So glad you vibed with it :)
Friend to birds & other animals. Vegan against fascism. Lead Narrative Designer @ my.games on [???] - 10+ years making stuff: Harold Halibut, Röki, Dying Light 2 + more Subscribe to my Narrative Design substack: https://narrativedesignlife.substack.com
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So glad you vibed with it :)
I guessed I was nearing the end, so I’d been putting it off, but I’ve just finished Harold Halibut. A lovely game, and the ending was absolutely perfect.
Hype is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The long wait for a sequel created a critical mass of expectation that leads to a kind of global FOMO. I'm sure Silksong is a great game but yeah in this day and age, hype blows everything out of proportion.
Ages ago i ‘digitised’ my old ‘best of’ collection. I like to be minimalist about my physical goods so this is a great way to relive the memories.
Finished reading the Liveship Traders trilogy and it’s somehow even better than Farseer. Robin Hobb has got to be the great living master of social fantasy, and believable and compelling interior lives. Immense stuff. The PoV characters are completely unforgettable.
Yeah man. Really pleasantly surprised so far. If the full game can deliver on the story and keep things evolving nicely it could be a serious hit. I haven’t been excited by a new AA+ game in aaaaages.
Hell is Us (demo) is the first game in a long time i’ve played that has gripped me with its atmosphere. I LOVE the complete lack of UI, map etc. Finding it extremely immersive so far.
reinstalling Harold Halibut to get my brain out of political cascades Seriously, if you've never played it, it deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Disco Elysium as like, a light to the darkness
I put Spinal Tap refs in any game I work on at the first opportunity. Haven’t managed ‘smell the glove’ yet though but … give me time.
Susan I am shocked and appalled you didn’t cite Harold Halibut by @slowbros.bsky.social - a must-play for cozy retro-futurist and xenobiology fans!
In AAA that’s usually code for ‘the direction has pivoted constantly and the writers have had to start from scratch 10x times so now things don’t make sense’. OR ‘we expected one mid level writer to be able to handle everything and now user tests say no one understands what the hell is going on’
Live-A-Live on Switch is so good. Amazing little short story-game anthology. Each one is very genre but always with a twist and is really tightly plotted. I love games like this! It’s the JRPG equivalent of Edith Finch. Can totally see the inspiration on Octopath.
Apparently Replaced was shown at Gamescom and it’d absolutely crack me up if that manages to come out before The Last Night
Don’t sleep on probably the best and definitely the funniest tactics game of recent years.
finished harold halibut yesterday and was really blown away by the whole experience. charming characters, great soundtrack, beautiful visuals. just wanted to throw my recommendation out there for anyone who enjoys narrative games that are essentially like interactive movies
Like, literally the secret is that that's how taste is formed. We can not like it, critique it, lie to ourselves that we / society only likes things organically, but in an industry - that's just not the case!
Will there be a console demo?
Harold Halibut coming to PS+ in August! So you really have no excuse not to try it if you didn’t already.
Game writers, this is what i mean when i say you need to kill your backstory. Write just enough to allow for internal continuity and cohesiveness between departments. The rest will only be an albatross.
Writers should internalize Lao Tzu's lesson about how the emptiness at the center of a wheel is what makes it useful, and how a pot is valuable because of where the clay *isn't*. Corporate geek culture has warped us into thinking that negative spaces are flaws that need to be fixed.
to solve a problem, it’s good to first look at: who has been trying to solve this problem the longest? and what do they find does not work? Is the reason the problem has not been solved bc it’s complex/expensive to build? It is rarely because those involved are not ‘positive’ or smart enough
Genuinely baffling that writing jobs are still expecting new hires to move cities/countries in order to be hybrid. Aside from it being ableist (I have universal healthcare here), a risk with layoffs, what do they think writing looks like? No one needs me in an office making faces while I type!
UFO50 on switch finally let’s gooooooooiooooooooooo
Sun shadow staff doesn’t ring a bell, i’ll look it up - maybe i missed it! But yeah it’s an incredible system.
Heck yes. The character scenarios, the secrets, the Path actions, the combat synergies… aaaaah.
Watch this if you’re serious about having a happy life youtu.be/BUp5YxPe2Qw
@slowbros.bsky.social Harold Halibut (in which I play alien Weeoo) is in the Handcrafted Steam Bundle along with @moonhood.bsky.social ’s beautiful Midnight Walk! If you love handmade art and exquisite stories, this is the bundle for you! store.steampowered.com/bundle/56282...
I really don't get why I haven't heard this game referred to waaaaay more.
Little Goody Two Shoes just keeps getting better. The life-sim 'work' is done via pixel-art mini-games and they're hilarious. There's been a surprise musical number, equally hilarious and yet beautifully drawn. Elise is a bratty but brilliant protagonist and without spoiling...dark undercurrents.
