The event was called Amazon Private Business, which is a bit ironic seeing as I managed to gate-crash it.

Guess who thought the LGF Self Publishing Toolkit conference day was today, and just walked into an Amazon Business event.

It was on Tuesday.

😫

...................fuck

Like everything Yoko Taro, it's incredibly direct and honest, which is still such an unusual thing. I'm so bored of developers gushing about how much they love every aspect of their jobs. Tell me what you think is boring, what you phone in, what you just don't care about. Be a human being.

There were other mid-project orders too. I remember being told to name the towns and make a map. Up until then, I'd been using real names like France and Germany for the countries in the game. Then they told me to come up with original names. Their reasoning was something about unique worldbuilding and original place names being part of Enix's identity as an RPG maker.But that didn't really click with me. In the end, I fudged it by giving things random names like the Silent Forest or the Temple on the Ocean. For the map, I literally took a real map of Europe, flipped it upside down, and handed that in!

This story of how Yoko Taro designed the world map for the original Drakengard makes me feel SO SEEN. As does the section header, "No Interest in Worldbuilding".

(From the lovely new book The Wor[l]ds of Yoko Taro)

WORK KLAXON! (Very small) paid gig!
Are you:

* A concept artist with demonstrable environment experience
* Based in the UK
* Available for one or two days next week

If so, ping me your portfolio! ❤️

xoxo gossip girl

I'm so sorry, Leigh.

A conversation with Vodafone's completely useless chatbot, TOBi, in which it says it's sorry it hasn't been able to help me, asks if I'd like to speak to an agent, and then when I say yes -- PICKED FROM A LIST OF YES OR NO, NOT EVEN TYPED -- it says it can't understand, because it's a piece of shit that deserves to be slung into the cold, dark, merciless void of space.

I swear to the highest of highs, Vodafone: I will find every person who enabled and developed this shitheap of a chatbot, and I will erase them. Not kill them, no -- I will so comprehensively destroy them that there will be no trace of them ever having existed, even in their dearests' memories.

The Guardian does amazing work in the data visualization field, and this is a great way of demonstrating an issue I didn't even know existed.

This game is so good - massive congratulations on making it to launch, Moo and team! Hugely compulsive, tight writing, and fun characters. Highly recommend it to anyone who liked Murder by Numbers and wants something compelling and cosy.

I love flip/foldable phones but fucking hell they are still SO flaky. Now the touchscreen of my Z Flip 6 isn't working, and it seems like it's a pretty common issue. And fixing them is expensive too - might make more sense to just buy a new mid-range phone instead

SQUARE ENIX MUSIC COVER SPECIAL LIVE - Guitar - YouTube video by SQUARE ENIX MUSIC Channel

Like game music? Right now Square Enix Music's YouTube channel is doing a live guitar performance livestream to celebrate their 4th anniversary. I'm loving it!

youtu.be/AwMBe2axi5o

"waaaaay ahead of you, buddy."

yes! and getting a coffee and chatting to whoever was also doing that. or having someone come up and go: "coffee?" and then getting The Update on whatever project drama was happening. Ugh.

hahahaha definitely haven't just seen something that's going to turbocharge my insecurities for a good few years. nope.

yeah, I used to go to a nice game dev one, but then it closed :(

the few times I've been to general coworking spaces it's always felt a bit cold and unfriendly... but maybe I've not been to the right one yet!

The other day I thought about how I hadn't been to an office in over 2 years and... it made me really sad? I really miss it. I know that's not what you're supposed to say but, man. I would kill for an office! And colleagues! 😭

FYI for fellow narrative designers/game writers: the studio in question is Sentona Games and it’s my understanding they are currently interviewing to replace me. Be very careful with them. They were very nice to me and easy to work with right up until I needed the money I was promised.

shit is gonna get DONE.
I tried Concerta for one day and it gave me the WORST anxiety so I'm a max Elvanse guy, but welcome to the top tier babyyyyyyyy

Wait, Anna Camp is a lesbian now? It's nominative determinism gone mad!!!!

thanks for playing our lil' game man! Hope you enjoy it :)

Steam Next Fest banner for Mythmatch showing a start date of Feb 23rd and ending on March 2nd.

Mythmatch in Steam Next Fest is Live!

It's a narrative-rich, town-building match-3 game!

store.steampowered.com/app/2490290/...

The demo will be live all week, but the first two days tell Steam how much to show it so please

🎮 Play the Demo!
✅ Wishlist the Game!
📢 Spread the word!!

I will definitely take you up on this! It might take a while (I need to get this other project in shape first) but one day for sure!

This piece was SO fucking good - the perfect balance of erudite analysis and barely-contained fury.

Hey Ren'Py peeps, please get on this, I still need to find a narrative picross game that scratches the itch that made me make MbN.

(After all, I never actually got to experience MbN as a player, so it remains very much unscratched 😭)

(This is the true cost of 'make the game you'd want to play')

Plus all the QoL stuff that we fucked up and @alblune.bsky.social absolutely nailed.

I hope someone open-sources their picross engine someday (or sells it, whatever) - it'd really help push the genre forward. If I owned the source code to MbN I would!

Oh this is super cool, I hope lots of Ren'Py people use it!

The difficult part for me would be the solver to give you the correct hints about where you can make moves etc - I remember it giving our coder some trouble, but we got there!

oh you 🥹

yeah absolutely. I keep wondering if there's some deal I can do with one of the other indies that's made a Picross game to get their Picross engine (it's surprisingly complicated!). Wouldn't be hard to do the VN stuff around it.

basically: it cost so much more to make it as part of a 300-person company than if I did it now as an indie. Add the sudden success of Fall Guys to that and it becomes a situation that I think is understandable, if regrettable for sure.