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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I was trying to look more into game dev crunch at Nintendo and the most recent articles I could find were about Mario 64, Ocarina of Time, Majora’s Mask (all for the Nintendo 64) and Metroid Prime (for the GameCube). From what I can tell all of their recent games have been delayed instead of forcing crunch.

    That being said the difference in work culture means they probably still have longer hours but they aren’t giving their developers actual PTSD like EA and Activision. It is really sad that the bar for AAA game devs is not having devs hospitalized from overworking. Hopefully more game dev and software dev companies can meaningfully unionize to combat that.




  • Calling odyssey Mario 64 v2 is like calling Doom Eternal Doom 1993 v3. There are a LOT of changes they’ve made to 3D Mario games mechanically that makes Odyssey a much better platformer than even Galaxy and Sunshine, let alone Mario 64. Yeah, if you look at the story it’s still a Mario game. But if you’re playing a platformer for the story then you’re fundamentally not the audience for a Mario game (or really a good portion of 2D/3D platformers)

    I personally despise Nintendo as a company for all of their legal nonsense but I will admit that besides the way Game Freak ruined Pokemon, most of their first party titles are pretty good games.

    From what I can tell they are also one of the only large game publishers that shows any amount of care for their game devs. Ignoring the fake Miyamoto quote about rushed games, they’ve also said in interviews that they want developers to have work-life balances and that they would rather delay games instead of having crunches. The only examples of crunch I could find were (ironically enough) Mario 64, Ocarina of Time, and the original Metroid Prime. (If there are more recent ones my opinion of them would probably be the opposite though)







  • I have a Steam deck, here’s the answers to my knowledge:

    1. Yes, you can connect a keyboard and mouse, and even in SteamOS they let you access KDE in a separate “Desktop mode”

    2. Not sure about multiple monitors but you can connect at least one. There are docks made for it to do just that (the USB C cable has display port support I think)

    3. It runs a 4 core/8 thread AMD laptop chip so assuming you get a mouse/keyboard it should work pretty well.

    4. It has a 5W mode in the power settings in SteamOS so I’m assuming around that much at idle.

    5. You can put other distros on it, it’s completely unlocked. You could even put Windows on it if you wanted. I’m not sure how easy the install process is though since I’ve just left SteamOS on mine.




  • Annapurna was a publisher team, not a dev team (that published a lot of indie teams’ games). I’m not entirely sure how this affects the devs though since I’m in general software development and not game development.

    When Warner Bros shut down Adult Swim’s game publishing team a few months ago, they did at least give publishing rights back to the original devs so something similar might end up happening here.

    That being said it’s also possible that all of the games Annapurna published get put in licensing limbo and the original devs get screwed over by this if the Annapurna parent company doesn’t want to give up their publishing rights.