how the new visuals were too polished

shmuplations.com/kingsfield/

It looks like most Destiny 2 expansions still do not have credits btw, and they don't take correction unless someone has previously submitted the full set of credits. So nobody has credit for things like Beyond Light, Forsaken, etc.

(let alone the seasons)

This conversation made me realize that there is anothr game designer named "Max Nichols" and somebody at Mobygames gave me credit for a game they worked on. Whoops! Just sent in a correction for that one, lol

You can, I’ve submitted images and links and stuff to my mobygames page. And I’ve also submitted credits of games I worked on.

That makes a ton of sense, love it

There is sooo much to unpack there, lol. From the patriarchalism to the colonialism to the hubris of it all. I was just a 21-year-old excited to get paid to make minigames.

But one lesson I did learn: huh, people really, REALLY like and think about their soap operas, and they are a serious medium

When I was in college I worked on a UN-funded football game that was attempting to combat violence against women in South Africa using the “Sabido Methodology”. That method was developed by someone in mexico who used radio soap operas to try, essentially, to humanize women

Anyways, soap operas really have a hell of a lot to teach anyone who wants to do episodic storytelling, IMO, and are probably badly under-represented in lists of places that game devs draw inspiration or lessons from.

(and there were external forces kinda making me mow at all, I was inclined to leave it alone otherwise)

And then my neighbor did my a "favor" by leafblowing the leaves her tree had dropped on my yard, which I had every intention of leaving there, lol

Can't escape it.

I lacked the bandwidth to mow my lawn last summer (or the greater bandwidth to replace with real native growth), so I hired a service. The contract had them coming every 2wk... for like, 2months longer than needed.

Drove me mad to have mowers on a lawn that hadn't grown since the last time

An image with a collage of Yakuza, Trails, and All My Children timelines. The Yakuza one shows 11 games spread out over 200 years, with most clusted in the last 30 years. Trails shows 13 games taking place over just 7 years. All My children has an image of a subset of the cast, with a too-small to read, but very complicated-looking timeline of "All my marriages, divorces, affairs, murders, and resurrections"

The Trails series shares a quality with the Yakuza series, which shares a quality with any long-running soap opera:

It's fun to see a recurring cast of characters AND places grow up over time while going through frequent interpersonal crises, design updates, and time jumps

Right, this literally still exists

Do... do conservatives all think that the fact that life got different as adults means that the whole NATION got worse around them?? Am I unlocking a core insight right now

Hari Seldon has used the mathematics of psychohistory to predict that the Techno-Pessimist philosophy will be the key to restoring the galactic empire a thousand years hence

A picture of C-3PO, the golden android from Star Wars.

Quick, activate the techno-pessimist! It will analyze all the worst-case scenarios — it’s the only way we’ll ever get through this asteroid blizzard alive!

A robot who is more efficient at being pessimistic than flesh could dream of

A screenshot of an automated message that says “ @schizanon.bsky.social has added you to the ‘Techno-Pessimists’ moderation list”

“Techno-Pessimist” is extremely funny to me

It sounds like a faction in a forgotten 90s RTS, or maybe a weird Warhammer 40k knockoff thing

This is now the third of the Trails games I've beaten (or am about to beat, rather) and I looooove them, but

but

All three have had brutally plodding, momentum-destroying final dungeons. They are experts at making me exhausted and convincing me that I want the game to just end already

#nopg

It’s kinda surprising how often this happens. I see it all the time, hahah

Of course, by the time you’re finalizing dialog it’s often too late to change the pacing, but still. Just rub it in will ya, hahah

A screenshot from Trails of Cold Steel 2. The upper left has text that says “Infernal Castle - 3rd Stratum End”. There is a cat talking. The dialog box says “Finally… Whew. That took way too long.” The color is terrible because it’s a photo of a tv screen.

Pro tip:

If your characters are commenting on the bad pacing, consider that it may be bad for the player, too xD

I think the main difference is that successfully returning is rarely in question, and they often have “warp home” consumable items. So to ACTUALLY hit this they need to make the return journey meaningfully difficult, which I have definitely not seen in an RPG

I feel like any dungeon crawler where you need to try to return from expeditions with supplies, which you can drop if you die, probably hits this? It’s not my most played subgenre so I don’t have examples off-hand though