Golly that title sounds like something a robot wrote. Anyways. Like most folks, Bek and I have been homeschooling our kids for the first time, but as of a week ago we have been needing to integrate our personal homeschool approach with some curriculum elements from the school our kids used to attend. It was pretty stressful initially, because there’s a lot of moving parts:

1. Two kids in two different classes with two different teachers
   
2. Two old laptops that they use to do their online school work + videos
   
3. Multiple websites, facebook groups, and email threads for sharing zoom links, assignments, and work sheets
   
4. Our own homeschool curriculum (which is mostly dinosaurs but)
5. And so on

Keep reading

Wanted to jot down some thoughts while they were still fresh, and I hate writing threads on Twitter, so, here we are.

(Surprise! Male game designer has DOOM OPINIONS. BEHOLD LOL)

Keep reading

As usual, I promise I’m not using the royal “we” in this writeup! Everything I’m jotting down here comes out of me and Bek’s collaboration. So it’s ours, not mine. Deal with it <3

Hello friends! PAX East is done finally, which means I have a few hours to finish our GDC wrap-up (before heading off to the BAFTAs and EGX Rezzed what even is this industry). Part 1: Notes on Indie Publishing has been up for a while and digs into some business stuff, but Part 2 here is more about the design side of commercial game-making.

GDC for us somehow has slightly less strictly-business stuff lately, and more mentorship- or feedback-oriented meetings, where we get a chance to sit down with harried geniuses from all walks and talk about their new projects and whatever their (and our) worries are at the time. Part 1′s publisher notes were largely distilled from these conversations, and most of the contents of this article are things that we found ourselves bringing up over and over again in different ways with a lot of different teams over the week. Which usually is a sign that maybe we should write it down and it could move the needle for someone else too.

Keep reading

(note: as always, this sort of business-y writeup is only possible with the help of Finji’s CEO who is the one in charge of all this stuff, including editing this post for me - except for the bit about the “advice yogurt”)

Hello friends! GDC is done finally. Didn’t get sick or exhausted. Learned a lot, as usual. Was lucky to get to see so many friends, especially after the last wild year. I gripe a lot but dream job doesn’t even come close to describing what we get to do here and who we get to work with. It’s absurd how good we have it. And then Night in the Woods won the Seamus McNally Grand Prize. A little on the nose you know.

Anyways, the entire industry continues to change rapidly, especially on the platforms and publishing side of things, where we’re in a particularly chameleonic state at the moment. Which is why I’ve timestamped the actual title of this post. Consider this a sell-by date on this big carton of advice milk. Things are moving quick and you don’t want to accidentally dump a bunch of chunky advice yogurt on your studio froot loops amirite?

Keep reading

So a question I get a lot and something that we’ve done lightning talks on in the past is “how do you do work-for-hire?”, especially in the game industry. I am not an expert in this field in any way, but contract work has been a cornerstone of our game studio for ten years, and there are a few principles or rules or guidelines or whatever that we developed that have helped us work with clients in a way that mostly helped us grow instead of holding us back. Maybe these things will be helpful for other people also.

This is by no means an exhaustive list and some of these things are going to be more principles or philosophies than like practical burn-down lists.

Keep reading