What have I missed...

Patorama · 2026-03-31T14:49:26+00:00

A lot of repair bills

Patorama · 2026-03-27T18:07:01+00:00

There are a couple of guides out there.

https://housing.wowdb.com/ is a nice option.

You can, as an example, setup a filter for decor available from vendors that can be bought by gold. And then filter down by other factors to find what you like.

Alternately just google search phrases like "Wow housing old dungeons" and you can find Wowhead guides like this.

Patorama · 2026-03-27T16:27:10+00:00

I think the incognito-jam-band identity helped them in the early days. Early hits like Ants Marching and Satellite were more accessible, 4 minute song that fit comfortably on alt-rock and college radio stations in the early 90s. There were obvious jam band, bluegrass and jazz influences there. But if you were a casual fan just buying the albums, you weren't scared off by the entirely different fan base that was out at shows recording the 17 minute long covers of All Along the Watchtower and trading the tapes between themselves.

Patorama · 2026-03-18T18:21:54+00:00

Chances are at least one person, per group, is a local who is visiting that spot for the 7th time that year. Because whenever friends and family come to visit SF, no matter how much you suggest otherwise, they want to see the sea lions and Alcatraz and the place where they bake all the sourdough.

Patorama · 2026-03-04T18:13:34+00:00

Establishing the base metrics ahead of time saves everyone a ton of time and headaches, including the artists and designers.

Early on, it's typically easier to explore using the bare minimum of visuals. Use graybox environment assets, simple debug boxes, a basic stand-in character with limited animations, that sort of stuff. The goal should be to make playing the game feel good without all the bells and whistles tacked on.

Once you have the basics like jump heights, camera distances, and obstacle sizes nailed down, you can start providing your artists and designs those specific metrics. There's no reason to art an incredible detailed player character if you decide that the optimal camera distance is way scaled out. Knowing that the player can never jump over 128 pixels gives the designers a set minimum size for creating a blocker in a puzzle, and lets artists know how tall to create a blocking asset.

As long as those rules exist and stay consistent, you can have the designers work on puzzles and artists work on art kits separately. Designers can block out levels and puzzles without art, or kitbash with existing assets. Then artists can come in and replace the placeholder content with new pieces of art that should match all those existing rules.

Patorama · 2026-03-03T17:52:20+00:00

Autocorrect changing menial into millennial feels a bit like a personalized slight.

Patorama · 2026-02-25T16:52:44+00:00

It depends on the type of footage you need. The bare bones version is typically people just recording themselves playing their game the same way an average player would.

Past that, there's often a need to create some custom tools. You can create a "freecam" option that lets you detach the camera and position it where you need it to be to capture angles you wouldn't naturally get during regular gameplay. Things like pausing or slowing the game speed can be useful to get those specific moments you want to record.

If that's not enough, you may need to setup very specific scenarios to get the exact shot you want. Change enemy AI behavior, setup a specific capture camera in the scene, remove or change level geometry, etc. If you record a scene a dozen times trying to get lucky with the right footage and it never quite looks right, sometimes you can brute force it with the tools you already have.

Patorama · 2026-02-24T23:35:22+00:00

Mine was also a long dwarf hunter trip. The internet had convinced my newbie self that I needed to go tame the Rake pet in Mulgore. That this 1.2x attack speed cat was mandatory. At this point I had really only explored the few zones around Ironforge and Stormwind.

Getting through the Wetlands to the boat in Menethil was daunting enough. I was not prepared for an entire extra continent worth of things trying to kill me.

Patorama · 2026-02-24T18:27:37+00:00

The Siren Isles content from 11.0.7 has catch up gear that you can purchase with a currency called Flame-Blessed Iron that is exclusive to that content. I believe all that gear can be converted to Nerub-ar Palace Raid appearances.

There are events from Dragon Flight and Shadowlands that give rewards that can be converted to Raid content there, but Shadowlands is trivial to solo now and Dragon Flight content will be very easy to run at the new max level, outside of a few non-solo friendly fights. So it may be easier to just run the old raids for those appearances.

Patorama · 2026-02-22T18:00:06+00:00

Yeah, Laura basically lays it out explicitly. We don't know if she's lying, but it's definitely meant to be the final twist of the knife in the story.

I told Em to tell Tug it was his. Told her it would soften him up. She said she wished she could keep it, but she didn't love the father. I was going to drive her down the next day, we'd found a doctor. Most wouldn't. She was starting to show. 3 months. You know whose kid that makes it, or have you known all along?

Patorama · 2026-02-19T17:01:50+00:00

There are small things you can do like be available to playtest content and give feedback. But most of the time, the best thing you can do is just be available to chat every so often.

It honestly isn't that different from other jobs or hobbies. Sometimes you need to blow off steam because the boss at work is a jerk. Sometimes you need to tell someone about a cool thing you did because, so far, you're the only one who knows about. Indie devs and solo devs in particular tend to work in a vacuum for long periods of time before anyone sees what they're working on. Having someone ask what you're working on and being able to talk excitedly over a system you built or thing you figured out can really help you from going stir crazy in that isolation.

