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The Nook: Immigrating for jobs in the games industry

Mon, 08 Apr 2024 22:58:51 -0700

The Nook: An Inaugural Introduction

Inspired by my pal and once-colleague in the trenches of writing for live service games, John Ryan, I’ve decided to start a column — The Nook — that seeks to answer *your* burning questions. Yes, you! Hearing these words through your eyeballs!

This column aims to answer all things game writing, narrative design, technical implementation, side projects, immigrating to three countries for work in the games industry (hey, that's this post!), layoffs, rhythm games, cats, being a multi-instrumentalist who's not really any good at any of them, desk drawer novels, and anything else relevant to my particular areas of expertise.

“That’s overwhelming. I’m overwhelmed. You know too much. Please, soothe me with example questions,” you might say.

I gotchu:

How do I balance the ambitions of a game’s story against things like scope, budget, and resources?
What game engines might I seek to learn as a person of narrative inclinations?
What is git, and why should I, a person of narrative inclinations, know about it?
What should I be thinking about when writing game dialogue?
What do all of the different narrative-like designer titles mean, and are they different from writer titles?
Should I try to work in the games industry while studios are announcing layoffs by the hundreds every other day?
Who are Rainbow Kitten Surprise, and why should Beat Games make a RKS song pack for Beat Saber?
Why are your cats such fluffy little babies, yes they are, yes they are?

On these and many other topics I have learnéd opinions and some semblance of expertise — but my perspective is just that: mine. Informed by my experiences, which have been many and myriad over the last 18 years in the industry, to be sure,...Read More

Playdate Dev Blog: "Downbrella" (a la Downwell)

Sun, 19 Nov 2023 15:56:26 -0800

Shhhh, shhh. Shh. Hush. I know. It's okay. Floaty Hippo will still be there. I've been making steady progress on it, actually. We've got scoring, we've got procedurally generated level blockouts, we've got a chill lo-fi soundtrack made by yours truly, and we've got ~plans~ for a character customization screen, so you can spend more time lookin' at your hippo's cute li'l face while you personalize color schemes and hair styles. (And by "we've", I mean the royal "we", because this remains a solo dev adventure. Unless you count the cat that is frequently battling my laptop for lap time.)

I took a break from Floaty Hippo in October to focus on Sculptober and level-up my 3D modeling skills, which, in turn, will make it faster to model environments and assets for Floaty Hippo — so there's a method to my madness. A breakdown of my work on Sculptober is coming, by the by. "Something something, subscribe here or follow me on LinkedIn so you don't miss the post, something something."

And here's a little preview — I decided to fill an isometric room with items inspired by Sculptober prompts to tell a unified story, rather than make 31 disparate items. (Can you spot the Floaty Hippo cameo?)

I thought about turning this isometric room into a point-and-click adventure scene, or at least some sort of interactable hidden-ish object scene... and I'm still thinking about it. Especially because The Chinese Room just released Inkpot for Unreal, and I quite love Ink in Unity, so I'm thinking I'll experiment with some sort of point-and-click narrative something-or-other so I can play around with Inpkpot in Unreal.

Eventually, anyway. I can only dabble in so many...Read More

Unreal 5 DeV Blog: "Floaty Hippo"

Mon, 14 Aug 2023 21:12:28 -0700

Easy. Take an unemployed game developer, currently between non-competes, who needs to show off Unreal Engine and Blueprints abilities, and behold: she'll start making her own game just to prove she knows how.

Also, the world has enough high-octane endless runners — your runs temple, your surfers subway, what have you — and not enough chill endless games à la Alto's Adventure and Alto's Odyssey. (Aside: How great of a game studio name is Noodlecake? Incredible.)

Also also, I'd already made a 3D model of a hippo on a pool floatie. Little guy is the emblem of chill, and deserves to star in an endless river adventure. In an overstimulating world of 60-plus-hour game experiences, I deeply appreciate a contemplative, chill, no-presh sesh.

Naturally, you have questions:

"What am I looking at here, exactly?"

This is the outcome of laying down a few foundational bits of the Floaty Hippo experience:

A performant and aesthetically pleasing water shader
Endless lane generation and the destruction of tiles behind the camera
Quick-switching between lanes, with sun-angle indicator sparkles
Contact ripples using distance fields
A general ~vibe check~ of the forward speed and water flow

"Why Unreal Engine, Amanda? Wouldn't a very-clearly-mobile game be much more practical to develop in...Read More

Behold, the outcome of Sculptober 2022

Sun, 26 Feb 2023 22:40:52 -0800

"Sculptober" is a month-long prompt-based 3D modeling challenge that takes place every October. In 2022, I made 31 Blender renders in response to prompts. Some days I had hours, other days I had minutes.

Here are the results*:

*Compressed for bandwidth friendliness.

Day 1: Boss

Had to go Super Mario 64 on this one.

Day 2: Lunar

This one was fun - I used accurate moon textures from NASA.

