Katie Chironis

they just nerfed your boss fight dude. yep they gave you more startup on your attack. all the people who beat you pre-nerf are gonna boast about it. sorry man.

(holding up the phone to my 3yo) these women sealed the honmoon long before huntrix ever existed

3yo: what are their names

me: this is scary spice, there’s also posh, baby, sporty and ginger

😈 Maleficent, the evil queen, had her goblins searching for Sleeping Beauty for 16 years.

🛑 BUT…. they were looking for a baby the whole time. Acceptance criteria fail!

🧠 This is why it’s so important for villains to leverage AGILE practices. Don’t let this become your team. My new ecourse will

check in on your local preschooler parent, we are not OK right now

me, curled up in fetal position, sick, prepping for 4 thanksgivings and 8 holiday events: i’m alive but please— no more

the universe, kicking me in the ribs with her glittery heels: get up bitch. you need to somehow secure a pumpkin pie for your kid’s class thanksgiving party by tomorrow morning

aww thanks max that's very kind! i love this team a lot

it's ok (in some genres! not all!) for players to not immediately intuit something, suck at it for a while, complain, etc. because that is the inherent cost of mastering a hard-to-learn skill. adding support for learning is always great, but don't sand off all the edges cuz someone stumbled a little

friday soapbox: as a designer, if you want something to be a skillful action for players, and you want growth in this skill to be very deep/meaningful, then you need to also let players be bad at it. sometimes horrendously bad. players hate this pain, and designers often want to mitigate it away.

we truly love to see it

it's on miro. it's literally on figma. you have to log into okta. it's in jira. it's on zoom. it's on pureref. it's on flow. it's on perforce. it's on slack. you can find it on slack. you can go to slack and find it. log onto slack right now. you can slack it. slack has it for you. it's on slack.

the developers clowning around in chat vs the producer who is desperately trying to keep this team ritual on the rails and get everyone to pay attention

Just friendly advice for the Dodgers fans: most fans of other teams are going to be rooting for the Jays no matter what, embrace the villain role and you will be much happier than trying unsuccessfully to convince everyone else that the Dodgers are the heroes everyone should root for

never invite a group of game dev parents to a “digital lab” toddler play place, i promise you we will be insufferable. why is this art wall stuttering and running at 10fps? how come the grass in the frog minigame is like 30k polys? is nobody doing the gameplay clarity work here???

sorry i can't respond to your text right now, i am in hell! aka 10 minutes into a 45 minute unreal engine tutorial video on some obscure part of the tech pipeline where a guy is mumbling rapid fire instructions over a dubstep backtrack

that's very global financial crisis coded so i'd have to say vans warped tour sorry

oh yeah. “I only collect road bikes/coffee presses/tarot decks/labubus” sorry. funkopop

the older i get the more i think there might only be 3 kinds of millennial midlife crisis: Vans Warped Tour, Funkopop, and Making Sous Vide Your Entire Personality

pleased to announce that there seems to be a passive-aggressive conflict roiling the august pages of Cooks Illustrated, Fall Harvest recipes edition. allow me to explain:

level designer and gameplay designer: our friendship is strong. we're not playing your little game

design lead in a Saw mask: oh you can leave anytime, but first you have to agree about what kinds of ramps are allowed in this game

(level designer and gameplay designer look at each other in horror)

Los Angeles came out in droves. #NoKings

most annoying part of having a baby is how everyone you know is all "can I see the baby" "where's the baby" "I don't see the baby" "is there actually a baby" "I don't mean to imply anything" "it's just that... You've been different lately" "ever since you fainted during that weird electrical storm"

developer: put it down. we don't need another one

concept artist: (clutching tighter) no. this is my emotional support sky whale

Learned that I am being laid off from Heart Machine, and will be leaving the studio later this month.

Do you need a contractor? I've got a track record of leading scope-friendly script revisions late in dev. I have also done a lot of consulting on new IPs and pitches/demos. Feel free to DM me!

every expedition 33 journal is like “sadly, our attempts at kitesurfing into the final boss failed” “we tried dabbing on the nevrons and we’re completely out of ideas” “will we ever be free of this tyranny”

it's normal to walk around with the fiscal quarter end dates burned into your brain so that you know exactly which weeks to be most anxious about bad industry news, right

the marshmallow test for game developers, except every day you come into work there's a big button saying JUST ADD A HOOKSHOT TO THE GAME and you have to exert every single ounce of free will to stop yourself from pushing it

i relate hard to your pain i’m so sorry

i just think if you’re hot, you shouldn’t have to learn how to parry

(holding up tablet) and here you can see the oldest known human writing, it's about one hundred billion years old. it's a message written by a designer to their engineer, begging the engineer to build them something and explaining "it'll be simple"

you: what are we having for dinner
game designer: great question. i wrote some pillars to help us align on a good outcome here.
you, reading: wait, this pillar is just "food must be edible," that seems pretty vague
game designer: ah, that's where the secondary pillars about Edibility come into play