Everybody's Talking At Once

Ezra Szanton painstakingly platforms his way over to talk about To The Flame, the first in his new studio's forthcoming kinda-trilogy of horror games. He also talks about how to effective horror, what makes a game interesting to watch as well as play, and some of the potentially-actually-pretty-intereting applications for so-called AI.

You can find Ezra's games on his Itch.io page.

• Here's my piece on the hypothetical No Berlin Roguelike, as well as my Babycastles talk about masocore platformers, and about how Celeste fits into that tradition and also my article about the history of asking machines to lie to us.

• Be Honest is indeed featured in Tiny Mass Games, which you can hear more about in our talk with Matt Brelsford. We should note that Ezra also worked with recent guest Ryan Canuel, who himself is currently working with other recent guest Ichiro Lambe.

• Here's the SCP Wiki (which is intensely creepy, as discussed), as well as a great video essay on why VHS is such a great format for horror.

• And here's Ezra's appearance on Party of One.

• Ezra's studio co-founder is Fergus Ferguson, with whom he also collaborated on Radio Tower.

• Here's Edward Ongweso Jr. arguing for the outright abolition of venture capital.

• And worst of all, here are Snolf and Snolf 0.

———

"All The People Say (Season 5)" by Carpe Demon.

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.

Eric Peterson hops on over to talk about the joys of hobbyist game development, the things that need to change in professional game development (even when compared to other parts of tech), and the cultural importance of drawing little guys.

You can play JOUNCER PX (as it's called now) on itch.io.

• Drew has absolutely been referring Big Bad Beetleborgs as Bad Bad Beetleborgs, charmed by the misremembered repetition, for decades.

• Eric says "this the season" for witchy vibes, which indeed it was when we spoke. And of course, in a very important sense, it always is.

• Here's that scene from Jurassic Park, recreated in Dreams. And then there's this.

• This recent episode of This Machine Kills has a good summary of the labor actions taking place throughout, specifically, the US.

• If you have a few spare bucks, consider donating a few to Medical Aid for Palestinians, Palestine Legal, or If Not Now. There is also lots you can do, especially if you're in the US.

———

"All The People Say (Season 5)" by Carpe Demon.

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.

Ryan Canuel of Petricore stops by for a mostly-not-especially-spooky conversation about augmented reality, what bootstrapping actually means, and?alright, some stuff about horror movies right at the end there.

You can get the Mythic Realms demo in Quest App Lab.

———

"All The People Say (Season 5)" by Carpe Demon.

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.

Jerry Belich talks about his wild work in the Alt.ctrl milieu, his boundary-redefining escape rooms (for lack of a better term), and his digital game work, from Recommendation Dog and Reel Steal on the Playdate, to High on Life and High on Knife.

High on Knife is out now on Steam, Epic, Xbox, and Playstation.

• And here's the Experimental Gameplay Workshop where Jerry talks about Please Stand By.

• Arvi Teikari was indeed a student at the University of Helsinki when he started working on Baba Is You—and he also made the initial prototype for Nordic Game Jam. So that's (at least) two villages that one might say it took.

• Drew mentions at the end that his music is on Bandcamp, which it is, for now.

———

"All The People Say (Season 5)" by Carpe Demon.

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.

Des Gayle ascends to the sky island of podcastery to discuss his storied career as a producer, the difficulty of enjoying art when you know how it's made?experiencing it with kids can help?and the joys of self-contained stories in the age of the mega-franchise.

You can learn more about Altered Gene and Radical Forge on their websites.

The way it works at Marvel, and I'm sure at some point somebody will talk in detail about this, but part of Kevin [Feige]'s brilliance is that there isn't really a plan. There's an idea, but you can't have a plan if the movie you're making tanks. There's no plan after that, right? So, it's really about, as the movie succeeded, there was sort of an enthusiasm about well, what else could we do? [...]A lot of the stuff was made up in between the movies. And some of the best call forwards or callbacks were thought of after the fact.

