As promised, the three Korths, Andy, Beth and Gabe, join us in the clubhouse for our hundred and two or so episode tradition! The clubhouse was too crowded to fit Mark in, but having five hosts makes up for it. Your nice hosts design a game about fixing the messes your child makes and then returning the favor as you age.

• Andy had brought up a chaotic game where you need to prevent your infant from getting into trouble, turns out there's a lot of those but here's an example!
• Who's Your Daddy -  Evil Tortilla Games, Steam

PromptCreate a game where you need to follow around a person or a thing that is breaking stuff. You gotta fix it!Game typeDesign documentPlayer count1Rules

• Child causes destruction and you have to fix it
• Child become adult you have to fix parent stuff
• Parent needs to work (remotely) and also fix whatever the kid has broken
  • You want to fix the things as best as you can before your partner gets home
  • Partner will do some fixing at the end of the day (to prevent negative feedback loop)
• Each level is just one day in the life of this family
  • The last level, the parent retires and now the kid is an adult and has to fix parents’ messes
  • And maybe also has a kid they need to take care of
• Mess examples
  • Older parent
    • Find keys
    • Knocking a pot off the stove
    • Install rail in shower/toilet
    • Bookcase falls down
  • Toddler
    • Pulling things with cords (as toddler)
    • Crayons on the walls
    • Legos (or any toy)
  • Pulled shower curtain
  • Teenager
    • Get mad at a thing and punch a hole in the wall
    • Leave the fridge open
    • Shave without cleaning sink
    • Dirty clothes
    • Plates everywhere
    • Dart board
    • Sticky slime
    • Leave milk on table
• What does cleaning look like?
  • Different minigames
• Co-op mode
  • Two parents, or parent and grandparent
• Orthographic camera angle that slides from one room to another
• Maybe the daycare couldn’t take the kid today
  • Basically these are snapshots of unexpected parenting that the player needs to deal with
• Need moments of time for narrative/exploration time
  • When you find an important item, time stops so the player can appreciate it
  • You can find things that you made as a kid
• More preventative tasks for the player to do
  • Place paper around so kid doesn’t draw on walls
• Parent sim
  • Decisions impact future decisions and might cause problems depending
  • How you parent changes how you recover energy/your stats during elderly stages
• Intro
  • Set the tone of the home
  • Ask questions for the player to adjust the game for them somewhat
    • How does a messy home make you feel?
    • How do you respond to criticism? How do you respond to conflict?
    • Center questions on the parent, not the child.
    • What kinds of appliances do you have in your home?

As is tradition, a couple of episodes after a hundredth we invite one or more of our pals the Korths into the clubhouse. This time we were lucky enough to have all of the family Korths (coming soon), and a bonus interview with Andy Korth! We talk with him about his recent work updating Verdant Skies.

Revisiting Your GamesGame DesignProductionUI / UXVerdant Skies - Howling Moon SoftwarePreviously we had Beth Korth on to talk about Narrative Design, in general and related to Verdant Skies.Narrative Design We had the whole Korth family on in this episode.Families in GamesAndy and Beth were both on in a deep dive into the code of Verdant Skies in this video episode.Code Comment: "Verdant Skies"And here's the episode that started the tradition!Steam GreenlightGamers using game controllers for PC gaming has tripled since 2018 — Steam surv… - Christopher Harper, Tom's Hardware

It's a big one for your nice hosts... and your newest nice host wants to know more. Lydia takes Mark and Stephen though the history of the program, in three acts.

0:02:04Act I: Interview0:57:38Act II: Quiz1:12:47Act III: Jam

Ellen's back for a serendipitously in-sync pair of metacognition-rich roundtable topics. In this episode, Lydia shares a chapter from one of her favorite books and tries to explain ganache while Stephen laments how easy it is to duct tape on features instead of solving problems. Together they discover four brains are better than one when it comes to figuring out how to get out of your head. 

0:09:56CompostingWriting Down the BonesNatalie GoldbergBonbonWikipediaThe Croissant Express diner mentioned in the book, formerly located on the corner of the Uptown Theater building.0:36:00OverdesigningMuralMirovia. "Writing at Night: Lewis Carroll, John Milton, and Me" by Mike Mason. https://www.mikemasonbooks.com/writing-at-night-lewis-carroll-john-milton-and-me/

Ellen’s back in the clubhouse, let’s see what she remembers. Lydia brings a Dungeons and Dragons mechanic about recovering memories called 'Untitled Mechanic,' Stephen feels part of a club that is not Nice Games Club, and Mark brags about playing 2nd Edition in middle school.

