#workjob

because, look, your favorite movie star or blorbo from your hit netflix show is busy modeling gucci sunglasses or something. your studio can't afford them. maybe once in a while they strike gold, like jason isaacs in bg3 or all the heavy hitters in skyrim, but you can't count on it. but that actress who played a space pirate on a canceled syfy series? that intriguing character actor whose highest-profile credit is an ER episode? that guy who does nothing but villains in cheap action flicks and indie horror, but has a spark of talent that somehow always transcends the bad material?

Had a HoH/Deaf person come through today. I assume she as HOH/Deaf because she never responded when i’d talk, but only when I gestured. So i thought ‘Okay, no problem, I’m not great, but I know some ASL.’

I signed to her “Do You Sign?”

I was NOT ready for her to shake her head ‘no’, Maybe she just understood what i was trying to ask? I have no idea.

Then she had questions about the cost of her items but again didn’t seem to know sign. She just pointed at an item and waved her hand around so I assumed she was wondering the cost. I figured she wouldn’t know sign numbers/costs aside from the basics, so i just used basic. Let’s say one of her items was $3.51, I used my hand to sign 3 5 1. Luckily she seemed to understand that and we continued on.

Unfortunately, our machine was also having issues, so that was a bit of a hurdle to jump through too.

I gestured with my hands the motion of reinserting the chip in her card into the machine, which she did. When that failed (because our machine sucks) I lightly waved my hand up and down through the plexiglass and gestured her to swipe her card instead. Which she understood. YAY!

We made it through the transaction alright, albeit I was a little thrown for a loop when I realized I couldn’t rely on the ASL i knew to communicate with her. Her receipt came out and she checked to make sure everything looked right and gave me a thumbs up and waved goodbye. :) Idk if she had recently lost her hearing and didn’t know much sign or if she was just a deaf person that didn’t grow up learning sign. Which kinda reminded me of The Hammer with the deaf lead.

Anyway, I think what helped me a lot in this transaction was the first basic thing I learned in ASL class. I had to remember that the person I was serving couldn’t communicate audibly, so I had to rely on using my body to show her what I needed her to do. Even if you don’t know the right signs, there are multiple ways to express what you need to communicate. Just be creative, and make an effort to respect your customers by putting forth an effort to communicate. Most deaf and non-English speakers will appreciate that.

man. thank you! i didn't come up with the idea of their existence or anything. i just wrote most of the stories (emerald stair's was kate dollarhyde, iirc) and helped the art team with briefs for how the illustrations should look. goodname, the art studio we worked with, does amazing stuff. they were inspired by sergio toppi's work, if you like the ancient memory/end slide art style and want more of it.

hey! thanks for writing in!

it brings me no pleasure to say this, but if your friend has never had a gamedev job before, i'd tell him not to apply to that IOI opening. spare himself the heartache and save the effort for getting experience elsewhere. believe me, i used to hear the kind of advice i'm relaying now, and it made me furious. i hoped i'd never have to be the one giving it.

it may help to have context. any big-deal studio who posts a narrative job is going to get a minimum of several hundred applicants. if they have a reputation for being good at narrative, it could be as high as a thousand. larian (the bg3 people) probably did numbers like that with their recent opening. they tend to ask for three to five years of relevant gamedev experience, unless it's for a senior job. then it could be seven or more. wherever your friend applies, he'll be competing with hungry aspirants like him, veterans whose game got canceled, veterans who want a change of pace, devs who already live in that country and don't need a work visa, devs who are friends with the team because they worked together eight years ago, and, unfortunately, the way the industry's been these days, people who worked on Mega Unicorn All The Awards and got laid off. gross.

should studios take more chances on promising juniors? yeah, they should, but they often don't, and the reasons can be more complicated than "we're evil for the sake of it." sometimes they ask for a lot of experience because a project has hit the skids, so they need someone who can run in and put out fires with no training. sometimes they would love to promote someone internally, but some corporate who-knows-what is preventing them from doing it. (standard disclaimer that i'm not subtweeting anything. these are stories i've heard tons of times from many different devs.) the court intrigue matters, but it doesn't feel like it on the other side, where a rejection is a rejection and no job is no job. it's a shame.

i'm not saying any of that because i want your friend to give up. i'm saying it because i want him to succeed eventually. if he's really starting from nothing, punching in IOI's weight class could take a while, so i encourage him to dig in and get comfortable. he could start by looking into a narrative mentorship or groups that run workshops. i did a pixelles portfolio workshop, and it was great. it couldn't hurt to learn some tools. twine is the standard rec, though i've heard unreal looks great on a resume because many studios use it and writers who can wrestle with it are rare. but in the end, even if your friend snags a rec on the inside, it'll hinge on that portfolio. that means projects, projects, and more projects, and smaller gigs until something clicks.

i applied to obsidian in 2021, so i can't promise any of my portfolio advice is still relevant. the goalposts move from year to year and studio to studio. samples that are crucial for call of duty would be irrelevant to a dating sim. this is why i'm pointing your friend toward workshops and mentorship: they stay up-to-date on this stuff and can give more tailored help. in the meantime, a good friend of mine made a video about how to make a game writing portfolio if he'd like to check it out.

i believe it was carrie patel who made the decision to write that for kai. we knew brandon could pull it off admirably. i'll pass your message along!

i don't want to speak for anyone or stomp on any NDAs, but i don't think the perception that obsidian hates romance is true. for all i know, it was true at some point, but i've picked people's brains about it, and i've heard a whole spectrum of thoughts beyond "ew girl cooties lmao." some aren't opposed to it, but have no desire to do it themselves. some are interested in trying, but nervous about their inexperience. others think the whole narrative team should be bought in to writing romanceable characters to make it worth the effort. we even have a handful of advocates who love writing it and think we should rise to the challenge in a bioware-and-BG3 world. frankly, it comes down far less to "does obsidian dig romance" and far more to the dull math of production costs. do we have the time and resources? that sort of thing.

hey, that's not very nice! i have a soft spot for marius, but i also spent three years hearing his writer talk about him. YMMV.

so, first things first: marius shipped with a really bad bug where a lot of his early-game conversations weren't firing. people remarked that he was weirdly closed-off until the last few regions, and it's because he had all these interactions the game straight up wasn't giving them. his writer has been working with other designers to figure out how to fix it, but i'm not sure whether that fix has gone in yet. in the meantime, you can always write to the comms team and inquire about it. i promise humans read those messages.

from a writing standpoint, i won't spoil anything, but marius has a good reason to be the way he is. there's something in his backstory that makes him treat his own survival, and the survival of his charges, with such extreme seriousness. it's also why he's so anxious and awkward in social situations: he's running from something, and his mind won't even let him remember what.