Todd went on vacation and kinda got stabbed upon returning home, a listener shares some less-than-constructive criticism, and we go in depth on smart planning during game design as well as the dangers of getting too weird with it.
Design
Gone Fishin’
Cast your cares away and join us on a wilderness getaway in the form of a show recorded inside a massively multiplayer online first-person fishing game. Yes, really.
Bit Shifter Developer Paul Dana
We caught up with Paul Dana of Plastic Games to talk history, philosophy, technology, and of course, to find out the status of his longtime indie labor of love, Bit Shifter.
Grand Theft Auto and Violence in Games
Todd returns from Las Vegas, no one knows what to wish one another on Columbus Day, and The Daily Wire posts a mysterious Grand Theft Auto hit piece. We break down the criticism and talk about how poor gaming coverage is leaving a huge portion of gamers in the lurch.
Behold the Presale Crunchpocalypse
In this mid-week edition of the GameDev Breakdown podcast, we examine a chaotic update to the SNES Classic Edition story, Xbox One X goes live with pre-orders of its own, and a AAA game industry veteran promotes his new book and praises crunch time in the game industry.
The Legend of Extreme Paintbrawl’s Mysterious Soundtrack
I was talking shop with a close friend recently about OST composition (he’s an extraordinary musician, producer, and almost certainly one of my studio’s future composers) when he brought up a desire to compose a game soundtrack he would really enjoy listening to, even when he’s not playing the game. It’s a noble goal, and in fact, it immediately made me think of Extreme Paintbrawl (Head Games/Creative Carnage, 1998): a game most agree is greatly inferior to its own music.
Letter Taps – The Official Postmortem
A version of this article was also submitted to the go-to game industry shop talk site, Gamasutra.
If you’re not familiar with the tradition of postmortem write-ups in the game industry, it’s not a negative term. It’s the practice of writing about the design, development, and the launch of a game, including reflection on what went right, and what lessons you learned along the way. What follows is the official postmortem for my educational indie game, Letter Taps.
My Indie Educational Game Is Out!
If it isn’t obvious from the gap between this post and the last one, many things are happening! Letter Taps Is Out Now! My indie educational game, Letter Taps is available in the Google Play and iOS App Store now! This is the product of my last six months and I can’t tell you how good it … Read more
Hands-On GameDev: Five-Minute Textures
If you happen to follow me on Twitter, you may have caught me sprucing up my “developer art” during a coding break, thrilled with myself for very quickly improving the backdrop of my card game prototype. If not, here was the tweet: I combined a couple of incredibly lame tricks to get this background and I could … Read more
itch.io announces refinery, an early access alternative for indies
itch.io has launched Refinery, a toolset it promises will allow indie studios to conduct early game releases with the flexibility to set their own terms. If this sounds like a shot at Steam Early Access, that probably isn’t a coincidence. “Early access ‘programs’ have long been an issue for developers looking to get feedback and … Read more
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