- Branding & Iconography
- The Ethics of Engagement
It's spooky season! Stephen is SO over it, but he can't escape all the scary stuff happening in this week's episode.
2024.02.01
It's a gamedev podcast!
The show where nice gamedevs Ellen Burns-Johnson, Mark LaCroix, and Stephen McGregor (with friends and guests) talk gaming and game development!
Nice Games Jam
It's been a while but your nice hosts come up with a game in roughly an hour, this one for the cat owners out there! After a fairly long meta, we get into the mind of a cat and design a competitive game for them to play.
2024.01.25
Much Ado About Unity (with Freya Holmér)
Earlier today, Unity issued an update to their controversial "runtime fee" policy introduced last week. What changed? What didn't? How could this have even happened? What does it mean going forward? Can we ever trust Unity again?
2024.01.18
- Pre-production
- Idle Games
Your nice hosts start off strong with an excellently performed intro, and it just gets better from there!
2024.01.11
with Zach Barth
Your nice hosts invite Zachtronics founder Zach Barth to discuss the closing of the studio and the logistics of moving on from that.
2024.01.04
Cheating (omnibus edition)
This year, Ellen thought a lot about cheating in games. So your nice hosts kept doing episodes about it. Three in total over this last summer.
2023.12.28
Nicest of 2023
#336
The clubhouse continues the annual tradition of reviewing the past year. But first they need to talk about Doctor Who and new Minnesota state flag.
with Will Bredbeck
#335
Will went to school for illustration. After many plot twists—including a bike accident, leading a team of animators, and climbing mountains in Alaska—he ended up working in games.
2023.12.14
Nice Games Jam
#334
This week, the clubhouse becomes the birdhouse; we're talking pigeons! Dale created a prompt inspired by Ellen's activities as a child and she bombards your nice hosts with a TON of pigeon facts! We somehow designed a game out of it!
2023.12.08
- Debug Functionality
- Polish
#333
Your nice hosts start this episode with some personal updates, and (spoiler) it does not "go quick" as planned, then take on two really fascinating production topics.
2023.11.30
with John Donkin and Rob Donkin
#332
In this episode the brothers Rob and John Donkin of BadViking join the hosts in the clubhouse for a frank discussion on goals and expectations, scoping, and setting milestone timelines, and making feedback useful.
2023.11.23
with Jennifer Javornik
#331
Ellen spoke with this week's guest, Filament Games' chief partnerships officer Jennifer Javornik, at the 2023 Serious Play Conference in Toronto, Canada about game-based learning, but also about commercializing serious games, growing the
Serious Play Conference Special
#330
Earlier this autumn, Ellen visited Toronto to attend the Serious Play Conference. It's an event for people who design, develop, and study so-called "serious games" — that is, games used for education, training, therapy, and more.
2023.11.10
with Trenton Greyoak
#329
We welcome Trenton Greyoak into the clubhouse to talk about the vast topic of megagames! Trenton provides a huge amount of insight into the development and play of these games in this slightly more mega-sized than normal episode.
2023.11.02
- Polymorphism
- Save Scumming
#328
In this week's episode, Mark teaches us to cast polymorph, a 4th level transmutation spell. Just kidding! But Mark does put his high INT score to work helping us understand polymorphism, a useful feature of object-oriented programming.
2023.10.27