Year: 2020

Golden Axed!

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SEGA celebrates its 60th anniversary by releasing a cancelled Golden Axe reboot on Steam, complete with a tongue-in-cheek title sequence and apologies for its bugs and jankiness. The developer cries foul and tells the story behind its chaotic production.

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Wheaton’s Law Has Consequences

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An email from a familiar name illustrated a perfect example of why you should be kind to people in your content space, or failing that, at least be quiet. We’ll also discuss why a sky-high number of followers on social media isn’t exactly what you should be chasing.

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Pricing Your Game

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By community request, we look at what successful developers have to say about pricing your indie game. I’ll talk about my experience, too, so you know what not to do.

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Supporting Your Game

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Do you really have time to support your own video game? If you’re an indie game developer, the answer is probably no, but app and game stores expect you to provide this service for your customers. In this episode of GameDev Breakdown, we’ll take a look at some strategies you can leverage to make this part of life a little easier.

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The Time Sierra On-Line Nearly Unionized

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Ken Williams has released a new book, Not All Fairy Tales Have Happy Endings: The rise and fall of Sierra On-Line. In the process of telling Sierra’s entire story from his perspective for the first time, he reveals what was surely among the very earliest attempts at unionization within the game industry.

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Founder Ken Williams Discusses the Time Sierra On-Line Game Developers Nearly Unionized in New Book

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Sierra On-Line founder Ken Williams clearly stayed busy during the pandemic. Earlier in October he released a new book, Not All Fairy Tales Have Happy Endings: The rise and fall of Sierra On-Line, which tells Sierra On-Line’s complete story from his perspective for the first time.

In one Sierra story I’d never even heard hinted at before, Williams spent part of a chapter describing the process of clamping down on the company’s wild start-up culture—or trying to “bring discipline,” as he describes it—and pushing his team to a point that he admits became abusive.

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Max Pears of CD PROJEKT RED

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Cyberpunk 2077 designer Max Pears calls in to discuss his recent book, Let’s Design: Combat, his podcast, Level Design Lobby, and his meteoric rise in game design, from school to Ubisoft’s The Division to CD PROJEKT RED’s most hotly anticipated title to date.

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Video Segment: Todd Talks Epic and Microsoft vs. Google and Apple on Fandom Unlimited

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Todd calls in for Fandom Unlimited’s Facebook live stream to discuss the unfolding courtroom drama over Fortnite, mobile app stores, and the very souls of teenagers everywhere. Okay probably not that last one, but it could have major ramifications for Unreal Engine devs everywhere.

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Fandom Unlimited Appearance and Courtroom Drama

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Todd appeared on Fandom Unlimited’s live Facebook stream to talk about Epic and Microsoft vs. Apple and Google, then we dive into an equally troubling lawsuit between a studio and publisher that you might not have heard about.

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Episode 100

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Well we did it. 100 episodes of GameDev Breakdown.

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