Felicia Day @feliciaday I guess my Dragon Age web series is now gone with the Machinima video purge grab the DVDs while you can not sure it will ever be online again. RIP Machinima.
Patrick Weekes @patrickweekes As I appear to have accidentally caused concern and speculation:
1) Not specific to game I’m on now. 2) I am not writing a catgirl in Dragon Age. 3) Yes, it was Catra, whose actor is great and also does Stevonnie on Steven Universe. 4) I AM NOT WRITING A CATGIRL IN DRAGON AGE.
David Gaider @davidgaider So does this mean your coy testing of the waters is a success or a failure?
Kenna Rylen @kennarylen Um... @patrickweekes what is this? 😻😆
Patrick Weekes @patrickweekes Imagine if I could use this social media power to get people to buy my books instead of just troll me. Heck, they can do both!
Games: Mass Effect Trilogy, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, Dragon Age Inquisition, Jade Empire, Mass Effect Andromeda, SWTOR, Anthem, Mass Effect Legendary Edition, Dragon Age The Veilguard Prime Posts: 3,912 Prime Likes: 9733 Posts: 2,894 Likes: 12,961
Mass Effect Trilogy, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, Dragon Age Inquisition, Jade Empire, Mass Effect Andromeda, SWTOR, Anthem, Mass Effect Legendary Edition, Dragon Age The Veilguard
^ ''Machinima has deleted its entire YouTube library.
Machinima, one of YouTube’s oldest surviving multi-channel networks, has taken down more than a decade’s worth of video content from its YouTube channel in the wake of its sale to Fullscreen Media.''
relevance: ''Actress and writer Felicia Day said the Dragon Age: Redemption series she’d written, produced, and performed in are among those lost in the mass deletion.
“I guess my Dragon Age web series is now gone with the Machinima video purge,” she tweeted. “Grab the DVDs while you can, not sure it will ever be online again. RIP”''
Edit: my bad hrungr, i didnt see that you had posted the tweet from felicia up the page already
Riah @tezariah does Solas actually know how to shapeshift or is that forbidden knowledge?
Patrick Weekes @patrickweekes Yes. Whether he could do so pre-power-up (ie, could’ve done so in DAI if we had had gameplay to support that) is up for debate.
“The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.”
Cori Nicole @genevrael In preparation for editing #TheDreadWolfRises, I have now picked up five different versions of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah for my playlists.
Emily (aka Domino) Taylor pentapod Finally we know what those five dark orbs on the #DreadWolfRises tapestry REALLY symbolize! 😄
Riah @tezariah does Solas actually know how to shapeshift or is that forbidden knowledge?
Patrick Weekes @patrickweekes Yes. Whether he could do so pre-power-up (ie, could’ve done so in DAI if we had had gameplay to support that) is up for debate.
Riah @tezariah Quick related question, if it's not too bothersome. Gonna go out on an assumption and say due to his nickname he often shapeshifted into a wolf. Now, does he shapeshift into a "regular" wolf or the six eyed wolf he's often depicted as? and do the six eyes the wolf he's depicted with/as have anything to do with his name meaning pride?
Patrick Weekes @patrickweekes And here we have reached...
Cori Nicole @genevrael In preparation for editing #TheDreadWolfRises, I have now picked up five different versions of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah for my playlists.
Yours_Truly @ytcshepard But wouldn’t it be funnier if after being exposed to red lyrium he switched to the rhythms of the Beastie Boys’ “Fight for Your Right”?
Cori Nicole @genevrael If we get to make our musical DLC, I will definitely present this idea.
aries @proletariatitty Okay guys let’s discuss: what’s the worst date you’ve ever been on?
Gita Jackson, it’s me your giant golden wife @xoxogossipgita Not a date, but throughout an entire relationship my bf would make references to South Park jokes which I did not get because I don’t watch it, and then explain the joke to me. After the umpteenth non-reaction he said “do you want me to stop explaining South Park jokes to you.”
Patrick Weekes @patrickweekes Then he left at the end of DAI with all the best mage gear.
Eric Anderson @ericander94 He could’ve at least mailed it back or something...
Patrick Weekes @patrickweekes “Inquisitor, we’ve received a package of top-tier mage equipment. It’s addressed to ‘Vhenan’, first name, ‘Moo’.”
Serena @rhizunis @patrickweekes Inquiring minds want to know!
Patrick Weekes @patrickweekes I am shocked and insulted.
TEA?!?!?!
