Ex-WoW (Vanilla/TBC/WotLK) & 38 Studios dev, now leading @UnleashedGames. Making Haven: WoW meets Valheim, AAA team, $0 budget. Mom of 3. Kyiv/LA to RI.
Rhode Island, USA
Joined February 2008
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Bonfire Studios’ Arkheron is coming soon and I couldn’t be more excited.
A little celebratory stream for Arkheron date announce day! November 27🔥
Go Team!!!
Twitch.tv/reilenaoc
Haven, as explained to my 9-year-old: you grow crops, cook a meal, fight a boss, pet the dog. They only heard 'pet the dog.' Honestly, same. Wishlist on Steam: store.steampowered.com/app/3…
Devastating news. This is the icing on the cake making 2026 one of the worst years of my life.
In lieu of flowers, memorial contributions may be made to:
Johns Hopkins Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center Fund
alzresearch.org/giving/
Alzheimer’s Foundation of America Caregiver Resources
alzfdn.org/donate/
Photo Credit: Tommy Garcia
As a founder and mom of three, my bar is simple: nobody should have to choose between shipping the game and seeing their kids. Burned-out teams don't make games people love.
'Morale has been terrible' at EA, workers claim pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/…
The honest middle: a tiny team using AI mostly in code, because that's the only way to build something Haven's size. The design came from people - experienced devs, before AI existed in our pipeline.
As EA kills Mass Effect 5, ex-BioWare lead says you can't "recreate great games" with AI gamesradar.com/games/as-ea-k…
Convenience is nice, but 'LF healer' is how strangers became groups. When everyone can be everything, nobody needs anybody. That's how MMOs drift solo.
Dual Spec in WoW Forever is already a welcome addition, but WoW Forever will continue to make it easier to change specs. We might get Triple Spec in the future!
✍️ icy-veins.com/wow-forever/ne…
#Warcraft #wowforever
The slow road through shared zones is where people met. Skip the journey and you skip the friends.
GTA 6 Won't Let You Speedrun the Main Story
insider-gaming.com/gta-6-won…
Hot take: tag friction is a feature. Fighting over a mob is how strangers end up in a party, and that party is how they end up in a guild. Make everything shared and soloable and nobody ever has to say hi.
Blizzard already said no to shared tagging. Players are still arguing about it.
Aggrend wrote on September 20 that Forever must "hold the line" on first-hit tags. Shared-credit fans want crowded quests to stop feeling like a mosh pit. First-hit fans say that friction is what makes strangers invite each other. A Forever beta thread on that fight now sits at 331 posts and 512 likes.
We are with the hold. Forever sells a social world. Shared tagging deletes the reason to talk.
Shared credit on every tap, or first hit owns the kill?
Barrens Chat wasn't an accident. It happened because everyone was stuck in the same zone at the same time. You can't bring that back with a documentary, you have to design for it.
Learn more about wolves, boars and the Barrens Chat in the new YouTube video series, Planet Azeroth, narrated by Bill Bailey.
#Forever #Warcraft
wowhead.com/news/planet-azer…
Hot take: we made MMOs soloable, automated away every reason to talk to each other, and then acted surprised when people stopped making friends and stopped playing. My EverQuest group taught me more about people than any quest did.
Why Play MMOs Solo? Emilien takes a look at the players who choose to stay solo despite countless players all around them. mmorpg.com/editorials/why-pl…
Every time a studio loses the people who built it, everyone asks what happens to the IP. I always want to know what happens to the people.
All three of BioWare's founders have left the video game industry to pursue new careers in medicine, social impact investing, and beer brewing.
Full story: 80.lv/articles/bioware-found…
Definitely WoW (how is it not even mentioned here?!) and I'm biased because I worked on it from patch 1.0 to Wrath. It didn't just change how people played. It changed how a whole generation made friends. Half my DMs are still people who met their spouse in a guild.
This would have been really cool to see. Doing this feels impossible considering the technology neccesary to make it work, but now we just won't know. Mass Effect was one of my favorite series... the heartbreak is real.
A former BioWare technical director has revealed that the cancelled Mass Effect game's story would have accounted for player decisions made in the original Commander Shepard trilogy.
For more info: bit.ly/3WswngD
ALT Canceled Mass Effect's Story Would Have Accounted For "All" Choices From Previous Games Via: Kotaku
Patch notes: trees no longer eat players.
The forest will now find other ways to kill you, like we intended.
#indiegame #gamedev
Y’all, we’ve reached the Amazon Drop Ship era of game dev.
#achievementunlocked
Someone with zero coding background shipped a game in 6 weeks with Claude Opus 5.5 and Godot, and the setup is worth copying line by line.
The rule underneath all of it: one feature at a time, tested in the game, before the next one exists.
Step 1 -> Opus 5.5 in Claude Code, opened inside the Godot project itself.
Step 2 -> Build one feature, play it, adjust until it feels right, only then start the next.
Step 3 -> Reference images in the game's style from Codex/Astra.
Step 4 -> Every image prompt that works gets saved as JSON and fed into the next generation, so the style never drifts.
Step 5 -> Big 3D assets in Tripo P2, built from those references.
Step 6 -> Small props modeled in Blender, textured in Tripo with the same refs, which is the cheap route.
Step 7 -> Animation in Cascadeur.
Step 8 -> Every VFX and shader documented in Obsidian so the look holds across six weeks.
Who does what:
> Opus 5.5: most of the code.
> Codex/Astra: references and assets.
> Tripo P2: the big 3D models.
> Godot: custom tools, headless scripts, the game itself.
One JSON file of good prompts is the reason every character, monster and prop looks like it belongs in the same world.
(Built by afterthewinddev, all credit there.)