Here's to an amazing team. Let it be known that through the storms, the ever-changing commanding officers and the madness of the admiralty, the crew is what held this cursed ship together.
6/6
It's not to say it didn't take its toll on the team. Morale got affected, turnover increased, amazing talent left. It's expected over 12(!) years. But the team as a whole showed incredible resilience and continued to deliver, new leadership after new leadership, new direction after new direction
5/6
The project suffered MANY problems, but the team was NOT one of them.
Unstable direction, unstable and toxic leadership, unrealistic deadlines, corporate interference, etc. all played a role.
But the team endured and delivered year after year in spite of it all.
4/6
Yes, it was a new team, formed from merging the AC naval team and the Ghost Recon Phantom team. But it was full of experienced people.
And during my time on the project, whenever the direction was stable, this team delivered. It delivered fast, and at a high level of quality.
3/6
Specifically, I want to address his opinion that the team might have been too junior and inexperienced to handle the project. This is in my experience (5 years on the project) a complete misunderstanding of what happened.
2/6
I just stumbled upon an article that gives Alex Hutchinson' perspective on the Skull And Bones fiasco. It's not something I usually do, but I feel the need to give my own perspective because I think his outside view misrepresents the ability of the team.
www.pcgamer.com/games/assass...
1/6
Congratulations to all Game Awards winners! We've been so lucky to get so many great games this year. Here's hoping the trend continues!
While we're not able to continue developing our first project Arsonist of Fate in the current context, we wanted to share a glimpse of what we've been cooking. Let this be a celebration of the creativity, talent and resilience of our small but amazing team.
youtu.be/vfvitxbEovs?...
3/3
It's been a crazy ride learning to be an entrepeneur while building an ambitious new take on weaving together linear and interactive media in a deep, rich world. I'm grateful for the people who believed, helped or joined us on this journey. I'm incredibly proud of what we achieved together.
2/3
The amazing adventure that is Standard Procedure - the studio I co-founded with a group of super talented friends - is pausing for now.
1/3
Another one in the bank! GG T1! #Worlds2025
3C is an acronym that's common in AA and AAA studios, but that I don't see much in the indie spheres for some reason. It stands for Controls Camera Character (sometimes "Character abilities" which is a better description imo). It's the area of GD that covers moment-to-moment gameplay and feel.
Dim Sum Games is soft-launching Tiny Tactics GO!
It's a huge achievement from former Riot Hong Kong and Singapore colleagues.
I tried the game during early tests. It's a lot of fun. Accessible, yet deceptively deep. The character design is so good!
Give it a try!
dimsumgames.com/tinytacticsgo
And who knows, maybe also inspire AAA studios to stop reinventing the wheel (as has been my experience with camera systems) and control their costs!
For fairness, I should also mention Black Eye, which is also starting to have interesting gameplay features.
blackeyetechnologies.com
Cameras are a cornerstone of good game feel and a polished experience.
I'm excited to see plugins like this surface, as it will help indies and AA continue to raise the quality bar at reasonable costs.
What Riveting Realms is offering here is an absolute bargain. It will save teams big and small months of work, for a potentially better result if you don't have or cannot hire a camera specialist.
Contexts, transitions, collisions, targeting, etc. are involving not-so-trivial maths and logic, and most importantly require a lot of finesse and tricks to feel good and smooth.
I just saw Riveting Realms is releasing an "early access" version of their camera plugin for Unreal.
www.rivetingrealms.com
I've contributed to the design of 2 camera systems in my career, and authored camera data for a few more. In my experience, the complexity of cameras is often overlooked.
โก๏ธ๐งต
Muriwai beach at sunset.
Muriwai beach at sunset.
First short trip out of Auckland: Muriwai. ๐คฉ
Goodbye Singapore!
It's been a very eventful 11 years. High highs, low lows. C'est la vie !
Throughout my journey I got to meet amazing people. Colleagues, friends and people that I now consider family. What a ride it's been!
On to the next adventure! ๐ซ๐ณ๐ฟ
I wish the games industry did a much better job at educating its audience on the cost of development.
We'd get healthier, less hostile conversations about free updates for premium titles, updates for live games with small communities, crowdfunding campaigns, etc.
I posted about the importance of designing for player perception, rather than objective mechanical balance.
Seems relevant to bring it back in this context:
bsky.app/profile/bob2...
The lie for this one was not so much on the developers side than it was on Nintendo's side.
What they showed in the marketing was actually impossible to detect reliably with the hardware present in the wiimote.
Their games "lied" as much as any other about the movements required to play.
Yes, I've encountered that when I was at Riot. The best you can do is show that you're listening and keep on adjusting. Over time, it buys a bit of credibility, trust and goodwill.
I find that designing these types of experiences takes a shift in mindset: design a possibility space, embrace the unknown possibilities and adjust based on data (playtests, tracked data if live).
These two twists on the genre's standards set it apart in a very good way: it feels like it's about musicianship, more than pure dexterity and memory as most rhythm games are.
Give it a try, it's a good lesson of how to integrate musicality into game design.
store.steampowered.com/app/2616170/...
2. Unlike all of the rhythm games I've ever played (and I've played a bunch!), its difficulty is not based on how many and how fast it can throw things at you. Instead, it's based on the complexity of the rhythm itself: syncopation, variations, embellishments, polyrhythms, etc.
1. While the rhythm you're expected to play to the music is always the same, the path to follow (i.e. whether a "note" is a movement up, down or a jump) is different every time.
It feels like sight-reading (i.e. reading sheet music you don't know as you play) and it's an exhilarating feeling.
I discovered ๐ก๐ฒ๐ฏ๐๐น๐ฎ ๐๐น๐ผ๐ yesterday.
It's a rhythm game that is clearly made by people who understand and love music.
You play as a girl following the path of a dog, each movement being synced to a music track.
It does 2 fundamental things differently that make it feel so musical. โ๐งต
#gamedesign
