Everybody's Talking At Once

Moo Yu stops by to talk about his work on Knights and Bikes, Subsurface Circular, LittleBigPlanet, and several of the Ratchet & Clank games?plus his advocacy, activism, and mentorship via POC in Play. Beyond that, he gets into a deep, generous discussion about the strange position of the code itself in how we understand games. Obviously the code is necessary and important, but it's not necessarily what we talk about when we talk about games, exactly. So how do we talk about the work a programmer does on a game, without necessarily going all the way down some highly technical, domain-specific rabbit hole or other? That seems important.

You can get Knights and Bikes on Steam, GOG, PS4, and Switch.

• The video I was thinking of was not the big player-facing PlayStation 5 hardware reveal, but that vastly more developer-facing Unreal Engine 5 demo.

• In the spirit of keeping the notes quasi--game-related, here's Polygon's roundup of ways to support the current protests.

Logo by Aaron Perry-Zucker, using Icons by by Llisole, Dávid Gladiš, Atif Arshad, Daniel Nochta, Mike Rowe, Jakub Čaja, Raji Purcell and IconsGhost from the Noun Project.

Greg Haynes is the Lead Games User Researcher at AbleGamers, an organization dedicated, simply but profoundly, to making sure that everyone can play video games, regardless of disability. That's a huge mandate, serving a dauntingly large and diverse group of players. So in this interview, Greg talks us through AbleGamers' philosophy and approach, from research via Player Panels, to workshops and consultancy matching with developers, to their rightly-celebrated work on what is now known as the Xbox Adaptive Controller (controller formerly known as the Adroit Switchblade), to what might be next.

You can find out more about AbleGamers on their website.

• Here's that stunning Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality on itch.io.

• Here's some context on AbleGames' work with Crystal Dynamics on Marvel's Avengers, and specifically Cherry Thompson's work on the game.

• Here's the Game Maker's Toolkit "2019 in Accessibility" video.

• And here's that Noclip podcast about Sekiro.

• The golden strawberries in Celeste do count, but they count exactly the same as regular-ass strawberries—so there's absolutely nothing in the entire game, including the best ending, that requires a player to mess around with the golden strawberries at all.

• And Brolylegs is impressive as hell. Street Fighter is the game he plays at a tournament level, and he recently beat Dark Souls—with his face, he hastens to point out—on his Twitch channel.

• Here's the other interview with Greg that I mentioned.

"All The People Say (Season 3)" by Holly Hyperion.

Logo by Aaron Perry-Zucker, using Icons by by Llisole, Dávid Gladiš, Atif Arshad, Daniel Nochta, Mike Rowe, Jakub Čaja, Raji Purcell and IconsGhost from the Noun Project.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons has been stealing hearts, blowing up timelines, and filling in blanks in our shared social fabric for about two surreally protracted months now. For once, the zeitgeist hasn't outrun our goofy, research-heavy way of picking topics!

So in this episode, Lauren Villegas joins in to talk about Animal Crossing, inclusivity, games-as-platforms, our shifting notions of gendered play, and some 90s miscellany.

We don't need to tell you that you can get Animal Crossing: New Horizons on Switch.

• And here's Shigeru Miyamoto's talk about the wife-o-meter.

• By way of decoding the 90s references, Polly Pocket (for girls!) and Mighty Max (for boys!)

• Here's a full playthrough of Rockett's New School.

• And an IndieCade interview with Brenda Laurel of Purple Moon, as well as a few of her "games for girls" contemporaries. She gets into how some of her research back in the day (which Lauren and I do feel has some stereotypey gendered assumptions in retrospect) is "historically situated," and very much a direct response to the videogames market of the time. Her book is something I'll definitely give a read at some point, too.

• FEMICOM is a fascinating resource, too.

• I think about the Bartle taxonomy of player types kind of a lot.

• As a contrast to Animal Crossing-as-platform, here's Dan Olson's piece on the hellscape that is (was?) Fortnite-as-platform.

• Here's the episode of Animal Talking with Danny Trejo and Elijah Wood.

• Here's a story about the Getty putting a bunch of its collection online in Animal Crossing form. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York did something similar, too.

• And here's the Monterey Bay Aquarium's collaboration with the Chicago Field Museum.

• Kurt Vonnegut did indeed do an interview in Second Life.

• In case you're not sure what I meant about seeing the true ending.

• Here's that story about FOMO-fueled Animal Crossing save deletion, as well as Nathan Grayson's piece.

• Here's my Destiny 2 tidying stream.

• And here's that piece about skin tones and representation in Animal Crossing.

"All The People Say (Season 3)" by Holly Hyperion.

Logo by Aaron Perry-Zucker, using Icons by by Llisole, Dávid Gladiš, Atif Arshad, Daniel Nochta, Mike Rowe, Jakub Čaja, Raji Purcell and IconsGhost from the Noun Project.

