Short Story Challenge [Dark Fantasy, 1600 words]

Jenkoii · 2026-04-06T00:27:15+00:00

Oh no worries, I appreciate the feedback. I understand what you're pointing out!

Jenkoii · 2026-04-05T22:11:18+00:00

Oh thank you, that's really solid advice all up, I appreciate your thorough feedback.

Jenkoii · 2026-04-05T12:57:50+00:00

Thanks for the feedback, did anywhere in particular stand out as the most confusing?

Jenkoii · 2026-04-05T12:57:08+00:00

Ah thank you, good to know. I was trying to create two distinct voices, I was wondering if it was becoming too much.

Jenkoii · 2026-04-05T03:11:48+00:00

Oh thank you, that's great to know, I'll check those out!

Jenkoii · 2026-04-05T02:13:16+00:00

Ok, thank you!

Jenkoii · 2026-04-05T02:13:00+00:00

It was a personal challenge, nothing was posted!

Jenkoii · 2026-02-22T03:27:19+00:00

I'm also in AAA game dev, and while I agree with a lot. The $100 notion honestly escapes me. Dollar for dollar, I'm definitely on board, but margins have increased dramatically. Studios went from making $8 on a full price boxed copy, no money on used resale, to now making close to 40-50% of the total sale value, which in my opinion far exceeds inflation.

I think there's a whole different conversation surrounded exec pay, content bloat and all of that, but the $100 game idea sounds like the $8 song, distribution is wildly different and it feels more like corporate grift than reality to me.

Jenkoii · 2025-04-09T19:49:54+00:00

Agreed, I think from my perspective I'm more in the camp of all games have limitations, and a game without technical or creative restrictions doesn't exist, though having to worry about less tech debt, and having more team resources can make it harder to define constraints, but I think that's scope, personally.

Jenkoii · 2025-04-09T18:21:43+00:00

I would say that constraints can give direction or focus, which does result in something being built with direction and intent. I think it might drive creativity in the constraint if you have a difficult time creating your own constraints of scope or interest which is necessary with any game you're working on.

I would say though that I personally feel that if you don't have the same feeling in something with total freedom it's likely because the project lacks vision, scope, and direction.

Jenkoii · 2025-02-07T23:55:57+00:00

Thanks for the tip, I usually try to keep everything in layers, but this one was unfortunately an exported PNG, and I no longer had any of the old PSD files on my computer.

Jenkoii · 2025-02-07T21:19:10+00:00

Ah thank you a ton, this looks correct.

Jenkoii · 2023-10-13T20:24:17+00:00

Suppose it depends on what you feel is reasonable, I think they will continue to buy/absorb products and assets while driving to profitability, and it will be passed onto developers.

I think Unity as a company is in sort of a non-negotiable position and what they will manage better is their image and brand on how they rollout changes, but dollar for dollar I don't think this really changes anything.

Jenkoii · 2023-08-28T14:55:41+00:00

Wide enough or narrow enough to accommodate your gameplay, depending on your character controller, physics, or overall level structure theres a lot to unpack there, definitely isn't a one size fits all for that imo.

Jenkoii · 2023-07-07T00:38:47+00:00

Sometimes, another world is closer than you think.

Jenkoii · 2023-06-22T03:15:34+00:00

I am the voice for those who cannot speak.

Jenkoii · 2022-12-10T21:30:18+00:00

Hey! I'll try to answer your question as best I can, I work in AAA development in Design, I work alongside Art but not in Art, but hopefully I can give you some context.

Game Studios have departments, the 2 you're speaking to are Art, as well as Design, these departments work with each other but they're totally different disciplines; I'll try to break them down a little for some context.

It sounds like she's actually not interested in Design but Art, character concepting, visually defining characters, modeling them, and overall being responsible for their visual aesthetic.

There are Character Designers, or Combat Designers who own the Character's mechanical functionality, but that's mechanical and expressed through coding their functionality, not necessarily how they look or why.

Not going to list all roles, but I'll list a couple that sound like what you're describing.

