New plan for [SELF:STORAGE] dev logs: gonna make ‘em paid. Sorry!

It’s just… the read rate is way low for the effort I put into dev logs, and I lose free subscribers every time I post one.

(Did you know Substack tells authors the email address of each unsubscriber? Might not want to use your full-name email address or your personal domain when you subscribe, if you don’t want us authors to know who you are when you unsubscribe :) Protect your privacy and right to unsubscribe to stuff without identifying yourself to the author!)

So, I’m going to make dev logs more expressly opt-in (and earn a few bucks for my time spent making them pretty for the internet) via paywalling them. I’ll keep the free stuff limited to not-dev-log posts (narrative/games industry advice, insights, analysis, etc.), because I gather that’s why most of you are here.

“Wait, I was enjoying those dev logs, but I’m not a paid subscriber, and I don’t want to be!” —One or two of you, maybe.

That’s okay! I’ll go back from time to time and make old dev logs free, so if you want, you can catch up on them then. (And I’ll alert y’all in the intro of a free post when that happens.)

I just figure, when these dev logs go live and hit people’s inboxes, if they’re paid-subscriber-only posts, I’m far less likely to lose free subscribers over posting them. And I care about you :)

I’ll also run sales on paid subscriptions every now and then, so keep an eye out in the intro of future free posts.

(Paid subscriptions are ordinarily $7 CAD/month, by the way, or $70 CAD/year if you subscribe annually – and if you subscribe for just one month to binge future dev logs, I’d have no way of knowing your intent, but would commend you on your savvy money-saving, because honestly I’ve done the same with creators I can’t afford to support long-term.)

The first two dev logs will remain free forever – and if you’re like, “Huh, what are we even talking about?”, start here.

I get it, by the way – most of you subscribed to this blog looking for free advice/insights/analysis, not to follow my overly verbose solo dev journey where I make a ton of stupid puns. I don’t take it personally! (Though if you wanted me to, sorry, I’ll try to take it more personally next time.)

So, back to our irregularly scheduled programming of infrequent advice/insights/analysis posts for free subscribers, and more regularly scheduled dev logs for paid subscribers!

Mail time, mail time, maaaaail time!

Here’s a question from a reader via LinkedIn (lightly edited for clarity):

“I haven’t found a games role yet, but something I want to know about cancellations since they happen so often: if a game you’re working on gets cancelled and it’s under NDA, how do you show your work on it in your resume and portfolio? How do you talk about the work in interviews?”

Short answer: You don’t! End of post. :(

Long answer*:

*As a reminder, I’m a data point of one, speaking only to my own experiences. Read far and wide to take in additional perspectives on this and any other matter you might bring to my inbox.

Some of the coolest stuff I’ve worked on in the games industry is stuff I’ve never been able to add to my portfolio because of the awesome combination of strict indefinite NDA + cancelled project.

1. There was my first full-time contract gig in ye olde 2000s as I was making the segue from full-time gaming journalism to full-time game development. I’d picked up a bunch of little contracts over the couple of years before then, lots of one-offs on smaller projects, but this contract was my first full-time AAA engagement.
   
   I was a subcontractor of an outsourced dev partner working with a AAA studio that made a well-known action-adventure franchise. A ghostwriter’s ghostwriter, basically. I was never going to see my name in the credits and it was hazy whether I could even use the work in my portfolio, anyway, but dang if I wasn’t excited as all get-out to jump in for the experience. (I was a wee dev, hungry for anything, even if it *didn’t* pay in exposure.)
   
   I wrote a series of side quests that were meant to unfold over the course of the game’s golden path – great worldbuilding and character-deepening, optional story for the narrative-minded player. Got a ton of high praise, quests greenlit for production… annnnnd the game was cancelled.
   

2. There was the fantasy action RPG with an IP so high profile, even a newborn baby would recognize it. Small AA studio co-developing a AAA title whose other entries in the series had made a literal billion dollars.
   
   I made a labyrinth mission – not only the story and dialogue, but the level blockout, set dressing, combat, rewards, cinematic moments, the whole bag. I did it fast, too, to pitch a playable prototype in an hour of need. It was badass and fun, and I was super excited about it. Once again got a ton of high praise, greenlit for production…. annnnnd the game was cancelled.
   

3. There was the story-driven branching-narrative game I’d spun up from scratch, meant to be a big mobile studio’s next hit – I led the development charge, held the creative vision, shepherded our team through months of preproduction. Projected audience of over a million monthly active players. Praise, excitement, yadda yadda… annnnnd the game was cancelled.

Whomp, whomp. And those are just a few isolated examples, out of many, where I feel like I can get away with that level of detail. (That’s about the level of detail I’d suggest erring toward if you find yourself talking about cancelled games that are under NDA, but that’s just me.)

Always, it was some uncontrollable outside force leading to the game’s cancellation, not the fault of the devs on the ground, who did awesome work. Investors reneging, some board room decision, some company restructuring (or shuttering), some publisher chicanery, what have you. And always, usually because of the IPs involved, our indefinite NDAs prevented us from ever speaking to specifics about the project or sharing our work in our portfolios.

Which is so, so kneecapping. Especially because it’s the sort of experience that gets you noticed. Renowned IPs and your impact thereupon land you interviews and roles, arbitrary as it may be. But thaaaaaat is how the world woooorks.

Sure, in some cases, you might be able to sign a Mutual NDA, and can then speak a bit more freely in preliminary chats or interviews – but that’s only once you’re already in the hiring process. Doesn’t help much when you’re trying to get your resume and portfolio in front of people, but your materials are missing those renowned IPs and demonstrations of work that would grab the attention of a skimming recruiter or hiring manager.

Well, that sucks

Agreed. One shift I would love to see across the industry is a relaxing of NDA restrictions after a game’s cancellation. As if the layoffs aren’t bad enough, barring devs from being able to speak about the games they’ve worked on or showcase that work in their portfolio adds so much insult to injury. The combo of layoff + strict NDA essentially wipes out years of a dev’s experience. Insult to injury, man. Insult to injury.

But, to our question-asker and other junior devs thinking about how the heck you’ll ever be able to build resumes and portfolios amidst this landscape of cancellations and layoffs, my advice? No, not break your NDAs. You wouldn’t want to stoke the ire of those high-profile IP lawyers. My advice is to try to avoid those kneecapping-NDA situations entirely by not chasing roles on high-profile IP, unannounced, might-get-cancelled AAA projects.

So… what, then?

One alternative: target roles on already-established live games.

You’ll start off learning the ropes within the live production cycle, which at least gives you solid hands-on experience – something you can showcase on your resume and in your portfolio, tied to something that exists on a storefront. Even if the game shuts down, it still was live at one point. Its very existence is not locked behind an NDA, and so you can discuss it far more than you’d be able to discuss a cancelled, unreleased game that you have to pretend never existed per your strict NDA.

I spent a solid 10 years out of the last 20 on live games – most all of which are still live today, actually. I can point people to work examples to offset the cancelled stuff I can’t talk about.

(Of course, the barrier I’ve encountered with my live games experience is that many of those games released first on mobile, and people (who have never worked on a mobile game yet have no problem making unfounded assumptions about their development) still think mobile games < non-mobile games, despite the max-speed full-cycle development cadence that repeats on an infinite loop to ship new content and features over the course of a live game’s lifetime. Live games have mere months to do what not-live games take years to do – and mobile games can get just as deep on storytelling and systems. It’s all the same parts of game dev as PC/console, but faster and forever. But I digress.)

Does narrowing your job search to live games add complexity and tension to the already complex and tense task of maneuvering the landscape of the layoff-happy games industry? ‘Course. Is it fair that so, so often you pour years of your life into a project, and then that experience can’t even help you find your next role after the project gets cancelled and you’re laid off? ‘Course not.

Working in games (particularly AAA games) is rarely ever on the side of the game developer. We’re largely milked for profit and disposed of the second it’s more cost-effective to cut ties than continue onward. You’re a number on a spreadsheet, a cost benefit/risk calculation, to even the most “We’re all family!”-valued of studios. I have been a department manager in these meetings; I have seen people reduced to row items in spreadsheets firsthand, with execs showing no regard for the quality of their work or the circumstances of their lives. In layoff and budget discussions, you are not a person with a mortgage, kids, a health condition, aging parents, hopes of retiring sometime before the age of 102. You are not the incredible work you do nor the sacrifices you make to destroy your work/life balance for a shareholder’s yacht money.

Yikes

Yeah. I don’t say this to upset any junior devs (or fellow vets who know the score and wish it weren’t so low); I say this so that you’re not gaslit into thinking this is a stable, fair industry. It is neither of those things. It is an industry, like so many in our dystopia, largely calculated to extract maximum shareholder value – and f–k everyone on the ground, f–k your resume and portfolio, f–k your ability to leverage your experience for your next role. This is end-stage capitalism, baby.

So, try to target roles on live games so that you have something you can point to that exists (or has existed) in the public eye… and work on your backup plan. For example, did you know Wind Turbine Technicians make upwards of $100,000/year? Higher ceiling than most game dev jobs. Lot of technical schools offer job placement, too, could pay off your student loans pretty quick. Food for thought – and inspiration for your moonlit indie game about wind turbine technicianing!

Half-joking aside (and barely-contained rage at capitalism somewhat simmered), that’s my experience with NDAs and take on how you might avoid the pitfalls of being kneecapped on your resume and portfolio after a game gets cancelled. (Seek other input, though – remember, I’m just a data point of one.)

Good luck out there. I’m sorry it’s like this. I wish the previous generations had built a better industry for you (and me, too). I wish it hadn’t all fallen into the hands of a few get-rich-quick schemesters playing Monopoly with our livelihoods. I wish art were prized above profit. I wish NDAs were more fair to devs. I wish layoffs weren’t rampant. I wish we still had entry-level roles. I wish we could confidently spend 40 years in the industry, if we want to, and walk away able to retire comfortably with our sanities mostly intact.

Ugh. I’m sad now. Here are my cats for some dopamine:

Further (flavorful) thoughts

I penned the above article a few weeks ago, before the entire team who built Highguard was laid off, two weeks after launch, and I have to ask, what the actual fuck are we doing, games industry?

It’s nothing new, laying off entire teams after a game’s launch. It’s despicable, but it’s nothing new. Used to be a less common story, though. Now it’s everywhere, all the time.

Seriously, what the actual fuck are we doing, games industry? (If you don’t like f-bombs in your Substack reads, I’m sorry, but these are warranted.)

You don’t ship a game – due to factors outside of any individual contributor’s control – you get laid off. You ship a game – and whether it’s a success or not – you get laid off. And either way, unwarranted as it may be, there’s a recruiter or a hiring manager out there who’s going to see your resume and have a bias, unconscious or not, because your game was cancelled, or it shipped but didn’t meet some arbitrary, unattainable measure of instant success (which, ironically, would’ve meant you kept your job).

What the actual fuck are we doing.

Juniors and aspiring devs, you’re worried you’ll never get into this industry, and I get how disappointing that is, to have a dream to work in commercial game development at a studio and feel like the gate is barred and there’s no convenient halligan lying next to the entrance. I have dreams that I feel cut off from, too; I’ve been pursuing a side hustle designing merch for my favorite band for years, and I can’t get any traction, no matter how much passion and effort I pour into it. Smaller example as compared to your full-time career goals, but still disheartening af. I understand your yearning.

But I can’t stress enough how getting into the games industry is not a golden ticket. Even if you get lucky to land one gig, there’s no guarantee of work. No guarantee of longevity, no matter how much you bust your ass. Six months from now, a year from now. Certainly not five years or ten years from now. I worry every damn day about how long each gig will last, and what happens after. Will the game get cancelled? Will we all get laid off after launch? Looking at the numbers across the industry, the probability of either happening is a lot higher than everyone keeping their jobs for the long-haul.

What the actual fuck are we doing, games industry? What the actual fuck?

Nintendo first entered my life when I was about six. I’d been gaming for half my life by then – impressive, yes – on PC and in arcades.

When I was around three, my dad had taught me how to load a 3.5” floppy disk into our family computer and what to type to start the game. I marveled at the power of a few keystrokes to bring Katie’s Farm and Reader Rabbit to my fingertips, and would lose hours to those 16-bit worlds.

On weekends, we’d spend our time at Aladdin’s Castle arcade in the Rhode Island mall, playing Galaga, PacMan, and Feed Big Bertha (a ball-toss game who’s theming wouldn’t fly today, but made me giggle as a four-year-old).

I loved games from my earliest memories of human consciousness – but it wasn’t until Game Boy that I met Nintendo, and set into motion the course of my life as I know it today.

I often slept over my grandparents’ house when I was a kid. They lived by beaches and playgrounds in southern Rhode Island, a more idyllic setting than the suburban strip-mall’d sprawl of my Warwick hometown. My parents would drop me off for summer breaks – See ya in a month! – and I was happy as the clams my grandmother and I would spot swimming in the shallows.

And whenever I slept over that house by the beach, I’d squat in my aunt’s former bedroom. She was in her early 20s at the time, in and out of digs between roommates and boyfriends – you know, that transitional early adulthood period we all have in which half our stuff gets shepherded from apartment to apartment while the other half is still home with our parents.

In that pile of stuff my aunt left at her parents’ house, in the corner of my borrowed bedroom of school breaks, was an incredible box.

Part 1: The Game Boy Years

It was breathtaking, full of possibility. Games I could take anywhere! And not just one game – multiple! The box promised “interchangeable game packs”, a concept filled with stunning promise and wonder.

Right there in my hands, anywhere I went, I could be gaming. Not relegated to the family computer back home in Warwick, nor would I have to bargain with my grandparents for gaming time on their computer in the basement, sprinting through Carmen Sandiego runs between my grandfather’s e-correspondences and Word Art forays into flyer-making for his brass band (The Romps - “Retired Old Men Playing Swing”).

“PLEEEEEASE, CAN I HAVE YOUR GAME BOY?” I begged my aunt. Every time I saw her. On repeat. For weeks.

If memory serves, it wasn’t even her Game Boy – her unopened, brand new, never-used Game Boy, sitting forlorn by itself, unplayed in a pile of forgotten left-behinds. It was some roommate’s or friend’s or boyfriend’s she was holding onto for some reason or another. But my six-year-old brain had no room for such complex ponderings, and such minor details as ownership didn’t stop me begging.

“You’ve never even opened it,” I wheedled and needled. “It’s just sitting there!”

I can’t remember why she relented – all I recall is that finally, finally, one day, she did.

And that day changed everything.

She didn’t have any games to gift me along with the Game Boy, but I didn’t let that stop me turning the Game Boy on and off over and over again, just to see the Nintendo logo scroll into view and hear that iconic “da-ding!”

I’m quite sure I annoyed the ever-living hell out of my grandparents with that “da-ding”, because we found ourselves at K. B. Toys in short order, my grandmother allowing me one game.

I picked Kirby’s Pinball Land – a solid choice for my six-year-old sensibilities (pretty sure I saw pink character and thought “This must be for girls”).

And that was that. I was hooked. My Game Boy went everywhere with me – eventually requiring a little bag to carry all my game cartridges and chicken-scrawled notes of level passwords and cheat codes. From Kirby’s Pinball Land, my collection expanded: Tetris Blast, Animaniacs, Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins, Donkey Kong Land (its cartridge a glorious banana yellow).

I gamed in the car. I gamed on the bus. I gamed through recess. I gamed at family gatherings, after school, through weekends. My AA battery consumption was a catastrophe for the climate. But little Amanda and her Game Boy were the happiest duo the world had seen since Mario and Luigi.

Until the Nintendo 64 entered my life.

Part 2: The Nintendo 64 Years

It was the turn of the millennium. My Game Boy had seen me through the best parts of my childhood, along with the worst: my parents’ divorce, my coke-bottle glasses and inexplicable 50-pound weight gain, the relentless torture of my peers for my appearance and newfound child-of-divorce poverty.

I had escape in the form of the little virtual worlds at my fingertips. I had distraction. I had a way to tune out what was happening around me. And this was absolutely critical. But it wasn’t until the Nintendo 64 that I found purpose and belonging.

One of 9-year-old Amanda’s only friends had this cool new game console and invited little Amanda over for a Friday night sleepover to check it out. That sleepover ended up lasting until Sunday – because that console was the Nintendo 64, and we literally could not stop playing The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.

Coming from the gray-green 2D worlds of my Game Boy, I was stunned. I couldn’t believe this 3D open world with its enormous offerings, soaring music, incredible sense of purpose.

This wasn’t just a game; it was a reason to exist. It was a call to adventure. It was a hero’s journey, and I was the hero.

By some stretch of the budget, my dad was able to find a Nintendo 64 console for the two of us to share. To this day, I’m not sure how he managed, from whom he had to borrow and beg. But after I came home from my sleepover raving about this incredible console and game, he saw a chance to bring some delight into my little darkening world.

After all, he was the first to introduce me to games – and was my stalwart gaming buddy since that first floppy disk. I passed him my Game Boy when the Donkey Kong Land platforming got too hard, and kicked his butt in Tetris Blast high scores. And lord knows we spent countless hours finding stars in Super Mario 64 – and trying to trick our way to the top of the castle, just to see if Yoshi was up there like everyone said.

But Ocarina of Time was the first game that we completed in full together, passing the controller from the off. One of us would man the strategy guide while the other manned the sticks, and back and forth we’d trade. At the start of every other weekend that I’d spend at my dad’s, we’d rent the cartridge from the local movie’n’game rental shop, and make as much progress as we could, praying no one else would overwrite our save in between rentals.

We galloped around Hyrule for months, exploring every nook and cranny, finding every last secret. And in those gaming sessions, I was important. I mattered to the fate of these characters. Moreover, I was the only one who could save the world. I can’t overstate what a critical need that sense of purpose was for me at that time in my life. Kids were cruel, life was so outside of my control, but Hyrule welcomed me with overwhelming joy and gave me a reason to be there.

I’d never before known a game to cultivate this living, breathing world the way Ocarina of Time did. The unique character personalities and dialogues, the interwoven quest lines, the distinct regions. Every moment I spent in Hyrule felt like a moment that mattered, where I had real agency to change the outcome of events that threatened to overwhelm the good people of this world.

I had no such agency in real life, but my adventures in Hyrule gave me the catharsis and confidence that 10-year-old Amanda desperately needed.

When finally came the day to defeat Ganon, my dad handed me the controller. “You can do it, you don’t need me.” But I did – or, at least, I needed him to experience it, too. When Ganondorf transformed into Phantom Beast Ganon, I passed the controller back, letting my dad swing the final felling blows.

And as the credits scrolled, both of us were filled with the bittersweet realization that we’d done it, and we’d soon be leaving behind all of our friends. But then another realization crept over me. Those names floating over the sweeping vistas of Hyrule as the orchestra played on? Those were people. Real people who had made this game.

What was stopping me from being one of those people when I grew up? What was stopping me from becoming a person who makes games?

Plenty, as it turned out – but nothing I couldn’t overcome. After all, hadn’t my years of Nintendo gaming taught me that I could achieve any goal if I just kept trying?

Part 4: The GameCube Years

In 2003, when I was 15 years old, my dad unexpectedly passed away. My best gaming buddy, the smartest and funniest guy I knew, the person to introduce me to games and cultivate my interest in the artform, my biggest supporter of my dream to work in games someday, was gone.

It’s hard, even now, to talk about how dark the world became. I won’t linger on that; instead, I’ll speak to what brought me through.

The brightest light in my life through this time was a shade of purple. One of the first GameCube games I added to my collection was The Legend of Zelda: Collector’s Edition, containing The Legend of Zelda, The Adventure of Link, Ocarina of Time, and Majora’s Mask.

The boxy GameCube offered me the opportunity to see my friends in Hyrule, where my dad and I had spent so much time together. Revisiting the temples and fields we’d explored together was a way to keep him close to me. Dialogue lines over which we’d laughed brought him back to me, even if only in spirit.

I decided to play Majora’s Mask for the first time – a game my dad and I had discussed playing on the N64, but had never gotten the expansion pack to enable us to do so. I don’t think 15-year-old Amanda was prepared for what Termina had to offer.

Through Majora’s Mask’s themes of grief, loss, longing, and inevitability, I found crucial resonance that helped me process my dad’s death. This darker entry in the series mapped perfectly – if such a thing could be considered perfect – to this darkest time of my life. Once more, Nintendo was there for me, the quality and depth of its games bringing to my life a sense of understanding I couldn’t find anywhere else.

