Life

[dibs]

That was three years ago.

[Nachimir]

#twitterchillers

(I miss Duncan Fyfe's twitter chillers).

[syntheticgerbil]

I tried it and holy crap is that game bad. The concept sounds absolutely perfect for me, and they blew it all on execution.

Yeah there's a long idiotic development history where it basically started as a more original concept in terms of FF Tactics type design (sort of) with myself at the helm of character concepts, then upper management happens, certain key members get replaced, and basically everything must be turned into a League of Legends rip off in terms of what sells, characters, art style, the style of character portraits, etc. Continuously the CEO was trying to get the parent company excited by citing all of Riot's numbers.

 

I was pushing for a cutsier style since it was originally supposed to be an iPad audience and it would be more simple to do in house with the people I actually worked with and reduce overtime, and not have to give tons of gratis work to the Chinese outsourcers that the parent company also owned. But then I guess because League is PC based and they have a stand alone EXE, that became all anyone wanted to do and target the "hardcore audience" and everything must look "bad ass." Those were the exact creative qualifying words used from that point on. So basically the studio director hired his buddy in as art director for a stupid amount of money ahead of every artist who had been at the studio for years, and then he could be the creatively bankrupt cypher artist that would not argue with him. I was taken off of all concept because of creative differences, and then I spent until the end of my time only animating the bad characters that came from China instead.

 

I guess the other side of it I didn't mention earlier is that I was initially super excited about what the game could have been and my heavy involvement with it and it was all kind of ripped away with a lot of my ideas completely scraped. I was very sad about that so that's part of the sour grapes.

[osmosisch]

Oh, I wasn't talking about the looks at all. Those are fine, though bland. The gameplay is what sucks. The minion turns being separate, and them just doing unreadable stuff at top speed, the lack of information overall, the arbitrary movement (off-grid seems like it is making a lot of trouble), no item shop that I could see so pure leveling, ugh... just Not Fun.

[Justin Leego]

My brother is out of the brain rehab unit!

 

Apparently he passed all the tests, which is unheard of. There are no specialists for him to see or anything. We have no idea whether or not anything will be wrong, but on the other hand none of the obvious stuff is wrong so yay

 

This is excellent.

[syntheticgerbil]

Ah, haha I guess I am more hung up on the looks of the game, the design stuff isn't really my department, but I do know the two designers doing the actual heavy lifting were having constant pushback by the CEO and studio director in passive aggressive manners. The week after I left one of the designers told me the art director buddy became official design (he was already making design decisions with his friend, the studio director, in the evenings outside of work and then stealthing in the changes with their other long time friend, one of the programmers). The two "designers" right now are only to do QA from now on for the project and never tweak the gameplay again.

 

But aside from that, the grid was an early argument and I guess the director and CEO were afraid a grid would be boring. That kind of divided everyone. I personally wanted the grid, but since League doesn't have a grid... But I'm also an artist and I don't really like to step on design's toes in any job unless it's in relation to the art. Any time I tested it, I was just picking random things with characters because even though I animated many of the moves, their effects were often too complicated or unreadable, so I tended to not give a shit. There's also an easy way to break the game overall by just keeping four together down an outer lane and hugging a wall the whole time. They've done a lot to counter that but in the end it can still be done, I think even now, because there's no grid and you could be 10 pixels out of someone's range easily.

 

As for the the item shop, yeah the game was designed around one and then it was completely axed because no one was working on it. Hooray.

[Roderick]

Welcome to the video games making business.

[syntheticgerbil]

Well, it's not the first game I've worked on by far, but it's definitely the most troubled that I've been through and the one I felt closest to in the concept stage. Before at the same company I created art and animation on a few garbage Facebook games with the pop ups and selling energy, but I guess I didn't care since they would never be anything more than what they were.

 

I think if I can keep this artist career going, I'm going to try much harder at the next company to separate myself from feeling anything for any of the projects. I should probably just put that all of that energy into personal projects instead.

[tegan]

My short-term benefits are apparently up next week, so now I have to go through the whole medical insurance thing again through a different insurance company. Here we go again!

 

(and just last night I decided to finally break down and splurge on a copy of Chibi-Robo)

[I_smell]

My new life in Hilversum is going extremely well, I'm riding bicycles everywhere and ordering sandwiches in extremely awkward, broken up Dutch.

 

I used to work from home and stay inside, but now I go to work every day and go to all sorts of meet-ups, and do touristy exploring. My new friends like going to things every other day because they're foreigners aswel. So that's much better than my bored, shut-in old friends.

