Everybody's Talking At Once

After a decade working on the Assassin's Creed games, Nick Guérin joined Thunder Lotus Games as the Creative Director on Spiritfarer, a farming and management sim about death, kindness, labor, wants, needs, and all manner of other things that Assassin's Creed (venerable though it is) rarely finds the space to explore. (What a moment it is, going indie).

Here we talk about the thrills and pitfalls of inventing an afterlife?or a liminal space between life and death, as in Necrobarista—the importance of getting little human details right, and the enormous difference between a game that merely contains death and one that's thoughtful about the process of dying. And yes, we do also talk about the whole Gustav thing.

A content warning is in order for a (largely death-positive) conversation about death and dying. And a TRIGGER WARNING for a discussion of sexual assault from to 00:44:24 to 00:46:50.

You can get Spiritfarer on Steam, GOG, Epic, Itch, Switch, PS4, and Xbox (with also includes PC access via the Microsoft Store, and GamePass, and all that).

• For more on fostering a sense of closeness and community in games, check out our talk with Nils Deneken, and for more on death positivity (in and out of games), check out our talk with Gabby DaRienzo.

• Here's Gustave Doré's etching of Charon from his illustrations of The Divine Comedy. This is the image that Nick mentions as one of the three main original points of inspiration for Spiritfarer, the other two being Studio Ghibli films like My Neighbor Totoro, and farm sims like Harvest Moon and Stardew Valley.

• Here I thought I'd found an honest-to-God example of a pataphor in the wild, but that remains a tricky thing to do definitively.

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Brian Handy stops by to discuss Wild Honesty, his game of, well, wild honesty. Just how do you design an experience of radical openness and ever-expanding intimacy? How do you then adapt that networked play, with all its extra layers of isolation and all the kinds of human connection it lack by default? (Brian would argue that it means intentionally not drawing in the player into the game's fiction?which takes an usual quantity and quality of design discipline).

Here we talk about all of that, as well as about design, linguistics, artificial intelligence, the kinds of conversations people of faith might be more used to having, and believe it or not, even an interesting angle on the ageless games-as-art debate.

You can get Wild Honesty on Steam and Itch.

• TableTopics, for the record, is one of the tabletop conversation games that I'd encountered before and kind of bounced off of. (This is not a review of TableTopics, however).

• Here's the conversation that got me thinking about Keynes recently.

• Sure, I'll link to John Berger's Ways of Seeing again. What am I gonna do, not link to it again?

• And here's Disco Bear!

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Oskar Stålberg builds little town dioramas, as he puts it?or more exactly, he builds the procedural generation tools that allow him, and his algorithms, and you the player to build little town dioramas together. You could call this an extension of his work on the "megamap" in The Division, and certainly of his smaller projects such as Brick Block, and of the elegant map generation in his first commercial indie game Bad North. But in some ways, Townscaper is the purest and most focused expression of his sensibility, his skill, and his aesthetical and technical preoccupations.

Here Oskar talks about the allure of procedural generation, the oft-unsung joys of toys (as distinct from games or tools), and the vital emotional difference between encountering randomness and embracing wonk.

You can get Townscaper on Steam.

• "Don't be a sucker" is a reference to this.

• Here's Oskar getting deeper into the technical side of the wonky quad grid in Townscaper.

• And here he is talking about the procedural generation in Bad North, and specifically about that game's use of wave function collapse.

• Martin Kvale's work really is wonderful.

• The best summary of that research on intrinsic and extrinsic rewards is probably this episode of Game Maker's Toolkit.

• The study that I mentioned, and that Mark Brown uses as a source in that video, is this one.

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Nils Deneken has been working on Mutazione in one way or another since 2008. (You might have heard 2009, but in this interview, we set that particular misconception straight!) Through more than a decade of reinvention and revision, the game has retained its core of ensemble-cast intimacy and gorgeous mutated nature (rendered in desaturated vectors and a sense of figure that it at once weighty and abstract).

In this conversation, Nils talks about the emotional and thematic center of Mutazione—from decentering the player-character, to celebrating our complicated relationship to the natural world, to depicting a utopian community where people can, like, you know, talk stuff out.

You can play Mutazione on PS4, Steam, GOG, Game Jolt, Itch, and Apple Arcade.

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Damon Reece is the lead writer on Necrobarista, a visual novel about death and coffee (and therefore the rest of life) rendered in a bespoke-unto-madness 3D anime style and set very definitively in Melbourne, Australia. It's in most ways a visual novel, but there are key ways in which it couldn't be written or built like an ordinary one of those?or indeed like a movie, or quite like anything else.

In this conversation, Damon tells me how this wonderful game was made, why Route 59 probably wouldn't make a game like this again, why Metroid Prime rules, and all sorts of stuff that Australian players don't need explained to them even though I most definitely did?like the fact that Necrobarista isn not set in the future, and what the hell Goon of Fortune is.

You can play Necrobarista on Steam and Apple Arcade.

• Here's the profoundly Australian interview I mentioned.