Part 5: The Years of DS, Wii, and Wii U

As if I’d played the Song of Double Time, life sped ahead after high school. I found myself working at a GameStop, making good use of my employee discount to collect consoles. I’d also started freelancing for video game magazines, pursuing my dream of working in the games industry – and my first-ever published article was about The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword.

I recall those years in shared apartments with multiple roommates, playing endless rounds of Mario Kart and Mario Party. I recall those years in Animal Crossing villages carefully tended to by dormmates. In gut-busting giggles over Wario Ware drinking games. In heeding the call to adventure once more in Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword. In Kirby’s Epic Yarn, in Yoshi’s Woolly World, in galaxies of Super Mario. In heated, epic, controller-thrown matches of Smash Brothers old and new – but always in good fun, friendships mended in the end.

My early 20s – not unlike those of the aunt who’d gifted me that first Game Boy – were a tumble from one apartment to the next, one job to the next. Always hustling for that foot in the door in the games industry.

And throughout it all, I had my Nintendo collection keeping me going. That north star that had come to mean so very much to me, that had set the bar to which I held all other games. Sure, I had played Playstations, Sega consoles, Xboxes – but it was Nintendo, time and time again, that captured me and held on tight.

Nintendo’s commitment to quality. Nintendo’s characterful, colorful worlds. Nintendo’s keen design choices, crunchy game loops, willingness to experiment and explore ideas that would make other game studios balk. Nintendo brought us dual screens, motion controls, Amiibo, cardboard creations – always willing to take a risk to find the fun.

At the core of it all was play – and that play, that bottomless well of joy and challenge and sense of accomplishment, kept me alight.

Part 6: The Switch Years

In 2017, I moved from the United States to Germany for my second full-time “grown-up” job in games. I went from Lead Writer and Narrative Designer at Backflip Studios, where I’d worked with DragonVale and Hasbro brands after transferring over from Hasbro HQ, to Wooga, where I shortly became Lead Writer and narrative vision-holder of June’s Journey (Germany’s first game to gross $1 billion!).

You know what I packed with me in my carry-on?

Through two legs of a 16-hour flight, with my cat/best friend Squish in a carrier at my feet, I gamed through my transition across the ocean. I was terrified of what I was doing – leaving behind everyone and everything I’d ever known and loved to move to a country where I didn’t speak the language, where I was acquainted with only three people (also from Backflip Studios, incidentally) – but I had my Nintendo console. And just like it had nearly 20 years before, it would get me through anything to come.

As I began an odyssey of my own, I had my familiar characters to keep me company. I had 999 Power Moons to collect. I had a new Breath of the Wild save to start – having, of course, played the heck out of it already on the Wii U – and almost as many Korok Seeds to collect. And I had Mario Kart 8 to tether me to the friends I’d left behind. We might’ve been an ocean apart, but Moo Moo Meadows was only a few button-taps away.

The more Power Moons I collected, the better my German got. The more Divine Beasts I conquered, the easier it became to navigate the S-bahn and the M. Life in Germany started to feel less like the worst mistake I’d ever made, and more like my dreams coming true. Because there I was, working full-time in the games industry, just like I’d decided when I was 10 years old.

Nintendo console in hand when I’d decided on my dreams; Nintendo console in hand as I was living them.

Part 7: Nintendo, now and forever

After Wooga, my career in games took me from Germany to Denmark, then over to Canada, then back to the US, then back to Canada again. And through it all? You guessed it: Nintendo.

When I was directing the narratives of A Thinking Ape’s catalogue of games and writing for our monthly offerings of story quests, I had Tears of the Kingdom sending my synapses into a frenzy of fusion possibilities. When I was navigating yet another layoff in 2024, I had The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom to offer the first playable Zelda experience outside of a Smash game.

And when I relocated to Montreal after landing at That’s No Moon, another adventure in which I knew no one and had a limited grasp of the local language, I had my Switch 2 and Mario Kart World. I had hours of roaming around this incredible feat of design, this culmination of years of MK iterations and explorations, whether with friends online or just my cats on the couch beside me.

Nintendo has been such a constant presence in my life. Through every transition, through every turmoil. Every time I felt lost and alone. Every time I didn’t know what to do next. Every time I felt uninspired or hopeless. There was always Nintendo, always a game into which I could throw myself and come out the other side renewed.

Nintendo has long been my north star in games. When I look to other games for inspiration in my own work, it’s frequently Nintendo games that come to mind. How their characters stand out, how their gameplay always finds the fun, how their worlds feel so rich and inspired.

I look to Nintendo, too, as north star for the state of the games industry and its endless cycle of layoffs. Rather than cut people, Nintendo execs cut their own salaries – nigh unheard of, but the clearest example of the heart that sits at the core of everything they do.

And when I think about why I remain in games, despite the difficulties across the industry, it’s because of Nintendo. Because if I were to find myself laid off again, it’s Nintendo to which I’d apply first for the chance to work on the game franchises that changed my life. It’s Nintendo where I’d see my dreams come full circle.

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that I wouldn’t be where I am today if it weren’t for Nintendo. It might not even be an exaggeration to say that I wouldn’t be on this earth today if it weren’t for Nintendo, and all the many brilliant games that carried me.

Thank you, Nintendo. From that first “da-ding!” on the Game Boy to that satisfying “snap!” every time I start my Switch 2, it’s always been you. It’s always been your way of bringing light and joy in the times I’ve needed it most.

Love,

Amanda

This one came in from LinkedIn:

How do you make instructional character dialogue interesting? Games with companion characters, for example, often have bark lines that tell the player what to do; usually very plain and straightforward. Is that just best practice? Or can we have fun with them?

Great question!

(As always, I’m just one lil guy with my own lil thoughts from my own lil experiences; none of what I say here is gospel, you are free to take or leave it!)

The role of these barked instructional lines – often called “nags” or “hints” – is primarily, well, instruction.

Nags’n’hints are typically delivered when a player is stuck on a puzzle, or goes the wrong way, or just learned a new mechanic and needs some concept reinforcement, etc. The idea is to guide the player to the next course of action.

You’re right that nags’n’hints are usually short and straightforward, and you’re right that it is something of a best practice.

The function of these lines, after all, is to deliver instruction, not necessarily narrative flair:

• “Did you check the drawer?”

• “You’re going the wrong way.”

• “Try drawing your sword.”

[Aside: There’s an aspect of systemic vs. bespoke lines to consider – which is to say, lines that are recycled throughout the game and triggered when certain systemic conditions are met vs. lines that are specifically authored for specific one-off moments in gameplay – but we’ll keep things simple and save the granularity of that distinction for a future article. Assume the distinction doesn’t matter for now.]

But does it have to be so on the nose?

I’m in the camp of let’s have fun with them, myself. Leverage the tone of your game à la your characters to make nags’n’hints more characterful. As much as you can, without muddling the instructional message, use a character’s distinct voice and personality to give instructions some pizzazz.

Take “You’re going the wrong way.” What are some ways we can express that in a character’s own voice?

• GLaDOS might say, dripping with sarcasm,
  “Oh. You’re going that way. That’s certainly a choice.”
  

• Astarion might say, in all his silky charm,
  “Did I drink too much of your blood, darling? Feeling a bit woozy? Because you’re going the wrong way.”
  

• The narrator from the Stanley Parable might say, ever omnipotent,
  “Stanley seemed to have his own idea of where to go, even if it was entirely the wrong idea.”

Do these lines still communicate “You’re going the wrong way”? Yes! Do the lines communicate that sentiment in distinct character voices? Also yes!

But what’s the trade-off?

There are a few trade-offs to this approach of making nags’n’hints more characterful:

• The above example characterful lines are longer than “You’re going the wrong way”, which means:

  • → more writer load → costs more time/money

  • → more localization load, if the game is localized → costs more time/money

  • → more VO load, if the game is voiced → costs more time/money

    • → more audio load → could cut into other audible things going on in the scene

  • → potentially more implementation load, depending on your setups and pipelines

  • → more cognitive load on the player to read

    • → more subtitle/UX on-screen → more visual load → could cut into other visual things going on in the scene

Another consideration: nags’n’hints often repeat. And long, characterful lines? Not so cute after you’ve heard them repeat 17 times in as many minutes. (The short lines aren’t so cute on repeat, either, but at least they’re shorter.)

So what’s a happy medium approach?

Here’s a nag’n’hint structure you might have seen in a few games (and if you haven’t, you may start to notice it now):

• After some amount of time of the player not progressing:

  • First nag/hint is characterful, on the longer side

• After some more time of no progression:

  • Second nag/hint is a little more straightforward, shorter

• After yet more time:

  • Third nag/hint is outright plain, short

• Any subsequent nag/hint after even more time:

  • A more blatantly obvious variation of outright plain’n’short

Sometimes it’s five, sometimes it’s three, sometimes it’s two – but the general idea is to get shorter and more obvious with the instruction with each progressive nag/hint.

Let’s take that structure and give it to GLaDOS:

• First nag/hint: “Oh. You’re going that way. That’s certainly a choice.”

• Second: “That’s still the wrong way, you know.”

• Third: “Stiiiill the wrong way.”

• Fourth: “Try going left.”

• Fifth: “Go left.”

Buuuuuut… something’s off, isn’t it?

Because GLaDOS wouldn’t just make a few quips and then point you in the right direction (or left direction, as it were). She would relish in the opportunity to berate you for going the wrong way:

• “Oh. You’re going that way. That’s certainly a choice.”

• “That’s still the wrong way, you know.”

• “Wow. I’ve never seen someone so committed to going the wrong way. It’s almost admirable.”

• “Good news: you passed the test for going the wrong way with flying colors. Unfortunately, you failed the test for following obvious paths. I’m actually kind of surprised. I didn’t even think we needed to test for that. I thought literally everyone could follow a simple path. This is a critical discovery for me. I might even have to congratulate you… for proving science wrong about the lowest possible bar for human intelligence.”

That’s more like it, huh? Dripping with the snark we’ve come to know and love from our favorite homicidal supercomputer. And it’s quite the opposite of the so-called “best practice” outlined above – nags’n’hints start getting longer, getting more characterful.

What makes sense for GLaDOS is different from what makes sense for Astarion is different from what makes sense for the Stanley Parable narrator is different from what makes sense for your characters in your game – because they’re each distinct, unique people with distinct, unique voices within the distinct, unique tone of their distinct, unique game.

So what’s the takeaway on making nags’n’hints more interesting?

The takeaway (or at least “a” takeaway; I’m not a preacher of gospel, remember):

• Lean into your character’s unique and interesting personality to make their nags’n’hints unique and interesting.

  • You may have to fight the good fight for the return on investment (ROI) on writing/localization/VO budgets, and trusting the player’s intelligence → but the gains are narrative quality, surprising moments of delight, memorability, etc. (And those things do matter.)

And another takeaway to help you measure impact:

• It’s always a good idea, whether or not your nags’n’hints are characterful, to playtest extensively to make sure your lines are hitting the mark.

  • Are the lines communicating instruction?

  • Are the lines considering time, place, and narrative pacing?

  • Are the lines considering the overall tone of the game?

  • Are the lines avoiding stepping on other aspects of the moment?

Lastly, keep playing games – take note of interesting and characterful nags’n’hints, take note of when they fall flat. Take note of how repetitive they start to feel. Take note of how well they fit the character voices and overall game tone. Take note of the trade-off between clarity and characterization.

And learn from the examples that miss the mark as much as you learn from the examples that nail it. There are what-not-to-dos and what-to-dos aplenty out there; keep paying attention, and keep honing your writer instincts for when it comes your turn to pen some hints’n’nags.

Thanks for your question; hope I gave you a useful answer!

Got a question for a future post?

This is an ongoing series on the solo development of my “walking novel” game [SELF:STORAGE] in Unreal Engine – check out Dev Log 1 here if you missed it.

Apologies – I intended to write and post this Dev Log the Second sooner, but I got the covid and spent several timeless abysses immobilized on the couch watching 3D Zelda speedruns. (Shoutout to speedrunner gymnast86, who also had the covid and missed his slot at AGDQ because of it. I feel ya, buddy.)

Once I recovered some HP, getting caught up at work took all my daytime energy, so pecking away at cat-themed dev logs by moonlight took a back seat. And you didn’t ask about any of that, but I’m a recovering people-pleaser who still gets cold sweats thinking about the possibility of disappointing anyone. Or maybe that’s just the long covid kicking in, who knows.

BUT GOOD NEWS: we’re gonna talk about cats today.

“Why do I do these things to myself?” Amanda asked, eleven hours deep in the Sisyphean task of trying to convince a digital cat to walk in a circle.

This game probably didn’t need an animated, autonomous, realistic cat character. There’s no real gameplay reason for having a cat. At first glance, there’s not even much of a critical narrative component. There’s really no perceivable ROI on adding a cat to a game in which Kitty™ plays Very Smol Role™.

There was likely no reason for me to spend money on a rigged and animated cat model. And there was certainly no reason for me to try my hand at animation Blend Spaces, dislike the result, try to set up Motion Matching, realize it’s a whole different beast (hah) for four-legged models, and follow four hours of tutorials to try to get it to work… only for it to not really work because the tutorial was for a player character instead of an AI-controlled NPC… and then find someone who was trying to do the same thing I was trying to do, who (thank Cthulhu) put their project files on Patreon for me to peruse and learn exactly how I needed to set up my four-legged Motion Matching to get the damn cat to turn in a damn natural circle instead of phase-warping 90 degrees every time I fired off AI MoveTo.

Yeah, probably no reason at all to do any of that. Absolutely no reason for me to spend, like, 12 hours of my free time and $40 just to get a cat that moves around (kind of) naturally.

And yet, this game absolutely needed a cat. So I did all of that. Whoops.

Ceci n’est pas un chat

It’s just one of those ideas that stuck in my head, y’know? And this is my game, so I call the shots around here, for better or worse. Besides, adding a cat NPC to the game is a Learning Opportunity™, right? Sure, let’s go with that.

I had this sense that the player character needs someone. Some other party. It can’t be other humans, because all the other humans are <gone?>. And a robocompanion wouldn’t fit the vibe. And while dogs are all fine and well, dogs are too sociable and friendly for the themes of this game. Isolation. Introversion. Yearning. Self-sufficiency. Quiet strength. Existential suffering.

That’s Kitty™ if ever I’ve heard of Kitty™.

“Will the needs of Kitty™ be gamified?” you ask? At this stage, I’m thinking not. You’ll find food and water that you’ll share with Kitty™, but since I’m abstracting the survival aspects of this game for the player character, it makes sense to do the same for Kitty™. It’s more “Kibble. The cat will eat well tonight.” and less “1x Kibble added to Inventory”, if you can picture it.

Kitty™ serves light narrative purpose as a light relief from the oppressive solitude and dread of your day-to-day. A little environmental friend to cut some of the tension – but also deepen the tension, in a way. Kitty™ could probably fend for itself if the player character decided to ⌘-Q their way out of the mortal coil, at this, the end of the world – but something about Kitty™ having chosen you… it’s a reason to wake up in the morning. Even at this, the end of the world.

Also, you can pet the cat, so, y’know, Game of the Year contender.

How to Kitty™ – or, at least, how I Kitty™

It starts with a high-quality, rigged, animated model. And my first thought was to do that part myself.

But then I watched some behind-the-scenes of how BlueTwelve Studio made realistic cat movement in their beloved cat game Stray, and realized I was probably in over my head. My cats Bean and Tilda are good sports, but they belong to a union; I couldn’t negotiate a purrformance capture claws in their contract.

(A moment to catch your breath from all that hysterical laughter.)

I’m also not an expert at 3D sculpting, nor rigging and animating, and definitely not the best at optimizing a character model and its animations for use in a game, let alone a character model with four legs.

So, instead, I found a cat pack (cat pack! say it aloud, it’s great fun) on Fab Marketplace – fully rigged, with dozens of animations that would suit my few needs.

And my few needs were thus:

• Kitty™ will walk around

• Kitty™ will jump onto surfaces (perhaps even into boxes)

• Kitty™ will eat, sit, lie down, groom, scratch at a post, and bat at things

• Kitty™ will do a beeeeeg stretch

• Kitty™ will react to being pet

No combat or death (sob) animations in my needs, though they’re included in the pack, so if that’s your need (you monster), you’re covered. This pack also includes animations for swimming, running, and digging, so it’s a great choice if your player character is a cat and you need something that covers most of your use cases right out of the box (minus the animation setup, anyway).

Also, lots of different cat skins! Because, as we all very well know, there’s more than one way to skin a cat.

(Thunderous applause, screams of mirth, howls of unconstrained glee.)

Cat → Game → ??? → Profit

Importing my model from Fab Marketplace into Unreal was pretty straightforward – drag and drop the cat mesh once the cat pack (cat pack!) was added to my library. Boom. Just to see how it was working out of the box, I set up a quick NPC BP, AI Controller, NavMesh, and Behavior Tree to have the cat pick a random point, walk to it, idle for a few seconds, then repeat.

And, uh, well…

(Ignore the shader experiments; this was back when I was still evaluating whether I wanted shadows.)

Helps if you set up your animations first, I quickly learned, hah.

So I tried setting up my animations as Blend Spaces, with the help of several tutorials on the subject, because – and I can’t stress this enough – I have no idea what I’m doing here. And that got things looking better:

But for the life of me, I could not get the cat to turn correctly. No matter the tweaks I made to the Blend Spaces, it would snap to an angle, then start walking forward.

I soon realized turning naturally was a whole thing – it’s not enough to just blend animations. You need some level of precision control over making the character take its turn in an arc, rather than snapping to and walking forward.

Which led me down a wonderland of rabbit holes of tutorials on how to do just that. There are a ton of tutorials on how to create realistic turning arcs for bipedal player characters and bipedal NPCs, but wouldn’t you know, very few tutorials on how to do it for quadruped characters.

At this point, I decided to switch over to Motion Matching, since my Blend Spaces were looking kind of janky, with a lot of stuttering and unsmooth switching. And that proved fortuitous, because “quadruped motion matching” ended up being the golden ticket of keyword searches.

I stumbled on this godsend of a tutorial series that helped me get quadruped Motion Matching going – AND solved the problem of the character turn arc! Huzzah! Huge shoutout to TechAnim Studios for this incredibly helpful resource. I learned way more math on calculating movement trajectories than I ever wanted to have to consider, but it was super invaluable.

I followed the tutorial, but soon ran into a new problem: this series is for a player-controlled quadruped character, rather than an AI-controlled NPC. So, all the setup under the hood for the player Character Movement Controller didn’t translate 1:1 with how you’d set it up for an NPC.

Which caused a fun little spin every time I called AI MoveTo from the behavior tree. Apparently I neglected to capture any footage of it for the bug reel, so please accept this dramatic reenactment:

Luckily, TechAnim had on their Patreon some example project files for how you could set up turning arcs for a four-legged NPC. And it worked!

Now in the cat’s behavior tree, I can call a custom MoveTo function that takes into account the turning-on-an-arc movement behavior that I’ve set up in the cat’s main BP, and avoids the default snap-to behavior I’d been seeing.

Did I mention this took me, like, 12 hours of my free time over two weeks to figure out? Haha. Time well spent?

Smoothing out pathing

I ended up buying a pathing add-on to add a little more of a natural sway and randomness to the pathing and object avoidance, rather than having the character move in a dead-straight line from Point A to Point B as is default.

(You can get a little bit of this more natural movement by switching from the default AI Controller class to the Crowd Controller, but I found that it didn’t really give me the effect I was looking for, since it seems to be best suited to other dynamic objects and NPCs in the scene and avoiding those that also belong to the Crowd Controller class, which was not the case here.)

And the Flex Path add-on was useful:

But the static mesh object-dodging isn’t 100% there – namely, the cat becomes one with the objects in its path instead of avoiding them. And that’s not a fault of this add-on, but actually a quirk of the vertical collision capsule of this four-legged mostly horizontal character.

After a bunch of research, I learned that, inexplicably, there isn’t really a native way to dial in the collision capsule to the exact dynamic mesh of the character. (And I’d imagine it would come with a pretty big performance cost, even if you could.)

If I knew a lot of C++, my research indicates that I could set up some custom collision capsule behavior, but I do not know a lot of C++, and learning a lot of C++ still remains decidedly off of my bucket list, so.

There is, however, a $178 add-on that will help – so if you want to donate toward getting my cat character to correctly avoid objects lol: buymeacoffee.com/itsamandalynn. Or become a paid subscriber!

