Music

Remembering Our Friend Abel Wang

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To celebrate the life of community rockstar Abel Wang, we revisit our 2018 discussion with him at GDC joined by Microsoft cloud advocate Jessica Deen.

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Triple-A Veteran Luis Alonso

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Luis Alonso of Recombobulator Games calls in to walk us through his experiences contributing to series like Need For Speed and Mass Effect–or if you prefer, Hannah Montana and VeggieTales–before going indie with his wife (accomplished writer Michelle Franklin) to realize a creative vision that’s stayed with him since childhood.

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Boss Fight Books Author Sebastian Deken

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Sebastian Deken calls in to discuss his book, Final Fantasy VI from Boss Fight Books, and how his musical background led to his unique approach in covering the game. We go over the Final Fantasy series’ history in the US and how the games have progressed over time. There is almost no gotcha journalism.

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Adam Fligsten of Silen Audio

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Adam Fligsten of Silen Audio calls in to discuss his process, his projects, and his path into music and audio composition for TV, film, and games. His credits include Marvel vs. Capcom, Saturday Night Live, NBC Olympics, and much, much more.

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Michelle Franklin of Recombobulator Games

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Accomplished writer Michelle Franklin of Recombobulator Games calls in to discuss cats, floods, and Space Boat, a shiny upcoming narrative adventure game being developed by a team of triple-A industry survivors with credits on Mass Effect 3, DeadSpace 2, Hannah Montana, and more.

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Some Great Retro Music Tools Died With Flash. Now What?

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After a history nearly as long as the internet itself, Adobe finally discontinued support for Flash after December 31, 2020. Now Flash content is actively blocked, and users are strongly encouraged to uninstall their players and plugins.

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Composer Stephen Tanksley

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Previously on the podcast we’ve had opportunities to hear from highly specialized sound designers, musicians, and recording engineers, but we’ve had somewhat limited time to really dig into composition, and that happens to be one of Stephen Tanksley’s areas of expertise. Stephen is a Chicago-area composer for both games and film. He has a wealth of formal music and audio training to talk about, he works on awesome projects as a freelancer (including original music for streamers and a Star Wars feature-length fan film), and he has a personal project to discuss that you’re going to want access to the moment it’s complete.

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The Path of Motus Creator Michael Hicks

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Michael Hicks has released more creative projects since his late teens than some folks get to throughout an entire career. His top two game releases, Pillar and The Path of Motus, have been downloaded half a million times across a wide variety of platforms. When Polygon investigated Valve’s shortcomings in supporting Steam developers, Michael’s sharp criticism for Valve’s practices took center stage in the debate.

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Religion, Metallica, and NBA Jam

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Happy Thanksgiving week! In this episode, Todd shares the story about how two awesome arcade machines ended up in his basement and shares what he’s thankful for (in addition to these awesome machines). 

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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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