My daughter (age 6) is aware that her daddy makes video games, though with somewhat abstract notions of what that actually entails. She has often asked if we could make a game together, which led me to research various child-friendly gamedev tools. On a whim I picked up Game Builder Garage, a game-making toolkit released for the Switch in 2021. I hadn’t heard much about it since its release, but generally trusted Nintendo’s ability to appeal to young children.

I had every expectation that this experiment would fail. My kid enjoys playing games, but making games can be slow and tedious. Nintendo’s website says the game is designed for children “as young as first year elementary students”, which is slightly beyond her. She is still in the early stages of learning to read, so we always played together; she held the controller and I narrated the lessons.

Game Builder Garage uses a visual programming language based on placing and connecting “nodons”. There are various types of nodons for inputs, calculations, outputs, and object spawners. Each nodon is also given a little personality, with a unique cartoon avatar, audio FX, and quirky dialogue in the interactive tutorials. This is a great help in making abstract gamedev concepts more memorable.

The tutorials are well designed, slowly easing the player into new concepts and frequently switching back to “game view” to let the player test out their iterative changes. They’re tightly constrained experiences: the player can only do the “right thing” in every step and the lesson doesn’t advance until they do. The exception is the final step, where the player is given a limited opportunity for customization (selecting colours, adjusting music, etc.)

This format worked perfectly for my daughter. Each step was simple for her to follow and it was impossible to get the lesson into a bad state. If any part required math concepts that were beyond her (multiplication, negative numbers, cartesian coordinates), she could still advance the lesson by heedlessly following the simple instructions for nodon placement. It gave her confidence and pride to create full games with minimal parental assistance.

The seven interactive lessons covered multiple game genres in increasing complexity: a simple 2D platformer, a top-down ball roller, a side-scrolling shooter, a 3D puzzle room, a racing game, and culminating in a complex 3D platformer. It all felt like a vastly improved version of my own serendipitous childhood discovery of game making, attempting crude versions of every genre in the StarCraft campaign editor or on a TI-83+ graphing calculator.

This last weekend my daughter proudly finished the final interactive lesson, and I was curious if the appeal of Game Builder Garage would hold up when presented with a blank canvas. I was delighted to watch her confidently assemble new games from scratch, though so far mostly platformers and hewing closely to the concepts and structures taught in the lessons. Her biggest difficulty has been debugging when things aren’t right, but thankfully I’m able to assist with that.

It’s been fun to see gamedev concepts influence her thinking in small ways. Watching me play a PC game, she asked: is this game also made with nodons? She was very impressed when I told her that, basically, it was! She also, unprompted, made the following comparison (quoting a text message):

In the car [daughter] was asking about the airbags in the car. She asked how the car knows to pop them out. I said the force of the crash. She goes “oh so it’s like a touch nodon is in the front of the car that sends a signal to the airbag pop nodon”.

I’ve been evangelizing Game Builder Garage to all the other parents I know. It’s truly a terrific way to introduce programming and gamedev concepts to young children. My kid had a blast with it, and I’m grateful to get to share game making with her as a creative medium and hobby.

Every few months on Twitter, there’s some dustup about work-life balance and whether it’s a good or bad idea to work hard when you’re young. Like most of these recurring debates, it has generated two opposite archetypes:

The anti-capitalist tells the young worker not to trust HR and not to buy into the idea of work as family. Your employment contract is the only thing that binds you to your job, and that can be terminated on either side. Arrive at 9, leave at 5. Prioritize the family.

The hustlebro tells you to wake up at 7am and get to work, and give it your all. Hustle, and earn as much as you can, build those connections. You can get work-life balance when you’re older, your early 20s are the time for making that cheddar and staying up till 1am.

In the short form, it’s hard to take a stance and not get grouped into either extreme. It’s also hard not to feel baited by someone who’s engagement-farming their social media presence by using time-tested bait questions.

This last time I responded something like:

work really hard and take everything very seriously

But I deleted it. A truism as an answer will lead people to all kinds of unintended conclusions about me and whatever I’m saying. I’ll need to use more words.