Subscribe now

I found a serviceable workaround in the form of adding a second sphere collision to the character’s head, thanks to some discussion on the Unreal forums, which helps some in that the cat doesn’t phase through things anymore – but the cat will still keep trying to walk forward for a bit and then bonk empty space before correcting, instead of just avoiding the object entirely. Also, the additional head collision doesn’t solve the issue of the cat’s tail clipping through objects. So I threw on a box collision, which… kinda works. But now there’s an unnatural clearance around objects that I don’t love, and the whole moonwalking-in-empty-space-as-the-collisions-bonk-together issue persists.

So, with or without the collision workarounds, this is a cat that bumps into things, hah. Might just have to work it into his backstory. Poor blind kitty with the neurological disorder that causes him to occasionally moonwalk into boxes. (I mean… it’s not the worst idea…)

Maybe there’s a way to use the character’s perception to avoid static objects – I suspect that’s an avenue to explore next before I give up on trying to do this for free.

For the tail clipping… I don’t know, man. I’m going to have to give that more thought and research. I suspect there’s a solution to this, too; I just haven’t stumbled on it yet. Like, maybe another collision sphere over the tail? But it can’t be that simple, can it? Why do I feel like that’ll just nudge the cat out of position instead of interrupting the tail sway? I think dynamically adjusting the tail animation is probably key, but how? Hm. Things to look into.

All that said, the character movement add-on is looking mighty appealing, even with that price tag. Work smarter, not harder? Don’t reinvent the wheel? MAINTAIN SCOPE? HAH. Yeah, yeah. At some point, this is entirely too much time to spend on cat movement without giving the cat a larger role in the game. Might be time to say “good enough”, live with the quirks, and move onto the actual game.

Cat gon’ do what a cat gon’ do

Let’s talk about AI behavior trees and all the things I have thus far made Kitty™ do, and will next make Kitty™ do:

Working out the cat movement was Priority Numero Uno, so I haven’t gotten much further than the initial setup I’d done on the behavior tree:

• Kitty™ picks random point, walks to it, idles, repeats

• If the player enters into Kitty™’s cone of perception, Kitty™ will follow the player, then idle

• Kitty™ will pick between these two behaviors based on whether it spots the player

Super basic so far. I wanted to try out some other ideas, but didn’t feel like doing so in the behavior tree just yet, so I set up a test cat on the bed for testing purposes. Test Kitty™ will chill on its belly until you interact, then will sit up, stretch, sit back down, and return to its belly.

(Don’t mind the delay – showing the interaction dot fading in and out before I press my interact key. I’ll say more on the interaction system in Dev Log 3, and will drop in a link for posterity once that’s up.)

The idea is to add a routine for Kitty™ to jump onto the bed, settle down, and become available for interaction – when it feels like it, true to the essence of being a cat.

But, uh, you remember how jumping is going.

So there’s more to learn yet about Blend Spaces. And I suspect this one is going to be a beast, because, once again, I have a four-legged NPC being moved around with custom movement, and not a bipedal character for which there exist 10,000 tutorials. Add to this complexity that I’m using Motion Matching and I don’t yet know how Motion Matching and Blend Spaces play together, and… yeah. Learning curves abound.

I’ve learned a bit about NavMesh Links and triggering jumps from one height to another, but have yet to get that functioning for Kitty™. Whether NavMesh Links are going to be compatible with all my custom movement, too, is another fun problem space to explore – but we’re having fun! We love Kitty™!

Other plans I have for Kitty™’s routine:

• Jump into boxes, once jumping on/in anything is working

• Eat/drink from a dish

• Scratch at a scratching post

• Yell at the player for no reason, like a cat gon’ do

  • I’m looking forward to recording my cat Tilda’s casual screms for this; they are mighty, impressive, and relentless

• Curl up and sleep (and purr <3)

• Easter Egg: Bat at the interaction dot if you aim it between its paws (is that too silly? might be too silly, but I kinda love it – maybe as a long idle thing, deep Easter Egg cuts)

I was thinking about whether Kitty™ will leave the office and follow you into storage units, to get into hijinks in said storage units – but I feel a scope creep coming on. Already, the development of this minor cat addition has been such a wild tangent; maybe it’s enough just to have Kitty™ in your office/camp. Perhaps Kitty™ doesn’t even want to go out exploring. He’s enjoying his retirement, thanks. (And he’s blind and has a neurological disorder, apparently – maybe the player character keeps Kitty™ in their office/camp for Kitty™’s own safety.)

We’ll see, though. Seems like we could have some fun narrative moments if Kitty™ is knocking over things in units that lead to discoveries that lead to reminiscences that lead to reflections on what a damn shame this whole end-of-the-world thing is. A cat-alyst, if you will.

(Fireworks, parades, streamers, Amanda crowned the Benevolent Sovereign of Puns.)

To concatenate a conclusion

“If you make one more f—ing cat pun in this article, I’m unsubscribing.” —You, probably

Thus, the development saga of Kitty™ thus far. Did I waste a lot of development time on this? Eh. Is it really a waste if I learned a lot? And is it really a waste if it’s going to enrich the atmosphere and narrative? And is it really a waste if is Kitty™? :3

Should I have made more of the game before spending time on Kitty™? Well, maybe. I’d grant you that. But hear me out: every time I playtest now, there’s a cat in the game. So, like, you know. It’s pretty rad.

I’d already die for him, tbh.

…NEXT TIME on All Things Games with Amanda Lynn…

• Dev Log 3: let’s talk BP Interfaces and interaction systems, ‘cause there gon’ be a lot o’ interactions in this game and ain’t nobody got time to not use Interfaces

• Do we care about strudel.cc and coding electronic music for video game soundtracks?

  • Seriously, I’m asking – if you’re subscribed, I want to know what you want to read about

    • Oh, look, I can add a poll:

• The aforepromised diatribe considered pondering of the trope of cassette recorders in video games

• Answering reader questions? Send me some and we’ll see!

  • Paid subscribers can comment here, otherwise you can email me: amanda@amandalynn.ink

Did you read Part 2? And Part 1? And Part 0? Sure you did! You’re a reader of refined tastes and excellent sensibilities. Your very subscription to this Substack is proof of your discerning palate. I commend you on your most astute selection of entertainment.

“But… but I’m not subscribed,” you whisper, awash with guilt in the face of my lofty praise. It’s okay; you can fix it. There’s still time. I won’t tell anyone. Just click the button and it’ll be our little secret:

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Phew. That’s better. Shall we vidya gjames? Vidiya jgameses. Indubitably.

On the seventh(ish) day of Gamesmas, my true love gave to me: Bendy and the Ink Machine

In the vein of such carefree-childhood-pleasures-gone-evil staples as Five Nights at Freddy’s and Poppy Playtime, here we have a 1920s-cartoon-inspired twist on the survival horror genre. Bendy and the Ink Machine has you exploring an abandoned animation studio (your character’s former workplace) known for its Steamboat Willie-esque ‘toons starring Bendy the cat(?) and Boris the dog(?).

Like FNAF and PP, BatIM sees you solving environmental puzzles to escape your situation, amidst the occasional running from/beating up enemies who stand in your way. This game’s set of ink-based baddies owe their unholy sentience to the titular ink machine, an invention by the animation studio’s founder that went a little… rogue.

I had a pretty good time with the first couple of chapters, but found myself falling off for a few reasons:

• one, the exposition delivered à la cassette recorders, which inspired me to write a-whole-nother nitpicky Substack piece on diegetic story delivery (link to come);

• another, the same-sameyness of the gameplay (a problem I had with PP and FNAF, too);

• and another, the sprawling layout of the third chapter that had me wandering in mildly bored circles fighting the same spawns over and over again until I decided to play something else.

That said, I didn’t have a bad time - I really liked the inky vintage cartoon aesthetic and setting, fun theming for the FNAF formula. (The shader actually reminded me a lot of what I’m doing with SELF:STORAGE - surprised BatIM didn’t come up in my research.) I’ll probably come back and finish it at some point, just to see what all that cassette recorder exposition is leading up to.

Also, Bacon Soup sounds pretty delicious and I’d like some, please. Make me a pot and I’ll let you escape the room.

On the eighth(ish) day of Gamesmas, my true love gave to me: Thank Goodness You’re Here!

Okay, okay! Yes! Now this is a treat!

Do you enjoy Monty Python, ‘90s Nicktoons, and the parts of Rick and Morty that don’t take themselves too seriously? Then you will adore Thank Goodness You’re Here!

In the style of Untitled Goose Game, but with a decidedly more helpful protagonist, direct a wee chap around an English hamlet that’s just TEEMING with ridiculous need. But Thank Goodness You’re Here™ to lend a hand!

I played this game on Christmas Day and totally forgot that I was alone, having been snowed in and unable to attend my family’s annual holiday revelry. What might’ve been a sad, terribly sad, oh-so-very sad day was instead a proper romp through a series of absolutely bonkers vignettes. I had a right chuffed old time, I did. A wacky, silly, thoroughly Union Jackéd misadventure dipped in a pint o’ lager with a side of fish’n’chips, baked into a meatpie (tiny or big, pick your side and hold fast), enjoyed in a telephone booth as red as your gran’s fanciest Sunday knickers.

Basically what I’m trying to say is this game is a delight, especially if British humor is your bag, baby. There’s even a musical number starring the whole town! Not enough games have musical numbers starring the whole town, if you ask me.

As if that weren’t enough, publisher Panic also put together a little post-game ARG treat for those who’ve successfully heeded the call to help the town - but I’ll be buggered if I’m going to let slip the spoils. You beat the game, you find out, you ol’ bodgie tosser!

On the ninth(ish) day of Gamesmas, my true love gave to me: Spiritfarer

Oh, I really, really wanted to be into Spiritfarer. I’d heard a lot (good) about it, and the premise was up my alley. Build and resource-manage my boat so that I might comfortably ferry souls to the afterlife? Sign me up.

But… the early-game writing didn’t really hit for me, unfortunately. The lightness of Animal Crossing with the verbosity of Final Fantasy (and without the redeeming quirky qualities of either) kind of took me out of it. A bit too go here, do this, yay you for my liking, y’know? It’s a tap-through tutorial writing style, which kinda saddens my storytelling sensibilities - but I don’t begrudge it being what it is. It’s an accessible style, and plenty of people don’t mind it, so that’s not to say Spiritfarer is doing anything wrong. It’s just, like, my opinion, man.

I might come back to it eventually - I still like the gameplay premise, and what I experienced of the loop had an appetizing crunch. I made the concession for Persona 5, after all - 127 hours of concession, whoops - but then again, Persona 5 had a fast-forward option. 😅

On the tenth(ish) day of Gamesmas, my true love gave to me: Hades

I swore to myself I would finish Hades before I jumped into Hades II, so that’s exactly what I did. (And by finish, I mean beat the final boss 10 times and see the end credits. I’ll get to the epilogue eventually… probably… one of these years.)

And, dang, damn, wham, bam, man! I’d nearly forgotten. Hades is SUCH a good game. Now there’s a writing style to savor - distinct, memorable, unique characters, each with their own voice, sparing in their soliloquies and fourth-wall tutorialing. And I’ve long loved the narrative design approach wherein death is a critical component for advancing the story. (In this, the year 2025, such a storytelling mechanic is not so novel anymore, but it was a revelation back in the day, kids.)

I’d lapsed on Hades for a few years - something about me being a n00b and needing to git gud - but when I finally jumped back in, I did so with jetskis. I blazed through the rest of the game over the course of two days (time is immaterial and but a mere suggestion in the Days of Gamesmas) and soaked up every minute of playtime with pure button-mashing delight. The combat of this game is EXCELLENT, and I can’t wait to see what evolutions are waiting for me in Hades II.

There’s also something especially fun (and mildly weird) about your real-life friend Cryus, who happens to be the voice actor behind many a character in this game, taunting you over and over again as you fail to defeat him and his minotaur.

I gotta say, though, the Hades loop is so addictive, I’m having a hard time putting it down and moving onto anything else. Even after getting to the credits, I still want to dash-strike my way through hell until everyone’s my friend. Luckily, the post-game offers an abundance of that, and is another reason why Hades’s approach to narrative is just the most rouged of bee’s knees. Plus, you can pet the three-headed dog!

Fun tip for anyone playing Hades (or Hades II, I’m sure it has applications there as well) on the Steam Deck: You can assign a custom button scheme to turn combo button presses into one single button.

I did that with my dash-strike (X+RB), setting that button combo to fire if I pressed the X button. I then set the X button to Hold, so dash-strike would fire continuously if I held X down; then later set that Hold to Toggle, so I could tap X to start dash-striking continuously, like I’d been doing manually, now with 100% less carpal tunnel.

Actual, literal game-changer. The ergonomics felt so much better, and it was still oh-so satisfyingly hack’n’slashy. And you can still trigger your Special and Cast whenever you see fit. (I haven’t played Vampire Survivors yet, but I think that’s generally the same playstyle, no? Abilities continually firing as you move around? I like.)

On the eleventh(ish) day of Gamesmas, my true love gave to me: Beat Saber

You may know this about me: I freaking love rhythm games. Especially the ones that see you get up and dance, man. Dance Dance Revolution started my obsession in my teens - and now, 25 years later, I have a DDR setup in my basement because I am an unstoppable nerd.

My second-favorite rhythm game of all time is Beat Saber. And Beat Saber occupies a special place in my gaming diet - a guilt-free place, because playing on Expert+ Faster Song while wearing a weighted vest turns a 30-minute session into a strenuous cardio workout. So you’ll catch me dancing in my holodeck pretty regularly, Gamesmas or not.

But what I don’t do regularly is explore my entire library of songs. I have my favorites that I’ll queue up and blast through, rarely challenging myself to sight-read something new (or fight through the antiquated mapping habits of OSTs of yore, iykyk). It starts to feel rote, playing the same dozen songs again and again; I needed to infuse my Beat Saber sessions with some new life.

So, I sorted all of my songs alphabetically and got to work. I have almost all of the song packs that are still supported on Quest 1 (the original Quest no longer receives updates because of enshittification and planned obsolescence, but I can’t comfortably do claw grip on the Quest 2 I borrowed from my friend, and I refuse to buy a Quest 3, so we’re stuck with Quest 1 until Valve’s new headset comes out and proves itself comfortable for claw grip, and most of you probably didn’t care one lick about any of that, but if you’re in the Beat Saber scene, you may understand my righteous stance on this matter).

And you know what? I had a great time. The comparatively unflowy mapping of those early OSTs and song packs brought me back to my PSVR days, where I first fell in love with Beast Saber and proselytized the good word to all my friends at Wooga. I would bring in my console and headset for Friday night beer’o’clock, and we’d gather to wave the silly little PS move controllers around, tethered about the head and neck to the PS4 with 17,000 feet of cable. Ah, such simple times. Awesome memories.

I also discovered some gems and deep cuts I might not have tried if it weren’t for this alphabetical romp through my library. Playing through Beat Saber history, it’s so cool to see how far the mapping techniques and level designs have come since those early days - and the general challenge, too. Y’all remember when Ghost was the hardest song in the game? Pepperidge Farm remembers.

I joked in my last Substack about the Coldplay pack - which I couldn’t even buy if I wanted to, see earlier diatribe about Q1 support - but generally I’m a fan of Beat Games’s choices for song packs. The Billie Eilish pack is top tier, probably my absolute favorite. Linkin Park comes in for a close second. Monstercat’s definitely up there. Queen, Lizzo, Skrillex, Lady Gaga, a good chunk of the songs in the Rock’n’Roll pack, that single Eminem song (there should be way more rap maps if you ask me)... there’s just some damn fun mapping going on. Even in packs where I might only play one or two songs on repeat, that replay value is so incredibly high for me, I never mind spending the coin.

And while buying song packs is a point of complaint for a lot of people, I will happily continue to throw money at the Beat Game devs for all the joy and fitness they’ve brought me over the last 10(!) years of playing literally tens of thousands of hours of this game. Rebuying my entire song library on the new Valve headset when I switch ecosystems? Insane to some, worth it to me. You gotta support the artists you love if you want them to be able to afford to continue making things you love, y’know?

*rummages in bag, pulls out megaphone, installs fresh batteries, clears throat*

HEY, SPEAKING OF SONG PACKS AND SUPPORTING ARTISTS YOU LOVE, YOU KNOW WHAT BAND WOULD MAKE A GREAT BEAT SABER SONG PACK? RAINBOW KITTEN SURPRISE!

I, uh, might’ve brought this up one or two (thousand) times over the years. But I’m not just saying this as an RKS stan - Rainbow Kitten Surprise is seriously THE PERFECT music for Beat Saber. Complex layers of instrumentation both acoustic and electronic, playful vocals and harmonies switching up from melodic folk to rap to rock’n’roll grit, wicked danceable beats, killer guitar riffs and bass licks, impossible-to-box genre-blending - it’s a mapper’s dream and a dancer’s delight. And the lighting of their live performances, come on! You could make such badass level lighting inspired by their staging.

(Obligatory “I was at that show, it was magnificent” - you can spot me in the shots of the crowd at the end if you’re up for some Where’s Waldo.)

Seriously, if anyone out there reading this knows someone who knows someone at Beat Games who makes decisions regarding song packs for Beat Saber, PLEASE, put me in touch so I can direct them to the good people of RKS.

And then hire me to dance in the song pack promo videos, please and thank you. (Actually, you don’t have to hire me, Beat Games, I’ll do it for free. I’ll pay you, even.)

Wait, what were we talking about again? Oh, right, Gamesmas.

On the twelfth(ish) day of Gamesmas, my true love gave to me: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (Ship of Harkinian port)

If you’ve been following my LinkedIn posts or old blog articles for a minute, you might’ve heard the story of the moment I realized I wanted to work in games. I won’t rehash it at length here, but in short: Ocarina of Time.

I played through OoT with my dad, who was my stalwart gaming buddy until he passed away when I was a teenager. We passed the controller back and forth for weeks, renting the N64 cartridge from the local video rental store whenever I’d come to visit (shared custody kid, you know how it is). When we finally finished the game together, I saw the credits roll, and realized for the first time that people make games. And I could be one of those people someday.

I was 10 or so, then. Nearly three decades later, OoT is still my favorite game of all time.

It’s part nostalgia, for sure. Through a 2025 lens, there are some rough edges to the camera movement, menus, character dialogue variety, etc. Relics of the time of its development (ye olde 1990s). It’s not a perfect game. But it’s pretty close to as perfect as a game can get.

So much of modern gaming owes its formula to OoT. The 3D open world. Z-targeting. Non-linearity. NPC routines (even more so in the sequel, Majora’s Mask). Puzzle box dungeons. Fast travel and horseback transportation options. Seeds sown that hundreds of games over the last 28 years have cultivated into their own special herbaceous blend. I owe my career in games to OoT; games across the industry owe their existence to OoT.

I decided to play the Ship of Harkinian port over the Switch Store emulated version because I wanted to smooth some of those aforementioned rough edges - namely, camera control. Back in the ‘90s, we had but one joystick on our ridiculous N64 controllers. So OoT (and Super Mario 64) had an autofollow camera that you could recenter as needed, but it got predictably janky around corners and walls. One of the many Ship of Harkinian perks is the ability to enable second stick camera control, like all the games we’re used to these days.

It is SUCH a massive quality of life upgrade, to the point where I wouldn’t recommend anyone play any other way in this, the year of our Lord Jabu-Jabu, 2025. There’s no nobility in being a purist, only frustration. Trust me. I’ve put in my hours on the N64 and 3DS versions, and SoH is the way to go. The setup to get SoH running on my Steam Deck was easy-peasy, and I’m able to launch it right through my regular Steam library.

SoH has a ton of other options/cheats/add-ons, frequently used by speedrunners and randomizers, but the only other options I made use of were:

• loading upgraded 4K textures from the Ocarina Reloaded pack, significantly improving the visual fidelty (with a handy hotkey for quickly swapping between original and reloaded textures - which I found I needed for fishing to see the fish better)

• enabling a dog from Market Town to follow me around for the whole game :3 absoultely no gameplay value whatsoever, but it made me stupidly happy

• enabling Adult Link Bunny Hood to make movement just a wee bit more expedient

Even though I’ve played this game probably 15 times in the last 28 years, I never tire of it. And SoH makes the experience of replaying all the more delightful. Jumping back into my file was the perfect way to end my 12(ish) Days of Gamesmas. Merry Shadow Temple to all, and to all a good RNG.

When I set out on the 12(ish) Days of Gamesmas, I did so with a goal in mind: recapture the guilt-free joy I used to know when I’d pick up a controller as a kid. Back when gaming after school, through weekends, and across holiday breaks was a gleeful adventure. Not a chore, not work, and not with a nagging voice in the back of my head telling me to do something “more productive”.