(More seriously, I go through the same feelings the player goes through at some point. Because development is long, there is ALSO time for what @biomarykirby calls my “Skeletor Cackle” when I get punchy.)
Okay, I just reread that, and it sounds sociopathic. For clarity, what I mean is: when a character dies for YOU, it’s a gut punch. But we had to work on the thing for years. We had to revise it, deal with clunky first-pass writing and animation glitches that killed the mood.
So that familiarity eventually causes us to turn to gallows humor. We don’t usually START there, though.
Mary Kirby @biomarykirby If it doesn't make us tear up or fill us with outrage when we first write it, we rework it 'till it does. And Patrick really does have an enviable supervillain cackle.
Imperator Furiåsa @devilkitten You may ask “why on earth are you playing Dragon Age Origins when Anthem’s being demo:ed” and all I can say is #TheDreadWolfRises
Imperator Furiåsa @devilkitten Come work with me at BioWare. I promise a challenging and rewarding job with lots of fun people. www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/1049181929
Imperator Furiåsa @devilkitten So here are the biggest challenges I’ve run into in different contexts and in different projects/companies as a UX designer.
1. No buy in from the team - UX design is a very new discipline within games, and it’s something that game designers used to do at least part of. Usually the rest of it - the menus - were handled by graphic artists. This means that in a team that’s never had a UX designer, it might be hard to see what they can do for the game. In a situation like that, it’s easy to end up working at cross purposes. Usually the best thing to do is sit down with the designers and talk through the feature.
2. Localization - yes. This is a real thing. Translating a game is pure hell unless you plan the UIs carefully. Usually you end up in situations where German and Russian has to scroll or you end up sending half the texts back for retranslation. English happen to be a short and succinct language. The worst situation I’ve been in was translating a text based game with 60 character limits to Finnish. I love Finland (I’ve even lived there for a while), but man those words...! The best thing to do is to build in contingencies such as scrolling text, but also be very clear with character limits.
3. Multiplayer features and getting data from backends that have to communicate with servers and then clients. This can seriously affect the frame rate of a game and cause real problems, not just for the UI but for all the gameplay features as well. Ping pong calls to the server from the client and back? Not a good idea. This is actually out of the design area, this is all on the backend.
4. Massive textures and 3D UIs. Everyone loves 3D UIs. Everyone loves pretty textures. One of the reasons why UIs can take a long time to load is because they’re memory intense. It takes a long time to stream them in. It takes a lot of memory to have everything loaded.
Figure out which UIs “deserve” the extra bling and cut back on the rest. Or make sure that the bling-y stuff doesn’t have to be loaded all the time.
5. Last minute feature changes. This really has to do a lot with the team buy in. A good user experience can’t really be smooshed in at the last minute. If you want to build good UX and good UI it has to be given the time and consideration of any feature in the game. I usually say “you get the UIs you deserve”, and sometimes those UIs are not the best.
Basically, give it time, thought and resources, and please don’t use it as a last minute fix for a system that’s too complicated. Which brings me to:
6. Using UI as a band aid. If you build a system you can’t explain in a simple way to your game dev colleagues, don’t expect UX/ UI to solve the problem.
I’ve been in situations where the designer couldn’t explain what the system was without an excel sheet and an hour long meeting, and even then it was hard to understand.
In those instances, either put everything on the page and ask people to look at it or play it, or talk to the designer about their intent.
7. Getting data. I mentioned it earlier but this is really the hardest thing we have to deal with. Every piece of information in a UI has to come from somewhere. Usually this is the hardest part. Asking for it early helps. Having the engineers involved in the design helps. I once printed a banner and pasted it on the wall. Any time a dev came to me and asked for a feature I’d point to the banner. It read “we need more data”.
There are a million challenges in game dev and UX for games, but these are the top ones.
I forgot a very important one!
8. Christmas tree HUD syndrome. The first instinct of some designers is to put _everything_ on the HUD. Cool effects, lots and lots of numbers and text, animations and other attention drawing movement. This is a mistake.
Put only what you need when you need it on screen. People do _not_ pay attention. All the data I’ve ever seen from UXR point to the player’s focus being at the center of the screen at all times.
If you overload the screen with information, the play won’t see anything
I have a perfect example of HUD overload in a game I did a while back. Everything went on the HUD and as a result, the important information was lost in the massive cognitive load of reading the screen.
We cut about 2/3rds of the information and ended up with a good experience.
grab the DVDs while you can not sure it will ever be online again. RIP Machinima.
