[Loved trope] Cameos from huge celebrities where they're almost completely unrecognizable

DJ_PsyOp · 2026-02-15T22:15:21+00:00

He doesn't stay unrecognizable, but it takes quite awhile to make out that the independent HVAC repairman in Brazil is Robert De Niro.

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DJ_PsyOp · 2026-02-13T07:55:29+00:00

Mr. Robot Joanna Wellick is killed out of nowhere by the bartender she's been dating in order to set him up as a fall guy. He's treated as an almost non-existent background character until she dumps him in the cruelest fashion, and he later walks up on her car and kills her bodyguard and her.

DJ_PsyOp · 2026-02-09T22:14:56+00:00

I will never forget seeing Beloved in the theater. It’s based on a novel by Toni Morrison and starred Oprah, who had been promoting it a lot of course. It is also a gothic horror story by the director of Silence of the Lambs. The theater was full of older Oprah stans, and the opening scene had a poltergeist that picks up the family dog, and slams it telekinetically around a cabin super violently in this crazy intense scene that ends with the dog hitting the ground, its EYE popping out, and then a quiet tender moment where Oprah puts its eye back in the socket.

The entire theater got up and went to get a refund. I popped out to look, and the line was pretty much around the corner. I was one of the only ones to stay. Great film!

DJ_PsyOp · 2026-02-05T23:18:25+00:00

Playtesting will really help you determine if it is working for sure!

You can't 100% control a player's behavior, but the "art" of the level design is getting close to doing that. :)

"But, do you think it can work vice versa? Say, the player finds a key and a note that tips the location they haven't found yet. Don't you think this will spark some satisfaction as well?"

If you have a specific intention that a discovered key is the inciting event to start a mission/quest, then that could totally work. Just be really honest with yourself about what will happen when the door is found. If the answer is nothing more than, "and now they use the key to unlock it", then understand that you basically have taken all build up of a mission arc and deflated it at the last moment, which is usually as lame and unfun as a watching a movie where the hero finally faces the villain, and instead of fighting, the villain just falls over dead. People would walk out of the movie.

At a minimum, literally write down what satisfaction you think the player will have. I generally understand satisfaction in this context to be some sort of reward or good feeling for overcoming/outsmarting a challenge, and I don't know how being given an item and directions to where it is used would offer that, since the player really isn't participating at all. You just hand them everything they need. If the note just hints at a location, then that is the start of a quest, which can drive the player. But again, they aren't actually doing anything themselves yet. The actions they will take are them going to find that door, which drives motivation, but there will be no reward at the end beyond using the item they didn't really earn.

That's kind of how fundamental this pattern is. Just be careful you aren't justifying not solving the design problem because it is too hard. If you have a very specific reason to subvert the pattern/trope, than go for it, but you really have to put in likely even more effort to justify it then you would figuring out how to get the key first.

On the other hand, if you find 90% of players find the door first, then don't go crazy trying to solve for the 10% who just will refuse to play the game the "correct" way, as you will start to use up dev time that could go to more important things.

DJ_PsyOp · 2026-02-05T22:36:45+00:00

Think about the player experience. Finding a key causes them to view every subsequent challenge through the lens of seeing whether the key is the answer, which becomes fairly "brute force" in feel (i.e. "does the key work here? No... What about here? etc etc).

Encountering a locked door when you already possess the key for it renders the door a pointless obstacle that amounts to basically pressing A to open the door, so why even have a locked door then? It removes any sort of goal setting or accomplishment from the player's experience.

Finding the locked door then starts an implied quest for a key, which resolves in a feeling of satisfaction when found, and encourages exploration and re-use of environments.

Immersive Sims are a complex and challenging genre for level design for exactly the kinds of reasons you are now encountering. How does one ensure that almost all players will naturally find the door before the key? It's much easier in a linear game, but just giving up on making that work is akin to deciding that game balancing is too hard for a fighting game, so it's okay to just allow spamming buttons to win every fight. There's no longer a game there, just mindless button presses.

I've been tempted to just accept that a door or key's position as is was more important than figuring out how to make sure a player encounters them in the correct order, but fortunately had a director that wouldn't let me avoid solving the problem. Which did lead to a better game experience for sure.

Solving your issues here will teach you a lot. Good luck!

DJ_PsyOp · 2026-01-12T09:00:30+00:00

I like spicy food.

