For those who don't know, this is what I've been working on for the last 3 and a half years with literally one of the best teams I've led in my entire career 20+ year career. I can't wait until you see what we've been making!
I've been making video games since 1999. There have been highs and lows on every project I've been on, but Dragon Age: The Veilguard is the best game I've ever worked on, with the best team. As a fan and a developer, I am so very excited for people to experience what we've made.
The Dragon Age folks are gonna hate me for this tease, but I just played through the section of gameplay we showed off last month for the first time in a while, and while y'all know it looks good ... it plays even better. I can't wait until everyone can get their hands on it!
A small tax - 0.1% - on each Wall Street trade would reduce high frequency trading, a practice which drains profits from retail investors and benefits only the very rich.
We could use the close to $1 trillion it would generate to cancel all student debt and make college free.
When you make a game like this, you hear the same lines over and over again during the course of development. I never get tired of hearing these performances though. They're such a great cast.
We’re incredibly excited to announce our cast for
#DragonAge
: The Veilguard!
Rook: Alex Jordan, Bryony Corrigan, Erika Ishii, and Jeff Berg
Harding: Ali Hillis
Davrin: Ike Amadi
Bellara: Jee Young Han
Neve: Jessica Clark
Taash: Jin Maley
Emmrich: Nick Boraine
Manfred: Matthew
So I did the level design for one of the earliest versions of the mission in today's
@dragonage
gameplay reveal and I've supervised it since and ever since we got the VO,
@OfficialGDL
's "people always die ..." line reading for Solas gives me chills every time.
@Devilstower
@GreatDismal
His supporters will simultaneously tell you that he "tells it like it is" while also telling you "what he actually meant to say"
The Canadians (most of the team) had the day off today, so without any meetings to attend and with my other tasks caught up, I spent the day reviewing my team's content. Yeah ... I speant all day playing
#dreadwolf
... jealous? You should be.
And I should say that all the other leads and their teams are amazing as well. The entire project is full of some of the most talented and professional people I've worked with over the last 20+ years.
To commemorate the 10th anniversary of
@SWTOR
here's a fun dev story from a year or two before launch:
My team was one of the first to place and script quest content on Hoth, the final section of which has a graveyard of downed starships. 1/7
"The passage of time expatriates us all" -
@GreatDismal
Found this in my quote file just now. I don't remember where it's from (probably Agency or The Peripheral) but I'm pretty sure you could do a lecture (series) on this statement.
The next time I tell someone that I make video games and they react like I just come up with cool ideas all day, I'm going to tell them about days like today where I do nothing but meticulously place nodes to create volumes for maps, pathfinding, etc.
@GreatDismal
Despite it being recently declared illegal, there is a somewhat large and complex homeless camp under 183 in north Austin. At its height a couple people were running businesses out of there. Every time I pass by I think about The Bridge.
quote retweet with four projects you've worked on.
(i've been at this so long it feels unfair to pick just four, because i love a lot of the others just as much. but let's go with this four for today)
@FreyaHolmer
@thelatemarkwood
Its because they're rendering all those extra national guard troops. It was a choice between lowering the shadow quality or poor frame rate and Biden won't suffer anything lower than a smooth 60fps.
Our team narrative in place and having inadvertently created a mascot for ourselves, I refined my original image to produce the below. Over 10 years later, I still believe in our myth of the Overtaun even if only a handful of people have every been privy to it before now. 7/7
@pattonoswalt
So just let me introduce myself
My name is Humpty, pronounced with a Umpty
Yo ladies, oh how I like to hump thee
And all the rappers in the top ten--please allow me to bump thee
I keep waiting for Bandcamp to implode due to some greedy exec's mishandling or sell out to some media conglomerate and completely change like every other seemingly progrossive business venture I've ever liked on the internet and instead they keep being awesome.
Nothing but love for my SWTOR friends on their new adventure. That this game is still going strong a decade later is a testament to the amazing talent that has worked and continues to work on this game.