Untitled Memory MechanicLydia's websiteLydia SymchychOneshot inspirtationZacSpeaksGiantYouTubeLydia's google docLydia Symchych

Your nice host return to the complex and sometimes underappreciated world of quality assurance in the game dev space, and also explore discovery as a design focus. In this episode: Lydia is still looking for recommendations while at the Serious Play Conference (answer in Discord!), Mark hates on Jira and Stephen finally catches up to the latest gaming trend a couple of months late.

• Chants of Sennaar -  Rundisc, Steam

0:06:27QA WorkflowsWhat Is A Kanban Board? The Ultimate GuideLaura Hennigan, Cassie Bottorff, Rob WattsForbes0:50:37Designing Discovery

We welcome Freya Holmér back into the clubhouse to talk about 3D game development for independent game developers. We get into the specifics of the tools available for devs and why they work and don't work for different teams, but it's mostly an excuse to talk about Freya's new 3D modeling software.

• Half-Edge - Freya Holmér
• Shapes - Freya Holmér, Unity Asset Store
• Shader Forge - Freya Holmér, GitHub

3D Workflows for Indie DevsGame DesignToolsUI / UXValve Hammer Editor - Valve Developer CommunityPicoCAD - Johan Peitz, itch.ioTrenchBroom - GitHubCrocotile 3DWhat’s the difference between OBJ and FBX? And when to you what - Reddit

This week, your Nice Hosts have a new prompt from a new source. Lydia's husband, Ian, draws from a rainy source of inspiration and the Hosts are all-in. We brush up on the water cycle, requisition the equipment, practice our Trans-Atlantic accents, dunk on hot dogs, and puzzle over water-based cloud economies.

• Big Pharma - Steam
• Le Ballon Rouge - Wikipedia
• Water Cycle - Wikipedia
• Loop Hero - Steam
• Human Resource Machine - Steam

Promptto match the current weather - what goes on inside the clouds during a thunderstorm?Game typeDesign documentPlayer count1Rules

• You control a cloud factory and manage what the cloud distributes
• Mission-based, scenarios
  • Plenty of fun fantasy options
• Condition options
  • Sunshine
  • Water
  • Static (use a balloon?)
  • Wind
  • The shape of your factory/cloud
• Water is your core resource
  • Use it to build the factory, use it to make the rain and complete tasks, use it to expand
  • Gain it from water vapor and such (water cycle)
  • Your factory is also water, you can reuse it
• You go through a campaign
  • Pick between a set of jobs each time, bigger jobs give more rep
• Isometric view
• Level 1: rain on the hot dog cart
  • Have the cloud rain over an area for a specific period of time
  • The mission before you just needed to dump some water
  • The player needs to collect water to have enough rain on the hot dog cart
  • Automation is the game
  • You need to shape the cloud to fit all of the machines that you order from a catalog
    • Catalog has a ton of options, with their own efficiencies
• Level 2: rain on a hot dog festival
• Level ??: Flood the Nile 

Your nice hosts talk about saving both your position in a game and saving your secrets from being spread around. Also in this episode: Stephen's birthday is coming up, Lydia's been presenting in webinars for a while, and Mark's got a new game coming soon!

• Category Quest - ELB Learning
• Webinar | Let’s Play! Category Quest: ELB Learning’s Newest Game - ELB Learning, YouTube
• Webinar | Escape Room Rx: Innovating Game-Based Clinical Education - ELB Learning, YouTube
• Episode we interviewed Lydia on before she became a host!Digital Escape Rooms
• Blippo+ - Panic
• Blippo+ on Steam - Panic, Steam

0:09:50Save SystemsBuilding Cognitive Accessibility Into Your GamesGame Developers ConferenceYouTubePassword SaveTV Tropes0:33:20Keeping Secrets

Mark rushes through the introduction to talk about his two rush projects, one of which, Blippo+, was announced on Sunday during the PC Gaming Show! You'll hear more about that next week, but until then, Lydia talks about feeling seen in Anime, Stephen laments that his filmmaking class has not only ruined movies for him, but also music, and Dale does a good job editing out Lydia’s coughs.

• Blippo+, coming to PC and Switch this fall!
• You Need To See FMV Cable TV Simulator Blippo+ - Wesley LeBlanc, Game Informer

Emotional Effects of MusicA New Foe Has Appeared!