Nikita Mikros and Josh DeBonis created the original field game Killer Queen, before adapting it into the venerable indie arcade esport institution that it is today. They were a bit less involved in the home game adaptation, Killer Queen Black, since to them, Killer Queen was a fundamentally face-to-face experience, communitarian to the point of being politically radical in its own way.

But then the world went all weird. So now Nik and Josh are working on a new, single-player game for Killer Queen fans in the time of COVID-19. ABS vs THE BLOOD QUEEN [which was later retitled ZOMBEEZ: A Killer Queen Remix] is a way for Killer Queen aficionados to keep their skills sharp while staying home, sure, but it's also a vivid creation in its own right, sticking with the same world while tonally shifting to a sort of frantic horror that can't help but feel like a product of our strange, strange times through and through.

They're also making the thing fast, but they did take some time to stop by and talk about the new project (as well as the legacy of Killer Queen more broadly) with us.

You can play Killer Queen at an arcade maybe-near you once the world is a shade less insane.

• Here are Jackbox Games' most recent charitable endeavors.

• And here's Killer Quarantine TV (which does indeed include cooking shows, cosplay-adjacent makeup, and lots else besides).

"All The People Say (Season 3)" by Holly Hyperion.

Logo by Aaron Perry-Zucker, using Icons by by Llisole, Dávid Gladiš, Atif Arshad, Daniel Nochta, Mike Rowe, Jakub Čaja, Raji Purcell and IconsGhost from the Noun Project.

Treachery in Beatdown City is a beat-'em-up/turn-based RPG mashup that combines a vast array of Shawn Alexander Allen's preoccupations, from a shifting and in some ways radicalizing political consciousness, to questions of hybrid identity, to frustrations with an ever-gentrifying New York. It's a game about the world going strange, and about when violence is not only justified but necessary, and not only cathartic but productive. It's a power fantasy, to be sure, but by no means a callow one. It's got stuff on its mind. It uses the seductive qualities inherent in power fantasies to broaden the player's horizons. It also, not incidentally, does the whole turn-based/realtime hybrid combat thing one whole hell of a lot more successfully than the Final Fantasy VII Remake does (in my opinion, not Shawn's; @ me, not him).

You can get Treachery in Beatdown City on Steam and Switch.

• And here's his A.MAZE talk, "Put Your Glock Away, I've Got a Stronger Weapon for You."

• There does not seem to be a publicly-available recording of "Building Better Beat 'Em Ups," unfortunately. (I will of course update the show notes if I find one).

• Three interviews that I consulted a bunch while prepping for my talk with Shawn were this one in Rock, Paper, Shotgun, this one in Gamasutra, and this one in Monster Vine.

• Here's the DJ Premier Verzuz RZA madness that Shawn mentioned.

• And here's the beyond-excellent trailer for Treachery in Beatdown City featuring a cut of Open Mike Eagle's incredible song for the game (and here's Open Mike Eagle's Patreon).

• Game Devs of Color is a cool-as hell event, and I do talk to Phoebe Watson about it a bit in her episode of this here podcast.

• Here's a great piece about Shovel Knight's selective, purposeful breaking of the rules of NES color palettes and suchlike.

• Dia Lacina did indeed make the connection between Treachery in Beatdown City's elegant blending of real-time and turn-based combat on the one hand, and Final Fantasy VII Remake's... less elegant blending on the other.

• And last but not least, here are Hbomberguy's videos on Fallout 3 and Undertale, for those who haven't seen them.

"All The People Say (Season 3)" by Holly Hyperion.

Logo by Aaron Perry-Zucker, using Icons by by Llisole, Dávid Gladiš, Atif Arshad, Daniel Nochta, Mike Rowe, Jakub Čaja, Raji Purcell and IconsGhost from the Noun Project.

Tijmen Tio is one quarter of the game dev collective/boyband Sokpop, who've been putting out a game every two weeks since 2018. It's a way of working that requires a great deal of trust among the developers, and between them and their audience—which makes it unique, and beautiful, and especially worth exploring as the world continues to go fully nuts.

We talk about how Sokpop started doing what they do, the "stupid ideas" (Tijmen's term) that they floated and rejected along the way, and some of the truly lovely work that Tijmen has made for the subscribers, from simmiland to Doler to Featherfall. (I do wish we'd also gotten to talk about Sproots and Bandapes, but that's the whole thing. right? There's just so much, and so much of it is so strange, and so, so good).

You can get Sokpop's games on itch.io, Steam, and of course, their Patreon.

• As is the one that Zach Gage and Bennett Foddy did.

• Brian David Gilbert's video, which introduced a whole lot of new folks to Sokpop, remains a goofy delight as well.

Logo by Aaron Perry-Zucker, using Icons by by Llisole, Dávid Gladiš, Atif Arshad, Daniel Nochta, Mike Rowe, Jakub Čaja, Raji Purcell and IconsGhost from the Noun Project.

