The art is gorgeous! Looking forward to the next chapter!

This made me laugh hard enough to fart.

Yes! I was never hardware savvy enough for that, and I was so poor for so long that I was terminally afraid of breaking something or getting scammed. But if you have no other options, that _is_ the way, and I applaud those who had the courage to jump right in to that.

Piracy is good, actually. 🏴‍☠️

I sound like a dinosaur when I talk about how important it is for games to be fun or engaging on their own merit. Ah well.

If I'm gonna be a dino, I wanna be a dilophosaurus. They look pretty cool.

Of course, the bar for what a game "is" seems kinda low.

I'm not a huge fan of calling dark patterns and microtransactions "game design."

Digimon and Club Penguin made games more accessible for kids, but from my experience the big equalizer that made games accessible for everyone was Facebook.

Mobile then helped even more.

Now, games are ubiquitous. People can't imagine limited access to games.

Yes, exactly. Even when I entered PC game development in '97, it was clear to me how elitist video games were. Even with consoles, you had to have so much disposable income.

I had 3 years in dev as a designer before I could afford a used PS. (Designers got paid jack.)

When I started learning about production and project management, I learned that most of the problems that created crunch were already solved problems. Teams and companies just weren't applying them.

For a while it looked like things were getting better.
But here we are, back in the stupid ages.

One of the primary reasons I left game design and went into production was to prevent crunch from happening.

You don't get a better product with crunch. You don't see higher productivity. You just see butts in seats, as though that's a metric worth keeping.

An important follow up I also learned:

Try to be the person who _will_ be there for others when they need help.

No one cares? Sure. Care anyway.
No one will help? I get it. Do what you can anyway.

Try to be the person who does care. Some days you'll fail, but trying's better than not trying.

I’m more of a 5-2-4-1-3-5 guy, myself. To each their own!

Remember to enjog your meal!

Beans are great!

Also, this is the kind of meal menu that would make Pythagoras lose what little cool he had.

Yes! Double yes for tooting your own horn on this!

And here I thought "playing the skins" would be offensive to skeletons!