Mark is still out sick, so Dale takes his place in the clubhouse and brings a topic! The club makes a prediction that by the time that this episode comes out, Mark will still be sick, and if you are listening on Patreon, that is absolutely true. If you aren't listening on Patreon, you probably should be.

The group talks about how often and when to say no. Stephen admits that he is the bottleneck, Lydia talks about things that she finds delightful in video games, and Dale makes a bold admission.

1:33The art of Saying NoGatchamari - Dale (and Mark)'s Global Game Jam GameGlobal Game JamMini Post-Mortems on Global Game Jam GamesIGDA TCYouTubeFTL PostmortemJustin Ma and Matthew DavisGDCCeleste team Cancels a project (Earthblade)ExokEarthblade OST SoundtrackLena Raine0:31:30Tiny InteractionsSkyrim's myth of the treasure fox finally explainedWesley Yin-PooleEurogamer

Roles reverse as Dale joins Stephen and Lydia for a Nice Game Jam prompted by Mark. The results are an antiques-fueled jaunt through time, and an unexpected win for Stephen.

• Costcodle - Zak Kermitz, Costcodle
• Timeline Inventions - Zygomatic, Zygomatic
• Hypodermic Needles - Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine, Maximum Fun

Prompt"Come up with a game where the winner is the player who gets (or gets closest to) a certain amount of points, but that amount changes from round to round. Hard mode variant: the players don’t always know what the amount is."Game typeTabletop gamePlayer count2-8Materials

Set of item cards from various years

10 chips for each player

Set of years/events

Timer

Setup

• Place 8 item cards on the table easily accessible for all players.
• Pick a random year/event.
• Set timer for 1 minute.

Rules

• Start the timer to start the round
• While the timer runs, players place chips on items to bid on them
• When the timer runs out, the player with the most chips on an item gets that item. In a tie, no one gets an item and it gets added to the pool during the next round
• Items that are earned get their times revealed, player closest to the chosen year/event wins
• Play repeats for three rounds, player with the most round wins wins the game

Beth leads Mark and Stephen through a therapy session. Stephen talks Kickstarter, Mark talks Patreon, and everyone agrees Beth's game Verdant Skies is great. 

• Part-Time Hero: I'm Broke But I Have To Save The World! - Future Club, Kickstarter
• Dreamsettler - Tendershoot, Patreon

0:06:40Begging for Money0:52:09Quality of LifeQuality of LifeMichael “Kayin” O’ReillyKayin WorksVerdant SkiesHowling Moon SoftwareSteam

Beth Korth, board member of Nice Games Alliance, enters the clubhouse to talk about the purpose of the NGA and how to best fulfill that mission. They discuss how workshops, talks, and conferences fit into their plans. And how they can provide unique experiences and services that the gamedev community can't get elsewhere. They also emphasize the importance of lunch.

Nice Games Alliance Workshops

Lydia joins the clubhouse for her first regular episode as a host (it's calendar math)! The clubhouse discusses the release of Civilization VII and how it is taking up all of Stephen's time. Lydia brings to the table the question of how she can learn more games, and how tutorials don't work for her. Stephen regrets not being able to fully develop the world which is the setting for his five-minute student film.

• Civ VII

• Civilization VII

• Switch 2

• Switch 2 mouse control - Kyle Orland, Ars Technica

0:15:01Incremental Learning Lydia talks about her success learning knitting, and her rectangle projections

The club talks about differences between recipes and game development tutorialsTasksxkcd0:54:10Making Science Fiction WorldsThis topic was inspired by Stephen's science fiction student film. You can watch that here:"All Good Things"Stephen McGregorYouTube"For All Mankind"Wikipedia

Widget Satchel

Widget Satchel is a game that Mark, Stephen, and Ellen worked on. Mark developed a lot of background story, including this:

"I do not wish that the troubles of the past be carried into the stars. I imagined better for us and expected better also. But we do not realise our whole future in sequence, small futures each after the other. We must go anyway, blind and smiling, emissaries of wonder, explorers. On this day, at this place, together, we launch an expedition for which we are unprepared. Yet we are now even, a collected peoples concerned of justice looking in order to see our whole future, ahead of us. Widget Satchel is on Itch and other platformsAlso check out this episode from when we released Widget Satchel"Space ferrets lift off!" Widget Satchel Special

The clubhouse gets Cretaceous this week; your nice hosts have been challenged to create a game about dinosaurs and their feeding habits.