Well said!!
95% of all talent/success is just good decision making. The other 5% is genetic predisposition/upbringing which you can't control. Invest in improving your decision making above and before anything else if you want positive outcomes.
Oh my god
A new shore is on the horizon. Harold Halibut pre-orders for the Mac App Store are now open. Your voyage begins soon.
Finally trying out Little Goody Twoshoes and I can’t believed i’ve not heard more about this game. It’s utterly beautiful for a start, the writing is snappy and the mix of cozy life sim with slow burn horror is great. Anyone played it??
And Tomahawk is better than both!!
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Skies of Arcadia is begging for it!
A lot of people come into the games industry and pretty soon develop a cynical attitude that the industry is largely run by business guys who don't know a thing about video games. It's only after a few years and some seniority that you realize that those guys don't know shit about business either.
I wrote this column and I'll just say that the original headline was much meaner. The piece itself, though, is still very angry and very mean, I assure you.
SkillUp is an incredibly nuanced critic, and pretty much the only one I currently know of who can properly, deeply and holistically engage with narrative design www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxMJ...
I think about this constantly
Sometimes I just sit here and think about how clever the narrative design of Returnal was. A lot of people will never experience it because of how challenging the game could be but my god there were some smart and well realised ideas in there.
Narrative design is, in part, understanding there's no "boring parts" of a game: it can all be used to tell the story, it's all an opportunity for creativity, and if you view certain parts as "boring" you are missing out.
Finished Kingdom Come Deliverance 2. Never played another game like it. It’s flawed - especially the combat, save system, lack of accessibility options and poor signposting of objectives, and choice/consequence transparency. But it’s also incredibly immersive, ambitious and the cast is exceptional.
Roast them!
I would just really recommend looking up how to quickly level up sword skills and make sure you spend a little while grinding so that you can kill enemies much faster than i was by end of the game haha.
It’s just getting worse. I now exist in a state of abject despair during any battle scene. Praying for the game to end soon so i don’t have to endlessly re-attempt the jankiest most unforgiving group combat scenes ive ever had the misfortune to play.
Be careful what you wish for…
🤣
Watching movies in which heroes stand up for the little guy, do the unpopular brave thing simply because it is right, help those in need, are kind to people different from them, and grinding my teeth in frenzied rage at this political bias that is personally attacking me, a massive piece of shit.
Yeah for sure. Combined with the unforgiving save system it can really tilt you. Buuuut the characters are just so goddamn well written i forgive all the gameplay awfulness haha. I’m v close to the end now… once the frustration fades i’m sure i’ll remember it extremely fondly.
A new bit. ‘do something about those archers’ - cool, but i have no idea where the archers are or how I’m supposed to get there with ten enemies in my face. Oh i found them - ten more enemies appear. I die, again. And again. Another minute of loading. Oooh there a badly lit staircase behind me …
I just got to a new stealth mission. I hate it. I can’t figure out the guard patterns. I’m normally good at stealth games! The takedown animation takes so long. I’m on attempt 5 and I just want to get on with the story. Every attempt takes so long. Aaarrrgghh
Like recently I had to do a climactic battle scene about 17 times before I managed it because my allies kept dying so quickly it was like 10 on 1. I was properly armoured and whatnot. That did not help with immersion or feeling like i overcame a challenge. It just made me hate the game for an hour.
Yeah i mean they boil down to this: incredible game with friction in all the wrong places. Many awesome moments are undermined by sheer jank, terrible UI or lack of direction/translation issues. But when it clicks it’s like nothing else out there. I love it, it’s just very hard to love sometimes.
I never played KCD1 and i’m damn near the end of 2! I have a lot of thoughts about it. Monster Hunter, I played Worlds and everything i heard about Wilds super put me off it.
That sounds very Dangan. They always evolve into interesting characters but start off defined by their archetype. In Dngn they always reference it as it’s why they were chosen, the apotheosis of their skill/stereotype.
I’m gonna need you to buy Hundred Line so that I can ask you lots of questions about it. Love the Danganronpa games and I love strategic combat - i hear such mixed things about it though and it’s clearly a big investment.
And I like Cavill as much as the next person but is he the only actor legitimately allowed to star in game adaptations because he’s a geek? What is it about games that are already cinematic that make people so desperate to experience them without the gameplay element??
I feel like i’m crazy when i see people calling for a RDR2 adaptation because Henry Cavill expressed an interest. The game is cool but like have these people not heard of the Western genre of cinema? Is the story of RDR2 gonna make for a better film than Good/Bad/Ugly or Tombstone?
Louder for the folks in the back. We don't have to give Microsoft the time of day, we can and must move on from relying on the same company upending tens of thousands of lives while at the same helping facilitate the murder of potentially hundreds of thousands in Palestine.
