Celia Wagar's CritPoints

10 years ago (and 2 months, but who’s gonna nitpick that?) I started this blog, Critpoints. Before that, I had been writing for Gather Your Party, a modest blog that aimed to challenge the establishment of professional games journalism with a staff of volunteers, no advertising, some of the early crop of gaming video essayists, and the tagline, “Honest Gaming Journalism”. For a lot of fairly predictable reasons, we burned out and eventually the site shuttered.

While I wrote there, I authored a column called, “More Than Mashing”, which showcased and explained different advanced video game techniques and play. This translated into a few YouTube Videos, most of which have been lost to time. I later ended up reviving this concept as a Facebook page, which did great until I got bored of it, and ran out of clips. Currently, that idea survives as a channel in my Discord Server, and as the banner in this site’s layout.

Since GYP, I’ve been involved in a few different projects, including Design Oriented, a group of game designers who were interested in exploring a more mechanical angle to video game design. I ended up leaving due to differences in point of view, but one thing I held onto was the name, “Crit Points”, which I had suggested as a potential name for the DO project. I tried combining the different ideas of “critique,” “hit points,” and “critical hit” into one short name. The tagline under the website name is intended to reflect the triple entendre. (Similarities to ActionPts, someone I used to work with, and ContraPoints are coincidental (I didn’t hear about ContraPoints until 2018) ).

Critpoints became my new brand, and I started this blog in March 2015!

I wrote prolifically for GYP and myself while I was in college (School of Visual Arts Class of 2014, BFA Animation (Yes, I shared classes with that one showrunner. No, I don’t have any stories to tell.) ) and a lot of that writing went straight onto this blog, resulting in new posts almost every day. 2/3rds of ALL the posts on this blog are from the first two years! A lot of my early posts were just whatever I thought about a topic, ideas I had on the brain, and critiques of other people writing about games (this earned me a lot of infamy, because I read and watched literally EVERYONE. And it turns out that “gameplay is the most important thing” is a tokenism that most people don’t follow with action, and nobody likes to be criticized for).

For most of this Blog’s lifetime, I ran an Ask.fm, then later a Curiouscat as that became the fashion, and a lot of posts here were questions I received on those, with slight editing. This supplemented the longer form articles I wrote, until eventually those services petered out and died. A replacement has sprung up, but I think that era of blogging is over for me.

2 years after starting this blog, in 2017, I started my Discord Server, which now has 456 members at the time of writing. In that server we’ve had an incredible number of in-depth and civil discussions on design. We’ve worked together to revise my theory of depth and bring together a broader knowledge of all different games across genres and time periods. We’ve had skilled writers author some guest posts for the blog. We’ve had our fair share of arguments. And we’ve had an incredibly silly time.

I consulted on DESYNC for Sean Gabriel and Adult Swim Games in the same year the discord was founded. I was credited as Special Thanks, among many others. I’ve gotten the chance to give feedback on many indie games projects, including Aztez, and I still join playtests in the Funsmith server for Game Design Skills. (I drew their discord icon too!)

Over my time authoring this blog, my career in software has taken off. Out of college, I failed to get an animation job. My portfolio wasn’t good enough in an incredibly competitive field, and I didn’t want to work for free in order to eventually work for low animation pay.

I spent 2-3 years unemployed out of college, before ultimately settling on a minimum wage job that slowly burned me out. Every time I clocked in, I’d read 2-3 askfm questions and think about them through my whole shift, then type them in as soon as I got off.

Eventually I decided that I couldn’t do that work forever, and I needed to go back to college (my post-college years were not a time I am proud of). I used a recommendation from a manager to get into a CS101 program at a local college and spent 3 semesters getting basic comp sci classes, and an intro to 6 different programming languages (C++, Python, Java, HTML5, Visual Basic, and C#).

I’d done programming in Visual Basic, Action script, C# and Game Maker Language before this, but I didn’t really understand the fundamentals of programming or how to use it practically. These courses helped fill out my fundamentals, but didn’t get me much closer to understanding how to use programming practically.