Did I manage to achieve that goal? In a lot of ways, absolutely. I felt delight, excitement, desire. I was playing for me, not because I had to for product research - and I point that out to illustrate the reality of gaming as a game dev, not to say “oh woe is me, it’s so hard that my career involves playing games”. If you had to eat ice cream every day, y’know? As much as you f—king love ice cream, you like to pick the flavor, too. And I still internalized inspirations and what-(not)-to-dos I’ll inevitably apply in my own work, so win-win.

Did I silence the nagging voice in the back of my head that’s always telling me to do something “more productive” whenever I sit down to game? I mean, can one ever, really? Gaming (at least for a lot of us Elder Millennials who got yelled at about it growing up) carries with it the connotation of wasted time, despite much scientific study of the contrary. But I did my best these 12(ish) days to “earn” my gaming time and premptively silence that nagging voice - I cooked, I cleaned, I exercised, I went outside, I wrote, I read, I practiced my instruments. Then, when I’d wrung the day clean out of productivity, I’d grab my Steam Deck and get comfy. Harder to do when I’m not on vacation, so I’m glad I carved out this time while I had it.

I’ll tell ya what I feel going into 2026, though: ready. We’re doing mumble mumble NDA mumble mumble at TNM, which means mumble mumble NDA mumble mumble. And that’s both daunting and exciting, as is typical of game development. So to go in reinvigorated and reminded why I freaking love games is exactly the necessary vibe.

If there’s a moral to the 12(ish) Days of Gamesmas, I’d say this, applicable to any creative career: Make an effort to continually fall in love with your artform. That love is gonna carry you through all sorts of goings, and especially when said goings Hulk out and get Tough™.

And with that, if you’ve made it all the way through these 12(ish) days, I bid you (and only you; lucky you) a most happy of new years. Thank you, as always, for tuning into All Things Games with Amanda Lynn™.

…NEXT TIME, on All Things Games with Amanda Lynn…

• One of the following, with the other to follow:

  • The promised second dev log for my solo dev adventure, SELF:STORAGE - wherein our enterprising dev, through much trial and error, learns about motion-matching quadruped animal movement and setting up AI behavior trees

    • Dev Log 1 here if you missed it

  • A diatribe thoughtful analysis on how silly it is that games so frequently deliver narrative through cassette tapes where it makes no diegetic sense to do so (sorry, Bendy)

• Perhaps a little piece on my adventures with strudel.cc, a live-coding language for making electronic music

• Generally a more concerted effort to update this Substack with something approaching regularity

• Wonder? Whimsy? Winsome wisecracks? Why, without a doubt!
  

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I’m a week into my 12(ish) days of Gamesmas (Part 1 here if you missed it). I’ve eaten my body weight in holiday treats (salty licorice, my love), the cats are perpetually glued to my lap, and I’ve been wearing the same reindeer-patterned fuzzy pajamas for six days straight. (I washed them at some point in that time, don’t judge me; I just put ‘em right back on, fresh out of the dryer. Peak cozy.)

Winter storms throughout the Northeast and New England meant that I couldn’t make the drive from Quebec to join my family for our usual holiday celebrations, which bummed me out - we’re Italian, so we do the whole seven fishes thing for Christmas, not unlike that episode of The Bear. Maybe slightly less yelling and driving cars through living rooms. Hate to miss Rhode Island seafood, but at least I’ve had Gamesmas to keep my mind off things.

Hopefully, all your holiday celebrations have gone off without a hitch (and with a blanket no-politics rule in place at your dinner table, lest you had to find a coat closet in which to scream between courses while rapid-texting your friends about your family members’ most unhinged views).

But we’re not talking politics at this moment, so let’s talk games instead. And I’ll be back next week with the conclusion to my 12(ish) days of Gamesmas, so make sure you’re subscribed, smash that like button, hit that notification bell, sacrifice a Cult of the Lamb acolyte, etc.

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On the third(ish) day of Gamesmas, my true love gave to me: POOLS & Scorefall

POOLS

POOLS presents a question that’s been robustly debated on my LinkedIn, among other places online and off: What makes a game a game?

The premise of POOLS is simple: wander a liminal, backrooms-esque labyrinth of gorgeous but uncanny indoor pools. That’s it. There’s no deeper to dive (if you’ll pardon the pun, and especially if you won’t) - save for what you may choose to read into, and the conclusions at which you may arrive.

Here are some things that are true of POOLS:

• It’s *beautiful*. A loving showcase of surreal architecture and water shaders. Soft-lit spaces evoking some semblance of underground caverns, yielding to huge, bright, cathedral-like halls. Gentle water caustics sparkling on shiny tile. Pleasantly perceptibly plastic pool floaties. The material fidelity and visual presentation of POOLS is really something to behold.

  

  Crank that quality up to Epic

• It’s *creepy*. Looping, meandering, claustrophobic corridors of infinite tile, dead-ending endlessly. Channels of water through which you must pass, whether you’d prefer to or not. Occasionally, you may encounter a short and unsettling vignette: a ladder that slides itself into a dark ventilation shaft just as you turn a corner; a suspicious splash from off-camera as you peer between rows of vast pillars in a space evoking a forgotten cistern; hands belonging to an unseen body descending a ladder into a deep, dark well - the entrance to which is already several feet underwater, in a nice touch of extra eeriness.
  
  In one particularly unnerving moment, I rounded a corner, wading through waist-deep water, to find a dozen marble mannequins in various poses lining the sides of a narrow passage. My only way forward. I squeezed through, breath bated, tensed for the sudden grasping of stone fingers upon my clammy flesh. When I turned around to look back, I half-expected they’d all have snapped their heads in my direction. But they held their motionless marble postures. For now.
  
  In exploration here, one is never fully at ease.

  

  The community pool equivalent of a rusty hospital bed in an abandoned sanitarium

• It lacks the elements by which we might typically define a game: combat, puzzles, platforming, QTEs, resource management, dialogue choices, character stats, et cetera.

  • There *is* choice, in that you’re in control of your path through the labyrinthine space (which includes the occasional water slide - simultaneously inviting and distressing, your initial excitement giving way to unease as your view narrows to an abyssal pinhole, speeding glimpses of ambient light reflections rushing along bend after bend of inexplicably too-long tube).

  • There *is* some of what you could technically qualify as interactivity, in the form of pool donuts and giant (staring, always staring) rubber ducks you can nudge along, ladders you can climb, various seats in which you can sit, and the aforementioned (don’t do it) water slides.

  • There *is* what you could consider an objective: progress through the level to the exit, such that the next level loads.

Maybe the maze-like experience and inherent end goal (find the exit) is enough to check the box for “Yes, is game”. Maybe the fact that the experience is user-directed, rather than user-observed (à la film, TV, books), is enough to qualify as game.

I should note, I casually wonder about these questions, but I’m not moved to police the definition of “game”, nor cast POOLS as not qualifying one way or the other.

And the more I wandered, the less I felt the need to even casually wonder whether POOLS technically makes the cut. The distinction, which doesn’t matter to me much in general, ceased to matter entirely. Whatever we want to call it, POOLS was making me *feel something*. Awe and appreciation ‘round one corner; uncanny and unsettled ‘round the next. I had questions - unknowable, unanswerable questions. And I had fears. Per the Steam description, I knew nothing was going to jump out at me - yet, at times, fear gripped me all the same. My wandering flip-flopped between relaxing and oppressive, and the experience lingered long after I put my Steam Deck to sleep.

I haven’t finished POOLS yet, but I suspect I’ll return to it when next I need something to do with my hands while I’m half-ignoring whatever’s on my TV. To say it’s the background noise of gaming wouldn’t be quite right - but there’s something, mmm, patiently non-committal, let’s say, about POOLS. It doesn’t ask much of you, yet gives you something that sticks in your head, compelling you to continue.

I certainly don’t expect it’s an experience for everyone - and many would staunchly stick it in the camp of “not a game”. And that’s valid; I’m not here to convince anyone one way or another. I’m not sure what I’m convinced of, myself - save for the landscape of interactive media being wonderfully diverse and open to creative interpretation, such that we can have affecting experiences like POOLS.

Scorefall

I love when my former colleagues from studios of yore strike out to solo-develop and release games, as is the case with Scorefall by Pat Tompkins. Pat and I crossed paths at Backflip Studios many moons ago, and when I saw in my LinkedIn feed that he’d released a Steam demo for his new game, I was happy to jump in and check it out.

Scorefall is, in essence, plinko meets Balatro: drop plinko balls, buy upgrades to enhance the playing field and score buckets, and try to beat the required minimum score to move onto the next round.

It’s a satisfying little demo - I quite enjoyed discovering the various combinations of peg and bucket upgrades, and it was always great fun to find synergy that caused dozens of balls to bounce around in a cacophony of high-scoring hits. The lo-fi chill-wave soundtrack kept me locked in, similarly to Balatro. Excellent sound design seems to be imperative to this genre of roguelike - something to keep you in the zone, pleasant enough to be repeated infinitely without seeming like it’s repeating infinitely. (I’d love to try my hand at one such soundtrack; if anyone reading this needs infinite lo-fi vibes for their indie game, reach out to me on scatterdabble.music.)

Looking forward to seeing where Pat takes this between demo and full release - good stuff, dude! Do check it out if you enjoy plinko and supporting indie devs.

On the fourth(ish) day of Gamsemas, my true love gave to me: Unpacking & Gorogoa

Confession: I’m cheating a bit. I actually played these games back in November, but scarcely got the chance to talk about them with anyone, so I’m going to sneak them into this Gamesmas round-up. I trust you won’t hold it against me; ‘tis the season of love and forgiveness and all that sentimental whatnot, ain’t it?

I played Unpacking and Gorogoa back to back one Friday night when I was feeling particularly burnt out after a tough week - and they were the perfect two games I could’ve played to soothe my tired soul and remind me of why I appreciate this artform.

Unpacking

Unpacking unpacks (indeed) the story of a life across each place the unseen character calls home. You get to know this person you’re piloting entirely through the belongings they move from place to place, and the new environs in which they find themselves. True to life, over the many years and many moves, some items change, some items remain, evoking a sort of coming-of-age nostalgia as the cherished treasures of childhood are swapped for the trappings of adulthood.

As someone who has moved, at last count, 46 times across four countries - no exaggeration; my parents moved a bunch when I was a kid, and I moved a bunch more after turning 18 - I felt Unpacking deeply. The items that stick with you from move to move. The items you lose, leave behind, or otherwise retire. How home is a relative mindset. How so much can change in such short order, for better or worse.

A few chapters into Unpacking, I ended up turning off the puzzle aspect of the game, which has you place items in specific locations, and went for free item placement instead - an accessibility option I greatly appreciated, which both sped up the gameplay (that, as with unpacking IRL, started to feel a bit repetitive) and allowed me to get more creative (read: chaotic) with my interior decorating.

I ended up finishing the game in one sitting - and, yes, definitely cried at the end. I don’t want to spoil anything, but iykyk. :) <3

If you’re looking for something casual and cozy this holiday season, do give Unpacking a go. It takes about 2 hours with free item placement turned on (probably less, my Steam playtime is always inaccurate for all the ADHD breaks I take while games are running).

Gorogoa

Sometimes, a game comes along that’s so original and creative, I almost find myself getting a little mad at it - “You brilliant son of a bitch, I wish I’d thought of this.”

Gorogoa is one of those games. An incredibly inventive puzzle game unlike any I’ve played before - wherein you’re working within a four-panel comic book-like grid to arrange story squares, zooming in and out and swapping to solve intricate puzzles that unfold across panels, perspectives, and layers. It’s all so wildly complex, yet never feels unapproachable. The stunning artwork hides clever clues for the patient observer, and the story told through this unique gameplay is contemplative and touching.

I went into this game knowing nothing about it, just having seen a few screenshots - and I encourage you to do the same. Try not to look up any walkthroughs, if you can; sit with the challenge of the puzzles, let your wheels churn. Walk away and come back if you need to. It’s so, so rewarding when you crack it on your own.

On the fifth(ish) day of Gamesmas, my true love gave to me: Light Up the Town & Mind Over Magnet

Light Up the Town

I’ve been watching Corridor Crew for years, coming to them first through the VFX Artists React series, then getting hooked on their wider oeuvre of fun VFX challenges, practical and CG experiments, short films, iconic shot recreations, and all manner of cool stuff surrounding the neat visual things humans do in TV, movies, and games. One member of the Crew, Peter France, struck out to start developing games, and recently released his second game, Light Up the Town.

I could not have asked for a better cozy holiday game for this Gamesmas playtime. In Light Up the Town, you, a little ferret not much feeling the holiday spirit, are charged with the task of decorating your town with Christmas lights. The world’s your blank canvas - there are no timers, no limits, no right or wrong places to decorate, no burnt bulbs or tangled lines. Just endless strings of light, cute anthropomorphic animal friends, and peaceful, royalty-free Christmas music arrangements. It’s my fuzzy reindeer pajamas in the form of a game: cozy, warm, feel-good, full of cheer.

I’d mentioned earlier that I couldn’t make it to my annual family holiday party because of the snowstorms - so Light Up the Town really hit me in the feels. And not just the surface subject matter making me miss my family and our holiday traditions, but also the wider ability of games to provide resonance and belonging. That “hey, I see you; you’re not alone” gift that art gives us, and reminds us why we keep making and supporting art. Even when the world is dark; especially when the world is dark.

And when it’s dark, there’s always a way to light it up. <3

Mind Over Magnet

Speaking of YouTubers-turned-game devs, one of my favorite gaming-related YouTubers, Game Maker’s Toolkit, AKA Mark Brown, released his first game last year: Mind Over Magnet. It’d been sitting on my backlog for a while, so I figured I’d finally check it out.

Mind Over Magnet is a neat little 2D game in which you solve magnet-powered puzzles. It’s never overly difficult, at least as far into it as I played, but it still feels like an accomplishment to knock out puzzle after puzzle as you progress through the rooms, learning new tricks and mechanics along the way. The art style is polished and colorful, the movement and animations slick, the sound design satisfying - a really solid first release.

GMTK has a dev log series on his channel talking about his approach to MOM, with which I’d followed along as each video dropped. In particular, I found notable his dealings with scope. So many first-time game devs want to leap in extra ambitious and make something above and beyond - and that can work out if you’re, say, Billy Basso, but there’s a lot to be said for keeping your first game on the simpler side. (And simple doesn’t have to mean easy - take Balatro as another example. Simple to learn, hard to master.) The more manageable your scope, the more likely you are to actually stick with - and, critically, finish - your game.

That’s why I’m not going full-out with SELF:STORAGE, myself. I want to keep my first game in the realm of achievable - and I know if I give myself too much to do, I’ll end up getting overwhelmed and giving up. Better a finished game from which I want more than an unfinished game gathering dust on my desktop.

So, yeah, Mind Over Magnet: low-stress, low-presh, good example of how to debut strong with a fun and simple concept.

On the sixth(ish) day of Gamesmas, my true love gave to me: The Quarry

Somehow, The Quarry had completely escaped my noticing. I only stumbled on it through GuessTheGame, a daily riddle ritual among many of my gamer chats. Screenshots of The Quarry first stumped me, then caught my attention, so I checked it out on Steam. “How the heck haven’t I played this yet?” I asked myself as I read through a game description that was totally up my alley.

From Supermassive Games (creators of my favorite horror gaming series, Little Nightmares) comes a choices-matter horror game about camp counselor teens-turned-prey à la every iconic slasher movie. But where you’d expect the story to stick to the trappings of the genre, it gets a little ~*~inventive~*~.

I gave this one a solid go - the story initially drew me in, its characters and their dialogue reminding me of Cabin in the Woods (a top of the genre). But I’ll be honest, after two hours of fighting the camera and character movement, I couldn’t do it anymore. I ended up switching over to Movie Mode, which lets you enjoy the story without the perils of actually having to pilot your character.

To be fair, my Steam Deck warned me that The Quarry wouldn’t perform well on its hardware, so I’m happy to chalk this one up to my own fault. (Though some of the FFX-style fixed camera maps were certainly a choice; tough to pull off in the dark.)

Unfortunately, I started to lose interest in the story once I wasn’t in control of it anymore… and I wasn’t compelled to jump back on the sticks to try to finish it. I think part of the issue, for me, was that a lot of the choices didn’t entirely feel like choices. Which, for flavor text, I don’t mind - we game writers and narrative designers can only support so many branching paths, after all. There are clever ways of concealing fluffy choices, but it’s still inevitable that things collapse into a main route. Not every game can or needs to be Baldur’s Gate 3.

But the “big” story moments in The Quarry also seemed to collapse sooner and more transparently than I might have expected. To pick an example light on spoilers, while I was still on the sticks in Chapter 1, I had a choice of two ways to sabotage the van that was meant to take us all home, such that we’d get to spend one more night partying before having to call it a summer. But choosing not to sabotage the van wasn’t an option.

If sabotage was going to be the only available story direction, I might’ve liked the choice to not sabotage the van, and then see the sabotage play out some other way, y’know? Then the choice becomes more about what kind of character I am, while not forcing the plot point of “staying at camp” quite so obviously. I watched a few similarly illusory choices play out in Movie Mode, and it kind of took the intrigue out of things, for me. The minecart felt pretty securely on the rails - and while the ride was mostly entertaining, it’s a long one without your hands on the wheel.

No shade, obviously - I’m just a lil guy with a lil opinion. Take it with a grain of salt, considering I didn’t get through the whole thing. But if you like horror flicks, and you have the attention span for Movie Mode (or the patience for the possibly wonky camera and movement controls), The Quarry is, to my knowledge, unique - I don’t know of any other games that are true odes to the teen-murder-movie genre. Seems like there should be more, huh?

Phew. Long read. Thanks for sticking with it. Hope you got some entertainment out of it, or at least a few recommendations for games that might not have been on your radar. And if your holidays were a little on the lonely side, too, maybe you enjoyed a bit of nerdy camaraderie from your friendly neighborhood Amanda Lynn and her two best gaming buddies.

See ya next week with the conclusion of The 12(ish) Days of Gamesmas. I’ll bring the hot chocolate, you bring the marshmallows.

…NEXT TIME, on All Things Games with Amanda Lynn…

• Amanda doesn’t stick to any of the games on the list established in Part 1, but we knew that was both likely and inevitable

• Amanda still can’t stop playing the Shroom and Gloom demo - but finally beat the final so-called “unbeatable” boss, lfgggg

• Amanda can’t fathom why there’s a Coldplay Beat Saber pack - who is this for? What is the Venn diagram between Beat Saber and Coldplay fans? Aren’t those just two circles on opposite sides of the page, never to intersect? Why would you make a Coldplay pack and not a Rainbow Kitten Surprise pack? Do you hate money?

• Amanda is still wearing fluffy reindeer pajamas - and you’ll have to pry them from her cold, dead legs after the snowstorms claim her

‘Twere the last weeks of December
And all throughout Slackuses
Palm tree emojis
Were gracing our statuses

The CLs were posted
To the bug threads with care
With hopes that our fixes
Still would be there

The gamers were nestled
All snug in their blankets
While visions of Steam Sales
Emptied their bankses 

My cats in their sweaters
And I in my smock
Had just settled down
To f— with some Koroks

When from my phone
Arose such a clatter
But heck if I'd check
To see what was the matter

Away to my Steam Deck
I flew in a flash
Pulled closed the shutters
And tightened the sash

I powered my console
And turned up the mix
Lost in my gaming
Until 2026

But work heard me exclaim
'Ere I gamed out of sight
"I'm on PTO until January;
have a good night!"

It’s that time of year again - two blissful weeks to do absolutely f— all while I recharge my batteries for the year ahead. Can you smell it? Smells like cinnamon hot chocolate and fresh fallen snow, with just a hint of eau de gamer cave.

Over the next couple of weeks off, I’m endeavoring to get in some quality gaming time - which is honestly a rarity for me. I don’t game nearly as much as I used to, nor as much as I want to.

It’s partly exhaustion; working on games all day every day sometimes makes playing games feel like more work, less like leisure.

It’s partly that so many games feel so LARGE, like such a commitment; I’m still not recovered from the 200 hours I put into BG3. I haven’t been able to fathom starting another relationship like that right now. I’ve needed to be single. It’s been healthy for me.

It’s partly that a good number of my hobbies involve screen-free time: reading, music, hiking, biking, skating, arts’n’crafts. After working 40+ hours/week on screens, I *must* take time away from screens or my eyeballs will fall out.

