Everybody's Talking At Once

Victor Burgos stops by to talk about his studio's debut game, Neko Ghost, Jump! We get into the difficulty of figuring out who your game is for, the challenge of controlling scope and scale when working with a small, part-time team, and the perils of trying to live and work in the frankly-sometimes-pretty-hellish social space the internet has become.

You can get Neko Ghost, Jump! now on in Early Access on Steam and Epic.

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• One could of course argue that making a game that is both 2D and 3D is less an example of spikiness and more an example of shagginess.

• For those who missed that fathomlessly bleak New Year's letter from Yosuke Matsuda.

• Here's that "GameJam and Now" version comparison for Neko Ghost, Jump!

• Here's that interview that Victor did during the Neko Ghost, Jump! Kickstarter.

• When Drew made that comment about marginalized people being especially susceptible to unjust social consequences, he definitely had "Hot Allostatic Load" in mind. This is not to say that what Victor is describing is the same as what Porpentine went through, but simply to reiterate: "Don't be part of spaces that place an ideal or 'community leader' above people."

• For more on the genuine difficulties of building an inclusive community that makes room for people to learn and improve, and for conflicts to get resolved, here's our talk with Rami Ismail.

• We'd also direct you to Anisa Sanusi's episode for more about healthy community dynamics, and to Emma Kinema's episode for more about fostering democracy in every area of our lives.

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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.

It's the Year in Review 'cast! Drew, Lucio, and Franny (along with her alter-ego Michelle) have gathered 'round to reflect on the games we played this year, the games we didn't quite get to, and the games we're definitely going to play once they're available to be played.

2021 has truly been the sequel no one asked for, from the protracted coronavirus crisis, to the Cambrian explosion of crypto-scams, to all the usual stuff (like neoliberalism being both unwilling and unable to do much about climate catastrophe, rising authoritarianism, or even the stuff it's supposed to be great at and indeed organized around, like supply chains and shit).

But there've been games! Great ones, and in abundance. As we take stock of the stupidest year since last year, let's also take stock of the vibrant art form that this here podcast was built to celebrate, explore, and explain. Will the team be as slap-happy as they were last year? (Yes).

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• There are in fact 900 Korok seeds in Breath of the Wild.

• The Luigi's Mansion 3 DLC did come out in 2020.

• NieR Replicant does also contain a not-insubstantial quality of literal egg delivery.

• There are in fact 1,400 unique foley sound effects in Unpacking.

• Here's that People Make Games episode on the intersection of outsourcing and crunch.

• You can indeed still play the demo to A Musical Story, as well as UNBEATABLE [white label] and the Linda & Joan prologue, "Four Months Earlier."

• Do consider playing moon.

• We didn't get into the TTRPGs that Drew played this year, but those were Reign, Nobilis, Psionics, Flying Circus, and Tricks, Treats, and Spooky Streets. If you want to heat him playing those, and get a lovely story or two besides, then you can check out Dice Punks.

• I did in fact miss Skin Deep, so thanks to Franny for catching that. I should also mention Sephonine, the next game from the creators of Anodyne, Anodyne 2, and Even the Ocean.

• And since we did long ago abandon any pretense of being comprehensive here, we'll note here that Drew's to-read pile does also include Unsighted, Eastward, The Forgotten City, The Artful Escape, Moonglow Bay, Wild at Heart, Serious Sam 4, and (once it has co-op) Halo Infinite.

• Jorge and Scott at Experience Points were sourer on the back two thirds of Inscryption than we were, and they did a thorough, thoughtful breakdown of why. (We should also note that we recorded our roundup before the publishing of this year's Gameys).

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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.

Whether you're a longtime listener or just tuning in—either way, thanks for that!—here's a roundup of our conversations from 2021. These are of course just samples, especially insightful or funny or surprising moments from their respective episodes. If you want the full context, and a whole lot more good conversation, then do check out the full shows.

This is of course also a golden opportunity to feature a whole lot of incredible music from the games under discussion, so see below for the list (with a few copyright limbo-dwelling 78s thrown in where the guest didn't have a music-bearing project to share right at the moment).