I hate review scores. If you literally score on aggregate then a narrative game could have 50/100 story and 100/100 sound and look like a 75. ‘Average’ scores say nothing about where a game excels and what makes it worth playing. Publisher Metacritic target scores are also so toxic to gamedev.
The replacement of everything with generative AI is NOT inevitable, but it sure is if you all shrug and say "Well, it's inevitable" like your brain was washed in bad predictive SF for decades.
Nah i get you. I’m kinda the same even though i work there, MOST of the big AAA games don’t appeal much to me either. But the same is true of most of the biggest indie games. Maybe we’re just both snobs 😂
That’s good! Lots of us rely on AAA to make our living though and it’s often where the people that go on to work in indie or AA cut their teeth. We need all three parts of the equation for a healthy ecosystem overall.
Indies and AA have almost all the same problems AAA has. Struggling to get funding, rampant mismanagement, and problems AAA doesn’t have - small marketing budgets, less centralised support etc. They’re just quicker to succeed/fail. It’s not as simple as ‘indies will save us’ by any means.
Hah yeah exactly. The thing all these articles/linked in thought leadership posts miss is mostly the occasional viral indie mega hit doesn’t funnel that money back into the ecosystem. The Balatro guy seems super nice but - rightfully and sensibly - he’s not suddenly opening a huge studio.
Just repeating it because some are repeating Microsoft's lies unquestioningly about them having to cut people to save money, etc. Their gaming division was 26 *billion* USD in the black. They had just posted record revenue. They were swimming in money. But Microsoft wants to invest *80bn* in AI.
This is just painful. Benzies doesn’t strike me as reliable. If you look at his history, it seems pretty sus, I’m not sure why people are surprised by this kinda behaviour.
Yep. I figured this and insisted on being fully remote since after my very first studio. And have gone through 4 redundancies in that time!
Very excited for this one.
GIMME
Executives get paid millions of dollars to be the bad the guy, so yes, we can make fun of them and get mad at them. At some point in games executives with a level of charisma showed up and we started conflating that with them being "our friend" Grow up.
Who can recommend me some good ‘folk outlaw’ stories? Firefly/Robin Hood vibes. Game, book, whatever. And yes i’ve read the Gentleman Bastards.
Kudos for taking a stance and showing some integrity. Solidarity!
Motile/vehicular/journey narrative games are my favourite genre i think haha. Pacific Drive, Death Stranding, Journey, Pyre - anything where you do a proper road trip. Truckful coming up looks so good for this. Someone needs to make a scifi one though…
Banging the "Please Have Standards and Hold Yourself to Them Even If It Means Sacrificing That New Toy You Really Like" drum again. You either care about stuff or you don't. If you only care when it doesn't cost you anything, that says a lot about who you are.
How to be a creative director.
Not sure a game has ever been so undermined by the combat as Kingdom Come Deliverance 2. It’s not just that it’s so unforgiving and janky feeling - it’s how much you have to constantly replay after dying because of the harsh save system.
Does Squid Game S3 stick the landing?
This game was completely insane. And awful. But brilliant.
I need to buy this game.
God, the 'say what you see lines' drive me mad. And they're everywhere! They're insulting and just BORING.
As a Brit i don’t think i’ve ever actually had a proper s’more. I’m deprived! I go camping a lot so i should probably figure out a version of it. what’s the kinda real key part?
Which ones??
Preach. Criminally underrated games.
What’s good?
Trying the Star Wars Outlaws demo and rookie ND mistake #1: updating the quest ui with a spoiler. I.e objective is to ‘investigate the body’ but my character doesn’t know there’s a body to investigate yet.
I just feel like people don’t talk about the game Catherine enough. Any Catherine obsessives out there? I think in many ways it’s my favourite Atlus game.
That reminds me of... Harold Halibut! A stop-motion presentation serves as the vehicle to one of the most emotionally resonant video games to ever exist. You'll laugh, you'll cry, and you'll be grateful you played it. My first and only ever 10 out of 10.
I agree until AAA directors actually learn some management skills haha
did you know you can get both of our games right now for like 26 bucks?
Whatever you think of Death Stranding, the Social Strand concept hasn’t been copied enough yet.
It’s a concept known as atomisation and i think it makes loads of sense. Some studios are doing more co-dev which is also very smart as it splits the risk.
It's the Steam Summer sale, so a golden chance to snag one of our two multi-award winning narrative indie games at a cheeky discount... ☀️ Mythwrecked - 25% off ❄️ Röki - 85% off
It’s ageless!
Yeah capitalism isn't rational.
You just cannot beat SNES box art. It can't be done!
CEO compensation graphed next to employee compensation. 🙃
What the best multiplayer games for narrative/quest design? And/or emergent narrative?