Brandon has been a professional game developer since 1998, starting his career at Epic Games with engineering and design on Unreal Tournament and Unreal Engine 1.0. More recently, Brandon spent 12 years at Valve wearing (and inventing) hats. Many, many hats… Brandon has spent considerable amounts of time in development and leadership on Team Fortress 2 and Dota 2 where he wrote mountains of code and pioneered modern approaches to game development. Also an advisor for the Makers Fund family of companies, Brandon offers his expertise to game startups at all stages of growth.
I’m not seeing any (sorry I missed a word) much game design here.
My experience as a designer, building out a genre of “peacewagers” (games that aren’t zero sum but also aren’t strictly cooperative, the set of games where honest negotiation is possible.), is that it actually is very likely that someone who’s mostly worked in established genres would drastically underestimate the amount of design thought that is required to make a completely new kind of game work, and they’re trying to make a new kind of game, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they just fell over irrecoverably as soon as they strayed from the yellow brick road they have lived their whole lives within. When you’re building a new genre… you have to figure out so much about what can be done there, what the challenge is, and what the appeal is, and how to elegantly communicate all of that to players and make them want it.
So… I’ve been working on semi-cooperative games for a few years now, I might be able to help with that (I’m also familiar with rust, and have built a basic game engine of my own for some unreleased stuff (in C++)). But I don’t get the impression from the site that they appreciate the difficulty of design, that they’d appreciate me, so I haven’t applied.
I see that this is getting quite a lot of agreement points. I would also like to add my agreement, this is probably a true quote. I agree that it’s probably a true quote. Your claim that this was written somewhere is probably true.
Well, I still think my pessimism was warranted given the epistemic state I had when I made the comment. I still don’t have a clue what the game is about though, and I think that’s a legitimate question… or did I miss an explanation of that on the website too? :/
I think it’s generally right to have a prior of pessimism about projects in this reference class, although I think you went overboard in assuming your initial read was right. (Critch also has a several successful non-game projects under his belt which I think is relevant)
I’m not seeing
any(sorry I missed a word) much game design here.My experience as a designer, building out a genre of “peacewagers” (games that aren’t zero sum but also aren’t strictly cooperative, the set of games where honest negotiation is possible.), is that it actually is very likely that someone who’s mostly worked in established genres would drastically underestimate the amount of design thought that is required to make a completely new kind of game work, and they’re trying to make a new kind of game, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they just fell over irrecoverably as soon as they strayed from the yellow brick road they have lived their whole lives within. When you’re building a new genre… you have to figure out so much about what can be done there, what the challenge is, and what the appeal is, and how to elegantly communicate all of that to players and make them want it.
So… I’ve been working on semi-cooperative games for a few years now, I might be able to help with that (I’m also familiar with rust, and have built a basic game engine of my own for some unreleased stuff (in C++)). But I don’t get the impression from the site that they appreciate the difficulty of design, that they’d appreciate me, so I haven’t applied.
I see that this is getting quite a lot of agreement points. I would also like to add my agreement, this is probably a true quote. I agree that it’s probably a true quote. Your claim that this was written somewhere is probably true.
I don’t think I remember seeing any of this information on the front page of the website. If it’s not there, it maybe ought to be?
It’s in the “team” section (you have to click on Brandon to get the info, but it does say Game Developer by default before doing any clicks)
Weird! How did I not notice that?
Well, I still think my pessimism was warranted given the epistemic state I had when I made the comment. I still don’t have a clue what the game is about though, and I think that’s a legitimate question… or did I miss an explanation of that on the website too? :/
I think it’s generally right to have a prior of pessimism about projects in this reference class, although I think you went overboard in assuming your initial read was right. (Critch also has a several successful non-game projects under his belt which I think is relevant)