It’s partly that I feel like, if I’m going to game, I should be doing *productive* gaming: Beat Saber, Dance Dance Revolution, Pistol Whip, et cetera games that burn calories, so I don’t feel guilty for not moving my body.

But I miss carefree gaming, y’know? I miss the simpler times, when I could get lost in a game after school and it felt like recuperation. When I could lose a weekend to a game and feel zero guilt about or fatigue because of it. I want to try to find that again over the next couple of weeks.

Care to join me? (By the way, I won’t post every day - so don’t unsubscribe in anticipation of being annoyed by my Gamsemas cheer.)

On the first(ish) day of Gamesmas, my true love gave to me: Shroom and Gloom

I started my 12(ish) days of Gamesmas a bit early, because I got utterly hooked on the demo for Shroom and Gloom by Team Lazerbeam & Devolver Digital. And I want - no, need - to talk about this game. It’s all I’ve been doing outside of work this week.

Shroom and Gloom is an addictive card-battler dungeon-crawler roguelike in the style of some of my favorites of its ilk, like Inscryption and Slay the Spire. Progress through claustrophobic, dark-psychedelic caves, battling increasingly weird and difficult shroomy baddies, collecting weapons and upgrades to modify your deck.

I cannot stop playing. The demo features 15 battles with three bosses scattered among them, and the replayability factor is high - I just know I can beat the insanely difficult last guy. Just one more run. Just one more run. <eyes begin bleeding> Just one more run.

You ever play a game and think, “Oh, yes. This renews my hope in the industry. The youths are gonna be alright.” This is that kind of game. The art style! The atmosphere! The gameplay! The soundtrack! The little innovations on the genre! It’s humming hard on all cylinders.

It’s still a demo, so there are some checks’n’balances to iron out - the “foes can continually call for reinforcements that are increasingly difficult” feature, in particular, feels super punishing and has suddenly ended many an otherwise strong run, especially coupled with very few/rare cards that damage all enemies - but it’s still polished as heck and a heck of a good time. I can see so much potential for the full shape of it.

In fact, I was so inspired by my imaginings of the full shape, I jumped into the Team Lazerbeam Discord to see if they were planning to add in any story elements. I was thinking delivery à la Cult of the Lamb - short, spare, oblique, inscrutable, not spelling anything out, only serving to deepen the mystery.

If you’re unfamiliar, Cult of the Lamb is another dungeon-crawler roguelike (although smash’n’bash like Hades, not card-based) that spreads its spare story seeds through rare story rooms, and upon death:

Team Lazerbeam was kind enough to reply to my inquiry:

As much as I might like to write some nebulous and inscrutable story moments for SnG, I totally get where they’re coming from on this. I foresee the community piecing together its own interpretation of the lore from the cards and the world, and there can be great fun and satisfaction in that kind of storytelling.

Overall, I can only highly recommend delving into this demo - and if you manage to beat the last boss, for the love of shrooms, tell me how you did it.

While I yearn for the full release, let’s check out something completely different.

On the second(ish) day of Gamesmas, my true love gave to me: The Beginner’s Guide

You might’ve seen my previous post about how I’m solo-developing a “walking novel” in Unreal:

And the plan for that game thus far is not to have much typically gamified gameplay, which places it in an interesting… er, place. Is it actually game if there’s no combat, no puzzles to solve, no platforming, no resource management, no QTEs? There are interactive elements, sure, and visuals, and player agency, but does that qualify it as a game? What makes a game a game? (Folks debated this at length on LinkedIn last time I brought this up.)

So I’ve started seeking out some “games that aren’t games” type of games to play for inspiration. Enter The Beginner’s Guide.

I went into The Beginner’s Guide only vaguely aware of what it’s about. I knew the writer from The Stanley Parable was involved (yay). I knew it wasn’t a “traditional game”. I knew it came highly recommended by gamers and game devs alike.

I don’t know exactly what I was expecting, but I wasn’t expecting a surrealist metanarrative/commentary on game development, creativity, expectation, form’n’function, motivation, depression, ambition, audience vs. creator and the push/pull of love/hate and intrinsic need and damn, man. I gotta sit down after that one.

It was both the perfect game I could’ve played as I’m embarking on my own solo dev journey and the worst game I could’ve played as I’m embarking on my own solo dev journey. I started off feeling buoyant - haha, look at how we’re deconstructing game development - and ended with an existential crisis.

10/10, would recommend.

…NEXT TIME, on All Things Games with Amanda Lynn…

Here’s what I picked up in the Steam Winter Sale:

• Bendy and the Ink Machine

• Pools

• Never Again

• Othercide

• The Quarry

And here are some games I’ve been meaning to pick up and/or get back to:

• Clair Obscur (haven’t played yet)

• Tears of the Kingdom (haven’t finished yet)

• Lorelei and the Laser Eyes (haven’t finished yet)

• Tactical Breach Wizards (haven’t played yet)

• Subnautica: Below Zero (haven’t played yet)

Will I play everything on these lists over the next 12(ish) days of Gamesmas? Maybe! Will I deviate? Inevitably! Will I post daily? Like I said earlier, decidedly not - so, again, don’t unsubscribe if you’re anticipating being annoyed. (In all likelihood, I’ll probably just post once at the halfway point and a round-up at the end.)

But *do* subscribe if you’re not already subscribed:

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Happy Crimbo!

I bet you’re wondering how I got here:

It all started with Pluribus.

You seen Pluribus? Das good shït. Vince Gilligan’s latest joint on Apple TV, starring Rhea Seehorn, AKA Kim from Better Call Saul.

Pluribus entertains an interesting question that I don’t want to spoil if you’re not already aware of the show’s premise. Go in unknowing, if you can; I feel it amps up the “I don’t know what the earthly hell is going on, but I’m so here for it” vibe of it all.

Either way, your familiarity with Pluribus is not required to follow along with this or any future dev log, so don’t sweat it if you haven’t seen it yet. (But also do watch it eventually, it’s great.)

Minorest of Pluribus details, so minor that I won’t even spoiler-text it: a self-storage facility features briefly as a setting in one episode.

And as I was watching that episode, I got to thinking: “Huh. What if I made a game set in a self-storage facility?”

And I answered myself: “Yeah, what if? What would it be about?”

Me: “Well, what if it’s about one person - say, the manager of the facility. And they’re seemingly/probably the only person left after an <apocalyptic event of some magnitude>.”

Also me: “Right, yeah. But the story’s not really about the <apocalyptic event of some magnitude>. It’s about the person left behind, and what their customers left behind.”

M: “Exactly. You’re hiding out in this self-storage facility you manage. And every day, forced by your basest of survival needs, you have to break into one of your customer’s units to scrounge for things that might keep you alive.”

AM: “And in so doing, you learn about these people who were only ever just passing faces to you. You uncover their histories - and it forces you to reckon with your own.”

M: “YES. And it’s not so gamified as needing to min/max resources - that part’s more abstracted. Like, ‘You find a can of tuna; it’ll do for the day.’ It’s more a walking sim meets visual novel. A walking novel. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road vibes - a sort of bleak reflection with a foregone conclusion.”

(This conversation with myself went on for some time; I had to rewind Pluribus three times because I kept spacing out so hard thinking about this idea.)

So. I had myself an idea. And unlike the other little game prototypes I’ve been tinkering with on and off (you might’ve caught a post or two on LinkedIn about Plettformer, Floaty Hippo, and Downbrella), this one spoke to me as something… ugh, do I say it? damn it, I’m gonna say it… ~special~. Something more than a proof of concept to play around with and put up on a shelf whenever I get bored or stuck. Something with something to say.

I could *see* it, y’know? I could see the loop. Waking up in your office-turned-camp, Day Whatever of the Apocalypse. You’ve long stopped keeping track. Rifling through your files for a promising unit. (“1408. Scraggly bearded guy. Prepper getup. Always came at night. Truck full of pallets. Maybe stashed some food?”) Just one unit a day; save your strength, save your hope. Setting out to walk the rows beneath the dead TV channel sky. Finding the unit, cracking the lock. Exploring inside. Getting to know the owners - posthumously, you assume. You suppose you can’t really know. But what does it matter anyway. What matters are the units. What you can eat and drink to wake another day. What you’ll go without to give to the cat. How the units remind you of your own life, your “before” life - or distract you from your present. The repetition. The days narrowing. The truths you don’t want to face, but know you must - before it’s all over. Before you succumb.

Mmm, yeah. Das good shït.

And then I had a back-to-earth moment à la an honest assessment of my game development strengths and weaknesses:

• Strength: Writing. I can write the heck out of some emotional, evocative descriptions of things in storage units, and weave those descriptions together into compelling character portraits sketched across an overarching narrative.

• Weakness: Creating art assets. I cannae draw whatsoever. I can 3D model, but only slowly, and with limited understanding of best practices for game modeling and optimization.

• Strength: Environment design. I love me a beautiful corner. I can place assets to tell visual stories all day long.

• Weakness: C++. Please, I’ve gotten this far in my career without having to seriously learn C++. Don’t make me start now.

• Strength: I’m decent at Unreal Blueprints - or, at least, decent at following tutorials to bridge my knowledge gaps, and decent at doggedly convincing myself that there is always SOME WAY to do the thing I’m trying to do, and damn it, I will figure it out.

• Weakness: I do not have thousands of money-dollars to spend on making a game in my free time.

Famous lasts.

So. What if I:

• built the game in Unreal Blueprints,

• sourced all of the art from free/cheap models on Fab Marketplace*,

  • *only human-made models, never AI slop, I hate it I hate it god I hate it so effing much burn it all to the ground

• applied an abstract shader to unify the different art styles so you couldn’t tell it was a bunch of random asset packs,

• and leaned on my writing skills to (so to speak) paint the full picture?

What if, huh? WHAT IF?!

A brief note to answer the inevitable question of “Why are you making a dev log that no one will read for a game that isn’t really a game and doesn’t have any mass market appeal and probably won’t sell any copies on Steam?”

I grant ya, that’s a good question. I guess I’m doing it for a few reasons:

• So I can be my own rubber ducky. You know that design practice of talking to a rubber ducky to work through your ideas? It’s that, mostly. I know very few, if anyone, will read these logs. But they’re a good space for me to work through problems - problems I’ve solved already, problems I’m facing, problems I’m punting down the line, where Future Amanda will curse Past Amanda. What fun we can have revisiting old dev logs: Well, well, well, if it isn’t the consequences of my own actions!

• Accountability. ADHD as I am with my hobbies, I am wont to hyperfixate on something for a few weeks, then lose interest and 180 entirely (see: everything I’ve ever done). But I feel like this is something I really must to finish, not just start. Maybe the act of blogging about it will keep me motivated to actually bring this idea to fruition.

• To showcase that anyone can try to do this. I’m mostly an idiot, honestly. But if I can piece together some functional components of a game, you can, too. It sounds trite, maybe, but I think there’s something potentially validating in seeing an ordinary dumbf—k like me take on something this ambitious. Let this series be the catalyst you need: “I’m a thousand times more capable than this idiot! That’s all the inspiration I needed! I’m finally gonna make my game!” Yay, you’re welcome.

And with that, let’s talk shaders.

PART 1: Shader? I hardly know ‘er!

…but how hard can it be?

Spoiler Alert: IT’S… actually surprisingly quick to get off the ground, thanks to YouTube tutorials.

My first thought was, of course, Return of the Obra Dinn. That dithering shader lends itself well to marrying simple geometry and asset packs of varying fidelity and aesthetic, wouldn’t you think?

But - but - I didn’t really *want* a dithered look for my game. I do quite like RotOD’s aesthetic, don’t get me wrong - but I didn’t want to jump on the dithering hype train. A quick search of “dithering shader” yields a few dozen games lovingly copying the style, and I love that for them. But I wanted something unique. Something unto its own.

I started leaning toward something more sketchbook-like. And then started gathering some inspiration.

FUN FACT: Did you know there are, like, no 3D games that employ a black and white sketchbook-like aesthetic?

I went a’gatherin’ relevant examples across 2D and 3D games with a black and white palette.

• There are the Of/Over Loathing games (my beloved) - but that’s (most excellent) 2D stick figure art:

  

  West of Laothing, Asymmetric

• There’s World of Horror (another beloved) - but that’s 1-bit pixel art:

  

  World of Horror, panstasz

• There’s LIMBO and INSIDE (beloveds abound) - but those are more monochrome-in-watercolor vibes:

  

  LIMBO, Playdead

• There’s Genesis Noir - which looks slick as all get-out - but that’s, mmm, like, vectory flat shading, I think I’d call it? and I spy some color:

  

  Genesis Noir, Feral Cat Den

• There’s MadWorld - which is close! - but strategically employs red, and reads more comic book LOD than sketchlike, to me:

  

  MadWorld, Platinum Games

• And various other examples from this listicle and this listicle and this Reddit thread and this itch.io collection.

• The very closest example I could find to what I had in my mind’s eye was Echochrome, a Monument Valley-like:

  

  echochrome, Japan Studio

• But that wasn’t quite it. A little too neat for what I was envisioning, y’know?

• Side Note: This highly specific search has yielded a number of games I’ve never heard of and now want to play, Echochrome and Genesis Noir top among them.

So. Unique art style? Check. We are living amidst a dearth of sketchbook-like 3D black’n’white games. Allow me to attempt to correct that.

Art style fully in my mind’s eye, I broke the shader problem space down into two things I wanted the shader to achieve:

• take colorful things → make them monochromatic

• take 3D things → give them a 2D-inspired grease pencil-like outline

Make ‘em Monochromatic

Through the power of amalgamated tutorials, I arrived at this solution to the problem space of making colorful things monochromatic, and applied it to a Post Process Volume:

And by the subsequent power of desaturating and separating our lights and darks, we get ourselves a shader that produces this sort of blown-out monochrome effect:

Yes, I know, it looks wonky out of context, but bear with me. This is only the first part of the problem space.

I played around with adding in various effects on the shadows - hatching and halftone and whatnot - but ultimately decided I didn’t like the look of any of them. (And this was excellent happenstance, for reasons we’ll discuss later.) Here’s an early version of the shader that played around with dithering(!) darks:

But it wasn’t working for me - well, I mean, it was working, like, it was functional, but it wasn’t vibing with what I was imagining. Although you’re welcome to copy the node setup if it works for you! Go ham, go hogwild, pig out. (Why does our language include multiple metaphors of encouragement involving swine?)

Grease Pencil-Like Outline

I gave this the old college try, following tutorial after tutorial, but always would up with Blueprint spaghetti I just could not untangle to achieve the desired effect. I got outlines that only worked from one angle, I got outlines that doubled, I got outlines that disappeared. Interestingly, once, I managed to make outlines that got thicker and thicker over the game’s runtime, until the whole game became a pulsating black void. Trippy effect - could be useful for a cinematic moment - but not exactly what I was going for.

So, I spent the very first money-dollars of the project and picked up the Advanced Outline Shader by Evans Bohl.

Look, I’m all for learning new things. And there will be endless opportunities to learn new things as I develop this game. But as a solo dev with limited time to work on this game on nights and weekends around my full-time day job of developing games, I am also all for making smart choices, knowing my limits, and not reinventing the wheel. So when my tutorial-fu failed me, I was happy to give money to someone who had already solved my problem. Thanks, Evans!

And by these Post Process Volumes combined (captaaaaain planet!), I arrived at a sketchbook-like shader I could apply over various asset packs to create a unified aesthetic:

And *bam*. That was it! That was the look I had in my mind’s eye! A sketchbook-like aesthetic applied in 3D. I love the way details fill in and fade out as you view from different angles - entirely an accident, I’m not even sure how I managed to do that. I love the high noon look, barely any shadows to be seen. I love it so much, in fact, that when I made an indoor scene, I ended up turning off contact shadows on all my objects and made separate lighting channels for different light sources so I could retain that barely-any-shadows look. Here’s me testing out different values on an ambient cubemap as I experimented with different ways to replicate high noon indoors:

I evaluated the shadows for a bit, but ultimately, it felt too dramatic and detailed as compared to what I had in my mind’s eye. I wanted to lean into the uncanny dream-like quality of the absence of shadows, and having realistic shadows grounded things too much:

Not to mention, shadows would later DRIVE ME SHATBIT crazy as I tried to debug why my cat character’s shadow was offset by a good chunk of units. I could not figure it out, despite hours of searching and videos about how Unreal renders shadows. You can see it in the bed above, too - the bed’s shadow is offset from the ground contact points. And this is not the sort of unrealism I was going for with my shadows. So, I said “Not today, Shadows!” and made my life a whole lot easier while also cementing my aesthetic. (“Say ‘aesthetic’ one more time, Amanda, I swear to god…”)

Oh, and, I must apologize for the camera-piloting of the videos in this post - all of my development so far has been on my couch with my laptop trackpad. Absolute insanity, I know. Truly chaotic evil development.

Thus, our shader journey reaches a conclusion

And with that, I’ve accomplished what I set out to accomplish, plus some emergent goals:

• A shader that unifies the disparate aesthetic (sorry) of random free asset packs from Fab, allowing me to focus on my strengths (writing & level design) instead of plodding through my weaknesses (fast 3D modeling of properly optimized assets)

• A unique art style inspired by, but distinct from, cool things I love

• An uncanny, dream-like look (that I suspect reduces performance overhead, what with not drawing contact shadows, or at least offsets the performance cost of running two Post Process Volumes) to reinforce the narrative themes

“Cool, Amanda, but what was up with that stricken-looking flying cat from the beginning of this dev log?” —You, probably

This post is already Rather Long™, so why don’t we explore that in Dev Log 2? (I swear, this was not an intentional bait’n’switch - I just reread through the entire post and realized I’ve probably already lost 99% of you, and am going to lose 99% of you who remain if I add another lengthy section. So let’s take a breather.)

…NEXT TIME, on All Things Games with Amanda Lynn…

• Amanda adds a cat to the game, because obviously

• Amanda has never animated anything and learns a lot about blend spaces, motion matching, and the perils of realistic quadruped movement

• Amanda also learns about AI behavior trees, nav meshes, and the joys/horrors of additive blend spaces

• Amanda gets Very Mad™ about AI pathing and strongly entertains buying a $178 plugin that will Do it For Them™

• The cat is in no way vital to the core game loop, such as it is, but it is important in our hearts, so it must be Perfect™

• Oh, Amanda also does a lot with Level Streaming, which may or may not need to be discussed in another dev log, depending on how long they ramble about Cat Fren™

Sometimes I struggle to feel like I have any right to write about how anything is done in game development.

Maybe it’s imposter syndrome - yes, still, even as I approach 20 years of games industry experience and 40 years of life. I’m an AFAB person in tech, after all. We live in a world where Gamergate happened, and all other sorts of delightful “opinions” about the validity of women and other gender minorities working or represented in games. Or existing at all (sigh).

I’m sure that’s part of it. But another part, the larger part, is: there is no one, single, source-of-truth, written-in-stone standardized way of doing anything in games.

Every project I’ve worked on, every studio I’ve worked with, from the largest AAA to the tiniest indie team, has done it differently. We’re largely making it up as we go along (hence the imposter syndrome!).

So when excellent questions come my way, like this thoughtstarter via LinkedIn, which I’ve amalgamated from a few similar inquiries:

My answer is, rather lamely, “It totally depends on a billion factors that are unique to each special snowflake of a game project and game studio.”

And I can only speak to my own experience with various projects and studios - but there’s no telling whether my experience will be at all applicable or helpful to anyone else. The whys and hows behind development processes are typically specific to the circumstances of the project and studio at that moment in time.

That’s sort of the larger issue of knowledge-sharing across the games industry - lots of reinventing the wheel in unique silos to solve novel (or not) problems. And it’s hard to avoid, what with most of us working under NDAs, contractually unable to share knowledge. By the time we’re able to talk about processes and best practices and technical tips and tricks… it’s typically years after a game ships, years after the work was performed, years after there have been changes to engines, years after the team discovered a new and better way to do things that they’re now employing but once again can’t talk about because of NDAs, until years from now the game ships… rinse and repeat.

As my grandmother is partial to saying, “See what I mean, jelly bean?”

But, on the off-chance my experience is at all applicable, useful, or otherwise imparts learnings, it’s still worth talking about, eh? So, buoyed by those caveats, let’s float on and look at some examples of how narrative seeds sprout.

I’ve managed to sort the things I’ve often encountered in the industry into three general scenarios. And per earlier caveats, I’m going to bird’s-eye-view this so I don’t spill any (jelly) beans I’m not allowed to spill.