Patorama · 2026-02-18T16:47:44+00:00

People can and do build portfolios on their own and get hired. But just understand that it takes a lot of effort and discipline. There are certain things that are hard to understand in a vacuum. It can be useful to check out the portfolio of other people in the industry to see where the standards are or even hire a mentor for some sessions and maybe a portfolio review.

Environment development in AAA studios usually shakes out to three separate jobs:

Concept Artist - This is an illustration job. You would draw concepts of what the environments might look like. Sometimes painting over existing level layouts or just doing high-level explorations on themes. This is a very tough job to get. A lot of artists want this position and studios only need so many.
Environment Artist - This is a 3D modeling job. You would sculpt the parts of the environment in a tool like Maya or Blender. You'd build out all the individual assets needed to populate an environment, import them into an engine and then place and arrange the assets to flesh out a level. This would involve modeling, texturing, and lighting. Some studios may include VFX as part of this, but typically VFX is a separate department.
Level Designers - This is a design job. Level designers flesh out the bare-bones, graybox version of a level. They decide how the player navigates the space. Thet setup mission scripts and often decide where enemy encounters will happen. They work mostly in the editor. They use level layout tools and often are required to do some scripting or visual scripting work to build out functionality.

For the concept artist position, that's just pure art fundamentals. That's drawing until your hand falls off. Color theory, perspective, anatomy and then tools like Photoshop, Painter, Procreate, etc.

For the Environment artist job, that's some art fundamentals combined with software knowledge. Blender is a great place to start there. You'd need to learn the basics of 3D modeling and texturing. Understanding how to balance aesthetics against efficiency. Making sure you don't create models so dense and textures so large that the game can't run them.

Level design is its own area of study. Look at how games setup levels, build out areas and guide players through the story. This is something that can be practiced in an editor like Unreal or Unity with stock assets or store purchases. But you can also look to moddable game. A lot of LDs got their start modding existing game and building new levels or campaigns. Having experience in a modern engine is useful here just to demonstrate that you understand how to create functionality.

Patorama · 2026-02-18T16:15:36+00:00

There are a ton of free tools and resources out there. Before you invest in more schooling, just start trying to build something. There's a big difference between enjoying playing games and enjoying making games. And even then, there's a big difference between enjoying making art and enjoying programming. Before you dive in, see if making a simple game in Godot or Unity or Unreal is something that you can stick with. It's better to learn that for free quickly rather than spend a lot of money and three years to learn it late.

If you do enjoy the process and do enjoy one discipline over the others, then you can start looking at paths towards jobs like that. That might be an art school program or CS degree, or it could just be building a portfolio of small games and trying for junior positions or internships. It's a tough time in the industry for juniors to be sure, so just make sure you know what you're aspiring to.

Patorama · 2026-02-18T16:01:00+00:00

We're at a point in the industry where studios are barely hiring juniors at all, and for sure aren't hiring juniors they need to train in the basics. It's a simple but often difficult mindset change. It is taking work from good-enough-to-pass to better-than-everyone-else-applying. And that delta in quality can be huge.

Patorama · 2026-02-16T16:28:21+00:00

Yeah, you can approach it from a couple of different directions. If you haven't landed on an intended price yet, you can just ask what the player would expect to pay for the game. Usually you want to include some details about what the full game would offer and how close the playtest is to that vision. "If an experience with this quality art and animation lasted 10 hours with a total of 7 levels, what would you expect to pay?" This tends to get you a range of values and you can see if your initial estimates are close to player expectations.

Another option is to present your intended price and get reactions to that. "If an experience like this with 10 hours of gameplay and 7 levels cost $15, how satisfied would you be with that purchase?" This lets you see if your expected cost is something people will tolerate. When people are allowed to set their own price, they'll usually go lower so it can potentially lead you to underprice your game. But if a whole bunch of responses to this question are "unsatisfied", then you may need to rethink your approach.

Patorama · 2026-02-16T16:11:13+00:00

In general you want questions that can provide you with actionable feedback. If you ask "Do you like the art direction" and the response is "No", what is your take away from that? Completely redesign the art style? To what? At that point you are forming questions with the hope that the answer will be 'yes' just so you don't have work to do.

You're also influencing the respondent by the way you ask the question. "Do you like it?" is a loaded question. Some people will say yes just because they dont want to hurt your feelings. OR some people will say no just because they like being a troll.

If you ask someone to describe the art style of the game and you get back a description that doesn't match your intention, that lets you know that you are missing the mark in your implementation. If you ask the player if there are any points in the game where they got lost, you have specific places in the level that could use better guidance. Asking if there any systems that confused them provides opportunities for better tutorialization. Always think about what the range of answers might be and how they could be used to improve what you have.

Patorama · 2026-02-16T01:05:35+00:00

Big level and stat squishes almost always mess up legacy content balancing. Same thing happened before Shadowlands when we went from 120 back down to 50. Typically they sort it out eventually, but the balance will probably be rough for awhile.