@neilhimself
@Nea_Pie
@meyoco_
@kickstarter
With all due respect, it ceased to be personal the moment you broadcast your boycott/refusal of support to 2.7 million Twitter followers. I'm angry too, but my words don't carry nearly the weight yours do. Boycotts _may_ hurt Kickstarter but _will_ hurt unionization right now
@US_FDA
Just give us anything ...ANYTHING! We've got no goddamn protection for our kids, especially the youngest who cannot yet wear masks. Our lives have been on hold for two years. Just give us ANYTHING! A little protection is STILL protection.
@Silent0siris
@Lobosjrgaming
The idea that "it's all down hill" after a certain age is based on the false assumption that there are certain things one is not "allowed" to do as one gets older. If someone tells you that you can't or shouldn't do something just because you're "old", ignore that shit. Be you.
10 years later I'm still proud of the work I did on SWTOR both for launch and for years after. I've moved on to other things at Bioware, but the SWTOR dev team continues to impress. Happy Anniversary! Here's to 10 more.
Props to Steve Kamp, Joe Graves, Haley Chivers, and Chris Schmidt (
@nighguy
) who were my scripting team at the time and who helped birth the legend of the Overtaun.
The California Department of Fair Employment and Housing has filed an explosive lawsuit against Activision Blizzard for discrimination. Some of the details in the complaint are horrifying
I've decided that while working today, I'll be listening to what I think of as
@Failure
's "space" trilogy (Fantastic Planet (outer space), The Heart is a Monster (inner space), In the Future... (meta space)) from front to back. Not sure why I haven't done this before.
This is where our personal team narrative began. We decided that this image wasn't just artistic license and that there _was_ actually a giant Tauntaun on Hoth: the Overtaun. 5/7
The Overtaun (we decided) was Force-sensitive _and_ that the diet of Tauntauns consisted primarily of starship hulls. Because of this, the Overtaun would use her Force powers to pull ships out of orbit for the other Tauntauns to feast on. 6/7
It was meant to represent Luke leaving Hoth in The Empire Strikes Back, but my team reminded me that on _our_ Hoth the ships are crashed, so the X-wing should be going the other way. I took the sketch into Photoshop and made this: 4/7
@Fran_del_Valle
I think Gary explained it well in his blog post (linked in the original post): "Naturally, the Dread Wolf still has an important part in this tale, but you and your companions – not your enemies – are the heart of this new experience."
Now, there's an actual narrative reason for why those ships are there, but as designers just trying to get first-pass quest scripting in (and since it didn't seem to be an important part of any quest narrative) we decided to come up with our own among ourselves. 2/7
@AlexanderMFreed
Bringing the Agent storyline to life with you was one of the pleasures of my career in game development. Cipher Nine, Darth Jadus, Ardun Kothe, and Hunter are as important to Star Wars for me as Luke, Leia, Han, and Chewy.
I should back up a bit. Around this time Olly Moss did his "minimalist" Star Wars poster trilogy and people were aping that style for all manner of things. To that end, I scrawled a silhouette of a Tauntaun with an X-Wing flying into the sky on a whiteboard in our pod. 3/7
My wife said that I should cosplay the Mandalorian for Halloween so our (at that time) 6 month old daughter can be "Baby Yoda".
She has no idea what kind of monster she has unleashed!
Along with Critical Thinking and Media Literacy, I think basic Diplomacy should be taught in schools. I feel like more people need to understand that the direct route isn't always the way to get what you or anyone you may represent want. Also they should teach the Kobayashi Maru.
@CorinneBusche
In my career I've been on good projects and bad and a sure sign of a great project is feeling excited to address the feedback you get from a content review.
This has probably been the kickstarter I've been most excited about in recent years.
@toejamandearl
Back in the Groove. My brother and I spent MANY hours on the original. Glad to hear the revival is up to snuff:
I don't know how else to say it ...
@thearmed
must be stopped. It's clear after Perfect Saviors that there is no form of music they cannot master. They will dominate and destroy all other music as we know it.
Refract.