Shall we?

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Scenario 1: Narrative as Afterthought

If ever you’ve talked with me at length about narrative design, you’ve heard me say something along the lines of:

“If you want to include narrative in your game, narrative does great work as eggs in the game cake batter, binding together all the disparate parts. But narrative is less effective when it’s the frosting holding together a crumbling cake, slapped on as a last step to try to keep the whole thing somewhat cohesive.”

But, sometimes-leaning-towards-often, narrative holds the role of frosting in game development. And it happens something like this:

Everyone hustles and bustles in the kitchen to whip up the batter for the game cake. For whatever reason, they don’t include eggs in this batter. Maybe they didn’t think the cake needed eggs. Maybe they thought another ingredient doubled as eggs. Maybe they didn’t have the budget for eggs. Maybe someone on high made a decision that eggs don’t sell game cakes and so it was always the plan to use frosting as a binding agent. Et cetera et cetera various reasons why, intentional or not, a project with narrative might not include narrative from the get-go.

The game cake comes out of the oven at the 11th hour looking a little sus. Things are falling apart. Gordon Ramsey would yell at it. Amaury Guichon would shake his head sadly in French. Chef Reactions would give it a 3/10 and say “F-ck it, yeah, I’d probably still eat it.”

So the team calls in a Narrative Expert™ to frost the cake, praying the frosting will hold the cake together and make it delicious. Better yet, if that frosting masks the lack of eggs and convinces diners that this cake is 100% baked with eggs from the start, it’s bon appetit and rock’n’roll.

Back to our question’s seed metaphor - in Scenario 1, the seed is the game that mostly already exists. And now needs a narrative to explain its maybe-not-so-cohesive crumbly bits. So what’s a Narrative Expert™ to do in the role of Cake Doctor?

Their best, really. Taking a game that has not spent much time with narrative and giving it a narrative after the fact of its development is not always ideal. You find yourself working backwards, trying to make up reasons why different game systems exist, why the world is the way it is, why characters do things, and most importantly, why the player does things. So you do what you can to cover the holes, applying frosting thick enough to glue things together, but not so thick that the experience of eating the cake is unpleasant.

I did note that this can be a less-than-ideal scenario, because frosting can’t fix everything, but don’t get me wrong: sometimes this works out great! Maybe this is blasphemous to admit as a game writer and narrative designer, but some games do just fine with narrative frosting. Not every game needs to or should be deeply story-driven. That’s one of the great beauties of games - incredible variety.

Scenario 2: Narrative as Inciting Development Incident

If I can presume for a moment, I think this is the scenario our question-askers had in mind when musing on the path from seed to sprout. In this scenario, narrative is the first ingredient. Slap those eggs in a bowl and get whiskin’, baby. We’ll sift in some flour later.

Let’s talk about an idea I had for a personal project, since I know this won’t break any NDAs: I wanted to turn the plot of Sondheim’s Into the Woods into a game. That was the seed. That whole play. A straight-up gamification of the exact story. Plot, characters, lore, quest through lines - we got ‘em all. That’s our narrative bible.

Now, this is quite the shortcut I’m using in this scenario to get from seed to narrative bible; if you’d come up with an original idea, or were licensing an IP into some uncharted narrative territory, you’d be thinking up all the plot, characters, lore, quest through lines, et cetera from scratch. But any excuse to talk about my love of Sondheim and how Into the Woods could make a great video game :)

So, we had our seed of an idea, which, after much writing, begat our narrative bible - now, how do we gamify it?

Typically, we have a lot of conversations (to start, and continually throughout development) with a lot of smart people across multidisciplinary teams. We talk to game designers about our ideas for quests - like the baker and his wife, searching the woods for “the cow as white as milk, the cape as red as blood, the hair as yellow as gold, the slipper as pure as gold” (iykyk). We talk to the engineers about what sorts of systems we’ll need to build to support questing, dialogue, cutscenes, inventories, et cetera et cetera. We talk to the artists about the environments and characters and animations upon which we’ll feast our eyes.

Importantly, we talk about how, moment to moment, gameplay will unfold for the player. And we talk about each of our shared parts in bringing that experience to life. After all, we’re not creating a play or a movie or a book - we’re creating an interactive experience. The (eggy) narrative binds those interactive moments together, gives motivations for the player and characters both to embark on those interactions.

Though the narrative seed is the inciting development incident in the scenario, it’s important (imo) that narrative isn’t the gatekeeper of the best player experience. Narrative can be a north star - it can guide decisions, remind us of our development goals - but it can also remain flexible, open to adjustment. A living thing that grows and changes over the course of development, takes into account the big picture. I’ve found the game cakes are best baked in conversation. If there’s a gameplay idea that will make the experience better for the player, but maybe strays from the narrative, that’s a conversation worth having.

Which leads me to Scenario 3 (my favorite)…

Scenario 3: Narrative as Conversation

Scenario 3? Goated. But I’ve found it to be one of the more rare scenarios. In the game cake of Scenario 3, narrative and gameplay are your wet ingredients, eggs and oil, mixed together as step one. It’s a narrative in conversation with gameplay from the very first.

If we shake up our confectionery metaphor some, you might think of it like a peanut buttered slice of bread meeting a jellied slice of bread. Two things that begin simultaneously, continually aware of one another, coming together in perfect harmony.

When narrative and gameplay are simultaneous seeds, it can sow a continual riffing energy throughout development. Sometimes gameplay takes the reins and that sparks a narrative idea; sometimes narrative takes the reins and that sparks a gameplay idea. Gameplay and narrative endlessly volleying ideas back and forth, shaping each other as the game progresses. (Art and engineering, too! We’re all storytellers in this scenario.)

One of my favorite freelance gigs of recent times was like this - narrative seed meeting gameplay seed to sprout together into a peanut butter and jelly game cake. Delicious collaboration to make something super cohesive.

In this scenario, sprouting the idea seed into the full game narrative is always in step with the larger picture of the game’s development. Scenario 3 takes all that same multidisciplinary collaboration from Scenario 2, but where Scenario 2 is frontloaded with fleshed-out narrative materials, Scenario 3 fleshes out narrative throughout, proactively and reactively. Both narrative and gameplay (and art and systems) are flexible and seeking to gel with one another, rather than being rigid and prescriptive from either side.

What does that look like in practice? Nothing (or very few things) written in stone. Having a lot of unknowns - but in a cool, casual, “we’re leaving space for invention” kind of way. Our plot may shrink and expand. Our cast of characters may change - their backstories, identities, story roles. Our side stories, lore, environmental storytelling - all subject to fresh inspiration as we get to know the game we’re making.

Stephen King calls it “seat of the pants” writing - letting the story develop as the story develops. There’s no straying from the narrative, because the narrative is open to wandering together with the rest of the merry band that is game development.

All of This to Say

Our paraphrased question was, “How do you take an idea seed and sprout a game narrative?”

And our three general scenarios show us - it varies. Cake metaphor or seed metaphor, take your pick, but you might be:

• applying narrative late in development,

• frontloading narrative to inform development and changing it a little here’n’there to accommodate development, or,

• developing the narrative as the game develops.

You might even mix some of the above - I once had a gig with a client who had started with a narrative bible, ignored it completely, and then called in a cake decorator to try and retrofit the original narrative idea. A little of column A, a little of column B.

There’s no one way, and there’s no necessarily “right” way, either. Different projects and studios have different needs, constraints, goals. There’s not a set of hallowed steps, per se - rather, approaches you might take, all variables considered.

And no matter what, you get to eat cake at the end, so it’s a win-win.

One More Thing

Listeners of the excellent gaming podcast Triple Click will know about One More Thing, the segment of the pod where each of the hosts talk about one more thing™ they’re enjoying in life, usually unrelated to the topic of the episode. Permit me a One More Thing moment? A little glimpse into what I get up to outside of games.

It’s long been my dream to shoot concert photography and/or do some kind of creative work for my favorite band, Rainbow Kitten Surprise. (Not least of all because I’ve long held a mildly parasocial theory that if lead singer Ela Melo and I were to work together, we’d become fast friends.) And recently, I got one step closer to that dream: I got my first photo pass to shoot a touring musician’s show!

And it was AWESOME. I had a blast slipping about shooting pics - felt fully in my element, which is a rarity for me when I leave my house. Now I have some sick DSLR shots for my portfolio - my first bona fides that aren’t just really good iPhone photos of RKS from the barricade. Let’s freaking go. Will 2026 be the year I work with RKS? Shall I ~manifest~ it? One hopes.

Was this post in any way helpful or enlightening? Did you get Value™ out of it? Was the cake metaphor working? If so, please assuage my imposter syndrome and validate me with a like and a share.

…NEXT TIME, ON ALL THINGS GAMES WITH AMANDA LYNN…

I’ve been working on a secret personal project. A ~game~. (No, not Into the Woods, sadly - the Sondheim estate won’t return my calls.) I just might reveal it. I just might do a series of dev blogs. I should probably do some sort of clickbaity engagement thing, “If this post gets 42 likes…”, but I am bone-deep exhausted of the algorithmic frippery ruling our world. So, I’ll just kind of awkwardly mention it and then walk away mid-sent-

Post link: https://www.linkedin.com/embed/feed/update/urn:li:share:7353894471094181890

This is the competition factor for the field of Writing & Narrative: 22x.

22x. Let that sink in.

Compared to, say, Art at 2.4x. Or even Game Design at 9.3x - a high number, to be sure, but a far cry from 22x.

When junior writers and narrative designers come to my inbox seeking advice, I don’t want to dissuade you from something you’re passionate about - but this is our reality. And our reality is 🦆ing hard. It sucks, it’s unfair, it’s the worst, it’s desk-flippingly rage-quitty. But it’s our reality.

There are relatively few writing and narrative roles - and we can speculate as to why, be it studios deciding they don’t need specialized narrative functions (the “anyone can write” fallacy) or an appropriate number of resources for the workload, or generative AI doing the creative work studios used to hire humans to do, or a lower number of story-having games being made, or what have you, or all of the above.

And there are a ton of applicants for these precious few roles. During my job hunts in 2023 and 2024, I heard from multiple recruiters who said they had over a thousand applications for an open narrative role. And not just one recruiter, one time. Multiple people. Multiple studios. Over a thousand applications per role. That’s where we’re at, straight from the people looking at these applications.

I was unemployed for 8 months in between each of my layoffs in 2023 and 2024, and I’ve been in games since 2006. Even with my experience and seniority, I spent 16 months out of an 18-month period unemployed. Bleeding through my savings, constantly trying to find scraps of freelance work while I applied for full-time gigs, and hearing “no” from everything within games and outside of games both. Moving 3,500 miles across the continent from Vancouver to New York for a job that laid me off after 7 weeks, and moving *again* out of HCOL New York to save money in lieu of any aid after the second layoff - because, if you remember, I’d moved from Canada and didn’t qualify for any aid in the US. That’s not a sustainable life. And I’m not even 40 yet - ageism still awaits.

I eventually found something (better yet, something I love), literally against the odds. And not from sending in my applications blind, but constant networking. Constantly reaching out to people, constantly exhausting every avenue, constantly trying to find anyone who would be willing to help get my resume in front of someone. I got so damn lucky to know people who know people, you know? And I every day I pray that it will last, every day I’m filled with anxiety that it won’t, because there is no guarantee of stability in this industry. Even when you’re building amazing and successful games, as we’ve seen from countless indifferent layoffs.

The best advice I can give to junior writers and narrative designers is to be aware of the realities. Follow Amir and his data - and pay particular attention to what he predicts for the industry based on his detailed research in regards to where in the world jobs are likely to be located as remote work dries up and development moves out of North America. Build up a network to lean on - join your local game dev groups, join Discord groups, make genuine connections with folks on LinkedIn. And have an honest heart-to-heart with yourself about your backup plan. (Take it from a 30-something who had to try to make the case for transferable skills for 16 months of job-hunting and couldn’t even get a gig at a grocery store: you need a viable backup plan.)

Keep writing, keep reading, keep making your own solo games, keep making games with friends, keep playing and critically analyzing games - but don’t do it with blinders on, if you can help it. Tune into the reality. Tune into the data. Have those hard conversations with yourself, and with your peers in your writing and narrative design courses. Ask your professors to comment on these realities, make sure you’re not being sold sunshine and rainbows while the storm rages.

I so want it to be sunshine and rainbows for you. I so want to be able to tell you “Hell yeah, our industry is super healthy and hiring so many junior writers and narrative designers right now!” I so want to be able to tell you that having a strong portfolio of your student/solo/small team work and demonstrating your skills is going to land you your first full-time studio gig. But I won’t give you false hope. You can be the absolute most prodigiously skilled and awesomely collaborative junior the industry has ever seen, and any studio would be damn lucky to have you - but there’s still our reality. 22x is our reality.

Writing for games is easy.



You just need a compelling story

with a clear plot

but not too simple —

enough twists and turns

that the player keeps playing,

but not so many

that they can't keep track.



And you need relatable characters

who feel real,

emotional,

and make decisions motivated

by their unique personalities —

so long as their actions

move the plot along

and don't contradict the gameplay

or make the pacing feel

off.



You just need to tell the player

what's going on

and how to play the game

without beating them over the head

with lengthy exposition —

but still frequently remind them

what's going on

and how to play the game

in case it's been a while

since they last picked up the controller.



And don't forget about

environmental storytelling

and all the ways you can

tell stories: like

documents,

notes,

letters,

emails,

graffiti,

audiologs

left strewn about,

but not so obviously

that it seems gamified —

and without knowing

the layout or the environment art

because it’s not done yet

and will change again anyway.



Speaking of change,

you just need

coherent missions 

and gameplay goals

upon which to hook the narrative 

while you’re guessing

what the final design

of a mission 

will actually entail.



You just need to tell

relatable stories

that stick with players for

decades —

so long as the stories

are within the dialogue limit

of your UI

and the word count limit

of an average player's

attention span.



All you have to do

is make sure the story

aligns with the gameplay

and keep track of everything

throughout development

that ever changes

so that when things get cut

or updated

the story still makes sense.



The only thing

you really need to worry about

is making sure you have

an encyclopedic knowledge

of your IP's entire canon

but write the story in a way

that assumes the player

has never heard of this IP before

while also making sure

players who know the IP

are delighted by callbacks.



And it's a cinch

to make sure

that anything you’ve already recorded

in voiceover and performance capture

never changes

so you don't have to spend money

to rerecord any of it.



And don’t even sweat

the pressure to make sure

you’re writing so well

and so fast

that no one would ever suggest 

using AI instead.



You just need to find time

to do the actual writing

while you’re in meetings

6 out of 8 hours of the day.



It’s really not a big deal

to secure the budget

for a sensitivity reader

and narrative QA

to make sure 

nothing is broken

in any sense of the word.



All you really need

is to work in conflicting feedback

from sixteen different stakeholders

and player feedback panels

and make sure

all the narrative

is representative

of all the different pillars

and priorities

that change

every day

throughout development

until launch day.



See what I mean?

Easy!

I was in some corner of the internet or another, scrolling through anecdotes about the lack of positive feedback in corporate game development culture, and it got me reflecting on the importance of giving people their flowers while they’re here.

Assuming critical feedback is in service of the best possible player experience (in the allocated time to develop said experience and with the available resources), critical feedback is of paramount importance. Critical feedback identifies tasks that need to be accomplished in order to make the game better: “X isn’t working the way it should”, “Y needs clarity”, “Z isn’t aligned with the vision”. Critical feedback is necessary for the game’s (hopefully successful) development.

But where critical feedback builds the game, it can break morale.

If the only feedback a team ever hears is “Fix this, do that, this is broken, that’s bad”, day in and day out, while more than likely crunching to meet demands, trading personal and family time for Asana tickets — no matter how valid the critical feedback, it becomes demoralizing.

There has to be positive feedback to balance things out. There has to be an acknowledgement and appreciation of the work going into things — even things that are broken, even things that aren’t yet meeting expectations. It took work to get from nothing to broken, and will take yet more work to get from broken to fun, but there can’t be zero positive feedback along that road from nothing to fun.

9,000 people lost their jobs last week, through no fault of their own, in one fell swoop of a (profitable) megaconglomerate’s indifferent sword. I wonder how many of those 9,000 received their flowers while they were there. I wonder how often they heard “I appreciate your work”, “Good job getting things to this point”, “I see you put a lot into this”.

No gold medals or cookies required for doing the job — just a little human empathy. The games industry is hard enough these days. *Life* is hard enough these days. Have you looked outside? Seems reasonable enough to make people feel seen and appreciated such that they’re motivated to continue addressing the miles of to-dos in the ultramarathon of game development. Red Bull for the soul.

Happy chickens lay more eggs, y’know?

Just some thoughts that surfaced in my meat-noggin as I scrolled through the tales of tired game developers.

Hope y’all are finding ways to cope in these depress-cedented times. (That’s my new word for the depressing way history repeats itself.) I’ll be back soon with a more substantive article.

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You ever have a dark night of the soul? And I don’t mean Batman making 3D-printed kicks; that’s a Dark Knight of the sole.

(Sorry, sorry — much to my own detriment, and that of everyone around me, I cope with attempted humor.)

Recently, I had my own moonless eve of existential contemplation. I’d just been smacked in the face with an iron — metaphorically speaking. An irony to end all ironies made itself known, suddenly and painfully. One of those revelations where you just need to lie down on the kitchen floor and stare at the dead fly in your ceiling lampshade for a while. In fact, at first, that’s all you can do.

And perhaps that’s for the best. Hyperfixate on the need to clean your lampshade. Distract yourself from the iron.

To back up:

It was, effectively, a 17-month-long job hunt. Laid off in July of 2023, briefly hired at the end of January 2024, laid off again in March of 2024, finally found another job in November of 2024. (That job is, blessedly, going fantastically. I love my team, I love the project, and I hope it’s a job I get to do for a long, long time.)

To say the hunt was grueling would be an insult to oatmeal. If an extended job hunt is not something you’ve experienced firsthand, I really can’t impress upon you the toll it takes to hear “no” over and over and over and over and over again. And not a mere “no” to some creation born of you, but “no” to the very concept of you. Even if your seams were stitched of the tightest elven thread, you can start to unravel, no by no, fray by fray.

But you persist. You have to persist. If you want a job, that’s the only avenue: keeping going. It’s at the top of every “10 Crazy Tricks for Your Job Hunt” AI-generated listicle. LinkedInfluencers post about it every 3.5 minutes. Every fortune cookie you break open, every horoscope you check, every self-help book a well-meaning family member gifts you. PeRsIsTeNcE.

Funny, though. Little bit of humor here. Just a chuckle and a joke from the universe. A real giggle.

Persistence? Not the sort of thing to demonstrate in the writers’ room, where killing your darlings reigns supreme.

So, if a studio is evaluating you for a role in the writers’ room, and they see you exuding 200% Maximum Persistence on your job hunt… well, connect the dots for me, gospel choir I’ve hired to stand in for the Greek chorus:

“They’re not gonna hire you, no! They’re not gonna hire you! They think you can’t let it go, oh! They’re not gonna hire you!”

Clap along if ya like.

Now — again — I’m extremely happy where I’ve ended up. It all worked out for the better in the end, didn’t it?

But — but — there’s still that iron, right in the face. There’s still that little guffaw from the universe.

That thing I did for my job hunt, 200% Maximum Persistence? Exhausting every avenue? Repeatedly sounding the call to networking action? Channeling Janis Joplin to “Try (Just a Little Bit Harder)”? Very much a different beast from how I operate in the writers’ room.

In the writers’ room, persistence can be a red flag. We make cutthroat decisions. Absolutely everything can — and most often does — end up on the chopping block. And it’s never anything personal, never an affront to (facetious flourish) ~*~my ideas~*~. My ideas are not precious baby kittens to be protected and preserved; far from it, they are seeds scattered to the wind. Some sow. Some decompose. Some are eaten by birds and later pooped out to fertilize better things.

In the writers’ room, you cannot hold onto things that don’t work — for the story, for the characters, for scope, for available resources, for gameplay, for user experience, for downstream teams, for player comprehension, for the sociocultural climate du jour, for the budget, etc. etc. There are myriad reasons why you’ll need to kill darlings in the writers’ room, and it’s so, so, *so* critical to be able to do so without making a fuss. To not take it personally. To not persist with needling “yeah, but…”s, arms crossed, grump face activated. You yeet it and move on.

