David Gaider

@davidgaider.bsky.social

27185 Followers 70 Following

Co-founder and Creative Director at summerfallstudios.com. Canadian game dev who escaped the winter and is now living in Melbourne, Australia! He/Him

A screen capture of an exchange on X/Twitter, where someone defends MLM romance (referring to Heated Rivalry, here) as "harmless fiction with no material harm", calling the other user (who says gay men shouldn't be told what they can and cannot be offended by) a tourist, since MLM romance is by women and for women.
It's me showing off my one and only tattoo: the Grey Warden symbol, already peeling a bit but you can really see the excellent job Julian @ Tanuki Tattoos did on it!
Austin Wintory, the composer of such games as Journey and the Banner Saga. It was absolute serendipity that brought him to Stray Gods, and we'll always be super grateful.
Troy Ferguson, our Engineering Director at Summerfall Studios. His hair is usually much longer than this.
The original key art for Chorus: An Adventure Musical, which was the original name for Stray Gods and what we originally pitched it as for our Fig crowd-funding campaign.
Sophia from Golden Girls. "Picture it!"
Elie Young, the third co-founder of Summerfall Studios - though, at this stage in my story, they're just a friendly face I met in Melbourne who mocked me relentlessly for liking Foster beer.
A picture of Liam Esler, one of my co-founders - the best part about getting to talk about Liam is that he will absolutely DIE of mortification, particularly if I say anything nice. So I'm absolutely going to say nice things.
The Beamdog logo superimposed on a BG-style painted portrait that one of the Beamdog artists based on me. Which I kind of wish I had my own copy of, but I don't.
I gave away most of my BioWare swag when I left Canada, but I still have a few things. The plaques I was given after finishing each of the three Dragon Age games, for instance, have a place of honour on my office wall.
Summerfall Studios logo
BlueSky posts by Karin West-Weekes and Patrick Weekes announcing their layoffs from BioWare. Both are now looking for work.
A screenshot of a tweet by GamerBot News, saying "Former Veilguard Director Departs BioWare, Suspenseful Departure After 18 Years" and citing me by name. Just in case the failure of AI isn't self-evident, I left BioWare 8 years ago, before Veilguard was a thing.
Here I've broken out the Design Department part of the org chart into the sub-departments as they existed in BioWare back in 2016, at least (when I left), each with its own sub-lead.
The organization chart now shows the levels above the Leads: namely the Project Director, who reports to Studio Leadership, who in turn reports to the Publisher (if any exists).
Here we show the Lead (or Senior Lead) in charge of each department.
An org chart - or the beginning of one, anyhow, showing the three main dev departments: Design, Art, and Engineering.
An event for Crusader Kings 3, hilariously depicting a successful seduce scheme - with my muscular ruler posing naked, holding a spear and with his hat still on, next to his adoring (and clothed) lover.
A head and shoulders shot of Cassandra, in heavy armor, as she first appeared in DA2. I almost forgot she looked like this back then.
One of the concept art variants of the "Rock Star Mage" which provided Dorian's initial inspiration. The one on the left was the first draft. The one on the right was the second draft with a few adjustments (bye monkey). There was more iterating after this, but you see where it was going - and it was so, so good.
Dorian, as he appeared in-game. This was the work of U Ri So, a character artist from Korea who'd just started at the time - Dorian and Cullen were her first big tasks, and boy oh boy did she knock it out of the park.
A snow globe with a wedding couple inside, standing under a white arch. The globe is on top of a faux wedding cake with a silver heart on the front inscribed "ALISTAIR NEVER LOVED YOU".
A screenshot from the Stone Prisoner DLC, showing Shale in front of one of the buildings in her initial quest area.
In-game image of Fenris from Dragon Age 2. I'd objected strenuously to the art team's plan at changing the elves to a more "distinctive" appearance. Not that I opposed the idea in theory, but I thought they ended up looking too alien, and according to the lore elves were generally considered attractive. The art team mocked and dismissed me (quite literally, I'm afraid) and the rest of the team had bigger battles to fight. For Fenris, at least, he reached a point of being kinda sexy despite the change... so not all bad, I guess?
Original flavour Alistair, in DAO. Always with the eyebrow.
Ahhh the original version of Flemeth's appearance, after we'd cut her unique model. I almost forgot that this is what it looked like. Bah, it's fine. Shapeshifter, right? We'll ignore that shapeshifters don't change into other human appearances - Flemeth is special.
Ah, Kieran. So dapper! I had a moment of "but what if the Warden wasn't, you know..." because he's SO white, but the artists just went "shhhh shhhh it's maaaagic" and I had to admit they were correct. This whole sequence had already stretched the limits of our resources and then some.
Morrigan's original appearance in DAO. I can't help but look back on this and balk at the old graphics, but at the time I was *enamoured*.