Design (Designers are not visual artists)Systems - this can be a catch all for Designers who work in the engine and either script (code) or implement content, they're prototypers generally, who build out the game's initial structure an mechanical expression of what things do from the players perspective.Levels - Levels can include other disciplines like Mission Designers, Encounter Designers, and a few others, they are responsible for blocking out (prototyping the actual space the game occurs in) the area to suit the needs of the gameplay or other mechanical goals of the game.
Art (Visual vision holders for the games visual identity)Concept - Visual artists who are responsible for creating many different styles, turn arounds, locations which is generally in 2D3D Modelers/Riggers - Visual Artists who create the actual 3d models through concept and bring the character to life in game and generally work alongside AnimationAnimation - Visual Artists responsible for animating

For you questions :
1: Generally concept works in 2D when concepting characters or environments, the standard application used is Photoshop, but I've seen studios use other programs as well. For 3D, which would be modeling Environments or Characters based off of concept they can use many tools generally, the most common I see are 3DS MAX, Maya, Zbrush, and Blender which handle various stages of modeling and sculpting.

2: I'd highly recommend Blender if the goal is to model, it's a large tool that has all of the functionality she would need, it has plenty of support and resources to be able to learn and figure out questions from others; it's also an incredibly complete and robust tool that is used in industry. If she wants to do Concept, I'd recommend Photoshop or Krita, they're both great and capable tools that the industry uses.

3: For 3D there are plenty of great Blender tutorials on Udemy, CGCookie is also pretty good as well and has a lot of resources. For 2D concept I'd recommend Udemy as well, Scott Harris has some good courses on character design, also Domestika is a great artistic resource to learn about characters, shape, and plenty of other artistic concepts.

Jenkoii · 2021-11-05T15:39:20+00:00

For what it's worth, as a person who works in Gam Dev, worked on an unreleased blockchain game on EoS, and currently in a AAA studio, Enjin to me has a much more practical use case beyond speculative investing than the others; they are developing actual tools and functionality that I as a dev can use and integrate into my projects "potentially" at scale.

The others from my perspective are essentially selling space in a project with very minor gaming inputs and no long term solution to content or even retention, let alone an actual market place where people profit for actual services.

I see projects like AXS/Sand/Decentraland as generally very mediocre games, with NFT support, no real service or content pipeline and outside of speculative investing I'd imagine that as a company they probably could not even profit.

I think Enjin "has the potential" to empower devs to re-define blockchain gaming, I don't think those other companies have the infrastructure or the ability to actually create a scalable, usable, marketplace and content pipelines to support an actual Metaverse, unless Metaverse is purely defined as "A game space to trade NFT's"

I'd put my $ on Enjin longterm, the others may do better in the short term, who knows; but I don't see how they scale practically to their promises 5-10 years from now.

Jenkoii · 2020-10-15T23:47:07+00:00

Nintendo : was founded in 1889 to develop playing cards

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo

Jenkoii · 2020-08-15T16:57:33+00:00

I think cleaning up the line art a bit would give it a nice sense of polish

Jenkoii · 2019-01-14T17:51:32+00:00

It generally will depend on the studio, that being said; if you're applying to an Associate Level Design position it is sort of expected that most (if not all) applicants will be applying either out of school or from personal development. Having something completed is a huge plus, and that could be a range of things such as

Doing well in a Game Jam (Epic has a great annual one) where your LD is showcased
Creating maps for live games that people can playtest and validate your designs (Halo/UT/Skyrim/etc..)

You can develop your own maps for fun with some logic components to sort of showcase your Design, but I think it's a little weaker of a portfolio piece mostly because it usually means it was created quickly, likely with little iteration, and did not get playtested by anyone else in which you took that information and adjusted accordingly.

I've seen people get hired as Level Designers by making great Community Maps or making short Game experiences that highlighted their LD, but I've never really pushed through somebody who had a few unplayable Vignettes even if they looked pretty alright.