241 workers at Bethesda Game Studios, the maker of Starfield and Fallout, are unionizing. We’ll likely see many more announcements like this in the coming months and years. Labor in the video game industry has reached a tipping point:
@guyro
I feel like there's something else going on too. My wife got banned for a comment that was appealed and deemed ok after, but the ban is still in place. The crazy thing is that depending on what she's trying to do sometimes it's a 7 day ban, sometimes 30. Something's glitched
OK
@abhithenomad
, explain to me how - after listening to the new album - I get "Me No Evil" from the last album stuck in my head? Must be doing some kinda subliminal, cross promotion shit.
I'm going to make a prediction in the hope that it doesn't come true, because I'm a shite prognosticator.
Increased resources and cashflow lead to increased ambitions, lead to overreach, lead to deficit, lead to compensating, which will screw artists and customers in the end.
@JulianCastro
We don't need some billionaire to make TX blue. Minus voter suppression, TX is likely already blue. We need congress to pass voting reform and secure voting rights. We need to
#EndTheFilibuster
I truly don’t believe LAZY is a thing.
We are either:
•exhausted AF from faking well or healing from TRAUMA
•burnt-out and/or DEPRESSED
•struggle with executive function and completing tasks from ADHD
•procrastinating as a symptom of ANXIETY
You👏Are👏Not👏Lazy
@SerInquisitor
@dragonage
@OfficialGDL
I've got to hand it to the designer who took over after me. It was literally the first content we gave her when she started and she's been owning the hell out of it ever since. It's a team effort though and everyone's done an amazing job. I can't wait for people to play it!
@CorinneBusche
With this analogy I'm just picturing "git gud" gaming gatekeepers as dainty dinner etiquette pedants, chastising people for using the wrong fork at the wrong time.
Had a chance to check out the situation at a few nearby early voting locations in Austin Texas over lunch.
Long (but not insane) lines, masks, and nary a Proud Boy in sight.
#TurnTexasBlue
Wild Type Droid by
@Failure
This was a late entry and I'm still digesting it, but there's no mistaking it as another stellar release from this band. Eschewing the sprawling nature of their previous 3 records WTD may be less lofty, but still rocks 2/11
Shardlight is about a woman named Amy is who is searching for a cure to a deadly plague.
As power fantasies go, it is a bit on the nose at the moment. But it is 70% off on Steam right now, so why not indulge?
What if this $2000 thing from Trump isn't a ploy, a con, a tantrum, or another of his usual bad faith moves?
What if instead he got visited by 3 ghosts last night and this was the best the experience could get out of him?
I like how Last of Us is taking conservative doomsday fantasies and making them woke:
A bad ass prepper ... and he's gay.
A fiercely protective colony of isolated survivalists ... and they're communists.
It's too good.
@CorinneBusche
Yeah, up until recently I was making Dragon Age from out of a converted garage ... that's some punk rock game development there. Had to make sure I wasn't also doing laundry in the background of Zoom meetings due to the noise. Maybe ... not so punk actually. Dad punk?
@JoshMalina
I've got a 16 month old daughter and I know how this story goes. Once you think they're all gone, sad mother duck is gonna say "quack, quack, quack" and then it starts all over again.
There's a lot of reporting on
@BetoORourke
's confronting the accessories to mass murder at a press conference today, but what he said outside after being thrown out is also powerful and worthy mention:
Watching kids learn to talk is great. Right now for my 2.5 year old "purple" is pronounced "people" and "orange" is "oh shit". She was saying colors while pointing to the spines of my
@JamesSACorey
#TheExpanse
novels on the shelf. Cibola Burn and Tiamat's Wrath are "oh shit"
Anyway, since this kinda blew up, check out my SoundCloud ... j/k. May as well scope my Bandcamp collection before they start shrinking artist revenue to pay for upcoming folly though. Again ... I really hope I'm wrong about this, but mo money mo problems.
Twitter right now feels like the end of beta event for an MMO, where the live devs test the ability to make large live updates by having a world ending event and all the players party.