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Alexei Pepers

@apepers.bsky.social

440 followers 89 following 150 posts

Technical system designer, proc gen ranger/druid, Roguelike Celebration MC, kaiju groupie (she/her)

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Alexei Pepers @apepers.bsky.social · Jan 23

Speaking of Polaris - I’m giving a 60 minute lecture at GDC about system suspense, a topic from a previous year! I’ll be able to dig into some case studies that didn’t make the report - so if you’re into systemic games and designing for surprise, check it out 😊

schedule.gdconf.com/session/desi...

Designing for System Suspense | 2025 Schedule | Game Developers Conference (GDC)

Attend 750 sessions for game designers, programmers, artists, producers, audio, business, and marketing professionals over 5 days at GDC.

schedule.gdconf.com

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Alexei Pepers @apepers.bsky.social · 16h

Congrats!! Really hoping I find time to read your dissertation, this is great stuff. Sorry that Blaseball exploded while you were trying to research it 😅 it makes me happy to see that you pulled together so many great sources despite the industry nonsense.

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Jacob Garbe 💀 @logodaedalus.bsky.social · 22h

Nice! Looking forward to reading a deep dive on a tough design space many designers engage with.

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Alexei Pepers @apepers.bsky.social · 1d

Turns out that being a burned out game designer puts you in the perfect mindset to enjoy undergrad chem lab work! The TA asked me “is this better than making video games,” and my answer is that it might not be better but it’s the opposite type of activity in so many ways, which feels great for now!

Alexei Pepers @apepers.bsky.social · 1d

fellow undergrads doing titration: ugh this sucks, why do we have to do this, it’s so finicky and has so many steps I hate this

me: vibing as I follow precise well-defined steps until I get visible feedback when I did it right and am done

a purple cat wearing a red dress is standing on a pink background

Alt: a purple cat wearing a red dress is dancing on a pink background

media.tenor.com

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Nifflas @nifflas.bsky.social · 1d

Have you ever wanted to listen to the Monty Hall Problem, in procedural music form?

If the answer is "Yes", see my upcoming talk at Roguelike Celebration on October 26, www.roguelike.club

A screenshot from my adaptive music software. Various fields describe the monty hall problem, but a lot of the behavior is customizable, such as whether the host is evil, whether the host is required to open a door, or even offer the player to switch to another door.

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sincerely, rob dubbin @robdubbin.bsky.social · 1d

we're going to have to give him a second hugo for this post

jason grinblat @jfg.land · 1d

Imagine, you are buzzing after the last sip of your third Kim Crawford sauvignon blanc. You just met a lovely retiree whose daughter-in-law is going to phone you about the condo in Hallandale. You walk up to my tent, I smile at you. I have Golgotha loaded up in Classic.

Cold email from marketer:
"Good morning Jason, are you or Brian Bucklew the right person to speak with about influencer partnerships?

We recently signed on as the exclusive influencer partner for the South Beach Wine and Food Festival, activating creators across 35 of their events."

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jason grinblat @jfg.land · 3d

I've called the process of designing a system from an inspiration set "story interpolation" (middling term, admittedly). I love to use this slide from a talk Tarn gave at Northwestern's Progression Mechanics to illustrate the concept

A slide from Tarn Adam's talk at Northwestern's Progression Mechanics, giving a systemic diagram to the sentence "A flock of sparrows landed and ate most of the pill bugs, but one managed to survive to lay some eggs."

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Li0ness @li0ness.bsky.social · 4d

The salmon swim upstream! Inning 15 begins again. No runs are lost.

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Chris Berube @chrisberube.bsky.social · 4d

"Oh yeah? You like baseball? What if I make you smoke *an entire pack* of baseball?"

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Alexei Pepers @apepers.bsky.social · 4d

Of course when you compel me to tune in for a live baseball game, it’s for the Tigers

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Cat Manning @catacalypto.bsky.social · 7d

I think this is bang on, and gets at a sense of what I see in play with stuff from Dwarf Fortress and Qud to Rimworld to Crusader Kings and the Sims: a desire to understand the world, whether a familiar or an alien one, through play

lincoln carpenter @lincolnhello.bsky.social · 7d

"'The more we try to understand what's going on in the world around us—the more we don't just withdraw into a hermitude of my family and I as a nuclear unit, the more we try to understand our society—I think the more these kinds of games speak to us,' Short said."