Wisdom is acquired by experience

I think the honest answer is that most people can’t gain perspective and moderation and maturity by reading someone’s advice online. The wise 35-year old dads on Twitter can follow their own advice about work-life boundaries because they’ve suffered the consequences. There’s no shortcut to perspective: you have to acquire it by experiencing bad things and suffering consequences.

Energy begets energy

I attribute a lot of my career path to my working really hard and caring a lot about things. I quickly internalized the lesson that a 9-5 job wouldn’t teach me enough, and wouldn’t give me all the intellectual stimulation or rigor that I wanted – so I worked longer hours, worked on side projects, hunted down my interests like a puppy chasing a squirrel.

The thing is, when you find a good thing to focus on, a thing to pour energy into, it can be positive-sum. It can give you energy in the rest of your life, give you a sense of purpose. The human body is not like a battery with a finite amount of energy. There are lots of things you can do, like exercise, learning, and practice, that can be rewarding and increase your ability. This is obvious, right?

If you have that thing that drives you, and that thing isn’t work and can never be work, then sure – get the lightest-duty job you can. Pour time into that thing. Maybe what you do at work is your main output, or part of your output, or just what you do for money.

Most jobs don’t give you time to learn

Many jobs, especially in technology, don’t have real, intentional, educational components. There is no time set-aside for learning, no time to practice, and no dedicated instructor.

It’s unlikely that what you learned in college fully prepared you for the job. It’s possible that you’ll have a wonderful mentor with lots of time to spare, but probably not.

I’ve worked with people who are smart enough to learn everything on the job, from 9-5. I’m not one of them. For me, to really understand something, I need to build it two or three times, write about it, use it incorrectly, and learn the consequences. Working hard meant playing around, having fun, but essentially playing with a lot of things that were not directly part of what I was paid to do at that time. This, honestly, worked out extremely well and some of those things led to jobs and opportunities that I never would have had otherwise. Writing this blog is one of those things.

Working hard on boring repetitive stuff is bad

Probably the biggest caveat to this whole post is that working hard in my experience was never working double-shifts or “hustling” for money or having multiple jobs. There are a million kinds of work that you simply don’t learn anything from, after a point. Thankfully, technology work is usually accretive, as are other sorts of knowledge-work.

Maybe you don’t want to do this, but I did

Maybe you don’t want to follow that path. That’s fine: not everyone is compelled by learning or intellectual rabbit-holes or exists in an industry where it’s pretty easy to self-educate. Or wants to “max out” their career. And it’s dangerous to generalize from a single experience. And it’s also dangerous to judge “a career” based on external appearances, which don’t tell you whether the person turned out to be happy, or rich. I haven’t maxed out either of those things, but I have few career regrets: I’ve always cared most about building useful things and learning and I think I’ve nearly maxed out those categories.

This is the answer to that question, of what advice could I have for someone in their early 20s. Well, that’s what I did – I worked pretty hard and was pretty unrestrained in pursuing interests. It worked out fine. Now that I’m older, my priorities have shifted slightly and I spend a little more time on other things, and am slowly becoming more balanced. But balance isn’t how I got here. Balance isn’t how a lot of the people I admire got to where they are now.

I’m all for moderation, but sometimes it seems
Moderation itself can be a kind of extreme - Andrew Bird

When your priorities shift, you’ll know

In the end, most people gain responsibilities. You’ll have a baby or a family member to take care of, or a thriving social life that demands more of your time. Your priorities will snap into place and you’ll realize that you care about new things. This is great. This will probably happen. But before you have those new responsibilities, you don’t have those new responsibilities. You have time to try and build a ‘rocket ship’ startup or chase down silly projects or learn a new instrument or run a thousand miles a year. Do that stuff. You don’t have to prematurely act like you’re older.

So, heed the warnings of those 30-somethings about burnout and workplace boundaries. And don’t work 24/7 on busywork for a startup if you’re not learning anything.

You can burn out by going too fast, or your flame can dim because you don’t let yourself spend silly amounts of time on silly projects to satisfy your intellectual curiosity. Beware of both outcomes: cultivate your enthusiasm for the things you want to hang onto.

