David Svez

So sick!!!! As an obsessed person, appreciate your input to this masterpiece

Hi! Not at GDC (too obsessed with Marathon) but I guess I'd like to pitch in my #WhatAGameDevLooksLike!

I'm David, indie dev, producer, designer, videographer, writer, artist, making silly things.

Tonight, Painted Kingdoms made its debut at Les Pégases ✨
The demo is live on Steam right now, free to play.
bit.ly/49MsjMm

We'd love to know what you think 🔥

I've been running gdcparties.com for a few years now. Some shitty company BlueberryAI decided they'd just take all the source code for the work I've done and reskin it, advertising it as their own. Jokes on them...it was still linked to my events spreadsheet, and now their website looks like this 😉

Damn hell yeah that actually slaps wtf hahaha

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"There’s no time to hesitate
The horrors of the future race
And I can not
Undo what they have done"

I love all of Marathon but am I the only one that really disliked the track? It's just doesn't fit the rest of the brand. Too sobby, and the lyrics are just awful. Glad people enjoying this but damn this one took me out of hype and had to go back to previous released tracks for a palate cleanser.

Ight hit lvl 30 in marathon and I fucking love this gameeeeee can't wait!! Idk how I'm going to stay productive at the end of the weeeeeeeeeeek

back in 2016ish when I was pitching Hypnospace around, a publisher told me that they prefer the games they publish to either be *first* at doing a thing or *the best* at doing an extant thing. for anyone who needs to make money from their projects this is still true imo.

Because I struggle to think of how this devs looks at friction and player integration and goal of mass adoption and say "yeah that's a good genre / design for this type of a game".

Again, I personally love it, this game specifically speaks to me on a level most don't. But will it succeed? IDKKKKKKK

These observations made me think about games and how they position themselves as products on the global market. I would be curious to hear from someone at the top about this. How do they evaluate games at that level? Artistic integrity is a consideration but I doubt that it's a top 5 thing for them.

All that is to say, I can just see why people would prefer ARC over Marathon. One is reducing friction into fun mooments, the other is CREATING as much friction as possible, and I'm not sure if that's was the goal or not.

They obviously want people to like this game and for it to succeed!

3. Narrative hook is GIANT ROBOTS ON EARTH and "you are one of the survivors, we are in this together" which brings in the co-op narrative / roleplay into play. It's just more wholesome.

4. The "scavenge" is a way approachable mental model here.

Marathon is alien in every aspect of it's design, which is why I LOVE IT. But I can see why Arc Raiders comes into a conversation:

1. Starting map is made up of open spaces.

2. Arc's are "easy enough" to fight, annoying, but nothing you can't deal with in a few shots (and balanced console aim)

You could argue that ABI has no hook, but again, that game caters to a very specific audience of Tarkov players who want something more casual and comes from a Chinese market. It's free. Accessible, grounded.

But most importantly, I think the story aspect of this game is lacking massively. Why struggle? What is at the stake? From narrative perspective, the ship, the colony, the world mean nothing to someone who constantly faces friction of dying from players and bots. There's no hook here.

3. UESC are brutal. They have a very extreme fighting flow to them, you can't just hide away as they will push you. That results in constant friction. You start on hard mode right away basically, idk how someone could "easy into" playing Marathon.

2. Got a call in the middle of tutorial session. Timer is still clicking! Why is there timer in the tutorial? I couldn't tell if he died from the timer or because he got shot by UESC since he thought he had nothing to loose at that point.

I was silently watching my brother in law launch the game for the first time and encounter a lot of setbacks that dev's wouldn't even think they could encounter:

1. Extremely slow camera sensitivity + overwhelming button interactions= Threw them to the ground and spent 5 minutes looking for them

Not every Battlefield or COD player is "always aware and ready to shoot back" type of a player.

That's just ~1%

The rest go in, die 20 times and get a few kills back and are happy to have some type of experience out of the game, but key here is they are back in action within 5-10 seconds.

Most people on consoles (and pc too) are in the casual category and they don't have the skills the game requires to play this game. They play casual long-play games like minecraft or fallout/skyrim, Destiny is casual as well. Nothing that requires extreme situational awareness and game knowledge.

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The Marathon VS ARC Raiders discourse is interesting, because at first I dismissed it as "apples and oranges". Now I think it's a little more than meets the eye.

Some thoughts on gaming space and gamers when it comes to mass scales, would be curious to hear y'all thoughts on this as well:

Totally worth it

Made it!!!!1!1!1!

OH FUCK I FORGOT I HAD A NINE INCH NAILS CONCERT IN AN HOUR

We’ve got a beautiful animated trailer to announce our 1.0 release date. And we’re looking for a gaming site or YouTube channel to feature it. Anyone interested? 🌞

That's a sick ass trailer, whoever made, they did an awesome job! Got me interested!

The Knight of The Seven Kingdoms.... SO GOOD. If this was a film it would have been such a great film, I think I could make a fan cut at some point. Loved everything about it. Every character was great. It's just a good "hero" story. I miss those. 10/10. Also, every frame a painting?

Ight 2nd episode down. Not sure if I buy that people aren't weirded out by whole thing. Ain't buyiiiiing that. But will stick it out lol. I like it.

Okay first episode of Plaribus had me by the edge of the seat. But had flashbacks to "last of us" and "the last man on earth", so wondering where they will take this.