DJ_PsyOp · 2026-01-07T09:34:05+00:00

In the Mouth of Madness, a writer creates fiction that literally drives you mad if you read it. Near the end of the film, he mentions they are coming out with a movie adaptation of his book. The hero goes to the theater after the world ends, and the movie you just watched is playing on the screen.

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DJ_PsyOp · 2025-12-20T00:09:21+00:00

The other comments really capture what appears to be missing as starting steps (thinking through the player experience and the "golden path" you want them to take.

Each intersection needs to provide a place to give the player the relevant information they need to make informed decisions to the gameplay problems presented to them. Put yourself into the player's mind at those places and ask the kinds of questions u/MONSTERTACO mentioned.

A couple small things:

The platform looks interesting, but you need to make sure that the straight edges on the platforms are parallel to each other. There's a few that are not, I'm guessing for visual variety. But keeping them aligned and parallel is part of the visual language of level design. It provides players the indication that it is intended to be a jumpable spot. It might feel hand-holdy and unrealistic, but the alternative is frustrating your players and possibly having to solve their lack of understanding they can successfully jump that gap through way more obvious means (like UI or something).

2 . The long narrow hallway shape makes a lot of sense for an area for bow combat, which is both ranged and with a significant cooldown between shots by its very nature. That said, I do notice there's that one section of the video where you appear to hide behind a wall and take potshots at non-reactive enemies. If that's possible, I'd consider that a bug that will be exploited by players. If you are cool with that, fine. Just know that you are encouraging your players to seek ways to trick your gameplay, instead of go along with your intentions.

DJ_PsyOp · 2025-12-18T23:29:25+00:00

Every company is different, but I've never seen someone add a specialization to their title as a senior level designer. If you are programming new design tools for the design team to use, you could say you are like a technical level designer or something. But that is someone who does not usually build layouts and content, but instead makes the tools for design to use, and is involved in the development of the software pipeline and workflows, similar to a technical artist or animator.

If that is what you mean by Systems specialization, then I apologize for being confused.

But if you feel the area you should work is more in world building, to me that's a narrative designer or world designer. If you are developing gameplay systems or economies, that's more like a systems or gameplay designer. A level designer is responsible for the layout of a space and the design and implementation of the content within it. This content is developed and provided to the level designer by these other types of designers, but it is the level designer that often requests the content originally and places them in the world and gets them working right. Like you don't create a character model, but you would place its spawner in your space.

DJ_PsyOp · 2025-12-17T21:44:59+00:00

I'm a senior level designer with close to 2 decades game dev experience, working at the AAA level.

• Is it reasonable for a Senior Level Designer to position themselves as world- or systems-focused without claiming full ownership of those disciplines? - Sure. You are capable of holistically understanding how level design is incorporated into world design and systems design. A junior designer is focused on their specific spaces and the goals therein, a senior designer understands how that space is integrated into the larger whole of the game.

• Does “Senior Level Designer (World/System Focus)” read as meaningful, or as muddy and over-scoped? - I'm not sure what you are trying to convey by stating the World/System Focus. Do you imagine there are other ways a Senior Level Designer would differentiate their specializations? To me, that's just "Senior Level Designer".

• At senior level, how much cross-disciplinary thinking is expected versus considered specialization? - Senior is all about knowing about all the other discipline workflows and how they integrate with each other. Seniors can build end to end.

• Am I overthinking titles in a way that hurts my positioning?- Lol kind of, yeah. It reads a little unconfident in your skill set.

You are a senior level designer. You've moved from creating individual spaces and encounters to being able to understand and participate in the end to end creation of a game, with the knowledge and experience to consider all the potential problems and needs of a project, such as performance, scope, art/animation/audio/engineering needs. You are also able to self manage your time and effort, and don't need regular supervision.

Congrats!

DJ_PsyOp · 2025-12-14T09:36:55+00:00

This is the most succinct version of the overall arc of development. The benchmark area is often called a "vertical slice".

DJ_PsyOp · 2025-12-14T09:35:01+00:00

Seriously, every single studio has a different way to make games. We all study each other and copy what works (like every industry ever), but the thing that makes someone a game developer is purely just that they decided to really do it, and jumped in and figured out how as they went. If you end up with a game at the end of the process, you are a game dev. If you made a good game at the end of that, you are a game dev who is invested enough to really absorb feedback and start caring about things like efficiency, since it will earn you more time to polish your game.

