Isaiah Everin

Alternatively, consider there has to be at least one planet more embarrassing than ours.

YouTube video by Vivziepop Homestuck the Animated Pilot Trailer

He stuck on my home til I Viziepop.

Working from home as a game dev with three monitors and back problems leads to creative solutions and a horror show of untenable cable management. Sorry for anyone who vomits a little.

What if I have *two* PCs literally hovering between both possible locations that change elevation for my physical wellbeing.

Always love that @backloggd.com does these throwback GOTY events. There are some tough choices for best narrative, but had to go for the one that made me feel the most.

On the one hand, yeah, Roblox has slop. On the other, just be happy you sold >5 million units on a game of this scope and people feel the desire to do this. It's not like this kind of thing doesn't happen no matter what in these kinds of game-making tools, take it as a compliment.

It's apt that corporations/governments divided the internet into SFW and NSFW & are now making it all Safe For Work, because that is the defining frame they want to place on the world--everywhere you go is for Work, not pleasure or art or love or culture. You must always Work for Them, or die.

Yeeeeah, though for me all my good ideating time was when walking or on public transit, and I lost that with WFH, tradeoffs. The periods where I do have it, unfortunately I do just want to listen to a podcast because I'm just sooo tired anyways.

YouTube video by The Morbid Zoo I Want to Talk About "Elevated Horror"

Really good take on genre discourse around horror lately.

Took PTO for a long weekend to deal with stress, 100%'d the Lagoon Layer of Donkey Kong Bananza in 4.5 hours, having a fucking blast. I still wish Nintendo could bring the graphics, especially when Astrobot showed just how amazing a game like this can be with top of the line, but it's still awesome.

The notable downside is the first episode comes out swinging as much sillier and more ridiculous than the show is outside of 2 scenes at the beginning, which could put people off. It does eventually (poignantly) contextualize why the character is that off the deep end, but I think it was a blunder.

"Too Much" on Netflix is so good it's crazy, why the fuck did it take this long for a proper evolution of the romcom. It's awkward, sweet, funny, and real, and it consistently actually makes me feel a lot. Great show.

me_irl

Signals and Light | Substack Video essays analyzing game design, narrative, and media. (by Isaiah Everin, Lead AI/Enemy Designer, Current: Crystal Dynamics - Past: Aspyr, Survios). Click to read Signals and Light, a Substack publ...

If you mean the video about combat design, I put all of them on my Substack as a text version, yeah. If you meant my implications of a project being cancelled, just look up Perfect Dark. 😅

signalsandlight.substack.com

Thanks man. I'm actually not laid off yet, just the studio that owned my project shut down and so there's a huge tbd on what's next (could end up being the worst, depends on what's sorted out). But yeah, I'll def be doing something creative once I've recovered and know just how bad the news is...

YouTube video by Signals and Light Defining What IS an Enemy Attack

New pinned post...I made six YouTube videos and then got a promotion, so I got too busy to keep working on other ones, but then the game industry went and does what it does, so I don't even know what I'm doing next with my career for a bit. Maybe I'll make more YouTube videos once I stop being sad!

Death Stranding 2 is an absolutely gorgeous game.

if youre like u cant joke theres genocide going on let me tell you about the last 15000 years

For writing specifically, that makes a lot of sense to me. I've gotten my three game design jobs through dozens of job interviews and applications, it ain't fun.

Horrible week at work, trying to find happiness where I can. Gosh I wish I could work on a game as smooth and fun and deep as Death Stranding. I'd settle for working on one that actually can ship at all. Going on nearly 5 years of work that went nowhere and meant nothing (KotOR and Perfect Dark).

Cultists. Absolutely unhinged.

If those are too expensive, then AAA is too expensive, because those are some of the lowest scope AAA games that exist on the market now. If you want to say AAA games shouldn't exist, feel free. I don't share that philosophy. I think all of those teams accomplished unique art that merits existence.

Saying all games should reuse art and animations bought off an asset store is basically saying artists shouldn't be able to have jobs and nothing should be unique, I'm not even engaging with that kind of point. Good luck pursuing that line of thought and thinking it's good for the industry.

I think it'd make more sense for one corporation to NOT own and take on the risk of this many studios. Also Avowed, Hellblade, and South of Midnight are already examples of affordable, low-scope projects thst cost less than AAA games. Telling them to share swords and trees is <5% of the budget.

(A massive amount of work that no one has time to do after 9000 people are laid off and every one of these teams is now working with even fewer resources and even less shared knowledge than before.)

Making a thought experiment of everywhere a team *might* figure out how to re-use an entire content set would be too deep for me to do in posts here, but every example possible requires a complete overhaul of pipelines, processes, and creative vision across multiple titles. A massive amount of work.