Nicholas Feinberg

not sure i’m a fan of players wearing jerseys with their name on the back. everyone can see it but you. i guess if you forget your name you’re just out of luck out there, huh

many years ago, doing an analysis of top-selling video games by year (to win a forums argument, natch), i discovered that there was a period in which "missile command clone" was a dominant genre. imagining if that had won out over, say, platformers...

I removed all the chairs from my house. Yes, all of them. Standing desks are for beginners. I don't sit anymore. Not at meals. Not during calls. Not ever. Why? Because sitting is a dopamine sink. Your glutes go dormant. Blood pools. Your brain gets 23% less oxygen (I measured it). Standing keeps you in a state of "productive discomfort." Discomfort = alertness. Alertness = pattern recognition. Pattern recognition = product-market fit. I eat dinner standing over the sink. I take Zooms pacing back and forth like a caged lion. My calves are basically a pre-seed round for my cardiovascular system. Studies show that 89% of Fortune 500 CEOs do their best thinking while in motion. Churchill held walking meetings. Zuckerberg did walking 1-on-1s. I haven't sat in 6 months and my sprint velocity is up 340%. Every chair you own is a commitment to mediocrity. Every cushion is a compromise with your future self. "But what about rest?" Rest is what you do after the exit. Right now, I have deals to close and a burn rate to justify. My living room? Empty. Just space to pace. My dining room? A war room with whiteboards on every wall—no table. Sitting is the new smoking. Standing is the new sitting. Pacing is the new standing. I'm not uncomfortable. I'm optimized. Don't let Big Furniture gaslight you.

I try to mostly follow people on LinkedIn who are unafraid to shitpost on main

nathan @wiseposter.bsky.social (big portrait painting's eyes follow you across the foyer as you enter) ME: (voice muffled by wall) oh hey just a sec. im in my painting. November 6, 2024 at 10:10 PM

An enormously complicated diagram, the child of several pie-charts that have undergone a process of nuclear fission, largely illegible. A caption at the bottom reads 'Figure 19. The Game Design Process'

When people I don't like ask me about the process of game design, I send them this diagram from Richard Duke's 1974 book Gaming: the Future’s Language

my incredible failure to ever release a mobile port of my games once again rebounds in my favor

(sigh)

he was definitely a substantial portion of my sales lol

I found it, the most unhinged text entry interface in a console game

for the right person, every year is a good year to act like a dipshit

🫡

the hypothetical of the military just ignoring civilian orders and doing their own thing is also a terrible precedent! the whole thing blows

i clicked with ori 2 less than almost any other game in that genre, but a lot of that was the ways in which it was different from 1

condolences

hunter s thompson's nixon obit gets a bit wishful

contemplating

"is this really the hill you want to die on?"

i chuckle and gesture at our feet. the "hill" is actually a pile of hundreds of corpses at various stages of decay. before you have a chance to respond my enormous health meter appears.

i did not click with Ender Lilies at all but it's definitely in this space

🎉 Manufactoria Mentioned 🎉

Hi Bluesky!

The diagram for puzzle lovers. Save it so you can find these games on Steam later 🎮💥

#puzzle #games #Steam #indiegames #puzzles #game #indiegame #gamedev #indiedev #streamers #youtubers #streamer #YouTuber #stream #twitch #youtube

my curse is that i like making puzzle games but hate watching playtesters get stuck. my life is self-inflicted agony...

smh. this is why you'll never be a billionaire

My weigh-in on game difficulty discourse is that difficulty, too, is aesthetic in nature.

Everything in game design is about crafting an experience, including giving the players a struggle time; to make them feel hardship in a controlled environment.

It's totally a valid way to make a game.

Heavy Slam

not me. i'm nice

i've been playing Triangle Strategy (very belatedly), and it feels so strange playing an SRPG with baseline competent writing. obvious traps are obvious to the characters, too. things can sometimes be left unstated

also the game is fun. which helps

Just released Snekcross, a dense open-world puzzle about a very long snek crossing a very wide chasm

#puzzle #freegame #webgame

epigraph was very cool! played through it with my brother. the ending didn't quite land for us, but it's very cool that the puzzle/language was designed in such a way that you could feel confident about making progress without any explicit confirmations/checkpoints along the way.