I’ve been yeeting and moving on for a good 15 years — that’s my superpower in the writers’ room. I think I can thank ADHD for that; I have a million ideas at any given time, of course 99.999% of them aren’t going to take root. No problem. Have ten more! I’m already sprinting down the sidewalk of another route we can take.

Not to mention, I’m stuntedly afraid of committment; I could never marry myself to my ideas.

So. Imagine the elevator plunge of my soul when I learned through the grapevine that my persistence in the job hunt was seen as a liability for the writers’ room, cutting me off from the opportunity to work with a studio I’d dreamed of joining.

Just a jocular universe having a good ol’ knee-slapper. Just a heehaw, yeehaw, heyhowdy, ain’t that a stinker.

It was me wielding the iron to my face, beating myself up. How could I have been so stupid! How could I not have seen! How could I have screwed myself over so badly! It’s the Numero Uno thing I’ve preached to every junior writer and narrative designer under my wing, the thing with which I lead by example in order to create a safe space for throwing spaghetti — don’t be afraid to kill your darlings. How could I have failed so miserably to make clear that my persistence was contained to the job hunt, and that I’m a downright serial killer of my own writers’ room darlings? *insert wordless existential wailing here*

To reiterate, though: it *did* all work out in the end. I’m extremely stoked to be where I am now — it’s a new dream come true.

So why am I writing this post?

Well, part catharsis. Part processing. It’s that one meme of that guy blinking. Much like my last post re: my on-the-spectrum brain not always getting tone right, it’s a needing to work through things.

But a bigger part of it is that most of my network consists of green “Open to Work” banners. Most of the outreach that comes into my inbox is on the topic of trying to find a job in games. And there just might be some small value in me telling you this little tale of the universe having a go.

Maybe it’s a cautionary tale against flexing skills in your job hunt that could bite you in the context of the job for which you’re applying. Or, perhaps, possibly, maybe: it’s all so wildly, heartbreakingly, maddeningly subjective, and you’re just as well off throwing some essential herbs into a pot of boiling dragon’s blood while standing on one leg and reciting the Littany Against Fear by the light of a supermoon on the third Monday of March when Mars is in microwave.

And maybe it’s a happy ending: my persistence paid off elsewhere. Maybe try not to beat yourself (myself) up about it too much. Maybe (definitely) there’s another room out there that’s happy to have you, and takes your persistence as a sign of strong stamina, boding well for the Long Walk™ that is video game development.

As for the iron to the face? Well, naturally, we yeet it and move on.

Share All Things Games with Amanda Lynn

I tend to overcompensate now, and especially in text — I’m bubbly, jokey, fun! Lots of exclamation points and emojis 😁 All in an effort to ensure that my tone can’t be misconstrued. I’m deeply afraid of accidentally hurting people because my brain brains the way it brains. I take pains to avoid doing harm.

But slip-ups happen. Sometimes catastrophically. One lack of an exclamation point, one emoji too few, one wrong word choice, one uncalculated delivery, and something I intend with a smile and wink comes across hostile. Feelings get hurt. The miscommunication can’t be worked out.

And sometimes that catastrophic slip-up burns a bridge. Slams a door. Kills a dream.

When it happens, I’m eight years old again, wanting to crawl into a hole and never come out. So distraught to realize someone is hurting because of me; so mad at myself for not being “normal”.

It’s awful when it happens with a person I admire, say, at an event or in a virtual forum. In my nerves and excitement, I forget my careful training to slow down. Read the room. Think. Make sure I’m getting my heart across. Take care with my jokes and quips, lest they come across rude. Those are the interactions that haunt me when I can’t sleep at 3 AM.

But it’s even worse when it happens with someone with whom I work. A peer, a manager, a report, a client. After I've gotten it wrong, I do my best to explain my intent and make clear that I didn’t mean to cause harm — but I caused harm nonetheless, and I have to sit with that. Those are the interactions I carry with me, along with that gut-wrenching knowing that I hurt someone I respect.

I remember once, early in my career, a coworker sat me down to explain how feedback I’d given had come across to someone — and I ended up crying, embarrassingly, in all my young overwhelm. I felt so, so terribly that I’d hurt feelings. That was the farthest thing from my intentions.

That moment of realization is inscribed on my brain — the cascade of tabs open in my coworker’s browser, the stuffing poking out of a hole in my armchair, the cut-grass smell floating through the window. I still get anxious when I smell fresh-cut grass, over a decade later.

There’s this assumption floating around out there that folks on the autism spectrum lack empathy, that our struggling with social cues and communication equates to not feeling for others. And while each individual on the autism spectrum is unique, I’d still argue against the assumption that empathy is foreign to us. Once I understand that I’ve hurt someone, it cracks me open. All I want is to take it back, fix it, undo their distress.

I bring this up because I’m painfully aware of my shortcomings, and my inability to “cure” them, despite how far I’ve come, and how hard I continue to work at it.

I bring this up because communication is the bedrock of game development. I think it’s the single most make-or-break skill, beyond any hard skill, that makes game development teams successful.

I bring this up because I recently learned that I messed up again. I messed up a while ago, actually, but it left enough of an impression on the person that they were put off from wanting to chat with me again.

And that’s devastating. Devastating to learn I’ve hurt someone I admire. Devastating that I have no recourse to make it up to them. Devastating to have burned a bridge. Devastating that, no matter how much progress I make in developing my interpersonal communication skills, I still make catastrophic mistakes that hurt people and slam doors in my face. Maybe not as often as I once did, but still.

I don’t think I have any sage advice to dispense in this post — it’s mostly a post-mortem of harm I didn’t mean to cause, and a memorial to a dream I managed to kill through my mistakes. Despite my constantly trying to improve this aspect of myself so I don’t hurt anyone. Despite my best and most vigilant efforts not to let my neurodivergent brain get in the way of said dreams.

Maybe the takeaway is this: It’s exhausting out here for some neurodivergent brains in our communications-heavy games industry. It’s a minute-to-minute minefield, a constant needing to be on top of your perceived vibes so you don’t alienate your collaborators. The mental gymnastics of socializing don’t come natural to a lot of us on the spectrum, and it requires so much brainpower to carefully curate communications. You don’t get a break from it. You slip up, you lose: trust, opportunity, respect. And our industry is so, so small; too small to make mistakes.

If I could cast a spell, I would. “Neurotypical Shapeshift: Exist in the world as a neurotypical person for the next three social interactions.”

Or maybe a better spell: “Asking of Understanding: Beseech the understanding of a person whom you’ve inadvertantly offended with your neurodivergent communication style.”

But all I can do is keep learning from these moments, even as they tear me apart. Even as they knock dreams out of the running.

A parting thought — there’s something my mom used to say (actually, still says) whenever I’d alienate someone with my neurodivergence: “They don’t know what’s in your heart.”

It’s her reminder that I move through the world with good intentions, even if my delivery muddles my message. There’s some comfort in that. There’s frustration in the “they don’t know” part, to be sure, but there’s indeed comfort in the “what’s in your heart” part.

If there’s one goal that I will chip away at for the rest of my life, it’s the goal of closing the gap between “they don’t know” and “what’s in your heart”. To the betterment of my professional abilities as a game developer — but more importantly, to lessen any harm I might do as a person whose brain brains a bit differently.

What started as a reflection on how I survived two layoffs in as many years turned into a lamentation for the state of the games industry, and a bit of an existential crisis. Be warned; my not-so-old wounds still bleed.

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It took 8 months to get from my layoff from A Thinking Ape in 2023 to my first day at Velan in 2024. Fortunately, throughout that job hunt, I had severance and unemployment to help keep me afloat (love you, Canada).

It again took 8 months to get from my layoff from Velan in the spring of 2024 to my first day at That’s No Moon in the fall of 2024. Throughout that job hunt, I did not have severance or unemployment to help keep me afloat, as we were not given severance, and I wasn’t eligible for unemployment with only 7 weeks of work history in the US after spending the prior 7 years abroad. (Worth noting, too, that I’d dipped into my savings to relocate 3,500 miles from Vancouver to NY at the insistence I be on-site for the role.)

I’ve been working in games since 2006 — nearly 20 years of experience under my belt across a range of full-time and freelance roles, from QA to marketing to writing to design to direction, and across a range of projects, from indie to AAA to casual mobile to live service. I’m solidly senior with solid experience. And it still took 8 months to land my next full-time role. Both times. After layoffs out of my control, where my personal performance was not a factor. With stellar recommendations. With literal dozens of people helping to refer me and get my applications seen.

I bring this up not to wallow in the trauma of that time, nor pat myself on the back for being such a good little victim, but to share my cautionary tale. And to share some things I did to weather that second chunk of 8 months, where the situation became especially dire without income beyond piecemeal freelance work.

Let me disclaim: I know these are pretty obvious tips. If you’re in this shitty situation, you’re likely already thinking of everything you can do to cut costs and bring in income. But in my personal experience, I was slow to do some of these things. Like, I spent three months longer in NY than I should’ve before moving to RI. Ditto shopping around for cheaper phone plans. I (naively) didn’t think my period of joblessness would last that long, y’know? And if I’d come across a list like this, I might’ve had a reality check and gotten my affairs in order faster. Slowed the savings bleed sooner.

Or maybe not. I might’ve thought, “Surely, it won’t take 8 months a second time.” Sigh.

Anyway, I’m lucky to have landed somewhere. I’m lucky to have surpassed my previous 7-week high score at Velan twofold. But I’m wary of this industry. I’m aware of how much life-altering decision-making happens beyond any individual contributor’s control. I’m aware of how even the most high-performing, passionate, dedicated, ass-busting people can log into Slack one day and find themselves laid off for the nth time — even when the studio’s making money. Even when the game is successful. No matter how much they crunched to protect their job.

I pray to the spaghetti god daily for my continued employment. But I also have an arsenal of money-saving tips and tricks if fate is once again unkind and I find myself on the job hunt grind for another 8 months at any point in the future.

Such as:

• I moved from a HCOL area in New York to a LCOL area in Rhode Island. This, obviously, required an investment in the form of a U-Haul rental to the tune of about $400. But I went from paying $2500 in rent to $1200, so that was a no-brainer.

• I cancelled every subscription and membership that wasn’t essential to my survival:

  • Streaming subscriptions

    • Instead, I read books (shoutout Libby), listened to tons of podcasts, and watched free content with ads on YouTube, Tubi, etc.

  • Gym membership

    • Running outside is free; doing squats with the cats at home is free.

  • Amazon Prime

    • Got used to going without or repairing; supported local and indie businesses when it was an essential purchase.

  • 100% Pure shampoo and conditioner delivery

    • Sorry, hair, Trader Joe’s Tea Tree Tingle remains a bargain.

  • Et cetera, et cetera — any recurring charge was scrutinized for cheaper alternatives and cut from the budget

    • The little bits added up; cut out 5 things at $20/month = $1200/year saved.

• I enacted a moratorium on buying anything at all that wasn’t human food (basic staples to be preared at home, never takeout or delivery), cat food, or absolutely essential to survival.

  • Hole in my shoe? Throw duct tape on it. Out of duct tape? Borrow some. Cat chewed through a phone charger? Borrow one, and in lieu of that, price shop at the thrift stores and dollar stores for another. That sort of thinking.

• I shopped around for cheaper phone and internet plans, and cut both bills in half without sacrificing any speed.

  • New customer deals are awesome for that.

• I embraced my inner dad and tried to use as little electricity, heat, and hot water as possible to keep my utility bills low.

• I signed up for Medicare so I’d have bare bones health coverage for emergencies and (hopefully) not get stuck with big bills.

• I took on every and any freelance contract I could find, even when the rates were insultingly low.

  • Funny how cash-strapped indie devs found a way to pay a livable freelance rate, but billion-dollar megacorps “couldn’t”.

• I sold things I could live without: clothes, shoes, books, games, concert tickets, art, collectibles, whatever I could.

  • Stuff is overrated anyway, eh?

I’ve kept up these habits since, and tried to keep my spending down as much as possible so I can rebuild my savings.

…but I’ve also had to pay down the credit card debt that was floating me alongside freelance income.

…and winter heating bills.

…and medical/dental/vision co-pays on all the annual maintenance of being a human.

…and veterinary bills for cats who periodically test all nine of their lives.

…and the cost of groceries is obscene. Etc. etc.

Four months into the new role, I’m just about able to put money back into my savings again — juuuuust in time to use some of it to move back to Canada. Worth it.

Other things I did during my job hunts that weren’t directly related to saving money:

• Allowed myself to take trips I’d planned while I had a job — to preserve my sanity, to give me something to look forward to, and because they were nonrefundable.

  • No sense denying myself dopamine; the money was already spent, the job hunt was a slog, and I needed the occasional repreive to refresh.

• Applied at the “just take any job” places LinkedInfluencers like to throw around — retail, restaurants, fast food, call centers, entry-level manual labor, etc.

  • But, wouldn’t you know it, it’s not 1980 anymore, and trying to find an “any job” isn’t as easy as filling out an application and shaking the hiring manager’s hand. Didn’t get a single call on any of those applications, even with having some connections.

• Tried to level up my skills — learned more coding, learned more 3D modeling, went down the road of getting some editing and proofreading certifications, that sort of thing.

  • To learn new things, but also so I could present myself as a more rounded games industry candidate rather than “just” a writer and narrative designer (insert pained expression here).

• Looked outside of the games industry — obviously wasn’t going to hold out for a role in games if I could find a paycheck elsewhere.

  • But, again, even with connections, I got no bites. I didn’t get a single opportunity to make a case for transferable skills, nor the value of my fresh perspective as an industry outsider, blah blah — other than in cover letters that were skipped because my resume was buried under all the in-industry candidates.

• Investigated and made headway on things I could do solo — make my own game, write a novel, start a business.

  • But these things take time, and aren’t guaranteed to generate money, and certainly don’t make money while in progress, so it felt like a bit of a lark to be spending any time on such things while I didn’t have reliable money coming in.

Writing all this out, pausing the hustle for the first time since I’ve started the new role to wrench myself open and reflect on the last couple of years… I’m staggered anew by how damn bleak it can get for game developers.

Trying to get a role in our own industry. Trying to get a role outside our industry. Trying to get an “any job”. It feels actually, literally cursed. To have poured blood, sweat, and tears into this hundred-billion-dollar industry and… *poof*. No longevity. No transferability. No options.

It is deeply, deeply disturbing that this is the state of things. It is truly no surprise to me that folks have decided to take their lives over it. I understand it. It is an exhausting, demoralizing, dehumanizing process to be laid off in the games industry. Especially considering what the games industry asks of you when you’re employed (i.e., absolutely everything, whether you have it to give or not). And even if you manage to claw your way back to employment, you always have the possibility of layoffs on the horizon, always looming over you, always a factor in the back of your mind.

No studio is immune to it. No matter how much your push yourself to deliver gold in the throes of the absolute unbridled chaos that is game development. No matter how many long days you pull, how many weekends you clock in, how much of your life balance you skip in favor or work.

Begs the question: Is it all worth it?

For me… I’m grateful to be doing this — when I’m able to do it. Building interactive stories that connect people, resonate with people, bring about joy and sorrow and catharsis and community and escape…. I’m so freaking lucky to have a hand in it. When I have a hand in it.

But, increasingly, I never know how long my “when” will last. I never know how long I might be unemployed between “when”s. And that makes it hard. That makes it damn hard. And it gets a little harder every time a layoff happens. And every time a layoff happens, my trust in the industry is bruised a little more. And every time a layoff happens, I think, “How is it that I’ve given so much to this industry, and now I’m back here again like it never happened?”

The uncertainty makes it difficult. The scramble to build savings to weather the next layoff. The half-living of life, afraid to plan anything too far out, not sure of being able to commit to anything, be it a trip or a move or a life decision.

But job insecurity is the norm in our end-stage capitalist world, I suppose. It’s not solely the games industry that sees people unable to say, “Of course, I’ll still have the option to be at this job in five years. Of course, I can make plans for my life knowing that my paycheck is reliable.”

So, given nothing is certain, I can at least say I feel happier and derive more satisfaction from my work making games than, say, when I was a secretary for a real estate appraisal firm, or a Sandwich Artist™. Not that I never tried to find satisfaction in the latter examples — just that I feel more of it when I’m employed in games, because the work aligns with my creative pursuits and personal hobbies.

I suppose that’s a measure of it being worth it, for me, personally. And for that little 10-year-old Amanda who finished Ocarina of Time, saw all those names in the credits, and said, “I want to make games when I grow up.”

But I do desperately hope for change in our industry. I hope for reliable, stable employment to become plausible again. I hope not to live in fear of layoffs lurking around every corner.

Barring any of that, and zooming out beyond me, I’d hope for the valuable transferable skills of game devs to be recognized. I’d hope that folks trying to find a way into a more stable industry even have the option to segue into something that lets them plan ahead five years at a time. Or even two. Or even six months. Hell, eight weeks.

Do I think we’ll get there?

I think hope and reality are two different things. I think I’ll try to be grateful for the ride as long as there’s a ride to take. I think I’ll try to keep hoping as long as I can keep my inner candle glowing.

Beyond that, there’s a loading screen. I don’t know what’s on the other side.

Also, as this was written in 2023, some info might be outdated. I haven’t picked up this project in a minute, and was going to switch over to Lua anyway, so if PulpScript or Pulp editor has evolved over the last couple of years, this post is ignorant of that.

Crank Dat, Yo

My Playdate finally arrived, two years after ordering it, and I've been super eager to get crankin' on a Downwell-inspired game. (This will absolutely not be the last of the crank puns. You have been warned.)

This is Downwell, for the uninitiated:

And this is how far I've gotten with my Playdate interpretation, which I'm calling "Downbrella" for now:

It isn't much, but it's something, considering I knew zero PulpScript going into this project, and PulpScript is fairly limited!

My intention — and the inspiration for the whole game, really — is to control the player's x-axis movement with the crank. And that 100% works in the Pulp editor simulator, I'm happy to say! But on device, it behaves... uh, rather oddly. You could say I got *cranky* trying to make it work, ahahahahaha.

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Developing for the Playdate

Would-be Playdate developers have a number of options for developing games and apps for the Playdate. And that number is 3:

1. Lua

2. C

3. PulpScript

I went with PulpScript, namely because it's the language of the in-browser Pulp editor. The Pulp editor is an all-in-one solution for making simple Playdate games, allowing you to create simple pixel tile art, make simple songs and sound effects, develop simple scenes, and write simple scripts in the propreitary PulpScript language.

Note my emphasis on "simple", because while you can make a lot of really cool, complex, and complicated things for the Playdate — like this awesome not-3D 3D spaceship shooter, Tau — you cannot do very many complex and complicated things in Pulp or with PulpScript, as I quickly realized.

Now, I'm not a programmer by trade. My game dev wheelhouse contains staggering stacks of storytelling, writing, design, and direction, and a healthy heap of visual scripting a la Blueprints and proprietary plugins. What traditional scripting I'm capable of has come about through experimentation and necessity — setting up game data in Javascript, building little tools in Python to improve my workflow, dabbling in C and C++ for personal projects, building websites in HTML/CSS, etc.

So, with that caveat, let us say: Amanda is maybe not the greatest programmer, and some of her approaches and choices will be laughable to people who are great programmers.

But, let us also say, PulpScript documentation is sparse, so considering a lack of information, and only a teeny-tiny Discord community for outside help interpreting that documentation, I'd say it's fairly impressive that I managed to pull this off.

So, let's laugh at my code!

...but first, let's take a tour of Pulp.

Pulp runs entirely in your browser (Chrome and Safari are recommended, but it worked fine for me in Firefox, my go-to), which makes jumping into Playdate development easy and appealing if you're not keen on setting up SDKs and working in Lua or C. And I was not.

Here's the hero view. On the left, you have your various tabs of development. We're looking at the "Game" tab, where you define the launcher card thumbnail that appears in your game list on-device and in Playdate's web catalogue. You can also set various metadata, export assets, and assign the song that loops on-device while the game is selected but not yet launched.

Let's pop over to the "Song" tab, as I want an excuse to show off the theme song I built. This was another reason why I was keen to use the Pulp editor, because you can build, right in your browser, everything you need to get a game going, provided you keep it simple.

Hobby musician as I am, and eschewing my destiny to play a mandolin (hahagetitmynameisAmandaLynn), I had so much fun setting up a little chiptune theme song here in the editor. With five channels of waveforms to play with, and various tweaks you can make to each sound channel, you can create some pretty interesting and groovy tunes.