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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.

Carlos Bordeu is the C in ACE Team, the studio behind Rock of Ages, Zeno Clash, The Deadly Tower of Monsters, SolSeraph, Abyss Odyssey, and most recently, The Eternal Cylinder. The studio's projects are reliably-original-unto-earnestly-bizarre, going full-tilt at strange, wondrous ideas and preoccupations. They're fascinating when they fail in places (Carlos' own main example being Zeno Clash II) and thrilling when they succeed, as The Eternal Cylinder does.

Here Carlos talks about the game's themes (and multifarious fan interpretations thereof), its slow-boiling narrative, and the absurd, ambitious tech behind its core conceit of a world that is lush, credible, and entirely describable, indeed doomed to be destroyed.

You can get The Eternal Cylinder on Epic, Xbox, and Playstation.

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• Here's that blog post by Jonas Kyratzes, who wrote The Eternal Cylinder's story.

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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.

Masao Kobayashi co-founded the indie studio Cut to Bits after about 15 years at Ubisoft, where he worked in a wide range of roles that often redounded to some form of project management and/or being a liaison between North American and Japanese teams and companies. That, and community management about as early as that became a thing, during which time (fun fact) he may have made the first page about a videogame in the history of Facebook.

Here he talks a bit about all of that, but just as much about the sheer surreality of late stage capitalism, with some perhaps-inevitable attention to the hypebeastly griftstravaganza that is the current NFT bubble—as well as the (sometimes only magically) less insane world of investors and studio structures.

You can learn more about Cut to Bits on their website.

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• As far as I can verify, Grand Theft Auto V cost about $265 million to make and market, and has now brought in more than $6 billion in revenue. If it's not both the most expensive and the most profitable game of all time, then it certainly does occupy a high spot on both of those lists.

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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.

The Mechanical World of Dr. Gearbox is first and foremost an attempt to rethink educational games, and specifically to rethink them into something that kids would actually want and choose to play. This is of course far from the first time that a game developer has attempted that lofty, elusive goal—so in this interview, Mike Grieci explains Flamehawk Studios' plan for building a game that not only takes the edge off kids doing their actual homework, but simultaneously provides a space for socializing and tells a meaningful, memorable story.

You can wishlist The Mechanical World of Dr. Gearbox, and play the demo, on Steam.

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• We talk a fair bit about Magic Wheelchair.

• For more on AbleGamers—as well as on the idea of many disabilities being invisible, and on the importance (and limits) of representation, and on the harmful trope of disabled folks supposedly wanting to "escape" their disabilities—do check out our talk with Greg Haynes.

• And for more on the character of Gustav in Spiritfarer, and on listening to feedback as an artist, you can give a listen to our conversation with Nick Guérin.

• There do indeed seem to be no notable videogame characters with cochlear implants (hype about how various versions of Hawkeye might be hearing impaired notwithstanding). Hayley from the recent Miles Morales game does bear mentioning, though, since she uses a hearing aid, talks to Miles in ASL, and (says the text) is very cool while doing so.

• Sarah Chayes calls infinite-acquisitiveness-for-its-own-sake "the Midas disease" in her book On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake.

• For those interested, here's the Dice Punks Spooky Streets spectacular.

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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.

At midnight tonight, David Galindo and his team are surprise-releasing ChefSquad, a collaborative cooking game that can only be played on Twitch. "Wait, what?" you might reasonably ask—and by way of answering you there, David has kindly stopped by to give us the scoop on this weird, joyful, formally inventive, genuinely new creation.

ChefSquad shares some DNA with David's Cook! Serve! Delicious! trilogy, but as much as it's a spin-off of those, it's also a foil to other stream-only games—games that, in David's view, pretty fundamentally misunderstand the technical peculiarities and cultural priorities of Twitch.

What does it mean for a game to be built not just for streaming but on the relationship between streamers and their audiences? In asking that, we also ask what kinds of games are better suited for a stream-centric media ecosystem in the first place, how developers can try and thrive in that brave new world, and how to even talk about the value of games nowadays.