• Here's our talk with Anton Hand about simulationist tendencies, and the limits thereof.

———

"All The People Say (Season 5)" by Carpe Demon.

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.

Matt Brelsford opens his hundred eyes and talks about the "loose collective" that is Tiny Mass Games, the spiritual dimension of game development, and (of course) Ophanim.

You can find Tiny Mass Games on itch.io.

• What the Internet calls Biblically Accurate Angels are indeed more properly called Ophanim.

• The "David Foster Wallace piece" Drew was referring to is Infinite Jest. (He overcorrected, not wanting to assume that all notable David Foster Wallace quotes were from Infinite Jest).

• And here's that Sasha Chapin piece about David Foster Wallace and "the gift of sight," which I've mentioned previously in the context of Death Stranding and Breath of the Wild.

• This conversation does sort of conflate games that are small in scope or short in duration with games that are smaller works, in the sense of being less polished, or made more quickly. There are, of course, hyper-polished, commercially released, "real" games that are, nonetheless and purposefully, quite short. Venba is a recent example. Portal is a less recent, oft-cited one.

• Here's a decent summary of what in the hell has been going on with Unity.

• Dave the Diver was made by Mintrocket, which is a subsidiary of Nexon, which has somewhere between 6,500 and 7,100 employees.

• As far as we can tell, the Supergiant team is 24 people. (They had "fewer than 20 people" when Hades launched into early access on the Epic store ).

• Here's The Videogame Industry Does Not Exist.

• And here's my piece on how weird it is that we want computers to lie to us.

• We should also note that the infinite Seinfeld episode didn't, like, end super well.

———

"All The People Say (Season 5)" by Carpe Demon.

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.

Drew and L talk about their time so far with Baldur's Gate 3, which works beautifully as a sprawling computer RPG, and as a unique intersection of free play and complex game rules—but how does it work as an introduction to Larian's RPGs? How about to Dungeons & Dragons?

This ends up being a conversation about expectations, about the actual moment-to-moment experience of playing games (especially strange and/or complicated ones), and about the push-and-pull of stepping outside our comfort zones, and then right back into them.

• "We'll do Beholders another day" was Drew channeling "We'll do blood another day."

• As ever, let us praise elegant design, but let us also praise messy design.

• Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade is the one that L recently played. It's on Nintendo's Switch Online quasi-virtual console Game Boy thing.

• L's new project is the Four Buds Floral Collective.

• Remnant II and Baldur's Gate 3 both prominently feature multi-classing: As in, you can be a Bard and a Barbarian, a Summoner and an Archon. This wildly increases the sense of player agency, and of build diversity—counter-intuitively enhancing the sense of free play by piling on more and more rules and mechanics and systems.

• Why do we say that's counter-intuitive? Well, in The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy, David Graeber says:

D&D, as its aficionados call it, is on one level the most free-form game imaginable, since the characters are allowed to do absolutely anything, within the confines of the world created by the Dungeon Master, with his books, maps, and tables and preset towns, castles, dungeons, wilderness. In many ways it’s actually quite anarchistic, since unlike classic war games where one commands armies, we have what anarchists would call an “affinity group,” a band of individuals cooperating with a common purpose (a quest, or simply the desire to accumulate treasure and experience), with complementary abilities (fighter, cleric, magic-user, thief …), but no explicit chain of command. So the social relations are the very opposite of impersonal bureaucratic hierarchies. However, in another sense, D&D represents the ultimate bureaucratization of antibureaucratic fantasy. There are catalogs for everything: types of monsters (stone giants, ice giants, fire giants …), each with carefully tabulated powers and average number of hit points (how hard it is to kill them); human abilities (strength, intelligence, wisdom, dexterity, constitution …); lists of spells available at different levels of capacity (magic missile, fireball, passwall …); types of gods or demons; effectiveness of different sorts of armor and weapons; even moral character (one can be lawful, neutral, or chaotic; good, neutral, or evil; combining these produces nine possible basic moral types …). The books are distantly evocative of Medieval bestiaries and grimoires. But they are largely composed of statistics. All important qualities can be reduced to number. It’s also true that in actual play, there are no rules; the books are just guidelines; the Dungeon Master can (indeed really ought to) play around with them, inventing new spells, monsters, and a thousand variations on existing ones. Every Dungeon Master’s universe is different. The numbers are in a sense a platform for crazy feats of the imagination, themselves a kind of poetic technology.