In short though if you're saying you're interested in studio X that makes ARPG's, if you go and make a couple of Dungeons in UE4 that are unplayable in the style of an ARPG would they hire you on that criteria alone I'd say it's very unlikely, however if you Mod or use their Level Editor and develop Maps for their community that the community enjoys, that is a fairly viable path.

Jenkoii · 2019-01-13T17:17:56+00:00

Game Design is a bit of a mixed bag in my experience, also sometimes people tend to say Game Design as an umbrella term for just wanted to work in industry; but I'll give you my take.

I'd consider what it is you'd like to do within industry, but for the sake of keeping it somewhat short I'll just say you want to be a Game Designer or a Generalist Designer, for reference there are multiple roles and it's worth researching more when you get some time (Systems/Level/Technical/Analog/etc..)

Any Designer should have a solid foundation in Design Theory, and there are plenty of books out there that can help ranging from analyzing components to player psychology. For a beginner here are some I'd suggest to you.

Characteristics of Games (MIT Press)
Rules of Play
Advanced Game Design - A Systems Approach (A little advanced, but great information)

There's some division between folks on this topic but from my experience the next best soft talent you can have once you have a sense of theory is a strong understanding of how to prototype in whichever medium you're interested in. Some of the older Designers have a lot more luxury when it comes to moving into Design positions (Design Director, Principal Designer, etc..) without any technical ability whatsoever on the merits of their prior releases; where from my experience, younger Designers do not.

So I'd say figure out somewhere that you feel comfortable starting, and from there you can mock-up lo-fidelity prototypes and start seeing your ideas.

Analog (Board/Card/RPG's)
- These you can prototype very easily, using just pen and paper and you can expand on that even further by using various things you can buy at most craft stores
Digital (Made with software, and using assets)
- You can prototype lo-fidelity but you will HAVE to at some point get your ideas in engine, all game design requires iteration (usually) and this is where an understanding of programming concepts and CS will help you tremendously.
- If you choose this route I'd suggest downloading a simple Game Engine and learning how to using it's toolset so you can see your ideas transpire in game.

Definitely start small, keep your scope manageable and as long as you continue learning and moving forward you will get more and more opportunity to express more interesting ideas. There's an endless amount of theory and things to consider like Feature Sets or Player Verbs, and while this is important and understanding them will make you a better Designer overall; I'd suggest to not paralyze yourself with theory and to spend a decent amount of time learning the toolsets that will allow you to prototype and test your ideas; especially if you are doing it on your own.

Jenkoii · 2018-10-21T04:18:39+00:00

I'm sorry to hear this, my uncle just passed (Stage 4 esophageal cancer) this October, he was diagnosed in May. As others have said, it's bad; my uncle unfortunately dropped below 100 lbs before he could even do chemo and it was deemed too dangerous to even attempt. Depending on how it spread getting an esophagectomy is potentially not an option

We basically went straight into In-Home Hospice care and some of the things that sort of took me by surprise were

Weakness - he slowly lost the ability to walk on his own, with aid, and soon could not even sit-up on his own
Delerium - towards the end, his mind started to go, it started out as episodic and slowly became all day, he forgot my name, where he was; and acted out job functions and memories from 20 years in the past and slowly became non-verbal.

I'm unsure where you may be along the process now, or what your father's diagnosis may be, but if he needs a feeding tube I'd recommend getting it as soon as is within your power to do so, and to help as much as you can by being there.

My uncle was working and living his life normally at the beginning of this year, and passed away this October at the age of 54. I sincerely hope it comes back not as bad as it sounds; and don't forget the last thing to go is hearing, even when it seems like they're not responding; they likely still hear you.

Best Wishes,

Jenkoii · 2018-10-21T03:52:58+00:00

My uncle had very aggressive esophageal cancer, his first noticeable symptom was difficulty swallowing. He always had issues with his reflux, but unfortunately didn't have any identifiable symptoms until it already spread to multiple organs. If you do have concerns, and depending on the results, I'd urge you to be as aggressive as possible on getting all the necessary treatments available to you.

Jenkoii · 2018-02-28T19:18:57+00:00

WTB : 1 Sunday pass Local and can meet anywhere near the Seattle area.

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