Welcome to Dev Game Club, where this week we continue our series on the unique Animal Crossing. We talk about the holidays we visited, Mr. Resetti and not wanting to mess with your save, going to the island, and many more, before turning to our series takeaways and feedback. Dev Game Club looks at classic video games and plays through them over several episodes, providing commentary.

Sections played: An hour a day! (Many in holidays.)

Podcast breakdown: 0:41 Animal Crossing 1:07:38 Break 1:08:13 Takeaways and Feedback

Issues covered: Brett's gyroids and UFO, Tim's asteroid, the attract mode and seeing outfits you don't have yet, learning about how to play the stalk market, whether the animals talk about things you haven't engaged with, additional visiting characters, how the fireworks work, the tricks on Halloween, how Jack works on Halloween, Tortimer's gifts on holidays, losing items to tricksters, having big scares on Halloween as a kid, how different Halloween is, the evolving nature of Mr Resetti, wanting to protect your town, the animal version of the Windows BSOD, playful shaming, having a dialogue with a designer, emerging design, recognizing what the player is going to do, seeing the things the player will do, encouraging the player to diverge from the intended style of play, weeds everywhere, setting the world state on the clock, having unique sets of animals between us, speculating about why the acre transitions occur, aesthetic choices and whether that translated to movement, Tim's adventures with morning aerobics and sports day, lacking interactions in mini-games, changing up the appointment play, trading off appointment play with real-world tension, theme sets on holidays, moving events to be longer time-framed for MMOs, talking about the new game's egg-onomy, reaching the island via Kapp'n, picking coconuts and wearing island shirts, Kapp'n's songs, the remarkable amount of discovery, Brett finds a coelacanth, the variety of bugs and other collectibles, attuning yourself to the world and being able to read things in the environment, appointment play and mobile gaming influence, the connection to mobile and social games, tend-and-befriend, means of player expression, Brett's gyroid fascination, growing expressiveness of the series, representing everything in the world, mechanically using the things that players interact with as animals and animal interactions, a huge variety of discovery supplanted by shallow interactions, not getting stuck, the potential to generate stories, a singing non-review delivered as a dramatic reading, the role of a designer for longer and larger development (such as AAA), the shifting needs for system design, communicating and holding a vision for an element of a design, advocacy and the narrative or progression of a design, communicating across departments, the complications of enemy or vehicle design, having to put micro pieces together that support the macro, being about more than the ideas, answering lots of why questions.

Games, people, and influences mentioned or discussed: The X-Files, Auld Lang Syne, Blizzard Entertainment, RoboCop, Starcraft, Asteroids, Gothic Chocobo, Game Boy Player, World of Warcraft, GTA III, Facebook, Zynga, FarmVille, Mafia Wars, The Sims, Pixar, Batman, Waypoint, Metal Gear Solid 4, Civilization, Peyton Place, Beverly Hills 90210, Blarg42, Pokemon, Billy/The2ndQuest, Halo (series), SW Republic Commando, Jamie Griesemer, Ryan Darcy, Elan Ruskin, Left 4 Dead, Epic Mickey, Kirby's Epic Yarn, Kirk Hamilton, Aaron Evers.

Next time: An hour a day of Animal Crossing: New Horizons

Errata: Although I stand by my memory of there being a coelacanth discovered in the Mediterranean in the 90s, the discovery that coelacanths had survived to the modern era dates back to one being caught in 1938.

Also: Brett, what is a "stegalosaurus?" STEGOSAURUS.

The television show Brett was looking for was Melrose Place. Peyton Place was in fact a multi-year running prime time soap rather than a mini-series.

Links: Five GameCubes and Four Sword

Jamie Griesemer: Changing the Time Between Shots for the Sniper Rifle from 0.5 to 0.7 Seconds for Halo 3

Ryan Darcy: Designing Spartan Abilities for Halo 5: Guardians

Elan Ruskin: AI-Driven Dynamic Dialog through Fuzzy Pattern Matching

Twitch: brettdouville, instagram:timlongojr, @brett_douville, @timlongojr, and @devgameclub [email protected]