At one point a professor recommended that students go check out a qualifier for a state-wide coding competition, promising extra credit. I went and did it. The questions were basic leetcode fare. I had a somewhat clever solution to one of them (finding the max value) that everyone else used a sort for (o(n) instead of o(log n), not that I could have told you that back then). I didn’t know SQL at all, so for a SQL question, I just wrote in, “I don’t know SQL, good game.”

Miraculously, I had somehow qualified as one of the top 50 coders in the state. Unbelievable. I was invited to participate in a code-jam at the Yale School of Management. I discovered that the candidates were all being divided into teams of 5, but 2 other people from my college had qualified, so I could work with them. I showed up and got carried HARD by my team. We were expected to make a web interface that made use of open data sets, ideally ones on energy, transportation, and education provided to us by the state, and then to visualize that on top of a map somehow. We were given some rudimentary web frameworks to visualize information differently and we got to work.

Our team made a heat map of the state, displaying hot spots for electrical charging, railroads, and other transportation and energy centers, with the stated reason of helping people decide where they wanted to move to, in order to find zones dense with urban essentials. We won second place, earning $2500, split to $500 for each of us. I talked my team into letting me keep the giant check, despite not doing an incredible amount or having much idea what I was doing (I wrote a For loop! Writing good loops honestly still makes me feel like a genius, haha!). Naturally, this achievement has stayed on my resume for the rest of time.

The real benefit of the code jam wasn’t the jam itself, but the Job Fair attached to it. Naturally, I was incredibly underqualified to work at any of the places presenting there, but I did notice a scholarship program sponsored by the state. I applied to this and was ultimately accepted (the only qualification was having a college degree of literally any kind). This scholarship paid for me to be trained to pass a number of certification tests offered by Microsoft: Software Development, HTML5, and Cyber Security (I got to choose the last one). But the real benefit of this was the headhunting program I got entered into at the end.

I got different job recommendations through this and one of them seemed perfect. It was in my home state and it used technology I already knew. It just meant working for an incredibly predatory boot camp program and surrendering autonomy over my life for the next 2 years. I interviewed with them and once again, they required that I had a bachelor’s degree of literally any kind, and that I had any level of experience programming in Java. After I passed the interview, they told me to drive on down to Reston, Virginia for the boot camp and intense training.

While I was getting my certifications and waiting for the boot camp to begin, I attempted a game project in Unreal Engine 4 with a friend of mine who now works at Halo Studio as a lighting artist (he lit most of the interiors for Halo Infinite and he has an expanded role in their upcoming project). We came up with some crazy and ambitious ideas, but I was the weak link.

I pushed myself HARD to learn UE4 C++ and had one of the most productive months of my life. I made several demos, which are still on my GitHub, and we collaborated together to make a networked first person shooter, where we could see one another and interact. We tested this over the Spacewar network test “game” on Steam. Ultimately network replication proved too difficult for me, as did working within the paradigms set by Unreal Engine, and I fell off the project, before ultimately abandoning it as my bootcamp started.

In the bootcamp setting, I learned about how predatory the deal I was entering into really was. There was no guarantee I would ultimately work in my home state. I had to sign a non-compete tied to an IOU for $20,000, which would hang over my head for the next 2 years, unless I failed out of the course, after which they promised to release me (a promise that I saw they honored for several “batch mates”. Yes, they called us a “Batch”, not a class. We had a “trainer”, not a teacher, and other weird corporate BS). People who washed out of the course were able to get entry level jobs that paid $20,000 more than we were paid for the jobs we got out of the course. Many people quit on day 1 because they didn’t want to sign the IOU. I entered into a weird slumlord apartment that was poorly maintained by prior occupants, living in close quarters with 6 other people. The rent was dedicated from our minimum wage paychecks and the ground floor bedroom was freezing cold, as it was mid-winter.

During our first week there, my new comrades and I started looking up Glassdoor reviews and seeing all the different complaints left about the place. One person left an Urban Dictionary definition for the company name, comparing it to a sex act of female genital mutilation combined with defecation. The review we ended up centering on was, “This is gonna suck and it’s bad for all the reasons everyone says it’s bad, but it’s College 2.0. Work hard and survive, and this can be a good start to a career.”

