Kelly Bender’s Post

When a company offers not one, but THREE narrative roles, it’s amazing. Or it’s a scam. Imagine my confusion when, halfway through applying for a writing job at Luminary, I saw that Luminary doesn't have a website. Or an office. Or staff. And yet, this “company” had posted 20 (!) job openings and claimed to have amassed $500K in funding. I dug deeper and realized that there are no jobs. There is no funding. Even Luminary’s name and logo were stolen from an Australian company! Thanks to Kelly Bender for reacting quickly and alerting his community. Please share for awareness! UPDATE: Luminary has now changed its name to Gray Wolves. It's still the same "company". Fake job openings are still up under Luminary's name.

I am overwhelmed by the number of people who have reached out to me regarding production, but certainly very thankful! If you're one of those people, please be patient as I go through each message individually. I don't believe in copying and pasting replies, and I want to make sure I give each of you the time you deserve. Regardless of what happens here, there's a bright future ahead for MicroRaptor Games! We're just getting started with building something MEANINGFUL and ETHICAL. This is not your average shovelware company owned by room temperature IQ businessmen who don't even play games. If you're a passionate individual who loves games and wants what's best for the industry and gamers, I want you to reach out! We won't weaponize your passion and overwork you. In fact, it'll be in our contracts that we DO NOT allow crunch and overwork. Instead, we'll enable your passion and work as a team, with a flat hierarchy, to help each other grow into the best developers possible. If it sounds too good to be true, it isn't. We're not the only dev teams doing this, and I am confident we won't be the last. It just requires people who have strong values and actually live by them. That's us, plain and simple.

Enjoy playing online games and learning at the same time? Are you a person that learns on the job insterad of from books? I came across this innovative method from Trust and safety tycoon to better understand how to run a #trustandsafety team. You have to run a social media platform and make various decisions that will impact your business. I have had no time to play it yet so let me know what you think. https://lnkd.in/gknVfVEf

How do you go about hiring a game development team, if you have no experience with #gamedev? I've seen MANY companies over the years, be scammed - sometimes out of *millions* of dollars, because they hired a development team that promised things that they weren't equipped to deliver. And it's not just game developers - on one project years ago, before I'd joined the team, they hired a team of "experienced Hollywood writers" to write the script for the game. The work they turned in nine months later was a failure in so many different ways, it's almost hard to know where to begin. The writing was awful, juvenile crap. It wasn't suitable for the targeted rating of the game. It was full of racism, homophobia, and otherwise wildly inappropriate content. But it was also completely unsuitable for a game where the player-character *is the player* and doesn't have a prescribed personality. We had to scramble to rewrite as much as we could in the six months we had left. I ended up redoing three characters *from scratch* in that time, writing *all* their dialogue while ALSO implementing the script into game logic. It was bananas, and if we didn't have a team of dedicated, excellent developers fixing the problems, that game would never have shipped. But other projects? I've seen "devs for hire" claim experience they simply don't have. They'd say one thing that was technically true-ish, but where the text implied something that was explicitly untrue. And it sucks to see companies invest their valuable time and resources into a team that's essentially scamming them. But how do you keep that from happening, when you're trying to hire for a discipline you *don't understand*? I think the best way to think of it is "How do you buy a house?" Sure, there are some folks who will buy a place with no inspection and no contingencies, and hope for the best. Some get lucky, some get very, very screwed. But most people who have a finite amount of money and care about risk get inspections. And they have contingencies. So if you're looking to hire a dev studio, you have to find someone with knowledge to vet that team. I don't know of anyone who provides that service. But on a project a while back, I had questions about the dev team - the project wasn't working, and the claims they were making were raising the rest of the team's suspicions. So I did a deep dive just into their website and their LinkedIn profiles. At first blush, things looked okayish. A sort of B-grade team with experience. As I looked closer, though, cracks started to appear. Yes, they worked on that game & have a credit on it, but as part of the IT staff. And yet that person is the "Creative Director" here. Is that fatal? No - not by any means. But as I went further, it turned out everyone's titles and experience were ... illusions. And once I realized this, it became clear what the right questions to ask were, and the whole house of cards came falling down... (cont in comments)

Relying on player reports for handling misconduct highlights a gap in proactive game management. It's an inadequate strategy, leaving the underlying problem unaddressed. Players are ill-equipped, with tools, both software and empathetic, to deal with it. We don't just burden players with enforcement, detracting from their experience, but it shows a design shortfall in autonomously dealing with disruptive behaviors. Automated systems such as VALATS would make a significant move towards using technology, you know, that awesome tool we as developers and designers have at our disposal, to improve the gaming environment. A system like this can more effectively spot misconduct through data analysis than manual reports, tackling the issue at its core. That was my short contract tenure with Blizzard. Use machine learning to detect bots and bad behaviours. Good automation frees players from policing duties, letting them enjoy the game as intended. This approach is essential for community management. It should be a de rigueur part of game development and design, and game industry business strategy. Any game that ensures a fair and engaging experience retains players, sustains interest, and thrives both in the market and in its community.

