This week, Ellen kicks things off with a chat about how games tell players, “This might be tough!” and how to make that fun and fair. Stephen and Mark jump in with their takes on what makes difficulty settings shine.
Entering the clubhouse this week is our the third Owl (employee of Owlchemy Labs) and first Peabody Award winner (as lead developer for We Are OFK), to talk about the "dos," "don'ts," and "good enoughs" of optimization.
Stephen brings a half-baked thought into the clubhouse for this Nice Thinking episode: how can we improve dialogue systems? He's got some opinions, which Mark and Ellen immediately debunk, but it leads to some engaging conversation.
It’s hot in the clubhouse and hot in Ellen’s greenhouse this week, so your hosts are eager to crunch through some discussion.
"Tutorials shouldn’t feel like tutorials!" Like most aspects of game design, it's an easy concept to summarize but a difficult one to pull off.
In the episode, Mark, Ellen, and Stephen talk local events, including (don’t worry everyone’s fine) a fire in the clubhouse’s building, construction, and the games they are playing, so if you are just here for the topics, go ahead and sk
Your nice hosts welcome famed designer Ron Gilbert (Monkey Island, Thimbleweed Park) into the clubhouse to discuss the virtues of inexperience, friction for its own sake, how it's all about story, and it's puzzles all the way down.
This week, your nice hosts talk about code that isn't yours and ask about the natural conclusion of the narrative. Mark is handy, Ellen kinda wants to add a note, and Stephen is grounded.
We invite Joanna May into the clubhouse to discuss serialization. We get ever so slightly closer to discovering what serialization even is with Joanna's help!
In this episode Lydia is back in the clubhouse to discuss her first job, and to help make a game about said job.
All of your hosts are together in the Clubhouse for a special interview! Lydia Symchych is an impact game designer who has been working with Ellen over the last year.
Your nice hosts chew over a concept Stephen brings into the clubhouse: a series of "game jams" where participants iterate on one specific idea in each session.
Releasing 2019's "Baba is You" after more than a decade of making puzzle games was a milestone for this week's guest, but it was also just the beginning of his design journey.