Approaching one year of unemployment is terrifying and bills need to be paid. A year of pitching The Arab League of Misfits yielded zero funding so far, and competing with 45K laid-off devs is bleak. I urgently need freelance or full-time remote roles
www.linkedin.com/posts/nazihf...
Friends, could you help me share this Kickstarter? It’s doing well but I need to extend its reach: www.kickstarter.com/projects/158...
Also, I'm persuaded there's an undercurrent of sexism to this whole attitude. Not targeted at individuals, but this whole "stem VS humanities", "logic VS emotions", "action!!! 💥 VS reading (ugh)" shit is just playground gendered bullying and it is impossibly dumb that we're entertaining it as adults
Narrative designers, we need to stop the people who don't respect narrative from getting away with using us as a way to discredit game writers 😤
(and most of the people who say this will not end up respecting us any more nor let us actually do the work we need to remove the "boring" friction)
What are we, twelve? come on
In 2026, I solemnely vow ✋ to no longer participate in the "not like other girls" ritual of pretending I agree that narrative in games is inherently annoying as a baseline and that it's just the natural course of the world that players want to skip everything because it's soooo boring 😩
??? Les gens disent ça ??? Je trouve sa performance exceptionnelle
It’s inaccurate to say Mario is brave and Luigi is cowardly
Luigi is afraid of death, so he runs away from danger. Mario is afraid of living, so he runs towards death. Both brothers are cowards in their own way
En France quand on veut traiter un problème (la comptabilité occulte) on crée un autre problème par dessus (obliger tout le monde à utiliser des usines à gaz).
The Dreams on a Pillow store page is live! If you want an emotional piece of Palestinian history, then please check it out! The team have been working really hard and are crowdfunding soon to raise more money to develop the game. Please wishlist 🖤
store.steampowered.com/app/4438850/...
Merci encore à toute l'équipe pour cet accueil !! 💜
C'était un véritable plaisir de pouvoir échanger !
(I'm having fun btw)
Coding for games is so funny, what do you MEAN it's the stupidest most negligeable yet non-negociable feature that is slowing the development to a crawl because of *one* idiotic exception in its logic, just after you breezed through the thing you were so stressed out about getting to work properly
It's apparently incredibly innovative to objectify everyone and sexualize everything (even MORE innovative if it's non-consensual!! 🤪), but if you *dare* to name things by their name you can't do your art and you need to be banned from every platform online because 🥺 think of the children... 🥺
I'm so mad that every big corpo/slop industry is getting more and more comfortable with fetish/softporn content while banning sex workers from existing, burying abuse cases, enforcing "grape" and "pdf files" language, criminalizing trans women...
This is all so gross everything is so gross
Congratulations!!!
an underrated game dev skill IMO is being able to realize “this person and I have been discussing (thing) for months, and yet i think we have slightly different versions of (thing) in our heads. let’s get together and talk about that in excruciating detail”
(anyway, it's all a very complicated subject matter, and there's a lot more to be said and figured out still)
(and it's just one of the many reasons why an in-house narrative designer cannot just be a vague presence you invite to meetings, and hope this somehow amounts to "now story and gameplay are magically meshed together thematically ✨")
(The power of consultancy is that you're an external actor capable of bringing in a bird's eye view without strings attached, so you don't have to tiptoe around internal politics and your own future in a production team. If you're a regular team member, on the other hand...)
(note: a consultant is a different beast entirely, but that's true of every discipline, not just writing/ND --yet NDs tend to be treated as in-house consultants quite often, which doesn't work and is less useful than it may first appear)
In short: narrative designers are game designers!!!!! They have basically the same needs as system designers and level designers in order to work effectively.
Trying to model their involvement after game writers' typical involvement in a game production (also flawed) is, imo, a big mistake!!
My two cents is: every single time I saw the promise of narrative design actually paying off so far, it was when deployed in small inter-dependant units of 2-3 people max with full access to a specific, extremely well defined area of design, accounting for iterations and in-engine tests.
...except NDs don't have access to the actual integration process, rarely have access to the engine, and therefore will need to defer to a team that might not even think to give them the space they need, even if they may want to in theory.
It's why I think narrative design (when ripped out of game design) was kind of a mistake. We removed the responsibility of cohesion from the core team and placed it, often, on an external actor who may find themselves at odds with a design team that suddenly has to contend with yet another cook.
And tbh I don't even really blame anyone here, I think the problem is deeply structural: almost no one really knows how to consciously integrate narrative design in the *design* process, and especially in the actual in-game integration process.
(yes. unfortunately it's still very much a problem 😔)
What they don't tell you about narrative design is how often you'll write novel-length amounts of documentation --not because you assume the team will read it, but because it's the only space you can genuinely own in the production.
So you write it, it influences nothing, and then you leave!! 😬
What the fucken hell do better @baftagames.bsky.social this i so shameful.
Multiple times Alyx offered to make changes. Trailer work infamously deals with lots of last minute changes and moving parts. And despite that, the door was open to make further changes, but no, cancelled THE NIGHT BEFORE.
J'ai eu l'immense plaisir de participer au podcast de Pixel Up récemment pour discuter de narrative design, d'économie dans le jeu vidéo, et de beaucoup d'autres choses !
Merci encore à toute l'équipe pour son accueil ! 💜