You can play ChefSquad on Twitch.

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• That game about a starship bridge is Artemis.

• Here are WhatifJulia's Twitch and Twitter.

• It does seem like The Bell Is Right is all but lost to time, sadly.

• For those who haven't heard about hate raids, or the massive Twitch leak.

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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.

Aaron San Filippo is currently working on Whisker Squadron, a roguelike-alike riff on the arcadey corridor space-shooter genre (of which there are fewer examples than you might expect, given how large Star Fox looms). Before that, his studio Fippfly put out the similarly low-poly purist flight game Race the Sun, the console reimagining of minimalist overhead racer Absolute Drift, and the similar-yet-wildly-different puzzle games Evergarden and Twelvesmith.

Here Aaron talks not only about Flippfly's completed and in-progress projects, but also about some of the ones that didn't work out, including an open-world, physics-heavy romp about a cat flying a helicopter. Why did cats flying space fighter-ships work when a game about a single cat flying a single helicopter didn't? The answer turns out to answer a lot of additional questions about scope, collaboration, and how and why studios build on their previous work.

You can wishlist Whisker Squadron on Steam.

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• For more on character-based metaprogression (and how that can be not merely cosmetic, but also not strictly an escalation in player power), here's our talk with Don Bellenger.

• And for more about what we mean by "chunks," and more on the rigors and rewards of level editors, you are hereby cordially invited to dig our talk with Chris King.

• And for more on Whisker Squadron—as well as her other work on Kine, Watch This Space, and OnlyCans: Thirst Date—do give a listen to our talk with Chel Wong.

• I can now confirm that Twelvesmith too is a good time.

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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.

Megan Fox heads up Glass Bottom Games, the small-core-team-and-a-cloud-of-contractors behindSkateBIRD. (They were a larger core team for their first-person brawler/roguelike Spartan Fist, it should be noted). Here Megan talks about how SkateBIRD first came to be, and the nuts and bolts of bringing it to life—not only from a technical and artistic perspective, but also in terms of running a studio in a fair, equitable, robust, and sustainable manner.

We don't talk much about Glass Bottom Games' previous works (the cat-rescuing auto-runner Jones on Fire, the first-person brawler/roguelike Spartan Fist, and the comedy-noir adventure game platformer Hot Tin Roof: The Cat that Wore a Fedora). But that makes a certain sense, given how close to SkateBIRD's launch we were speaking. Megan was (and is) in it.

You can get SkateBIRD on Steam, Switch, Itch, Luna, and Xbox (where it's on Game Pass).

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• Here's the Kitfox crew on the baggy, the shaggy, and the craggy in game design.

• If you haven't already, do check out our talk with Xalavier Nelson Jr.

• And for more about how Blendo Games is operating these days, here are Laura Michet and Brendon Chung talking about Skin Deep.

• Meanwhile, our talk with Laia Bee covers the topic of why small studios generally can't juggle two games at once was not (among a whole lot of other topics).

• We didn't get to talk about Ultima, even though I wanted to. So regardless, here's Megan talking about Ultima VII.

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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.

Laia Bee is one of the three co-founders of Pincer Games, who've debuted with the card-based brawler Fighters of Fate. She's also deeply involved in the project of fostering a sense of community in the Uruguayan game development scene, and among South American game developers more broadly, and even more broadly than that, among Latinx game developers.

Here she talks about the process of launching a game—a multiplayer game, no less—as a team of three, the cooperative spirit of game development in Uruguay, and her approach to moderating #1ReasonToBe at this year's GDC.

You can get Fighters of Fate on Google Play.

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• Ironhide and Pomelo are two notable Uruguayan game studio success stories.

• Here's a video on Pincer Games' time at the Google Play Academy.

• The #1ReasonToBe panel that Laia moderated this past year is free to all in the GDC vault.

• You can hear more about the previous phase of #1ReasonToBe in our talk with Rami Ismial.

• And I mean, yeah, The Simpsons on how Americans see the world.

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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.