Nels Anderson
@nelsanderson
Founded Sonderlust, helped design Firewatch, lead designer on Mark of the Ninja, and the only Canadian game developer born & raised in Wyoming.
When the intake nurse looked at my file and said this would be my 69th time donating blood, the amount of restraint it took to not immediately reply with "Nice" was without parallel. My entire form was vibrating at the effort.
Nowhere near as fancy, but I crocheted this guy a little while back:
And that dynamic music, plus every other sound effect in the game, was crafted by Cole (bsky.app/profile/rawp...) of Power Up Audio. Every crunch, every swift, every little click is pitch perfect- literally and proverbially.
The legend Ben Prunty himself (bsky.app/profile/benp...) composed the game's soundtrack and it is *incredible.* Over an hour and a half of music and in particular, the way the multi-layered tracks seamless shift when switching between biomes in-game is gold. benprunty.bandcamp.com/album/genera...
Curtis joined us near the game's last mile with a mountain of crucial engineering support and without which, the game would have run at like 12 fps and never been able to save which, ya'know, ain't exactly great qualities for a video game to have.
Karla (bsky.app/profile/coal...) did so much of just... everything, grabbing lines untethered and pulling it all back to the centre as much as possible. No knot of Gordian unserved, much to the tremendous benefit of the game's final form!
Marri's (bsky.app/profile/marr...) writing brought so much personality and life to the game, and was essentially in helping draw out so many of the key themes we wanted to highlight in the game.
Niamh is without question the kindest person I have ever had the honour of working alongside. Her leadership and organisation truly saved us on more occasions that I can count and under circumstances that certainly no one ever be asked to rise to. Genuinely, one of the finest humans I have ever met.
Ginda was originally supposed to just be animating the people, but she refused to be confined to such narrow a station and also designed the game's entire UI, implemented tons of it and picked a thousand other things that simply Had To Get Done. A titan without peer.
Tarik (also smart enough not to use these bad websites) crafted every *human* 3D thing in the game and the task of assembling an entire multi-generation starship's worth of human face pieces that could be slotted together in nearly limitless combinations is an *unhinged* task and yet, he crushed it.
Steve (smart enough to not use social media) was the other primary code slinger on Generation Exile and without his ever-present positivity and dynamism we would have had a much poorer game and been a way less joyous team.
Matt (bsky.app/profile/matt...) not only led programming on the game and built so, so many systems but his fondness and fluency with city-builders and management games was invaluable in getting the game's rather... unconventional design into an actually coherent form.
Pier-Olivier (bsky.app/profile/pode...) spent more time on this project than anyone aside from myself and literally every single non-human 3D thing you see in the game was crafted by his own hands. The game is gorgeous and it's P-O that made it that way.
And the most precious in the whole archive? An autographed @trudicastle.bsky.social original, of course!
Hahaha, I grabbed almost the exact same shot yesterday to yell about in work Slack. It totally just makes everything blown out and flat, it looks like shit!
This is "free" in the same way that someone giving you chlamydia is "free"
It is absolutely wild that Firewatch came out a decade ago today. I don't think any of us then could even get close to fathoming the ways it which it would resonate with people. I'm still unspeakably grateful to anyone who spent time in this (lightly fictional) corner of the place I grew up.
And if there was any doubt that calling these people to the mat does indeed work, local billionaire and CryptKeeper cosplayer Jimmy Pattison and his company just pulled out of a pending deal to sell one of their warehouses in Virginia to ICE (who were going to, ya'know, turn it into a prison)
If you're in Vancouver and think it's morally repugnant for a Canadian company to be signing contracts to support ICE "public relations," come join at 111 East 5th Ave at 3pm *today* to let @hootsuite.com know this is indefensibly vile.
Sometimes you just stop and have a think about the fact you can say the words, "I just got an email from Mayonnaise" and you're describing factual reality
We launched GenExile, our solarpunk city-builder, in Early Access last week. We had ~35k wishlists before launch (not a barnburner but not nothin'). And they said, "Well, there's no way you'll convert literally 0% of your wishlists to sales." I looked them dead in the eyes and said, "Watch me."
