Mark DeLoura

TONIGHT AT 6:30 PM join us for an improvised version of PVP Circuit and help us rebuild our local community brick by brick. I still can't believe I get to work in the video game industry. My 6-year-old would laugh, and then cry once she realized what it means to work in the creative technology sector. That's why IMO everyone could use some levity during these unprecedented times. Join us for a fun evening to raise funds for the Trevor Project. Event link >>> https://lnkd.in/g7tBuP6d Frequently Asked Questions: What if I can't attend the event? - If you can't make it, please consider purchasing a ticket to help us raise money for charity or get one on behalf of someone impacted by layoffs. What if I want to join but can't justify the cost? - If you want to join but find the cost prohibitive, DM me and we'll make it happen (see point above). Do I have to pitch at the event? - No, you don't have to pitch if you prefer to observe. It’s a great way to see how it's done. Will there be another event like this? - We plan to host our community again, but I can't specify if this event will be the focus. #gamesindustry #event #comedy <3

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Short sample from my Acting for Motion Capture class at UC. Working through some attacks, impacts, and deaths. We're leveling up! #performancedirector #mocap #videogame #gamedev #uc #ccmacting #videogamedirection

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So with the amount of layoffs in games, its created a large bed of variables to look at.. yeah I'm not a scientist but trying my best to sound smart. Recent lunch with some friends out of work in games, had an interesting convo. All 3 of them are artist and they all applied to the same position at a company. They had found out after they applied they all were in competition and luckily they were in friendly spirits about it. Anyways, two of them got interviews. In the initial talks with the recruiter/hiring manager they were given a salary range. Only two of them got that far in conversation. Of those two, the range was different even though they had similar experience. They compared the responses they got and it was really odd how they were different, same person but different attitude in the way they were replying to them. Also in the interviews, the duties and role was slightly different, like the one with the lower pay range was basically being given a heavier responsibility description. Same interviewer too so a bit odd perhaps how the convo changed per person. The 3rd person, they were being notified once a week or so about progress and to don't worry, we'll get in touch soon with more info. Well.. at the end, none of them got the job, or feedback of why. The 3rd person just got ghosted without an update or reply asking for an update. I feel for them, hence giving them a lunch to vent, its stressful as all heck to interview, not wanting to put all your hope into a job that could or could not happen. And then to see that there are differences and inconsistency on the whole process. Some might actually say the 3rd person had it the best since they never got their hopes set too high but at the same time the ego can take a hit on not being asked to talk. Thoughts, anyone currently interviewing/looking for a job have some experiences to share?

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Crossing neurons and streams: - https://lnkd.in/gxbe62rU Meta opening up their OS to OEM. My take -> next step of what Zuckerberg saw in 2014. Metaverse is still on and full steam, thanks the hype is dead now. - https://lnkd.in/d2-VfgKE Next step of 3D Gaussians Splats My take -> Mixed reality (Passthrough and See-through needs more enhancements to be something really useful to the general audience. Including fiction and simulations! The interactions between acquired-“real” and virtual needs less friction. Scan “reality” is a thought task, not just what we see, listen and feel, but also what we perceive as “reality” too; the sensation amalgama, the cognitive biases, the body restrictions. To augment you need a plausible base to depart from.

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🌟 New blog entry 🌟 Just published a new blog post on my blog discussing Edward Deming, the father of quality, and what game development project managers can learn from his principles. As a game development project manager myself, I believe his pillars are crucial for the success of any project, with a focus on user satisfaction among others. I hope you find it informative and insightful! Feel free to share your thoughts and comments. #GameDevelopment #ProjectManagement #Quality #UserSatisfaction https://shorturl.at/0a79o

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🎙️ New Podcast! This week on our podcast, we're joined by Emily Pierron from Nightmarket Games! We dive into some crucial topics that shape the world of game development: 🔹 The critical role of psychological safety within the studio 🔹 Mastering communication and fostering culture in remote work 🔹 The evolving responsibilities of game producers 🔹 A peek into the rebranding of Nightmarket Studios Make sure to listen to this episode as we unpack these exciting insights and more. You'll walk away with some game-changing takeaways to enhance your teams and projects. Check out the links below!