Still, the introduction of numbers, the standardization of types of character, ability, monster, treasure, spell, the concept of ability scores and hit-points, had profound effects when one moved from the world of 6-, 8-, 12- and 20-sided dice to one of digital interfaces. Computer games could turn fantasy into an almost entirely bureaucratic procedure: accumulation of points, the raising of levels, and so on. There was a return to the command of armies. This in turn set off a move in the other direction, by introducing role-playing back into the computer games (Elfquest, World of Warcraft …), in a constant weaving back and forth of the imperatives of poetic and bureaucratic technology. But in doing so, these games ultimately reinforce the sense that we live in a universe where accounting procedures define the very fabric of reality, where even the most absolute negation of the administered world we’re currently trapped in can only end up being yet another version of the exact same thing.

• Here's Xalavier Nelson Jr.'s important thread on Baldur's Gate 3 and our present, highly volatile era of "megagames". The thread has, unfortunately, been covered really badly and dishonestly, partially as a symptom of the closely-related phenomenon of "orbital decay" in mainstream games journalism.

———

"All The People Say (Season 5)" by Carpe Demon.

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.

Bryant Cannon tunes into our frequency to talk a bit about OXENFREE II: Lost Signals (which it's too early to spoil), and a whole lot about The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (which it's high time to start spoiling). We do in fact start spoiling the latest Zelda at 00:36:13.

OXENFREE II: Lost Signals is out now on Steam, Switch, Playstation, and Netflix.

• Here's the interview in which Eiji Aonuma contrasts the (remarkably fast) development cycle of Majora's Mask with the (remarkably not-fast) development cycle of Tears of the Kingdom.

• Here's Meg Jayanth's GDC talk about giving NPCs agency.

• And here's one of Bryant's many ambitious TotK flying machines.

———

"All The People Say (Season 5)" by Carpe Demon.

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.

Jaku is a security expert, a speedrunner, and a longtime builder of tools that expand how we interact with games online—from Crowd Control, which empowers streamers' audiences to alter the state of the games being streamed, to Turnip Exchange, which vastly expanded the scope and functionality of the stalk market at the height of the Animal Crossing craze.

Here Jaku tells the full story of Turnip Exchange for the first time. It's the story of a small project becoming enormously popular ridiculously quickly, and all the commercial, social, and technical implications that follow. More broadly, it's a story about attention, and what it means to be the next big thing here at the end of the end of history, in these waning days of "Web 2" social media, these halcyon days for grifts, rug-pulls, and jank-ass cloak-and-dagger.

Here are links to CrowdControl and Turnip Exchange.

• The Nookazon folks are making a game called Galactic Getaway.

• Drew became familiar with "the end of the end of history" thanks to Kohei Saito's Marx in the Anthropocene.

———

"All The People Say (Season 5)" by Carpe Demon.

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.

Jessica Antenorcruz has a unique, and also uniquely appropriate role on the upcoming drag queen fighting game Drag Her! She's in charge of the game's writing, from spoken lines to character concepts to plot?and she's also in charge on posing and motion, using her own physical performances to drive the game's hand-animated, rotoscoped realness.

Here she talks about why that works so well for a fighting game, with the genre's focus on over-the-top personae (and just as importantly, over-the-top performances of gender).

We also talk about Mortal Kombat and ClayFighter, as one ought.

You can follow the development of Drag Her! on Discord, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok.

• And here's Ruben Ferdinand's piece about Yoko Taro and "weird feelings for weird people."

———

"All The People Say (Season 5)" by Carpe Demon.

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.