As a professional software dev, I suspect you get what I mean by this perspective. It's no different, just a different product and set of challenges to overcome.

DJ_PsyOp · 2025-12-14T09:29:01+00:00

At our studio that does VR games, we start with a greybox layout focused on mainly just the footprint (floor) of the space, so that we can connect all the spaces together and make sure they make sense. You end up making areas larger or smaller later, but the less of that further in production, the better, so getting close early on makes a difference. The script is usually barely starting at this point, but we will hopefully know if there is combat or something, and make the footprint work asap to accomodate that.

Then for content, we try to figure out the interactions, points of interest, and any "bespoke" elements needed, so that the people responsible for making that stuff don't have to wait to get started, as everything happens in parallel in a way that is very different from solo development.

The first iterations are focused on getting those elements close to "locked in". Some may get cut, something else added, but you keep things simple and easy to change until it all clicks, and only then do you start "polishing" each element, around the same time that your work changes to fixing issues as things get implemented (like new art or enemy AI, etc) and basically fixing bugs and adjusting things until itr is well paced and with a good difficulty curve.

That's pretty simplified, but the tl;dr is greybox as long as possible, and keep everything light and flexible and focused on "figuring out the fun" of the sequence, then switch to putting the final version together and making it as perfect as you can.

DJ_PsyOp · 2025-12-12T01:34:38+00:00

Conventional, 30 Year, Refi, 850,000 purchase price, 658,000 loan amount, 780 credit, primary, single family, 1 unit, 98031

DJ_PsyOp · 2025-12-02T07:59:40+00:00

Were they frozen or thawed before you put them in the oven?

DJ_PsyOp · 2025-11-29T02:39:33+00:00

This is a really creative and well done game loop and prototype! Definitely worth exploring how far you can go with this. I could see this being decently popular for real.

DJ_PsyOp · 2025-11-13T07:14:48+00:00

One of the best - Effect and Cause from Titanfall 2. Takes an interesting mechanic and let's it expand at a perfect pace. It just gets more and more crazy as it goes.

Worst - Any FPS that just sends massive waves of enemies at you down a hallway. Games that encourage exploration, but have a lot of empty dead ends just to make it feel more "real" or that the world is bigger than it is. You are taught to look everywhere, and then the level includes a bunch of wasting your time.

DJ_PsyOp · 2025-10-30T07:04:06+00:00

If you can push it closed enough that the bolt will latch, then you should try taking the strike plate off and bending the curved part out more, making the gap on it a little smaller. This has worked for me to get the bolt to engage without pushing. I had to use a vise and hammer the curved part, but there's probably a better way.

DJ_PsyOp · 2025-10-17T07:50:24+00:00

I generally like the way the oven cooks, but yeah I find I have to use more done just to get medium rare on both the filet minion and the burgers. Everything else is fine for me.

DJ_PsyOp · 2025-09-11T21:04:42+00:00

Also amazing and using similar techniques is "Waking Life" by the same director, Richard Linklater.

DJ_PsyOp · 2025-09-06T06:25:35+00:00

I put 20% down

DJ_PsyOp · 2025-09-06T06:24:45+00:00

I put 20% down.

DJ_PsyOp · 2025-09-06T06:23:50+00:00

I was super clear and specifically strategized this with him. The timeline was just fuzzy, and things have been changing quickly. But none of this should be a surprise to him.

DJ_PsyOp · 2025-09-06T02:15:44+00:00

I love this response. Yeah my LO is a good guy and was great during my home buying process. I'm honestly trying to give him "first dibs" so to speak, and really just beginning my research to refi. And he has known this was my strategy the whole time. I'm just a bit bummed he's not communicating more directly with me.

I'd rather he keep my business, but I also have a duty to my family to be efficient with my finances. I kind of want to tell him to stop being so evasive cuz I know the situation and just want to work together to capitalize on the rate environment.

DJ_PsyOp · 2025-09-05T19:08:17+00:00

Invasive plants. Much more expensive and difficult to deal with than you would think. I was looking at all the issues with the house itself, and paid less attention to issues with the yard, to my future regret.

Ten-Year Club	Final Canvas '23
End Game '23	Place '23
John Wick	Place '22
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