(Incidentally, there's a bug with the editor: beyond 32 bars, you can't scroll the song editor, but you're able to paste data beyond those 32 viewable bars, which results in portions of the song you can't see/edit beyond bar 32. Which means if you want your song to loop seamlessly, and you've accidentally pasted data beyond bar 32, you have to rebuild your song from scratch, because there's no way to scroll over and delete that extra data. A bit annoying. It's been flagged in the dev forums, so hopefully someone's working on a bug fix.)

Here's the theme song I made for Downbrella (screen-recorded from my laptop, so scooch your volume down a tad):

Groovy, no? I was going for something moody, dramatic, a little bit dangerous — and I think I got there.

Now let's take a look at the "Room" tab, which is where you build out your pixel tile art, and then arrange that art into scenes.

Here in the center, you have your view of the room you're currently building. On the right is the pixel tile editor for creating new tiles, which you can then place in your room. Playdate is a 1-bit console, so your choices of color are black and white. These red squares you see are for the dev view, indicating "world tiles".

On the bottom, the "Layers" section shows the different sorts of tiles you can build and place. World tiles are your environment art. Items are interactable and can be collected. Sprites are also interactable, but can't be collected. The player is... self-explanatory. And exit tiles are connected to other rooms, which sets up where the player goes after stepping on an exit tile.

Here's a closer look at my Player tile. As it were, the name "Downbrella" came about because a) I'm not good at pixel art, and an umbrella was the best I could do for my player character, and b) it evokes "Downwell", and that's free real estate marketing.

As you can see, you can set up an animation for the player (which you can do for other tile types, too), whose frames you can call in PulpScript to trigger various animations. I haven't gotten that fancy yet, but eventually I'll flip the tile when you move the player along the X-axis to indicate directionality.

You can also assign a script to the player — more on that later, but briefly, "on bump do" controls what happens when you bump into the wall. In this case, because bumping into the wall = death in my game, the screen shakes, a sound plays, we wait half a second, and then return the player to the start. (Remember in the "Game" tab how I described this as a "punishing arcade game"? }:D)

Here's a look at the first room after the starting room. Note (haha, pun not intended, but certainly welcome) the music note collectible — it's a red tile rather than an item tile! Why would I do that?

Well, to quote the Greek chorus singing exposition to the audience, here's the short answer why: PulpScript is *funky*. So let's get into it.

Descending into PulpScript

So. In PulpScript, we can call a handful of events in a handful of specific circumstances:

And because my game is about the player character constantly falling downward, "on interact do" is largely not available to me. Because the player is not, technically, actually moving the character. The game is moving the character.

Which means I have to do almost everything in this game via "on loop do".

Like so:

Here in these first 45 lines called on the game, we do the following:

• Check if the room is the “start” room. We do this so we can retain the manual D-pad controls in this room, and give the player the opportunity to manually progress the player character down to the first room, where the player character begins falling automatically. This gives the player the chance to rest between death and the next run.

  • And we also set the score counter to "0".

• In any other room that isn’t the “start” room, we do the following:

  • Lines 9 through 21: Control the player character’s movement on the X-axis based on the rotation angle of the crank. This works perfectly in the simulator in-browser! And works terribly on-device for reasons I’ve yet to figure out. The player character goes absolutely flying across the screen at the slightest breath of air on the crank, so there are some kinks to work out.

  • Lines 23 onward: Move the player continually downward along the Y-axis, and check what type of tile they’re falling through. We have to check what type of tile they’re falling through in order to invoke certain mechanics — because, technically, at least according to PulpScript, the player isn’t interacting when the player character is falling. So “on interact do” isn’t available as an event to call on the player character in these circumstances.

  • Based on what type of tile the player character is falling through, before reaching the bottom of the screen (targetY<=13), the following happens:

    • If the type of tile is one of the barrier tiles, the screen shakes, a sound effect plays, and the player character returns to the start — because, remember, wall = death. }:D

    • If the type of tile is a collectible tile (tileatlocation==24), as seen below starting at line 63, a sound effect plays, a global variable is stored, and the score counter increments by 1.

• If the player reaches the bottom of the screen (targetY==14), then the player is teleported to the top of the next room.

  • "Ah, but why not use 'on exit do'?" ask the astute of you. Yes, why not, indeed! Again, because the player character is falling, and not interacting, I wasn’t able to reliably trigger "on exit do" any other way than through this roundabout method here.

As you can see, this gets long, because I have to set up the next-room teleportation at the end of every single room. I’m sure there’s a smarter way to do this; I have to experiment to see if I can increment string names or do some other better workaround. You can’t use arrays in PulpScript, or complex arithmetic (literally -=, +=, *=, and /= are all you can do; you can't do "thing.x + thing.y = thing.z"), so… yeah. That’s a head-scratcher. But probably calling a custom event that increments the room name? And naming the rooms in integers only? Maybe? We’ll see.

And that's the end of the script we call on the game during "on loop do"! And there's not much else going on in terms of scripting, really. It was surprisingly simple to get the core mechanics functional.

Let's take a peek at the rest:

So this is what we call on the player character, and almost entirely in the "start" room while the player still has control of the Y-axis on the D-pad:

• "on bump do" — what happens if the player character bumps into the wall (i.e., death }:D).

• "on update do" — this is called on movement (initiated by the player, not falling automatically); so, if the player character reaches the bottom of the screen, teleport to the first room.

• "on draw do" — this is called every frame before the player character is drawn, so this handles the scoring label in the top left of the screen, which dynamically updates when the player character passes over a note tile, as recalled from the global variable "collected" being incremented in the game script.

And this is the dialogue that appears at the very start of the game — "on load do" — rather than in the room "start", otherwise it would be called every time player dies and restarts the run.

Here's a closer look at how that all plays out in the simulator, which is a bit easier to see than the video on-device (although no crashes and restarts are showcased here, and you don't get the sweet retro soundtrack):

And that's been my descent into development on the Playdate so far!

What's next?

Well, I could keep beating my head against the limitations of PulpScript... or I could rebuild this in Lua, and then be able to do things like:

• Procedural level generation

• More nuanced player movement (as you can see, the player falls at exactly one speed, and I don't yet know how I'd be able to alter that in PulpScript)

• Build more complex music and art in external editors to use in-game

• Create enemies, projectiles, moving obstacles, and more complex interactions with those things

• ...and, you know, generally draw the rest of the f*#&ing owl

But as far as making a prototype and proof of concept goes, I'm really glad I played around in Pulp editor and with PulpScript!

Rapid iteration and prototyping was... well, rapid. I was able to tweak a value in my script, or make an adjustment to my room, or edit a song, or fix some tile art, then save, and play the updates in about three seconds. I'd imagine it's similarly swift in the SDK with the Playdate simulator, but then again, I didn't have to set up the SDK to get going with this prototype. Just signed into my Playdate Dev account and got going, no setup required.

It felt super approachable to be able to just start making something, no downloads, no setting up, no getting overwhelmed by the endless possibility space of Lua or C. PulpScript, for all its limitations, is great for someone who doesn't consider themselves a programmer, and whose prior programming experience is all very circumstantial and scope-contained.

Will I, in fact, jump over to the SDK and rebuild this thing in Lua, and then some? Well, frankly, that entirely depends on whether I snag a job offer in the coming weeks, or whether I find myself needing to fill time as the holidays slow down my job hunt. If I'm, say, moving across the country in the middle of winter to start a new job, I'm probably not going to have much time to work on this. But if I'm spending my holidays alone and unemployed in Vancouver, I'm going to need a distraction. So maybe I'll crank out some more progress. (I promised you puns, didn't I?)

If you've made it this far, I applaud your interest in Downwell-likes and Playdate development! I'd offer to help answer questions about PulpScript and Pulp editor, but really, all of this was trial-and-error, so I'm not sure how much use I'd be. But feel free to leave a comment here or on LinkedIn, and I'll see if I can help! Likely way more helpful are the Playdate Dev Forums, Playdate Dev subreddit, and Playdate Discord server.

Naturally, we've arrived at the only appropriate conclusion for this dev blog:

Soulja Boy, I tell ya.

I entered NYC Midnight’s 500-word flash fiction contest (mostly because the grand prize was $5,000, but also) to give me a little structured motivation to keep my fiction chops sharp while I’m between full-time gigs.

I received the prompt “comedy/celebrating/grilled cheese”, and had 48 hours to produce a 500-word story incorporating those three details.

If I were to go back and do things differently, I think I would’ve pressed harder on the comedy gas. I went with nose exhales and smirks over hearty belly guffaws, and that maybe wasn’t the right move. Ah, well. Still enjoyed writing it.

Maybe you’ll enjoy reading it, if we share similar sensibilities.

‘Fish Tits’

“Porgy and Bess aren’t looking great.”

Josh stares at my tits. More accurately, at the two plastic half-domes filled with water that I’ve stuck to a bra with industrial marine glue, and the two listless goldfish sloshing within their makeshift bowls.

“Yeah, well, I didn’t think it’d be 110 degrees in June,” I say, fruitlessly fanning my breast aquariums.

He bats five inches of false eyelashes. Around us, the thrum of Katy Perry’s “E.T.” incongruous with the noon glare. A parade float of 20-somethings in jockstraps whooo-hooos by, showering the crowd in a glitter of condom packets.

Josh whoo-hoos back, scooping a handful of prophylactics from the confettied asphalt.

“Let’s test these!” he shouts, twiddling his manicure at two men on the back of the float. One twirls around to reveal HAPPY PRIDE emblazoned across his bare cheeks and gives Josh a wiggle.

“Porgy and Bess,” I say, poking him. “I gotta do something. I can’t stomp around with dead fish in my boobs for 16 hours.”

“Why not? Make it fashion.”

He’s eying the next float: “Providence’s Famous Rainbow Grilled Cheese!” A pert woman with a shaved head throws cut triangles into the crowd. Josh extends to grab one as it makes a brilliant arc, streaming rainbow strands of melted cheese like a kaleidoscopic snack kite.

“Shitsticks,” he says, misjudging the catch. The triangle slaps a centimeter from his pink stiletto. He spares me a conspiratory look, then snatches the sandwich. Scraps of confetti glimmer in the entangled threads of dyed cheese.

“You’re not serious,” I say, watching him pluck metallic detritus from the multicolored mess of mozzarella.

“What? It’s free! The block party cover is $50, babes. And we still gotta find party favors.”

“It hit the ground.” I watch as he bites.

“For, like, two seconds!” He sticks out his tongue; it sports two shards of confetti.

“I can’t with you.” I stare at my chest. Porgy makes a half-hearted glub in the left bubble.

“Come on,” he says, grabbing me with the hand not holding the trash sandwich. His painted talons claw my bicep as we navigate the parade partiers. A beautiful man in leather chaps tries to ensnare us with a lei. Josh pirouettes and dodges, blowing a kiss.

We tumble onto the other side of the street — the river side. Hand in hand, we weave to the rail overlooking the water.

“Et voilá.” Josh gestures with the glinting grilled cheese, then takes another bite.

I glance around. Everyone’s lost — in the music, each other, the day. No one to witness an aquatic wardrobe malfunction.

I slip off my bra, revealing the goldfish escape hatches I’d sewn into each cup. I tug the corks, spilling some of the fish prison, bathwater warm.

“Well,” I say, holding the bra over the rail. “Sorry. Be free.”

I tip the tits. A small synchronized splash below as Porgy and Bess flop into the river and disappear in the murk.

“Summertime… and the living is easy…” Josh sings.

(No goldfish were harmed in the imagining of this story.)

I can’t stress enough how much of an expert in this broad topic I am not — but, because people keep asking this question, I’ve been trying to write an updated post for our modern times. And there’s one particular head-scratcher I keep butting up against. As do you.

In this, the year of our Lord and Savior Beancat, 2024, the landscape of the games industry is, uh… *gestures at landfill inferno blazing merrily stage left*.

Back in 1752 AD, when I was first starting out, we used to have something called “entry level roles”. The idea being that these roles required no experience and served as your “entry” point into the games industry (ooh, ahh, semantic synergy). Roles of limited responsibility with a lot of oversight, guidance, and opportunity for learning. Roles that would allow you to grow into additional responsibilities — which behooved the studio nurturing your potential, enabling them to promote from within.

A good number of studios operated on this model of drawing you in and keeping you around. The hire-layoff-hire-cheaper cycle existed, but was not nearly as widespread nor on the nose as it is today. It wasn’t laughable to work towards a goal of being able to grow with a single studio over the course of 5, 10 years.

Now, the industry seems to have conflated “entry level” with “junior”. Job listings far and wide want you to have 1 - 3 years of experience in the industry before entering the industry.

That don’t math. And until we as an industry address this, no one’s getting started in games.

Which is a truly terrible problem. For any industry. Innovation thrives on welcoming voices from all walks of life. Right now, the only walks of life the games industry is seemingly willing to employ are… people who have already worked in the games industry. Hm. Damn.

Then there’s the other half of the equation: the “disposable dev” culture of the hire-layoff-hire-cheaper cycle running rampant.

Let’s say an entry-level game dev beats the odds and snags a truly entry-level role. It’s statistically unlikely that a studio will actually keep them around long enough for them to bank experience and continue to develop in their field. One step forward, two steps back to search for another job after an almost inevitable layoff.

So what’s my answer to the question of “How do I get started in games?”

I think, until our industry starts healing — and again, truly, I’m just one person who is not an expert in this subject, please don’t take my word for gospel — one way for aspiring game devs to get started in games is to start on their own. Independent of a studio.

Start small — make a game that is low scope and low complexity. Leverage what’s free — YouTube tutorials, market asset packs, royalty-free music and sound effects. Publish it on itch.io. Crystallize the learnings, increase the scope and complexity, and do it again. Repeat.

Does it pay the bills? Probably not unless you go viral, and even then, probably not all of the bills. But it does satisfy a few things: full-cycle development experience; skill-building; the desire to be making games.

When (hopefully) the industry starts hiring for truly entry level roles again, you’ll have a portfolio of work to demonstrate your skills and initiative. Studios will (ideally) see your passion and potential, hire you on, and offer an opportunity to build your skills in the arena of commercial game development — chiefly, collaborative work across multidisciplinary teams to create a product for consumers under tight deadlines and amid shifting priorities and resources.

I don’t envy anyone trying to get a start in the games industry today, whether new grad or outside industry transfer. But the industry can’t gatekeep you from learning skills on your own and making games anyway.

And, please, don’t give up. The industry needs you. It might not realize it at the moment, but without fresh perspectives to contribute new ideas, we’ll keep making the same games over and over again — and those games will see the same mediocre critical reception, and sales will fall short of revenue goals, and waves of layoffs will ensue. So the fickle cycle pedals onward — until we do something differently.

Please enjoy this ultra-exclusive poetry reading brought to you by 13 months of job-hunting in the games industry. Well, technically, six months of searching, seven weeks of working before the project got cancelled and I was laid off again, and six more months of searching. And counting. *distant soblaughing*

🌸🌸🌸

unfortunately
another candidate more
closely fits the role

~

thanks for applying
a human will be in touch
(if robots allow)

~

this role has been closed
because our studio was
acquired and closed

~

thanks for using our
applicant trashing system
please do not reply

~

we cannot provide
feedback to candidates, you
spurious prune-tart

~

resume loaded
now enter it in this form
manually, hah

~

this job reposting
has 600 applicants
and is def totes real

~

prove to this robot
that you are not a robot:
fire hydrants! choose!

~

“I know I reached out
first, but the role has been filled,
whoops!” — some recruiter

~

update? who’s it from?
“noreply at job dotcom”?
god f*cking damn it

~

open to remote?
not even remotely, HA!
(see what we did there?)

~

“competitive pay”
means lowest candidate ask—
happy hunger games!

~

hey, new job posted
two minutes ago! I should
apply! …annnnnd it’s gone

~

now, I know you were
hoping for a paycheck, buuuut
we have foosball! yay!

~

perfect CV? TRASHED.
“arbitrary keywords are
my kink.” —ATS

~

this unpaid spec test
takes two hours — or ten, if
you WANT want the job

~

“please apply again!”
…later, applying again…
“nah, we were jk”

~

hi, happy first day!
here’s your desk annnnd we’re shut down
I’ll take your key fob

~

“the other prospect
has a dog we want to see
on zoom calls, sorry”

~

pro networking tip:
headlines should be clear and short,
like: “AHHHHHHHH HIRE ME”

~

linkedin dude: “advice:
don’t trust anyone’s advice
on linkedin, trust me”

~

*accepts connection*
“HI I AM SELL COURSE GET JOBS—“
*removes connection*

~

post comments be like:
“have you tried sacrificing
a goat? no? why not?”

~

no one: ...ellipses…
linkedinfluencer: “👀 here’s my
secret: (shhh 🤫🤫) coffee! ☕☕☕”

~

interviewer late?
good! more time to scream into
the roiling abyss

~

“celebrating a
new role! the one that ghosted
you after six calls!”

~

…INITIATING
“CAREFUL CONSIDERATION”…
FIVE… FOUR… THREE… TWO… NO

~

easyapply™: send
resume by carrier
dove; await our sign

~

entry level role
seeking senior candidate
to underpay lots

~

no shipped AAA?
you peasant swine! how dare you
apply for this role?!

~

we read every app—
hahaha, sorry, can’t say
that with a straight face

~

we won’t pay, but you’re
open to relocation
to get laid off, right?

~

seeking a rockstar
unicorn capybara
who will work for free!

~

do you have six years
of experience in this
tool that’s two years old?

🌸🌸🌸

Thank you for attending my poetry reading 🫰😎

Advice I often give to junior and aspiring game devs is to be playing and analyzing games — can't build and improve upon what's been done if you're unaware of what’s out there. (Sometimes veteran game devs need that reminder, too.)

In tandem with that hands-on play, I’m an advocate of consuming media on game analysis and discussion (podcasts, videos, articles, devlogs, what have you) — keep abreast of trends, innovations, things that work, things that don’t, how and why things were done, impact and reception, etc. etc. Keeping informed keeps me well-rounded as a game developer, and that’s invaluable in our industry of rapidly changing technologies and player affinities.


So, here are a few of my favorite (free!) sources for game analysis and discussion:

YouTube Channels

• Writing on Games: typically covers all things related to storytelling in games, from worldbuilding to systems design
  

• Game Maker's Toolkit: diving deep into level design and systems design, especially so in the Boss Keys series
  

• Snoman Gaming: breaking down what makes for good and bad game design
  

• videogamedunkey: a more comedic take on game analysis
  

• Curious Archive: worldbuilding in games, and sometimes things that aren't games
  

• Coding Secrets: an inside baseball perspective on the coding decisions/restrictions that lead to certain game designs
  

• DidYouKnowGaming: looking back at the history of various consoles and franchises and how things were inspired/recycled
  

• DPadGamer: looking at glitches, Easter Eggs, and dev-unintended play styles - an interesting lens through which to analyze a game's design
  

• ESA Speedrunning: European Speedrunner Assembly, the GDQ of Europe - speedrunning is another fun lens
  

• GDQ: Games Done Quick, the commentary from speedrunners can yield really interesting analysis
  

• Gaming Historian: another history channel to help round out the story of how games got to where they are today
  

• Lowest Percent: the history of speedrunning and breaking down how speedrunners break games
  

• Noclip: the god-kings of video game documentaries
  

• Retro Game Mechanics Explained: excellently descriptive title, that
  

• Shesez: taking the camera out of the intended game bounds to see how levels and art assets are built, another unusual lens through which to analyze
  

• Summoning Salt: another history of speedrunning channel focusing on the evolution of techniques to break world records
  

• The Game Theorists: gets a bit out there sometimes, but goes deep on lore analysis and theorizing
  

Podcasts

• Triple Click: one of very few mainstream gaming podcasts with a female host!
  

• The Noclip Podcast: of Noclip documentary fame
  

• Deconstructor of Fun: by game devs, for game devs
  

• Hello Hyrule: for mega-Zelda fans, a deep dive into each region in each game
  

• RPGaymer: haaaay, representation 🌈
  

• Nintendo Power Podcast: infrequent, but great
  

• The MinnMax Show: “a place for games, friends, and getting better"

News Sites, Articles, Blogs

• Game Developer: the artist formerly known as Gamasutra, featuring a lot of articles by devs
  

• Kotaku: gaming news/reviews
  

• VentureBeat: covers tech at large, and games often
  

• Polygon: gaming news
  

• Waypoint: Vice's gaming news
  

• Naavik Deep Dives: contributed to by devs
  

• Deconstructor of Fun Blog: also contributed to by devs
  

• Gamesindustry.biz: game news as well as wider industry-level news

Happy edumacating!