Writing
Essays & talks
Game design, free-to-play monetization, live services, leadership and hiring. (I abbreviate “free to play” as “f2p,” as is common in the industry.)
- 2022Learning About Film After Giving Up FilmmakingI occasionally see posts on Reddit and elsewhere asking where to go to learn more about filmmaking, sometimes from people who spent time in film school but didn’t enjoy it.
- 2022Undertale’s Punishing “Genocide” Run Is What We DeserveMedium (opens in a new tab)First, I love Undertale. It’s probably one of my favorite game experiences ever. (Major spoilers ahead.)
- 2021Doom Eternal Is Great And Terrible And It’s Driving Me Nuts (or: Interesting Decisions Are What Make Doom(s) Fun)Medium (opens in a new tab)I just finished playing Doom Eternal and my impression is that it’s roughly a “I have no idea how to feel about this” out of ten.
- 2021Hiring for Indie Games: It’s Harder Than You ThinkMedium (opens in a new tab)Ever wonder what it’s like to hire for a position in the game industry?
- 2021How I Learned to Stop Complaining and Love the Arch-VileWhen I first played through Doom 2 fully as a teenager, the Arch-Vile terrified me, inducing total panic whenever one appeared.
- 2020Why Low Pay In the Games Industry Leads to Bad GamesI originally wrote this as a Twitter thread in response to the #GameDevPaidMe hashtag.
- 2019On Leadership and Promotion In the Game IndustryI wrote a series of tweets about leadership and promotion in the game industry that went somewhat viral (at least by game developer standards).
- 2018LD41 Postmortem Part 2: Monster StewAs I said in Part 1, Ludum Dare 41 was my first game jam, and I was determined to produce a complete game.
- 2018LD41 Postmortem Part 1: The Games I Didn’t MakeLudum Dare 41 was my first game jam, and I was determined to produce a complete concept.
- 201810 Live Service Game Tech Mistakes And How To Avoid ThemBuilding your first live service game?
- 2018On Hiring, Learning, And TechnologyAt GDC 2018, I had an unfortunate conversation at one of the exhibitor booths with a CEO/founder.
- 2018Clash Royale Is Like PokerClash Royale is one of the most popular games in the world.
- 2018Monetization Design: The BasicsMonetization can seem foreign to designers who are new to it, and I’ve actually seen designers throw up their hands and declare “Well, I don’t play f2p games and I don’t understand why people would spend money on them anyway, so I’ll just add a bunch of monetization features that I’ve seen in other games!”
- 2018The Economics of Microtransactions: Consumer Surplus And WhalesIn order to understand why so many players are willing to spend money on microtransactions in games, one must understand a key economic concept: Consumer surplus.
Talks and interviews
- An interview with the podcast Everyone’s Talking At Once (September 2022)