It isn’t a revolutionary idea that people who are excellent in their fields often get there by trying really hard. If you can figure out the difference between busy-work that only benefits your employer, and the kind of work that makes you as a person feel like you’re making progress and becoming more skilled, then you’re ready to learn.

Wanted to share a bit of news about what I’ve been up to since shipping The Last of Us Part I remake in 2022. I’ve had the privilege to continue in the role of game director on The Last of Us Part II Remastered. I helped oversee porting the game to the PlayStation 5, including various technical enhancements and DualSense controller integration. We also added a whole slate of new features: lost levels with developer commentary, a guitar free play mode, new bonus skins, audio descriptions for cinematics, and much more.

The one that is closest to my heart is the new roguelike mode: No Return. I was the lead systems designer on the original The Last of Us Part II (PS4), so I was well-versed in our extremely robust enemy AI, terrific combat spaces, and a deep roster of weapon, melee, crafting, stealth and upgrade systems. In pitching this mode, I knew that we could remix these elements (and some fun new ones, more on that later) into thousands of dynamic combinations.

Why make a roguelike? We certainly took broad inspiration from the amazing games that have revitalized the genre in the modern era; some of my personal favourites include Spelunky, Hades, Dead Cells, Vampires Survivors, FTL, Cult of the Lamb, Prey: Mooncrash, The Path of Champions, and Inscryption. The sheer variety of these games proves that the fundamental roguelike concepts can be flexibly adapted to serve many genres, and to resonate with different design goals.

The particular design goals of No Return have been on my mind for a long time as a combat designer; in fact, I’ve written about them before on this very blog. In “Thwarting Boring Tactics”, I shared how Deathloop stymied my bad immersive sim habits by removing my ability to save scum. The permadeath aspect of a roguelike forces players to push through and improvise when plans go awry, emerging from the situation with either a memorable defeat or a hard fought comeback. The escalating stakes as you move deeper into a run create a thrilling tension.

Another major design goal was improvisational play (see “Intentionality & Improvisation”), which is a type of gameplay loop that asks the player to constantly make new plans on the fly. A roguelike structure supports this playstyle through randomized items and encounters.

Each character in No Return begins with a unique loadout, but the guns, recipes, and upgrades you acquire during a run are randomized. Because of this, players can’t always rely on their favourite standby items and tactics, and may instead be forced to equip a gun or crafting item that they neglected in the main story. The weapon may be unfamiliar or unwieldy at first, and lead to some spectacular failures; with luck, it eventually expands the player’s toolkit with a new option.

A similar dynamic is found on the randomized encounter side. The player may know one of the WLF combat encounters by heart, but the strategies become totally different with infected enemies in that space. They know how to fight the Rat King with Abby’s arsenal, but what about Ellie’s kit? We also have some small variations in certain layouts; the player may have to scramble when they find their go-to escape route closed off.

This philosophy also led to the addition of “mods”, which are random rule variants found on certain encounters. Because No Return is not canon, we had the freedom to experiment while eschewing the series’s usual groundedness. Some mods were designed to shake up the player’s playstyle, either reinforcing certain tactics (e.g. melee sets enemies on fire) or limiting them (e.g. long guns locked). Other mods create exciting new situations for the player to figure out: foes dropping pipe bombs on death, infected pustule clouds raining from the sky, or even (my favourite) invisible enemies.

As you can probably already tell, No Return was a real passion project for me, and I’m thrilled to have had the opportunity to marry the excitement of a roguelike structure with the incredible combat mechanics of The Last of Us. I’m looking forward to seeing the reaction to the many new features in The Last of Us Part II Remastered when the game releases worldwide on January 19th, 2024.

never-obsolete:

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Since he was a toddler, artist C.W. Moss has made the artwork for his family's Christmas card. Here are some early installments from when he was three & seven:

Some from when Moss was 17 and 29:

And the most recent one from age 36 (you can watch how he draws it):

It's fascinating to see his artistic sense grow and shift over the years, not only increasing in artistic skill as he gets older but also moving from simple depictions of holiday scenes to more conceptual creations.