Roundtable

Ellen's back for a serendipitously in-sync pair of metacognition-rich roundtable topics.

Your nice host return to the complex and sometimes underappreciated world of quality assurance in the game dev space, and also explore discovery as a design focus.

Your nice hosts talk about saving both your position in a game and saving your secrets from being spread around.

Mark rushes through the introduction to talk about his two rush projects, one of which, Blippo+, was announced on Sunday during the PC Gaming Show!

Your nice hosts all secured a Switch 2 pre-order... from a certain point of view. Then, Stephen examines the body, Mark attempts a vocabulary, and Lydia has recommendations.

In this episode the club house talks about the games that they have been playing. Mark attempts to define the terms good friction and bad friction, declares his distaste of rouge-likes, and talks about friction in his current projects.

A new Nintendo is on the way, and your nice hosts talk about both it and the world it's being born into.

Mark is still out sick, so Dale takes his place in the clubhouse and brings a topic!

Beth leads Mark and Stephen through a therapy session. Stephen talks Kickstarter, Mark talks Patreon, and everyone agrees Beth's game Verdant Skies is great. 

Lydia joins the clubhouse for her first regular episode as a host (it's calendar math)! The clubhouse discusses the release of Civilization VII and how it is taking up all of Stephen's time.

This week, your nice hosts talk a little bit about our civic duty before getting into two very on-brand topics. Make a plan to vote on (or before!) November 5th.

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.

This week, learn about what Ellen was like as a student. Stephen wonders if he’s made a huge mistake, Ellen does some work research, and Mark insists that there is no such thing as magic.

There are now episodes of Nice Games Club for each new day of the year! When you get to the last day of that year, you'll hear about Audio Middleware and Psychic Distance from us in the clubhouse.

It's a nice sleepover as this (and next) week's episode is recorded from Ellen's basement in Duluth. Mark has an angle, Ellen shares her topic, and Stephen manages.