PromptMake a game about the feeding habits of dinosaurs or of paleontologists, bonus points if all the dinosaurs are from the same era.Game typeDesign documentPlayer count1Rules

• Cretaceous period
  • Flowering plants evolved here
  • Early mammals here too
  • Velociraptors too!
• Different sized dinosaurs
• Name: Dinosaurs of North Dakota
  • Play as big (T-rex), small (dog-sized) and medium (triceratops)
  • Survive a day as each of these creatures
  • Order of play
    • Medium first (herbivore)
    • Big next (T-rex)
    • Small last (scavenger)
    • Then Paleontologist discovers (eats chicken with a PLASTIC fork)
  • Where you die determines how preserved the bones are during the paleontology phase
    • If you want more preserved bones you have to choose to not live as long (due to how the preservation works)
  • Gameplay
    • Play as the different creatures, the player chooses when that phase of the game ends
      • Can also end after a certain time played
    • Then you swap to a new creature and play as them, choosing when to end
    • When you get back to a creature, time has passed and things are different in the world (partly due to player influence from other creatures)
      • Player knocking down trees might be knocked down in future scenes, eating a lot of plants may make the area sparse in the future
    • Keep playing as the different creature until enough time has passed
    • Afterwards, play as a paleontologist and rediscover what you’ve done
    • Record what you’ve done with the knowledge the paleontologist has (and not the player), so it won’t actually be accurate to the player’s playthrough
    • Based on what the player’s done, it can affect what things the paleontologist will be able to say about the state of things after

NEWS! New episodes now come out a week early on Patreon!! Sign up to listen to next week's episode now! We talk about why, and the silly reason why now, in this episode, along with another, much bigger piece of NEWS.

And of course, your nice hosts continue the show's annual tradition of recounting what they did during hiatus.

SO. MUCH. NEWS.

• Nice Games Club on Patreon

What We Did On Our Winter Break (2024-25)

Twin Cities Gamedev community

Join the IGDATC serverDiscordDonate to Nice Games Alliance ("no" relation)IGDATC 2025 gamesGlobal Game Jam

Stephen

UFO 50Civilization VII

Lydia

Play Lydia's team's GGJ game, Meowlogue MittensMeowlogue Mittens - Main ThemeEdison BoerkeSoundCloudLydia's team invited everyone at the event to vote on the name of thier game's main character.

Mark

Play Mark's team's GGJ game, Gachamari

Ellen

Mars First LogisticsSteamMartian ChessLoony LabsRoboCoSteam

#373Puzzle SystemsInterview2024.11.15

Releasing 2019's "Baba is You" after more than a decade of making puzzle games was a milestone for this week's guest, but it was also just the beginning of his design journey. Arvi "Hempuli" Teikari talks to your nice hosts about the balance between giving players freedom and constraining their expression, the pacing and sequencing of individual puzzles, what happens when a "cool" design annoys players, and more.

Arvi's cats make a spirited apperance in the back half of the episode. Here they are basking in the Finnish sun.Puzzle SystemsGame DesignToolsMultimedia Fusion 2 - ClickteamClickteam Fusion 2.5 - ClickteamConstruct - Scirra LtdMP2MP2 Chowdren EngineBring the ice cube to the goal without exposing it to heat. - IncreparePuzzleScript - IncrepareCovechrome - Hempuli, itch.ioYou nice hosts previously discussed what happens to players who become developers in:"Numbers go up."Arvi "Hempuli" TeikariGuestExternal linkHempuli - social media linksHempuli on Itch.io

#368“That’s way too many pawns.”Roundtable2024.10.11

This week, Ellen kicks things off with a chat about how games tell players, “This might be tough!” and how to make that fun and fair. Stephen and Mark jump in with their takes on what makes difficulty settings shine. Then, Mark thinks about the practice taking familiar game mechanics and twisting them into something fresh. Think pacifist runs or limited equipment modes. Why limit yourself to one way to play when you can remix the whole game? As always, there are some goofs in here, too.

Unity 6 Preview is now available - Nancy Larue, UnityUnity is canceling the Runtime Fee - Matt Bromberg, UnityUnite Conference - UnityHasbro Game Night (for Switch)We Were Here Series - Total Mayhem Games, SteamLoopy: a tool for thinking in systems - Nicky CaseMachinations: Create digital twins for your systems, processes or economiesCommunicating Difficulty0:21:44Ellen Burns-JohnsonGame DesignReally Bad ChessPuzzmo - Orta Therox & Zach GageAggro Crab Studio"Why Quitting Is Usually Worth It" - David Duchovny & Stephen Dubner, Freakonomics Radio NetworkRemixed Play Modes0:40:35Mark LaCroixGame DesignMetro Nexus - Noble Robot10 Most Unique Multiplayer Modes In Video Games - James Kennedy, The GamerExtra game modes - Universal Videogame ListPARKS Board Game - 59 Parks

#366OptimizationInterview2024.09.26

Entering the clubhouse this week is our the third Owl (employee of Owlchemy Labs) and first Peabody Award winner (as lead developer for We Are OFK), to talk about the "dos," "don'ts," and "good enoughs" of optimization.

Cleveland video game designer Jarryd Huntley wins Peabody Award for ‘We Are OFK’ - Joey Morona, cleveland.comWe are OFK - Peabody AwardsCleveland Game Developers - LinktreeOptimizationHardwareProductionProgrammingIs Using LINQ in C# Bad for Performance? - James Vickers, The Startup For Vs Foreach In C# - Sagar Gavand, C# CornerJarryd HuntleyGuest