Day 3: Rest

Same energy.

Day 4: Illusion

Day 5: Porthole

Something something wooden spaceship. A rushed day.

Day 6: Lost

Fun with shiny reflecty things.

Day 7: Chunky

It was a butternut squash soup kind of day, Day 7.

Day 8: Spy

Okay, I can't find the *actual* sculpt I did on Day 8, but here's a thematic other render.

Day 9:...Read More

“How do I get started as a Game Writer / Narrative Designer?” An exhaustive exploration

Mon, 28 Mar 2022 13:09:34 -0700

This is, by far, the most common type of message I get in my LinkedIn inbox — followed by recruiters who don’t look at my profile before pitching me an irrelevant backend engineering gig, cold sales assaults from people who are inexplicably connected to 300 other people in my network, and entitled dudes sliding into my DMs with their misspelled "hello beuatifull"s because they think LinkedIn is a dating service (do we really truly need to hear that it’s not, because it’s really truly not).
The first type of message is the only reason I still bother to slog through my LinkedIn inbox, because it hits home. I was there once, too. I was 18, fresh out of high school and into college, holder of a dozen school writing awards that meant absolutely nothing in the big wide world, and completely lost on the topic of how to get started in games. I had passion, I had moxie, and I had no earthly clue what to do with all of it.
If we even had LinkedIn back in 2006, I wasn’t on it. I was, in fact, on Craigslist, trying to have a casual encounter with the games industry, looking in the "writing gigs" section of every city in the New England area. I even set up elaborate boolean searches to scour "writing gigs" posts worldwide for mentions of “remote” or “online” in conjunction with "games". I think we might’ve had Monster and Indeed back then, or at least some prehistoric ancestor of that type of service — so there I was, shotgunning dozens of applications a day across a plethora of platforms, aiming at anything even slightly related to writing or games. Anything, absolutely anything, to get my foot in the door.
What got my foot in the door was Beckett’s FUN! Online Games magazine. I still remember that many-winged feeling in my stomach the day I walked into Barnes and Noble, picked up a copy of my long-awaited magazine edition, flipped to the middle,...Read More

10 Tips for Writing Better Mobile Game Dialogue

Wed, 16 Feb 2022 13:06:29 -0800

Who, me? My qualifications? Sixteen years in the games industry, the last 8 of which have been spent writing and designing for mobile games. June’s Journey, Lily’s Garden, DragonVale, to name a few multimillion-dollar story-driven hits. Pleased to meet you. Want to learn some stuff about ~*~wordsmithing~*~? Wunderbar! Read on.

1. Show, don’t tell
Yep – the adage popularized by every Creative Writing 101 class *extra* applies in video games, an intrinsically visual medium. Your character art, assets and environments, UI – all of that works in your favor to keep dialogues short and snappy.
If your protagonist, say, recently inherited a rundown estate (seems to be a lot of that going around), you don’t need your character to call out, “Yikes, this house is covered in dust and junk – what are we going to do with this place?” Your visuals are doing the heavy lifting, so skip straight to the call to action: “Yikes! What are we going to do with this place?”

2. Make people talk like… well, people
People use slang, contractions, fragments. They exclaim! They start, stop, stutter. If your game dialogue sounds like Victorian-era prose – unless you’re writing a game set in the Victorian era, I suppose – you’re doing it wrong.
Let’s take our house-renovating protagonist, whose cheating ex-fiance just showed up on her doorstep (a lot of that going around, too). Does she say, “Oh, my, it is my ex-fiance, Chad! How dour a day it is to see you again.”? Uh, nah. She says: “What… I… you… WHAT THE HELL, CHAD?!” She talks like someone you know, like a relatable person you’ll want to hang out with for the next 90+ days of retention.

3. Also, make people talk like individuals
Each and every character in your game should have a distinct...Read More

Leveling up: 3D modeling and environment design in Blender

Tue, 08 Sep 2020 06:48:46 -0700

Behold, the fruits of some 10 hours of YouTube tutorials:
Smooth glass cup... suspiciously too smooth... gonna need to throw another texture on that there glass.
This cafe doesn't believe in overhead lighting, but it does believe in soft focus to hide its imperfections.
Several thousand lightning and angle iterations later, I figured out how to make it rain.
Before I worked out how to make a convincing napkin, Sir Donut made a mockery of physics.
I had to add a napkin, because only a sociopath would sit in a dark cafe eating donuts directly on the countertop.
I quite liked the mood in this one, even if donutless.
3D model, or a 'Gram from that one friend who's always trying to be artsy-blurry in cafes?
The donut was my first ever 3D model... can't tell at all, right? Haha, please lie to me.
The scene behind the scenes. The window planes are, um, large, yes.
Cozy, eh? All that's missing is a good book. I think I'll model one... if only so that the next time someone asks "How's the novel coming?", I can answer with earned confidence.
Read More