• If you do want to hear more about indigenous Australian (or "Australian") representation in games, do check out our talk with Phoebe Watson about Chaos Tavern.

• Starbucks has made a bit more headway in Colombia, but the fight has not been lost as yet.

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Drew and Lucio check in on the state of co-op games, especially online ones, in this strange isolated times. How has co-op changed over the past few decades, both in character and in quantity? Why are we so drawn to cooperative games, and why (for us) does team competition just not scratch that same itch? And when you get right down to it, what the hell is up with the guys who grab you and throw you off in Fall Guys?

It's a conversation about cooperation in games, and the broader, deeper value of cooperation in general. Plus, we talk about Goemon's Great Adventure, because of course we do!

• You can indeed go all the way back to our first and second episodes (interviews with Jake Kazdal and Davey Wreden, respectively) and our third (Lucio's debut) though the magic of the archive.

• And here's Drew's conversation with Kenny Lee, of Cellar Door Games.

• The Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles Remastered Edition has online co-op, but not couch co-op. Apologies if that wasn't clear.

• A few times in this episode, we mention the streams that we've been doing lately. Like Lucio says, they've been on at odd hours, but they're good stuff?and you can watch them, if you're so inclined, on YouTube and Twitch.

• Here's that video about Call of Duty.

• Unravel, not unravelled.

• Streets of Fire is the movie I was thinking of. D'oh.

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Warren Arnold has been with Jackbox Games since they were Jellyvision, having worked first on the Facebook iteration of You Don't Know Jack, and later on every Jackbox Party Pack, including the forthcoming seventh one. Here he talks about the peculiarities of Jackbox Games' design process, the finer points of comedy writing in big, collaborative projects, and the ethical mandates of moderation—with special attention to his work on Push the Button, Patently Stupid, and Quiplash 3.

You can play The Jacbkbox Party Packs on Steam, Epic, PS4, Xbox One, Switch, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, Android TV, Xfinity, and the Mac App Store, with links to all those storefronts on the Jackbox Games website.

• Here's "People Are Alike All Over," the Twilight Zone episode that inspired Push the Button.

• Here's a blog post on the new moderation features in Party Pack 7.

• Here's the current state of the profoundly bizarre U.S. Army Esports Team situation, with its bannings and unbannings.

• And here's that stream that showed an early version of Quiplash 3 specifically, and a more recent stream showing a slightly less early version!

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Ilan Eshkeri has had a storied career in film and television—from Layer Cake, 47 Ronin, and Ninja Assassin, to Black Sea, Still Alice, Austenland, and the Shaun the Sheep Movie—and has recently been working in video games as well. He's now taken the playful reactive soundtracking tricks he honed on The Sims 4 and applied them to the samurai-epic hypercinema of Ghost of Tsushima.

This score, a collaboration with Shigeru Umebayashi (who Ilan worked with on Hannibal Rising as well) showcases Ilan's penchant for research, and for letting individual instrumentalists leave their stamp on the pieces they play. Here he talks about his process, his goals on this particular work, and the discoveries he made along the way.

You can play Ghost of Tsushima on PS4.

• If you've never seen Junko Ueda perform, you should probably go ahead and fix that.

• I'm pretty sure it was Raymond Chandler who said that "there is no art without resistance to the medium."

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Brendon Chung is the main creative force behind Atom Zombie Smasher, Gravity Bone, Thirty Flights of Loving, Flotilla, Flotilla 2, Quadrilateral Cowboy, and the upcoming Skin Deep. Laura Michet is an accomplished writer, and a perhaps equally accomplished editor, having lent her talents to Industries of Titan, Frog Fractions 2, and Where The Water Tastes Like Wine?not to mention her really excellent noncommercial work, which includes one of the greatest Twine games ever made, Swan Hill. Now they're making games together, beginning with Planetfriend.

Here Brendon and Laura discuss their work, the actual process of working during (and through) our current hellish historical moment, and the infinite solace to be found in movies.

You can find Brendon's work on the Blendo Games website, and wishlist Skin Deep on Steam.

• And the movies Brendan and Laura mentioned were The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, Summer Wars, Artemis Fowl, Heist, Da 5 Bloods, and Why Don't You Play in Hell?

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Bobby Fowler and Brenda Noiseux outrun the Hunter to join us again and talk about Space Chase, their co-op tabletop map-'em-up and the delightful follow-up to their assiduously PvP card game Wicked Apples. This is, to put it mildly, a strange time to be making indie tabletop games—not only because tabletop games are irresolvably social (much to the fear-then-joy of introverts such as myself) but also because the way these things usually get sold is by players and developers playing together. That's intimate, and wonderful, and keenly missing from our lives right now (but hopefully, hopefully not for too much longer).

You can get Space Chase and Wicked Apples on the Almost A Game website.

• PAX East was indeed February 27 to March 1 this year.

• The Jason Rohrer game I was thinking of was Diamond Trust of London.

• Pipe Mania!

• Here's that message from Toby Fox.

• At time of posting, PAX Unplugged is still on.

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