IAmA Maxis development team on SimCity. AMAA!

maxis · 2 months

Hey now, the idea and design approval for SCS came directly from EA.

wwoodyb008 · 6 months

Another grave omission: Maurice LaMarche

mildmisanthrope · 6 months

(The first duty)

RockNRollahAyatollah · 7 months

Throw it in a pot, add some broth, a potato. Baby, you've got a stew going.

SineadNZ · 8 months

Laser sensors? Jesus christ, when I was a kid I think the race results were determined by some guy named Larry.

Sluhzer · 9 months

Technically speaking, it is kind of hard. I wish that article still had pictures.

vigile · 9 months

Commander Keen would like a word with you

trancelogix · 9 months

Is your husband Mike Birbiglia?

ethomp · 10 months

The Great Outdoor Fight is where I got sucked in. I still make a point to reread the entire thing every so often...it's on its way back though, if Onstad is to be believed.

ethomp · 10 months

Anders Loves Maria by Rene Engström. It's occasionally NSFW, but not pornographic, as it were.

edit: Sinfest is another great one with a long history. I would also recommend Goats and Jon Rosenberg's current comic [Scenes from a Multiverse].(http://amultiverse.com)

J4CKJ4W · 10 months

Their last album, Saturdays = Youth, was supposedly heavily 80s-influenced, maybe that's the direction M83 is maintaining.

The 2003 album Dead Cities, Red Seas and Lost Ghosts sounds much less 80s to me -- check out tracks like "Gone" and "America", they're a lot less poppy I think.

althius1 · 10 months

"This is not my beautiful wife..."

Narc_Cop33 · 11 months

Pretty good analogy.

To complicate it a bit, the decisions surrounding what goes into DLC (and what development is devoted to it) aren't always that simple.

Sometimes there are plans for specific DLC content right from preproduction -- but to continue your analogy, that's like the author saying "this doesn't fit within my main story, so I'll leave that for the sequel or the appendices." Sometimes DLC results from ideas that the development team doesn't have the time to flesh out during production, or are ideas that never quite fit well within the main release for gameplay or technical reasons.

In the case of DLC packs that are essentially self-contained asset packs like guns or skins or hats or songs or whatnot, it's still often the same development tradeoff -- do the artists/engineers/sound guys want to spend their time making 20 widgets at the expense of chapter 10 of the main plot arc? Or would they rather make 10 and table the rest for the downtime between the end of production and the shelf date?

It's very easy to be cynical and blame the suits looking to squeeze as much cash as possible out of ignorant consumers by shaving content off the disc and leaving it for a la carte purchases after release. A game has n months to be developed -- very few studios have the luxury of releasing a title "when it's ready" -- and therefore developers have to drop content that doesn't have a good time/benefit ratio.

Sure_Ill_Ask_That · 1 year

College helps but the most important things are your motivation and your relationships with the other developers. If you express a modicum of skill and a whole lot of drive, and people like to work with you, getting out of QA is an option. I know some great programmers who don't have a degree (or have one in a completely unrelated field) and at least one abysmal one with a Master of Science from MIT.

Ultimately, the best people I've worked with are the ones I get along with who aren't afraid to bust their ass occasionally.

Sure_Ill_Ask_That · 1 year

At the risk of being redundant, exactly the same can be applied to the first (bugfix) patch or two. The lead times are a little shorter if you're going download-only, but if you need to schedule time at the replicator at any point (or, god forbid, you're bundling with hardware), you might have three or four months between RC and your street date.

dazzlepuzzle · 1 year

Blessed are the cheesemakers

02072011 · 1 year

Someone asking "do you want me to chip in" is, in my experience, usually an invitation to hear "don't worry about it" and leave with a clear conscience. It's subtle, and probably not even conscious, but it's semantically and psychologically different from phrasing it "can I chip in" or "here, let me chip in." It puts the psychological burden on the person doing the favor, in a way.

belbo · 1 year

Sounds like you're doing a kind of Development Support role, which tends to be a hybrid of QA and assorted grunt dev work. The worst QA I've encountered personally is publisher QA, which is the stereotypical "big, dank open room full of people pulled off the street" kind of environment. Usually half the people are serious about careers in game development (at least at that point) and the rest think they're getting paid to play games all day.

hatata · 1 year

But that doesn't mean I don't love the people there(even though it feels like an unpopular opinion).

Personally, I think that's exactly the right opinion to have. Of anyone, everywhere.

Not to sound too glib, but governments and their policies aren't human beings; you can't conflate hatred for one with hatred for the other. That's how you get hateful government policies.

solilo · 1 year

Hell yes. Frengers is still my favorite of their albums.

13channelsofshit · 1 year

Not Springfield, MA?

Digital_Buzz · 1 year

Hubris is the downfall of all grape-stomping ladies!

themangeraaad · 1 year

Amazing. I promptly sent it to my dad and grandfather, who are likely to geek out over it even more than I did.

mildmisanthrope

TROPHY CASE

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