Design

#GameDev Breakdown podcast – Looty Christmas

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In our inaugural holiday show: Apple admits they’re slowing down your phone, they also led the charge in requiring transparency in the loot box process. StoryBundle has great books for gamers and devs on Christmas break, Steam has probably already pried your wallet open for the Winter Sale, and we try our hand at designing some questionable Christmas games on the fly. 

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Absurd Christmas Game Design

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Initially, we planned to make a Christmas game for the site. Nothing elaborate, we just wanted to put together something for friends and site visitors to toy with, so we could say happy holidays in our own special way. Turns out it was a lot easier to just say it into the mics during a podcast.

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Looty Christmas

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The guys convene for a very special Christmas cast to discuss very good and very bad developments from Apple, best entertainment deals for gamers and devs over the holiday break, and we try our hand at designing a couple of Christmas games on the fly. Happy holidays!

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Passion Projects

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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.

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Gone Fishin’

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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. 

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Bit Shifter Developer Paul Dana

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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. 

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Grand Theft Auto and Violence in Games

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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.

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Behold the Presale Crunchpocalypse

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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.

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The Legend of Extreme Paintbrawl’s Mysterious Soundtrack

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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. 

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Letter Taps – The Official Postmortem

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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. 

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