Founder of Dwarf Fortress and Caves of Qud publisher Kitfox Games says its procgen sims for sickos are 'giving storytelling tools back to the people when games and passive media took them away'

Streets of Fortuna, Kitfox's own in-development "megasim," is chasing that same systems-driven storytelling.

pcgamer.com

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Alexei Pepers @apepers.bsky.social · 9d

Canadians aren’t immune to this. When my American spouse and I were figuring out immigration, I had so many friends on both sides of the border be baffled I was talking about immigration because surely once you’re married you can just show up. The simplest case was still complex and stressful.

BeijingPalmer @beijingpalmer.bsky.social · 9d

if you ask the average American to describe what they think a tougher immigration system should look like, they will describe something a degree of magnitude softer and more generous than the current reality.

The lesson here is that people are both better and dumber than they appear.

Alexei Pepers @apepers.bsky.social · 9d

Completed a task today that had been bugging me for no joke, at least 8 years. It took one google search and less than five minutes. That’s gotta be a new record.

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Ami - Tiny Retro Robot 💾 🏳️‍⚧️ @amithero.bot · 12d

Everyone SHUT THE FUCK UP Protomen dropped pre-orders for Act III theprotomen.bandcamp.com/album/act-ii...

Protomen Part 3 Album cover - This City Made us

a character stares into the city as in the distance a giant beam of light shoots from the mountains into the cloudy sky.

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Alexei Pepers @apepers.bsky.social · 17d

It did mean manually setting up the associations and what options to surface, but that was kinda nice since it let the end result be very cleanly labelled and suited to specific team asks. For the generic solution, these days I love doing as much as I can in Notion lol.

Alexei Pepers @apepers.bsky.social · 17d

Absolutely. One visualization is mine from a UE project where we’d export JSON from data tables and I had JavaScript to parse it all, associate entries (for the creature grab the tags for drops, from the drops find what matches tags), and then easy to put filters and various views into static HTML.

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Alexei Pepers @apepers.bsky.social · 18d

This was my first topic to bring to Polaris and I was so pleased with the results! A quick run through the framework is so helpful when you’re getting a bit lost in the weeds on communicating complicated systems. The cherry on top is the appendix sharing real examples from super talented folks 👀

Polaris Game Design @polarisgamedesign.com · 18d

Let's talk System Visualization! As designers, we often lean on visuals to help understand, communicate, or simply use a system. But which visuals???

This report (polarisgamedesign.com/2022/when-sp...) suggests we "PAUSE" and consider:

- Purpose
- Audience
- Usage
- Scope
- Emphasis

(Thread!)

When Spreadsheets Aren’t Enough: A Framework for Approaching System Visualization

Visualization techniques can help us design and maintain game rules and systems, communicate these internally (across the development team), and effectively convey them to external stakeholders (such ...

polarisgamedesign.com

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victoria rose @riningear.bsky.social · 20d

just learned the Baby Steps soundtrack is by an NYC-based hard techno artist who literally processed about 400 bird noises into ableton instruments, so that's neat

kilbourne2themax on Instagram:

for the last year I've been part of the audio team for Baby Steps with my good sis @maxi_boch and @jackschlesinger and now now it's out today on ps5 and steam it's the first game I've worked on, it's been a bananas learning process, anywho the reviews are really positive and I feel happy about it!

The soundtrack is super bird-centric, I processed ~400 unique bird species into ableton instruments which eventually made me start birding. Lmk if you end up playing it, and the music will be all the places you find music soon!

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$fractrans.bsky.social$

flattened beneath the layer cake @fractrans.bsky.social · 22d

Excited to announce that I will be speaking at Roguelike Celebration @roguelike.club this year!

www.roguelike.club/event2025.ht...