During this bootcamp, I was expected to learn a new technology related to full-stack enterprise Java web development and microservices every single week. We had online quizzes testing our knowledge, then “QA”, where the group was tested for proficiency to evaluate our trainer. We were expected to wear business formal on Mondays, business casual mid-week, with casual, but not too casual, Fridays. We steadily built up a knowledge of Java and Enterprise frameworks and practices from basics to advanced. My roommates and I got especially involved in the bootcamp, volunteering to present in front of the group until we were told to stop and give other people a chance.

We were regularly given mock interviews and given thorough feedback on our knowledge, our presentation, and how we performed the interview, as well as our performance in the bootcamp overall. They were preparing us to be contractors for them, or to have our contracts sold off to another company at the end of our training, IOU attached to protect their investment in our training.

Our final assignment was to revise part of the bootcamp’s internal infrastructure. Our batch had pulled together across the 3 months of the bootcamp, regularly holding study sessions at each other’s dorms, sharing answers, and covering for each other’s shortcomings. We were explicitly encouraged to cheat and not get caught, but we were also warned that our final test, a “panel”, would be an interview on a completely random set of subjects within the training, so we needed to be perfectly competent at everything to guarantee passing. We made study guides, flash cards, shared answers. Our batch had one of the lowest failure rates of any batch, and we had far in excess of the people necessary for the final assignment.

In the final weeks of the bootcamp, we were set up with a series of interviews with different companies, some of whom we’d go to as contractors for the bootcamp, some of whom would buy our our contracts and “own” us for the next 2 years. I passed my second of these interviews, getting my contract bought out by one of the largest consulting firms in tech, and one of the largest companies in India.

During this time, I also took the chance to visit Xanadu Gaming (I caught the final event in the original venue!), and I got to play in a number of different tournaments there, and even meet a member of my discord who still hangs around to this day.

Following that, I got an email informing me that I had been accepted by the consulting firm and I would be expected to arrive in a state on the West Coast, 3,800 miles from home, or I would be fired, but still bound by my non-compete for the next 2 years. At the time, I had burned a lot of the ties I had to my home state. I had made myself a pariah in my home state’s smash scene for helping a girl compile evidence for #MeToo allegations on their ex. This got him placed under tighter supervision, but a lot of people didn’t associate with me anymore. I was also just an asshole and alienated myself from a lot of people across my life.

So.

I drove for 4 days across the United States, from coast to coast. I slept in a Lowe’s parking lot in Ohio on my first night, at a relative’s around the midway point, and pulled an all-nighter until I arrived in 2018.

Since then, I’ve worked for 5 different corporations, and I’ve steadily climbed up to a Lead Software Engineer position, with roles in a number of substantial new projects, using an awesome number of different technologies (I’ve since picked up Golang and I even learned Ruby in a week for a job interview, which impressed the hell out of them). But this is a game design blog.

I tried getting back on the horse for game development, but I found it difficult with my new responsibilities. I got a good start in Unity, but again had trouble wrapping my head around oddities of the engine and ultimately got thwarted. In 2019, I made a serious attempt to reengage my social life. I started cosplaying. I went to parties. And I joined a lot of offline social groups. I also started dating for the first time since high school. A lot of game related stuff took a backseat compared to all that. 2019 was one of the happiest years of my life as I finally fully realized and took advantage that I had the independence to go out on my own and do anything.

I got fired from the corporation that had brought me across the country very shortly after I had passed the 2 year limit on their non-compete. They were demanding that I move to another state to continue working for them and I declined. I was paid a severance or something. Around the same time I was dumped by my then partner. And then the 2020 COVID pandemic hit. I was hit with incredible depression, having been hit so hard, then isolated from anyone that could make it feel better. I bounced back by the end. COVID served as a convenient excuse for unemployment, and I quickly landed a number of roles. By the time restrictions started to lighten up, I was back on my feet, earning more money than ever, making new friends, and dating new people.

At some point during the 2020 COVID lockdowns, I was contacted by Alexander Brazie, one of the founders of GameDesignSkills.com. Him and Joe Sopko, former Blizzard and Riot Employees, then employed at Moon Studio as they worked on what would become No Rest for the Wicked; were readers of my blog. In particular they liked how I was able to think visually and diagram my ideas, citing my 4 criteria of depth image. They asked me to work with them on what would become Mastering Game Mechanics.

