AJ Smith

Hi, and welcome to my GDC talk.

Your team needs a producer.

Thank you for coming to my GDC talk.

Riiiiiiiiiiiiight...because the casual market isn't already flooded with minimal-effort, scareware-ad-ridden, cookie-cutter-at-best, reskin-at-worst games that lie about their gameplay in their ads. Gosh, it's the most gatekept genre there is! So glad AI is here to make my dreams come true.

Twitter post from user Megannn_lynne reads: "i will be Fixed if i make enough Lists"

Producer contributing to QA efforts like

in the spirit of not being able to leave well enough alone, an expanding bonus collection radius when you're going fast

Iron Lung the movie, good shit @markiplier.bsky.social and crew. The others in the theater for a Saturday afternoon matinee didn't seem the type to go watch movies in a theater, but they would watch a streamer.

Like me, I bet they wished for subtitles. But like the film says, it doesn't matter.

I don't really play AAA titles so I feel like a freshly born fawn sometimes trying to play this game but I'm honestly having a great time and moments like this have made me laugh harder than I ever have in my life. Ten oudda ten

I owe you an apology Cyberpunk 2077. I was not really familiar with your game.

If there was an employee in the clock when Kenny was looking for his food, it was either someone trying to get through a poorly prioritized and too-full to-do list or steam was coming out of their ears from their brain frying from burnout.

Not sure if it's what Kenny ran into here, but every customer-facing job right now is expecting you to do the workload of 5+ people with one person's pay in half a task's reasonable amount of time and you don't even get health insurance or a chance to pee.

I'm one of the many people that got impacted by the earliest tech layoffs back in 2023, and now I have a retail job to supplement my part time dev contracts. Skeleton crews feeding into bad attitudes is what I'm personally witnessing.

Sometimes game dev is going outside to stare at your own car for a while. For research.

damn, this is kind of a fun way to get around

The one out of this that gets mentioned the most is Sonic and it's usually in the context of how it's essentially impossible to NOT take control away from the player in a loop-de-loop.

I'm currently working on a cartoon platformer and this image gives me whiplash because these are rarely the ones we discuss during design sessions...

There are so many banger indie platformers out there guys you're just not bothering to look for them.

...when, in reality, the world around them thinks nothing deeper than "wow, that sure is a fancy car!"

I'm reminded of a chapter from @morganhousel.bsky.social 's book, The Psychology Of Money. He speaks to a "man in the box" phenomenon, where -- paraphrasing -- someone places themselves in a Ferrari and imagines the world around them admiring them for their financial prowess because of it ... 1/2

SKETCH (8.5 x 11") $50 b/w, $80 color. DELUXE (11 x 17") $100 b/w, $150 color. EVERYTHING ELSE (sketch pages, comics, design, icons, emotes, painting, etc) $20 per hour.

I'M OPEN FOR COMMISSIONS!! 🎉 I've got a light workload at the moment, which means my turnarounds are super fast!

Feel free to ping me through anything in the bottom left corner! Throwing a rock with a note through my window will also suffice.

I can't believe this has to be said but if you see a woman working at GameStop just leave her the fuck alone and do not:

1. Make a fun game out of trying to figure out her deadname;

2. Badger her for her phone number four times before figuring out that no means no.

We were the man then, dog.

For GDC, I was on the West Coast for the first time ever, in San Francisco -- a city with a reputation that speaks for itself.

I went on the BART as a frail white woman, of average size, by herself, and the scariest thing was the noise the yellow line makes when it's in the tunnels.

Skill issue.

Just because I'm a hypocrite, doesn’t mean I'm WRONG

PSA:

1. If you are not silly, it is vital you become silly

2. If you are silly, you must stay silly

2. If you used to be silly but have stopped, you must make all efforts to return to silliness

Piece of snarf* 👀

Embrace your fate!!!

GDC is a reminder that all my peers are some combination of hot smart creative unhinged neurodiverse theater kid goblins creating magic and fantasy using tools made from duct tape and dollar store staples.

@alexaray.bsky.social said that writers need to be weirder and thirstier and who am i to ignore her advice

TROOTH!

- first year GDC, first year CA, extrovert but with chronic pain

Those braids are to DIE FOR!!! The saturation! The gradient! AHHH! 💕

I'M ON MY WAY LETS GOOOO

Selfie of AJ Smith at GDC. She is wearing an iconic corduroy naval-style cap and the bright orange shirt that indicates that she is a Conference Associate for GDC 2025.

This is #whatagamedevlookslike, and you should definitely find a person who looks like this and ask he or she for help. Either at GDC or not, your preference.