Rahul - Digital Marketing

Hi, dear!

Just to note, I’m only a beginner in creating websites at the moment since I’m still studying, but I have listed a few of my favourite resources that have helped me so far throughout both web design and the actual development.

My area of interest is mostly coding, so I’m afraid I don’t have that many reliable resources for the design aspect.

As far as I’m aware, at the time of writing, all these resources are online and free (though some may require you to register an account).

Web Development

HTML & CSS

HTML and CSS are coding languages which help to create very basic websites and style them. They’re also really easy to learn as a beginner.

Codecademy

Codebar

Interneting Is Hard

JavaScript

JavaScript is a programming language that can be used to help make websites more interactive for users.

You can learn a little bit more about it here.

Codecademy

Khan Academy

W3Schools

Codebar

PHP

PHP is a server-side scripting language which is made specifically for web development.

You can learn a little bit more about it here.

Codecademy

When you’re testing PHP, you will need a server. I prefer to use USB Web Server for its simplicity, but I’m sure there are many more if you search for them.

Web Design

Smashing Magazine

My go-to for all things web design and development-related. I highly recommend it. There are some fantastic articles there that will help guide you and keep you up-to-date with current design standards.

Usability

Explains a lot of the theory behind design decisions. A good foundation for learning more about web design and how this affects your website.

There are many amazing resources out there if you do a quick Google search. The ones that I have listed above are ones that I have used a lot and have genuinely helped me. If you have any specific questions, please do let me know I’ll try my best to answer.

they don’t outright say it’s to push out Black farmowners but what I’m talking about is a web of rural development policies which do a few things including:

give incentives to new farmers (the incentives grants are given freely to white farmers and routinely deny Black farmers)

advertise rural life/farming but in a way that targets white people in particular (small town chambers of commerce were all over Instagram with white women/babies/families/etc. in wheat fields since it started)

continue the displacement of Black farmers, particularly landowning Black farmers 

these together form a system that entices and privileges white people to ‘work the land.’

it also goes without saying that these rural cities, often sundown towns, really really do not want Black and Indigenous people, or any people of color, Jews, LGBTQ people, etc., to move to their towns so they set up these systems with the coordination of the federal government.

Multiple sources say the some of the studio’s most troubling dynamics originated from one person: co-founder Kevin Bruner.

Bruner worked primarily as a programmer prior to Telltale, including during his stint at LucasArts. But he wore many hats during his time at Telltale: first as the company’s CTO and later as a director and CEO. According to numerous current and former employees, Bruner’s behavior became significantly more abrasive and inflexible after the success of The Walking Dead. Thanks to his background in programming, he had been a strong force in creating game development tools for Telltale. As the studio’s popularity exploded, some employees felt he wanted to step into the role of a design auteur, which sources say made him resistant to give the spotlight to other employees at the company.

“That’s when things got really bad,” says a former employee. “I think a lot of the insecurity came from The Walking Dead.” The game’s success had significantly raised the profiles of Rodkin and Vanaman and earned them widespread praise. “I think that that really irked [Bruner] a lot,” says the source. “He felt that… he deserved that. It was his project, or it was his company. He should have gotten all that love.”

Some say Bruner’s behavior led Rodkin and Vanaman to ultimately leave after the wildly successful first season of The Walking Dead. “They were tired of fighting with [Bruner],” says a source with direct knowledge. They jumped into indie development and founded their own studio called Campo Santo, where they released the award-winning game Firewatch. One source points to Campo Santo’s success, along with Night School Studios and its supernatural thriller Oxenfree — co-created by former Telltale veteran Adam Hines — as a catalyst for Bruner’s tightening grip.

“He was hesitant to give anyone much credit for having significant creative vision,” one source says. “He thought they would leave and become a competitor because he had a couple of strong examples of people doing exactly that.” If Bruner’s behavior was aimed at quashing future competitors, however, it only wound up driving more people out the door. Those who stayed as project leads often felt that they were no longer trusted to do their jobs, and were shuffled to the side in favor of giving Bruner the limelight. “There was a dark period of time where if you were in charge of a project, you are not getting any interviews,” one source says. “He’s going to be the one on the panel. He’s going to be the one doing the interviews. He’s going to be the one in the magazine.”

Former employees and sources with direct knowledge of Telltale’s inner workings consistently describe Bruner as a creative bottleneck who micromanaged every part of the development process, from pitch to final product — even going so far as to personally rewrite tutorial text. “He wanted to be consulted on everything from the color of the walls to who they’ve hired to write specific dialogue,” a former employee says.

Bruner took over as CEO of Telltale in 2015 from Connors, who former employees described as a far less imposing figure. Numerous employees describe Bruner as cultivating a culture of fear, and a running joke at the company compared Bruner’s attention to the Eye of Sauron, the fiery gaze of the villain in The Lord of the Rings. “Inevitably, the Eye of Sauron looks at you, and that beam of light just blows everything up and makes it a hellscape where you don’t believe in a thing you’re building anymore,” says a former employee. “A lot of times at Telltale, you don’t feel like you’re wanted there.”

Executive review meetings with higher-ups like Bruner became infamous within the company as brutal, hours-long arguments where Bruner would belittle and question the choices of those involved with the studio’s projects, according to half a dozen sources. “When [Bruner] saw something he decided he didn’t like — which very often was exactly what he had asked for — [that] was really undeserved, and often really difficult for teams to deal with,” the source says.

But multiple sources told The Verge that they often felt like they weren’t making the best games possible, but rather the ones that Bruner personally preferred. “It often felt like we were building games specifically for him,” says one source with direct knowledge of the process. “We were tailoring the type of content we were building — not just gameplay mechanics, but tone, the types of characters we chose to use — to his taste. This was one of the biggest issues with him as a CEO: he was pretty convinced that his taste was everyone’s taste.”

Bruner’s time at Telltale came to a close in March 2017, when employees spotted him leaving the Telltale offices with his backpack. He’d left most of his things in his office; shortly after, the company got an email from him announcing that he had stepped down as CEO, and Connors would once again resume the position. Though rumors of Bruner’s departure had circulated widely, many were shocked when it came to pass. Others were more surprised by the quiet way Bruner had chosen to leave.

”My guess is that he saw writing on the wall,” says a source with direct knowledge of the company. “We needed to break out of the Telltale formula, do something different, surprise and delight people, multiple years ago. It’s reflected in [online] comments in articles about us. It’s reflected in our review scores. It’s reflected in our sales. It’s reflected in our game scores. Everyone [could] see that, not just people who work for Telltale.”

And there we have it. Four years later, I finally have a name and a face to attach to cataclysmic shift from original TWDG to the worst sequel ever made: Kevin Bruner. He stepped into the role of CEO, he bullied, belittled, and demeaned the hard-working artists, programmers and coders of the company, he forced his idiotic and often changing personal whims on already over-worked development teams, he ruined literally everything Telltale Games ever built. But he’s not all bad. From the same article there’s also this: “One of the most recognizable mechanics in Telltale games, where players are told that a character ‘will remember that,’ was his idea.” Well Mr. Bruner, you took a company hot off its heels from a massive sleeper-hit that won over 80 GOTY awards, codified a new sub-genre of games, and was famous for literally moving jaded YouTubers to tears, and destroyed it and everything it ever built, and only in six years time, the last year and a half of which you couldn’t even be bothered to stick around for, all because you wanted to be the center of attention.