I wrote most of the original outline for what would become the course. Over the course of 5 years, we slowly worked on slide decks presenting and expanding on all the information I outlined. We FINALLY turned this into a viable course and took on our first class of students in summer of 2024. At time of writing, we just finished teaching our second cohort of twice as many students and are revising the course again for the 3rd cohort, aiming to provide an even smoother experience and a better on-ramp for a career in game design. People have told us that our course far outstrips what is taught in schools and books for game design. I am incredibly proud of this course and the fact we were able to bring it to market.

I recorded hundreds of different clips of gameplay across dozens of different games to provide examples for the course, and made a large number of illustrations as well. As we ran the course, I continued to make changes to deliver a smoother learning experience, elaborate more on examples, and add new topics as relevant.

Eventually this is going to be released as a video course. I hope that when we get there, it will be in a form I’m proud of.

Apart from that, over the past 5 years, I’ve continued writing, but the pace has slowed down and the quality has gone up. My girlfriend of 4 years told me when we started dating to edit my writing more and make it more professional, and I’ve done a lot to tighten it up since. I use section headers and regularly include images and other diagrams wherever possible. I’ve slowly moved away from game reviews and towards more technical articles. I am working on a lot more at any given time and my backlog is a lot bigger, like 2014 before I started this blog. I frequently find unfinished posts and dust them off for release.

In terms of tone I believe I’ve mellowed out a LOT compared to the vitriol of my early days. I was mad at everything for being the way it was, and I did the only thing in my power to try to change it. Eventually I moved away from the place that made me so mad (4chan), and I found my own voice instead of the stereotypical angry gamer nebulously upset at “modern” game design and a red-string corkboard of unrelated industry trends. I realized that I wanted something different and more specific than them (clearly defined principles of fun gameplay), and I needed to make that for myself instead of expecting them to implicitly get it. That’s been the project of this blog and my writing for the past 10 years.

More recently I’ve set my sights higher, and I’ve been collaborating with CabalCrow, a long-time member and moderator of my discord, in order to make a fighting game of his design. I’ve been acting as an animator and general art director, but I also wrote the code for the input interpreter that were using.

The game is fully functional, because CabalCrow is awesome and hard-working. I’m mostly aiming to not be the weak link again (ADHD is a curse) and be able to put out a good looking demo by the end of the year (and hopefully debut it at a big tournament).

I work in Enterprise Software Engineering instead of video games in large part because that’s the job I could get when I was at my low point, and because I worry about working directly in the Games Industry. I know it doesn’t pay as well. It would be more stressful with less free time. And I wouldn’t have as good job security. I have a lot of experience in my current field and I’m in a comfortable position.

I want to make games. I want to aim higher than where I have been. I want to impress people and spread my ideas on game design further, as well as bring to life ideas that I know nobody else can replicate.

I have a busy year ahead of me. Hopefully by the end, I’ll have more to show for myself. And in 10 years, I better damn have something to show, or I’ll be disappointed! (Maybe I’ll reveal the top secret Crit Point mechanic!) I’m now a decently competent coder, and I have some awesome games industry contacts, as well as skilled friends. I’ve grown to be a much stronger artist and animator than I was 10 years ago. I still don’t totally have work ethic down (I’m procrastinating at 3AM on a deadly urgent assignment for work to write this), but I’ve done things that I couldn’t have imagined 10 years ago when I was a sad angry unemployable kid out of art college and I couldn’t really imagine things ever working out; When I didn’t really have anything but video games; When I was burned out on art so thoroughly that I stopped doing it for fun; When I was trapped in the suburbs and dependent on my parents, not even having a driver’s license until I was 23. I’m still kind of a mess in many ways, but I got better.

And I’m going to keep getting better, because hey, games are about improving our skills, aren’t they?

This has been 10 years of Critpoints. If I’m not murdered in the streets or a concentration camp in the next 4-8 years, I promise to have a lot more for you by 2035!

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Posts: 612~ (76 private posts too)
Words: 838,992 (115,096 in private articles)
Comments: 1024 (300 are mine)
Games Reviewed: 22
YouTube Videos Made: 3
Guest Posts: 7
3,968,174,057,271 Drowned Immersionists