Olof Karlsson autoruns on over to talk about Wunderling, the puzzle-platformer where you're a not-a-goomba with some ambition (or maybe just some especially good-bad luck). We talk about the finer points of movement code (and the oft-subliminal nature of gamefeel), the art of building on what you like in other games (and excising what you don't), and how to design in collectables in ways that are compelling as well as compulsive.

You can get Wunderling on Steam and Switch.

• Here's a longplay of Gimmick!, as well as a great Hardcore Gaming 101 piece about the game.

• Giant Bomb also did a little piece on Bergsala.

• Here's the best intro to that "four-step level design" in Mario games.

• As I say in the intro, that incredible game by Camila Gormaz is called Nanopesos. It's playable for free in English, Spanish, and (for some reason) Esperanto.

• That Yoko Taro quote I referred to comes from this promotional video, which I learned about because of this excellent article.

• I've shared Celeste's movement code a fair few times before, but hey.

Logo by Aaron Perry-Zucker, using Icons by by Llisole, Dávid Gladiš, Atif Arshad, Daniel Nochta, Mike Rowe, Jakub Čaja, Raji Purcell and IconsGhost from the Noun Project.

Arvi Teikari is here to talk about Baba Is You, as well as Environmental Station Alpha, its forthcoming sequel, and the bonny pile of other gamic delights that he's made and is making. Along the way we also talk about the function of criticism and reviews, the ever-befuddling burlesque of spoiler avoidance, and icebergvanias (a semi-obscure maybe-genre that I'll definitely revisit in more detail in our blog sometime, for those who want a primer).

SPOILERS about Baba's late-game surprises from 48:05 to 59:03 and 1:35:46 to 1:37:12.

You can get Baba Is You on Steam, itch.io, Humble, and Switch.

• I believe it was Heather Flowers who said that thing about world-building, and I believe that she said it on Twitter, but I'm having a hell of a time finding the Tweet.

• It was actually at the Gamelab Conference that Arvi talked about designing "Entropy" fairly early in the game's design process.

• His disembodied voice time with the GDC folks is lovely too, though, and it gets a shade more technical besides.

• And here's why Baba's name is Baba. (Just so soft and round is Baba). This is of course also why Keke's name is Keke.

Logo by Aaron Perry-Zucker, using Icons by by Llisole, Dávid Gladiš, Atif Arshad, Daniel Nochta, Mike Rowe, Jakub Čaja, Raji Purcell and IconsGhost from the Noun Project.

Adriel Wallick has been running Train Jam, a game-make-a-thon on a train traveling from Chicago to the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, since 2014. The event has produced a truly staggering number of weird and wonderful creations, and just as importantly, it's been creatively and socially reinvigorating foe a whole lot of people who make games.

This year, though, Train Jam has had to be cancelled (along with GDC, E3, and um, the NBA season) due to COVID-19. So in this episode, you'll hear Adriel talk about Train Jam 2020 both before and after she had to make the call to cancel it—and along the way, you'll also hear her talk about the value of jams more generally, the importance of Mischief Makers, and dogs.

You can play the previous Train Jam games here.

• I couldn't find a treatment of the Vatican's exorcist convention that lacked both snark and slack-jawed credulity, so here's a medium-snarky one.

• Here's Argentina Train Jam.

• And here's some documentation of the A MAZE. Train Jam in South Africa in 2018 and 2019.

• Midnight Rescue! is the game Adriel was thinking of that wasn't Mischief Makers.

• Also, The Astyanax.

Logo by Aaron Perry-Zucker, using Icons by by Llisole, Dávid Gladiš, Atif Arshad, Daniel Nochta, Mike Rowe, Jakub Čaja, Raji Purcell and IconsGhost from the Noun Project.

William Chyr's long-in-the-works puzzle-exploration art installation of a game, Manifold Garden, has been out in the world for a few months now—which means it's the perfect time to talk through how the game came to be, how it changed over the past seven years, and how it fits into the tradition of mysterious garden games (let's call them) like Starseed Pilgrim.

Along the way, we discuss the questionable orthodoxies of puzzle design, how to listen for what a game wants, and why your project needs a producer—and more specifically, why an adversarial relationship between producer and artist can actually be healthy and necessary.

You can get Manifold Garden on Apple Arcade and Epic.

• If you haven't played Starseed Pilgrim, give it a go. And if you'd like to hear more about why it's interesting—before, after, or instead of playing it—then do check out Starseed Observatory. (Full disclosure: One of the pieces featured there is mine).

• Here's Droqen's piece on whyproofing.

• Honestly at this point it's a running gag, how often I point people toward Ways of Seeing, but it just makes so very many otherwise nonsensical things make sense.

• And do consider giving Arthur Brussee a follow as well.

Logo by Aaron Perry-Zucker, using Icons by by Llisole, Dávid Gladiš, Atif Arshad, Daniel Nochta, Mike Rowe, Jakub Čaja, Raji Purcell and IconsGhost from the Noun Project.