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https://lnkd.in/gjJak_7G Great stuff coming for PC Gamers in the Xbox PC app and Cloud! Cloud gaming support for mouse and keyboard brings input support to a bunch of cloud games. (Personally, M+K is my favorite way to play fps, so I'm very happy about this.) Hellblade II is coming to the PC app with special channel and Compact mode improvements for players on handhelds. Proud of the work of the design team on these features: Joe Wheeler, Yi-An Chien, Jimmy Hsu, Jazz Ang, Fernanda G., Anthony Giardini, Selina Huang, Katie Calaway and Kristine Golus. #xbox #gaming #pcgaming #design

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"Over 90% of power users say AI makes their overwhelming workload more manageable and their work more enjoyable" At it's best, AI is not a replacement for creative or engineering talent, but a tool to augment it - a way to skip over the boiler plate and tedious parts of the job. Human taste and expertise are still critical in creating solid output and products. While there are major ethical, privacy, and security concerns that need to be addressed, the productivity divide between those that leverage AI in their personal and professional lives is going to keep growing. Now's a great time to dip your toes in the water and see how AI can make managing work and life more streamlined and joyful. https://lnkd.in/gDvvux5j

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Navigating the complexities of porting to Apple Vision Pro? Unity's guide offers 6 essential tips to streamline the process, from leveraging Unity's AR Foundation to optimizing your app's performance on Vision Pro. Check out the full guide for expert insights and practical advice to ensure your app shines on Apple's latest platform - https://lnkd.in/dCcxYKem. #AR #VR #AppleVisionPro #Unity #realtime3D

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Very interesting article. When we say "A.I." it often means "statistical computing feature that outputs a prediction". A.I. represents the future and always will be, as it is a very anthropomorphic notion that evolves in time as we do. Spellcheck is for us a useful feature, while for Gutemberg it would have been called witchcraft. Somewhere in the middle it could have been called an AI proofreader. LLMs predict the next most probable word ("token") based on the distribution of the data it has used to "learn" (actually "set statistical weights"). (1) If we talk about "computing statistical feature" we'll say something like "the result is wrong". But as we talk about A.I. we say things such as "it hallucinates". As such we project beliefs that can feed themselves back. Now the fun part. It is exactly the kind of technique used by psychics. 👇 https://lnkd.in/eMACW4r6 (1) check this very cool demo 👇 https://moebio.com/mind/

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In the past few years there has been a lot of work done to increase representation and build more diverse game development teams, by increasing accountability and protection from discrimination on the workplace, and create opportunities for underserved minorities, but culture is a hard thing to change. We cam a long way, but we still have work to do. #DEI #Diversity #Equity #Inclusion https://lnkd.in/gqmky59x

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This podcast is chock full of design approaches and great marketing tips for self-published indies. Adam did his research and came prepared with super insightful questions. It was a really fun discussion! #indiedev #indiegames #gamedev #gamedevelopment

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I like sharing the good news about the video game industry (because I know many people have been burned by working through it). Although, as a whole, the industry is expected to continue growing year after year. What do you think this means? The concept of diversity becomes the inevitable truth. Growth encompasses variety and innovation, bringing a richer palette of stories and experiences. This transformation is driven by a new wave of creators who are not just making games but also crafting cultural bridges. A fantastic example is the upcoming game 'Rooster', which celebrates Asian heritage in a deeply authentic way. The team behind Rooster has a shared vision of representing this culture through fun and accessible gameplay experiences, which aligns beautifully with broader industry trends toward inclusivity and representation. It seems like they love what they do to boot! If there was a clear path to surviving the video game market while also enriching the social impact of gaming, IMO, it would be to get behind and champion these vital initiatives. #diversity #equity #inclusivity #asianheritage #rooster

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Now that Timbre is officially closed -- and my heart goes out to all those affected -- I think someone should ask WTF Sumo Digital Ltd was thinking in making this drastic cull. You have a team of about 100 folks who -- just based on the outpouring of support and collective love between them; I know nothing about the studio itself -- seem to have been a high-functioning group of developers who had worked together for up to 2 years (obviously some of them were newish, as the median time employed was about a year; I saw some layoff notices from people who'd been hired within the past 2-3 months, so this suggests the leadership team had no idea the closure was coming, unless they are just evil...). Anyone who has built a team understands the value of having folks across many different disciplines who work well together. There is significant value in this, and you don't just throw it away. I understand Sumo decided they needed to make 15% cuts to save costs, but then why not cut 15% uniformly (more or less) across all your studios and the parent org? If you are cutting 250 people worldwide across multiple studios (I count 14 studios: https://lnkd.in/gxmRTJcz), why then cut 100 of them in one place? 250 people across 14 studios is less than 20 people per studio (some of the Sumo studios have 100s of people). You could have cut 15 from Timbre and kept 85 employed. Could they not have sold the studio to another publisher? Or found a buyer from outside games? Both Relic and Phoenix were bought by non-game buyers (private equity in Relic's case, a blockchain company in Phoenix's case), so there's clearly money from outside the industry looking to invest and own a piece of the games business, even in super expensive Vancouver. This doesn't seem like just another "oh whoops we overhired during COVID" story. What, did you set up an entire new studio from scratch and hire 100 people between 2022 and 2024 by mistake? Tencent bought Sumo a while ago. Tencent has more money than anyone. Did Tencent not want this studio? They could have spun it out from Sumo. Microsoft? Ubisoft (they used to have a Vancouver studio...)? Anyone? Nobody out there wanted a team of 100 folks who knew how to work together and had built some amount (maybe a lot?) of a game together before they were unceremoniously shut down? No publisher wanted to pick up the game and continue to float the studio until it shipped? There's been a lot of love being generated from the demise and aftermath of this studio. But where's the rage?