Chatting to random people is a hundred times easier because:

A) I am the most eloquent speaker in the room as everyone else is from all corners of Europe.

and  Moving to a new country gives you a bottomless pit of none-specific things to talk about.

also C) Most people here already know what a computer game is.

When someone's English, they magnetically gravitate towards you for the rest of the night without thinking, so this is fucking easy.

 

I went to the barbers, neither of us knew what the hell the other was saying, and I got most of my hair shaved off. Which isn't even that bad cos I look pretty good and now everyone assumes I'm German or Russian. These are just more funny stories for me to USE on people.

Now I'm dying for this good-luck fumbling around to fall into place like a rom-com scenario where I bump into Jennifer Aniston for the first time in 10 years and we hook up.

 

I could go into much more boring detail about the passed month, but the gist is that it''s been generally positive.

[Roderick]

Yep, that's pretty much the Dutch Foreigner Experience^tm. We loooooove to hang around with English speakers to hone our own skills, and because most of us have a healthy interest (well, I at least) in people from strange and exotic cultures. That means you.

[Apelsin]

That means you.

Me?

[osmosisch]

Me?

Yes, if you're not Dutch.

[Nachimir]

Glad to hear that, I_smell

 

My friend Catherine moved to the Netherlands to study, and found speech really frustrating at first. She'd be trying to practice Dutch in shops and so on, but if people picked up the faintest flaw in it, they'd switch to English immediately. In the end though, I think that resulted in her accent becoming perfect.

[Twig]

I had my first coffee in a week this morning. MY GOD. SO DELICIOUS. I wish I could appreciate black coffee so I could get all overexcited and purchase a coffee press or whatever they're called and start buying good coffee beans and stuff. X: But making a mocha every morning... eh.

 

I'm sure I could eventually acclimate to black coffee, but I'm not sure I want to.

 

THIS IS MY GREATEST DILEMMA IN LIFE.

 

Okay but actually my greatest dilemma is I was recently appointed to The Prototyping Team (as in I AM the team, I'm the only one doing it) and I'm working on rapid prototyping of random ideas for the mobile platform which is SUPER AWESOME but they still don't know if it's a permanent thing and if it ends up not being permanent I will be super sad and sorta probably lose all my desire to continue working here. I hope it is permanent, because I love the people here.

 

...

 

Also I've been working from home all week because of the BART strike but I decided to come in today and was an hour and a half late because FUCK CALTRAIN and... There's nobody here. I'm really confused. I mean there are some people here. Maybe a bunch of people just took the day off since we had yesterday as a free holiday and working on a Friday after that is LAME-O.

 

...

 

Also known as: I'm in a weird happy mood this morning. HI EVERYONE!!

[elmuerte]

I'm riding bicycles everywhere and ordering sandwiches in extremely awkward, broken up Dutch.

It's like you were born here.

[Apelsin]

Sounds great Twig!

Hope the position is permanent!

[Twig]

I hope so, too!

 

Also it just occurred to me that some people I work with could easily trace me to here, because I use the same name on Steam and I've mentioned Idle Thumbs on occasion. I wonder if that will ever bite me in the ass!

[syntheticgerbil]

Oh man, those prototypes should lead to a good chunk of portfolio work. Glad to hear it!

 

I feel like Twig isn't specific enough to track down on Google though.

[Twig]

In most cases, sure, but if you know my Steam name and know I like Idle Thumbs, well, 2 + 2 ~= 4.

 

Portfolio! That's a good point, although... I'm not sure how much I'm allowed to share. They've been weirdly coy about some things. Like it's kind of on the down-low even within the company I guess because they don't want to make a big deal out of it. It's really weird.

[syntheticgerbil]

Ah, I don't know how much designers are willing to throw up on a portfolio site, but artists tend to violate all sorts of NDA when putting up their most recent work. You kind of commit career suicide if you don't even though you aren't supposed to. The first job I worked at my art director there told me unless a company finds your site and sends you a cease and desist, then don't ask and don't worry about it. But I'm sure that doesn't work out if you are working on high profile stuff that people do random searches for like the leaked stuff for Duke Nukem Forever.

 

But you could set up a quiet little site for your next employer to show off all your cool prototypes. I personally love seeing designer portfolios just because it's like a bunch of neat toys.

[Twig]

I'm actually a programmer who also wants to be a designer, heh. I guess you're right: throw it up regardless.

[Twig]

I'm actually a programmer who also wants to be a designer, heh. I guess you're right: throw it up regardless.

[elmuerte]

I'm actually a programmer who also wants to be a imposter, heh. I guess you're right: throw it up regardless.

[Twig]

WHAT