Greg Street

Studio Head and Game Director of Fantastic Pixel Castle. We are making an MMO!

Previously: Riot, Blizzard, Ensemble Studios, oceanography

[Greg Street @Ghostcrawler]

Our new studio, FPC, has released a gameplay video for our upcoming MMORPG. See what 1 year of dev with 25 people looks like!

https://t.co/JusbE6iobg

[Greg Street @Ghostcrawler]

@bloore37 @Ahwhwh2740394 The former works well for open world and the latter for more corridor-based gameplay (like an fps) where every inch of geometry placement matters.

[Greg Street @Ghostcrawler]

@KatDoes3D Try to objectively think about why a designer made a particular choice in a game. What were they trying to get a player to do? How did they want a player to feel? What else could they have done that might also deliver on those same goals?

[Greg Street @Ghostcrawler]

@BenPielstick Agree it is presented in boring ways. The way they explained the why was like you were learning a language that you needed to talk to other scientists. You should just know the forms that nitrogen takes in water and the average absolute amounts of each

[Greg Street @Ghostcrawler]

I was a good but not great student.

I skated by in high school by being able to write fast and well, but I never developed good study skills and that bit me in college. Entry biology (I had a double major in biology and philosophy) is all memorization, which I was bad at.

[Greg Street @Ghostcrawler]

I think a lot about the nature of learning these days when most games are required to teach you how to play, and the best ones do it in a way that sucks you in rather than a big Play The Tutorial button.

/thread

[Greg Street @Ghostcrawler]

I can still identity hundred of plants, birds and fish, and perhaps thousands of species of marine invertebrates (crustaceans, mollusks and worms). For some reason that part of memorization clicked with me. But foreign languages never did and I remain frustratingly mono lingual.

[Greg Street @Ghostcrawler]

@SandyofCthulhu @MacdonaldJonald I had to change from DeathShrimp to Ghostcrawler through a quirk of the Blizzard forums where your posting name needed to match your account name and someone had already claimed DeathShrimp (no doubt because of me)

[Greg Street @Ghostcrawler]

@SandyofCthulhu @MacdonaldJonald Yes Sandy was my mentor (and friend) at Ensemble, which was my first job in gaming. We bonded over arthropods because I studied crustaceans and he arachnids. And we played a lot of board games at lunch.

[Greg Street @Ghostcrawler]

@MagdalenaDK While I think M+ helped, the trend was already there from speed running easy dungeons for badges. Gogogo means there is no time to explain and since the tank needs first contact with the enemy, they end up setting the pace

[Greg Street @Ghostcrawler]

@MagdalenaDK Two quick points. When speed trumps everything, it doesn't leave room for other roles to lead. This wasn't always the case.

Second, we did some preliminary work that suggested that a dungeon party size of 6 (4 dps) might match natural ratios better.

[Greg Street @Ghostcrawler]

Earthquake in NE Japan felt in Tokyo. I’ve lived in SoCal so not my first rodeo. (Some of the swaying is just me not being able to hold the phone steady.)

[Greg Street @Ghostcrawler]

@DirtyEffinHippy I think it will recover somewhat, though I admit I thought it would be faster. The industry still produces a lot of revenue, which will make it eventually seem like a good investment again. Investors are learning not all AI bets pay off and even forever games don’t last forever.

[Greg Street @Ghostcrawler]

@LieNeverx About 5500 game developers were laid off last year. It was a blood bath for many people.

[Greg Street @Ghostcrawler]

I am excited / relieved / grateful to have found a really good new job - an occurrence which is vanishingly rare in the modern gaming industry. I can share more once I've signed the official paperwork.

(No, it's not an MMO, at least not yet.)

[Greg Street @Ghostcrawler]

@joaopopsick Like so many studios these days, our funding was pulled. It’s really hard to make games right now.

[Greg Street @Ghostcrawler]

@Collectorian Shippable art is one the most important differences. A first party studio can squint more, assuming everyone gets the art direction overall. We were technically a first party studio, so we didn’t focus on shippable art yet. That ended up being a mistake, but not an obvious one.

[Greg Street @Ghostcrawler]

I talked to 80 Level about some of the challenges of fundraising for our game in these challenging times.

[80 LEVEL @80Level]

.@FPCStudio's Greg Street discussed the financial pressures, funding gaps, and production challenges facing today’s game studios.

Read the interview: https://t.co/Ezgb3tWOII

[Greg Street @Ghostcrawler]

@Collectorian For example, if you are at e.g. Blizzard, you likely need a prototype to prove out the gameplay, but you aren’t going to be shopping that prototype around to outside investors. Investors or publishers need a different kind of demo than internal stakeholders.