Igiss Q&A Thread

[Igiss]

Hi all, thanks for the questions!

The question about Normandy and my intents are the most hard to answer, so I'll start from the end.

How old are you?

I'm 40 now.

I'm sure the story went in totally different directions than you intended, but what do you think of the current story path?

I still need to learn more on what happened with the storyline since my departure. I had no precise plans for most things that were started back in the day, and I trust that those who succeeded me did a good job.

Have any new mechanics implemented by the FLHook codemonkies surprised you?

Also need to dive deeper into it but there are lots of hugely impressive things that were completely impossible when we started, or even 10 years ago.

Do you think the new cap mechanics and balance are stinky like I do?

No idea...

What have you been up to since your departure? I vaguely recall hearing something about you being a teacher a few years back.

Your memory serves you well. I really was a tutor of screenwriting for games in 2020-2023. It was a good job but unfortunately ended when the game design department of the online educational website I was working for has been scrapped.

Speaking about my jobs...

When I started working on Disco I was still at the university getting a lawyer degree. I never worked as a lawyer. After uni I became a tester for mobile apps, and in a few years grew to be a level designer and then a game designer. I worked there as a game designer, mostly concentrating on narratives and writing but never receiving a formal title of narrative designer or writer. The company had several names but was mostly known as Glu Mobile. Later the Moscow office where I worked was purchased by a huge Russian IT company mail.ru and detached from its parent US company. Many of my former colleagues still work in Russia, many have relocated to Netherlands, Cyprus and elsewhere with the same company.

In 2014-2017 I studied screenplay writing in Russia's leading cinema university (VGIK) along with working fulltime, which didn't go well with my managers at work and affected my job badly, which in some way led to me quitting in 2019 (I was fortunate not to get fired at that point). I did some unreleased writing for Russian TV, and while I'm still trying to get into the TV writing world, I now feel somewhat detached from it.

I also started writing short stories, some of which were published (mostly online). I wanted to write fiction since early years but I couldn't seriously get into that until about 2020. Also wrote some poetry in 2020-2021, and experimented with video poetry, but the fiction works are all in Russian and have never been translated, so there's not much to share, and I can't really call it a job because it doesn't earn me any money, and probably won't earn much in future, though I'm planning to continue and there's a book of mine, a collection of short stories, that may (or may not) be published by the end of this year.

In the recent years I've mostly worked with some not-very-prominent Russian gaming projects, and lately became a lead screenplay writer for a company that does visual novels for mobile. I like it.

As for more personal things...

In about 2010 I got involved with Russian opposition politics and this in some ways caused my departure from Disco (I received some criticism from Russian-speaking community members at that point, saying that I get involved with cringy anti-government movements and quit what I do best). But there were other reasons for my departure, including a long-lasting depression and lack of technical knowledge that was necessary to keep up with mod development. I was never any prominent political activist but I did participate in various political organizations and events. This was a relatively joyful and meaningful time for me, but then it turned to worse, since many of my friends had to flee Russia in 2012-2014, and the movement itself was weakened by repressions and by the assassination of Boris Nemtsov in 2015.

I stayed in Russia till 2022 and then had to emigrate. I lived in Armenia and Georgia since, and I don't regret leaving. I remain an outspoken critic of Russia's current regime and the war.

As for hobbies, I watch and read a lot, and I'm still a huge fan of scifi and space-related stuff. I don't play games as much as I used to. Not much time for it lately.

I'm unmarried and have no kids. Most of my latest relationships were polyamorous partnerships.

What else there is to tell about my life? Feel free to ask.