If there's one piece of advice I'd offer someone starting a new game company... or... starting in a production/leadership job at a new game company it's this... Play your game. If there is no game to play, get something together and start playing it - the quicker the better. With the whole company. Regularly - at least every week... and the dev team should be doing it at least every day. Build your company around the game and the game experience. Put the game at the center of gravity... not meetings, not documents, not schedules. Move the action to where the audience will be. Force yourself to make and eat your food every day - no matter how bad it tastes. This is hard because there are 1000 things that prevent this. We don't know what we're making. We need to choose our engine. Our tools aren't built yet. We need to hire x, y, z person. We should work on the vision. Yes. Sure. Those are all true. But these reasons are also varying forms of procrastination, fear, self-doubt and uncertainty. You have to break through those things. Your first company playtest can be a base Unreal map with a few stock characters running around. If you're bold add a jump puzzle or some obstacle. Throw in a few skills or download a couple of plugins and see how they work. With the engines and samples out there ANYONE can put something together quickly and start playing it. What is important is to form the habit early and build on it. Get people used to playing as the center of what matters. Get your hands dirty. Make stuff. Play stuff. Then make it better. And don't ever stop. I guarantee you your game will be better for it.

VALORANT Anti-Thrower System (VALATS) "fan design work" project, part 10. Previous post: https://lnkd.in/g6Cvd2Qw Riot Games owns VALORANT, and VALORANT is a registered trademark of Riot Games. I am not sanctioned or endorsed by Riot Games in any way. This is my own design work. This is a business social media platform, we are here to talk about business, and in this series, the player customer experience. If you ignore issues with player experience, you neglect the core of game design as well as business. If sabotage is not treated as the game-breaking condition it is, the game breaks. And, sabotage is one half of the account-farming cottage industry rotting the player base. This final series post can't ignore the obvious: all the data is available, all the conditions are known; implement solutions with these tools or lose the opportunity with each player customer. Legitimate players are at a severe disadvantage. The game's promise says the game is balanced and players play in good faith, but the saturation of this behavior breaks their trust. Players routinely experience: 1) Dread knowing there is a good chance of team mate throwers in next match 2) Toxicity from throwers, so they will buy a higher ranked account This series observed consistent conditions, and knowing the data exists, a systemic solution to the throwing problem is the opportunity simply not taken. It is not credible to see this as an unsolvable problem, an unknown problem, nor an insignificant problem. The top five thrower behaviors (a.k.a. sabotage) are: 1) Slow-walking or stopping from obvious action  . spike locations and enemy locations known, but not approached  . calls for team help ignored  . site edge reached or attack pushes obvious with long pause 2) Running into enemy fire  . entering multiple enemy angles repeatedly  . failing to fire when enemy in sight repeatedly  . pushing solo while damaged repeatedly 3) Not using agent utility to team advantage  . held, but bought, utility  . using utility on team mates (harm, blind, hold)  . throwing util without using advantages (shoot) 4) Announcing presence to enemy  . using util on walking push or lurk  . using util before site reachable  . running without making use of endpoint (plant, shoot) 5) Abandoning team pushes and retakes  . on attack, split off multiple rounds  . on defense, stack multiple rounds  . time in round versus time tending spike Have data, massage conditions, and with that, implement action that delivers results to benefit the player experience, instead of the cottage industry work day. Asking players to be the police, and manually report sabotage is wishful thinking at best, as a player has to understand the landscape as it is, with throwers on the job. There is also a lack of data in these reports to respond appropriately. This is just business. Addressing the thrower phenomena with a systemic solution like VALATS makes long-term business sense. #gamedesign #gamedev #riotgames #valorant

The idea of tipping Game Developers sounds great! ...in theory, but practically I can't imagine this would work in any way and only be a bad thing. Firstly, I'm too cynical in imagining the money made from tips would even make it to the developers themselves without being siphoned off at least in part by the company. Even if the developers themselves did actually get the tip, then I can't see help but imagine companies will see this as a way of outsourcing their bonuses. There's more to consider on this front, but I will say I'm entirely against this due to potential reprucussions. Thoughts?

The meta description. Why not use it to give people trust and peace of mind before they get to your website? Here are some tips for leveraging the meta description to give your customers confidence: Guarantees and Warranties Industry Awards and Recognition Certifications and Accreditations Security and Privacy Assurances Years of Experience Share your click-worthy meta descriptions!