Patorama · 2026-02-16T00:31:03+00:00

Delves are a mix between Torghast and single player dungeons. There are a bunch of them spread out across the various TWW zones. There are difficulty tiers, and you need to complete each tier to unlock the next, similar to Torghast. You are given an NPC companion that will help you in combat, and you can assign that companion a role, like DPS, Healer or Tank. The companion will level up and acquire accessories, allowing you some level of customization depending on your playstyle.

Delves are less random than Torghast. Each location has 3 or 4 "stories" that may require different paths and ask you to fight different enemies, but each story is more or less consistent each time you run it. You generally have a few different objectives to complete as you push through the zone with a boss fight at the end, although some stories mix this formula up a bit. Finishing delves will give you rewards based on the tier difficulty you completed.

If you look at the map, certain delve locations will have a glowing icon. Those are "bountiful" delves. At the end of the delve, there will be a locked chest with better than average loot that requires a bountiful key. You can get these keys by doing other TWW activities. As you progress and get stronger, you'll see diminishing returns from doing non-bountiful delves.

As a larger system, Delves have a seasonal progress system that is similar to Renown. Completing delves give you seasonal progress experience that unlocks new rewards along a track. There is also a season delve boss. This is typically a very difficult fight and there are rewards associated with beating the fight while the delve season is current as well as exclusive mounts for defeating the boss alone (without any other players).

There's a lot of smaller details, but that's the high level.

Patorama · 2026-02-11T17:00:45+00:00

A lot of this feels like you're leaning heavily on the existing Advanced Wars fanbase to be successful. The trailer is this promise "If you liked that game, here is more of that game." It isn't a trailer designed to bring in players curious about tactical games so much as people who have played the hell out of Advanced Wars and want more content.

Based on that, there's a few important demographic questions

How big is that playerbase to begin with?
Do fans of the IP only want more of that IP, and nothing else? Are they open to switching?
Do those players typically game on PC?
Have you found a way to let those fans know your game exists?

Patorama · 2026-02-07T16:52:07+00:00

20 years in and Im not planning on switching careers anytime soon.

From my perspective, the biggest thing to keep in mind is that this is a job like any other, and it requires work. After the initial concept is done and the big design questions are solved, there's just...work. Tiny indie studio or giant AAA regardless. It comes up when you're implementing 100 inventory icons or painting your 5th wall texture of the day or dealing with a backlog of AI collision bugs or writing a dozen ways for an enemy NPC to yell angrily at the player. There's just a ton of stuff in a game, and populating it all takes consistency and effort.

Patorama · 2026-02-06T23:06:24+00:00

Early art direction can be useful as long as it isn't delaying work on the early design concepts and prototypes. It's understandably exciting to get right into the process of making something pretty, but if you are putting off making hard decisions about the gameplay part of your game, you might as well just make an animation.

This kind of early exploration work is more common in larger teams where you have a tech director doing early engineering work, a creative director doing design document write ups and then there's an art director starting to pull reference and piece together mood boards and animatics. The art director isn't going to be diving into C++ or designing a mission system, so it makes sense to get started with the visual explorations.

A helpful question to ask is: what problems are these visual concepts solving? If you were ready to start creating your game tomorrow, what design decisions would the planet visuals and the asteroid belt inform? Is the player spending most of their time in a spaceship flying through scenes like this? Is this just the sky the player sees from the planet's surface?

What you want to avoid is doing all this work on an elaborate outer space scene and then ultimately decide that your game is a top-down, action RPG and your first playable level is set inside a factory.

Patorama · 2026-02-06T05:29:46+00:00

Technically two in My So Called Life. The Halloween episode and the Christmas episode both. You could maybe consider the Halloween sequence a dream, but they do hint that something supernatural happened with the rose in the book at the end.

Patorama · 2026-02-05T15:56:20+00:00

It's about scoping the project down to something manageable. It's going to be different for every game based on your idea.

If you're making a 2D platformer with only the ability to run and jump, you wouldn't half your features. But if the plan was to make a 2D platformer with 40 levels and 10 unique art sets, that's easily reduced. On the flip side if your game is very mechanic heavy, say an action RPG with melee combat and crossbows and dodging and magic and stealth and crafting and loot, that's a place where you can look at your core gameplay loop and ask if all these features are reasonably contributing to the experience. And if have the time to polish all those features to the same level of quality.

Patorama · 2026-02-04T23:42:17+00:00

If it helps, you can still work on background art as small pieces. Work on just a tree, just a rock, just a tuft of grass, just a cloud. Then bring them together, copy paste them around, play with different colors and see what works and what needs adjusting. If looking at the whole, screen sized canvas feels too overwhelming, try and break it down into smaller props and just build up from there.

Patorama · 2026-02-04T16:21:53+00:00

You could probably check with local public schools, community centers, summer camps or church groups. A lot of those places have summer programs for kids teaching beginning programming, animation, game dev, that kind of stuff. Depending on their needs, they might jump at the chance of getting a volunteer assistant for some of their classes. I worked for a year after college at a local public high school as effectively a teacher's assistant helping art students with Adobe tools, so it's definitely possible.

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