Spellbreak Dev Tracker

Both Twitter AND Reddit telling me to not use them today as an intentional "feature" is quite a strategy. July's looking like a great time to pull back further on socials.

My white whale of game design: "is it still possible to have meaningful mystery and discovery in game at a large scale?" https://twitter.com/Dansgaming/status/1673666661663096832

A coworker a few decades back had a wild career trajectory:
- BA was math (or physics?)
- MA in Poetry
- Xerox PARC doing research
- Content designer for a few years on MMOs
- Left games to teach poetry to undergrads

Once an ex and I were sitting around reading. Suddenly she flung her book into the corner where it joined a big pile of others.

"Are you okay?!"
"I wasn't enjoying it. When something's bad, I toss it in the corner and ignore it."

She taught me a good life lesson for all media.

I think about that feature and the motivations of those players a lot these days. *looks pointedly at the internet*

You'd regularly see players or guilds have an argument or try to one-up each other and realize they'd just spent THOUSANDS of dollars to try and save face, get the last word in, or just show off their strong wordplay.

It was simple. A player could spend $1 (or maybe even less?) to broadcast a text message to every player's chat. Since it was a PVP game, it's not hard to see the appeal here and the main use case of talking trash to other players/guilds.

The best and wildest game monetization feature ever made was almost 20 years ago, unsurprisingly, in a PVP MMO:🧵

But if someone wanted to send a message within a few minutes of the previous broadcast, the cost doubled. There was no cap on this and the timer reset with each message sent.

Bunch of fresh, undergeared 20s vs Ashava ....

The graveyard rush left us very dead and it very alive at the end of the 15minutes.

I couldn't find any screenshots from the REALLY weird stuff we'd built in the past. (wru Hobo Attack?!!)

quote retweet with four projects you've worked on

Deep cut edition... One of these is even still up!

Conversations in the past 24 hours with multiple different gamedev friends /groups: "how fast do you think we can make a looter shooter / extraction game / survival game as a side project on Fortnite?!"

Gold rushin'!

Ah the deep panic and anxiety around "what class and build should I play first?" in a Diablo game is setting in. (Let's be honest, it's like 99% going to be a sorc this weekend, but what build!?!?)

Some real good (nerdy game design) reads

I wish there were personal business cards to exchange at playgrounds so we could make relevant notes on the back after we meet and talk about our kids, their ages, milestones, childcare, etc. This is what all those years of tradeshows have done to me. I am a broken man.

Someone at Zynga was irate that the hard boiled eggs in the kitchenettes weren't pre-peeled. "Do you know how much of my valuable time I waste peeling an egg in the morning?!? Someone should be doing this for me!"

Stolen from Slack... to all my PMs past and present.

Nothing really surprised me about the money required to raise a kid until I realized we're spending ~$30/week on her berry habit.

Look at that CCU for Asheron's Call! 2,086 people! And if you're not in the beta, you can get access from CGM!