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Is your organization ready for AI in the world of Customer Experience and Service? Is AI ready for prime time, or is it still a work in progress? I'm thrilled to host a webinar with Stephen Peacock, the Keywords Studios Head of Games AI, and Erik Ashby, Head of Product Research at Helpshift, to discuss the current state of AI and how to prepare and integrate AI into production. Check out the link below and register to learn more!

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Hi all. I want to share another magic item I've created for an upcoming D&D 5th edition supplemental item module that I'm working on. This item is called Viridis, which loosely means Green, and is inspired by Emerald Dragons. Since I'm not affiliated with Wizards of the Coast, I'll be removing any Forgotten Realms lore I desribed when it's included in my upcoming module—it's just for my current campaign haha. About the weapon, I wanted to make it a Halberd because 5th Edition D&D doesn't currently have any unique magic halberds ha. I've always been interested in some of the less used weapon types in D&D. D&D Beyond Link to the item: https://lnkd.in/eex9H2mP

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What people on LinkedIn don't seem to understand is that AI (LLMs, generative art, and others) is very limited in its usefulness in real world applications. I understand some of the confusion given that most AI companies out there are promising the world, and basic intuition suggests that if The World is possible, certainly something much smaller should be trivial. Unfortunately, if the world is possible, anything smaller is likely impossible. Fundamental to these AI systems is that they are inference machines. And we all know what happens when we assume. The strength of an inference is mainly governed by three things: 1. 👀 The context of the inference 2. 📖 The knowledge of the inferencer 3. 🧠 The reasoning ability of the inferencer The AI products generating the most buzz today are focused primarily on #2 - feeding more and more data into their models, with a smattering of #3 during the training process, and a fair helping of #1 in chat assistants. But with little to go on other than language, which is an exceptionally vague data point if you're not human (and even if you are), the results are guaranteed to be imprecise and untrustworthy. Unless of course you choose to harness the power of the sun to fuel your city-sized data center. But that still would not eliminate the problem. Far and away the most impressive and reliable applications of inference-based AI is in the advancement of sensing and computing solutions. They use an extremely limited set of inputs and have knowledge of only a very specific set of operations, and so they comparatively reason about very little. The results are often extremely impressive and fairly reliable, though they still cannot be trusted. Where certainty is necessary, I believe the only true path forward is leaning heavily on science and mathematics - the true heroes of our technological progress. Then trust computer scientists to allow us to use their advancements. Where they have not yet succeeded, AI can fill in the gaps with their pattern recognition. Stereolabs is one company that seems to have taken this to heart and I have a lot of respect for them for that, though it can get much more granular. CPUs with AI-powered decision making works on instruction-by-instruction inferences, and has been used to great effect. TLDR: when we need precision, AI has the most to give us when it does the least. Fund researchers, not OpenAI. Human researchers have an unlimited supply #1-3 and make it so other people, systems, and even AIs can have the smallest context, knowledge, and reasoning necessary to come out with a solution. Unfortunately, this bubble will burst. Out of its ashes I hope we can find a proper way forward. Obviously I have opinions on that 😅

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Amazing list of practical game design principles from Warren Spector, one of our industry's great. Appreciate how he frames some of the magic we feel playing his games. Can't wait to play his next one! Wonderful peek into Warren's design mind. His Deus Ex is stuff of legends. While I'll argue that there are operable definitions of fun (humbly suggest The 4 Keys to Fun ;) I agree wholeheartedly that a team needs more than a single word "make it Fun" to guide the design. In fact that's kind of the whole point. In our extensive player research players favorite games support multiples of their favorite play styles. From a Psychology perspective it's vital for an exceptional game to offer players new playstyles. The exploration of novelty, cause and effect relationships, and especially new kinds of strategy to get to a goal are vital to what human beings (and all mammals) call play. Definitely worth a read! Here's a list of company values for Warren's company Other Side also worth a look https://lnkd.in/gpq-qusR

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