Who the Hell are you?
Yo
Hey there, I’m Josh, and I am the one who rambles. Everything you find on this website is my own work, from the questionable opinions, to the questionable writing ability, to the questionable CSS (excluding of course, the stuff that comes built into Squarepsace templates. Yay Squarespace!).
I’m a pretty typical gamer-for-life-turned-gamedev type of guy. Growing up, making games was the only profession I ever saw for myself, and so here I am. I did one of those 2 year private college courses everyone says are a waste of money, and as it turns out, they basically are.
But luckily, I’m awesome, and I convinced other people I’m awesome, and that lead into an internship with a local company, SHG Studios! While there, I made mobile games using Adobe Air (which some would correctly say was… ill advised). This ended up leading into a full time position as a Unity Developer programming in C#. However as a true indie, I of course also wore several hats, with my choice of secondary headware being Game Design and QA. In my 2.5 years at SHG, the main projects I worked on include Zombie Moon, Badlands: Max Carnage, and Star Pirates: Infinity (in addition to multiple projects which were unfinished, or are no longer available). The longer I spent with the company, the more I tended to focus on design, and on UI/UX.
Following my time at SHG Studios, I moved on to work at Ubisoft Toronto as a UI Development Tester, where I have worked on an unannounced project for the last 1.5 years and counting. My role here is to be a master of the game’s UI. I should know very well what the game’s UI design is, how that interacts with the rest of the game, and any ways in which that differs from what is in the game today. Day in and day out, it is my job to ensure that the game stays at a high quality level, and that the UI team is empowered to develop as efficiently as possible, and deliver the best possible product.
What The Hell is this place?
This is my personal website! You can think of this as something of a repository of thinkpieces and research related to the games I play. I try to have a takeaway from every game that I play, and while I don’t write about all of them, the ones that I do, will go here. I suppose you could call what you find here to be critical analysis. I don’t want to just talk about what is in the game, I want to try and figure out why it is the way that it is.
I find that, to play a game, and to critically think about the experience you’ve hard, are two very different things. While we all do the prior, it is the latter that leads us to really understand and elevate the medium. Writing about my thoughts and findings is a good exercise in trying to dig deeper than the surface-level analysis that, really anyone can do.
Beyond even the analysis though, writing forces me to try and then communicate my findings, which is a good exercise in itself. It’s one thing to simply ponder about this or that, and another to put your thoughts forward. Even just the act of writing can force us to think that much harder about what we are saying, and making our message more concise and understandable is a good way of evaluating what parts of an idea are actually important.
And so here we have this place. It’s a record of what I’ve done, a resource I can point to, an excuse to step up my game, and with any luck, a jumpoff point for us all to learn and discuss together.
So like… What games do you like?
Well, hopefully that’s somewhat self-evident by the kind of games I write about! Though it’s also true that, I try to write about the games I think I can learn from, moreso than the games that I most enjoy.
For a long time growing up, I played almost exclusively JRPGs, and so that’s a genre I’ll always have a special connection with. Around the PS3 era I was forced to diversify a lot though, and since then I’ve increasingly found myself willing to play just about anything. In general I tend to gravitate towards games that are mechanically interesting, with high levels of polish.
I find that a lot of my favourite games tend to fall on the 2 extremes of a spectrum of sorts. Many of my favourites involve a lot of planning, and executing a high-level plan over the course of the entire game. These games tend to have a very low requirement for manual skill required to play them.
On the other end, many of my favourite games occupy this space of games that are a bit simpler mechanically, but that one can truly master. I don’t really like games that are an infinite skill grind, or that are competitive in nature, but I greatly enjoy taking the feeling of a gameplay experience that is fluid and exhilarating, and then mastering the mechanics to elevate it that much more.
Now I realize that’s all a bit vague, so here’s a random sampling of some “favourite games” that immediately come to mind:
Final Fantasy Tactics
Ogre Battle 64
Super Metroid
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
Bloodborne
Shadow of the Colossus
Okami
World of Warcraft
Celeste
The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
Fire Emblem
Rayman Legends
Mega Man X4
Dragon Quest VIII
Persona 5
Super Smash Bros. Melee