Ellen's nephews have charged her with the task of making a board game about pizza. Making a clone of Hasbro's Candy Land is more difficult than it sounds, especially since these young stakeholders have requested some "creative deviations" from the design of the original board game. Stephen and Mark step in to help out. Can your nice hosts realize the wild, cheesy dream that is Pizza Land?

• Candy Land, a classic board game for kids - Hasbro
• That meme from The Office - Giphy
• Gharial, a weird-looking endangered crocodilian - Animalogic, YouTube

The art is here on Google Drive for you all to enjoy. 

• Whale, may or may not be pizza-related
• T-rex sort of on fire, facing us
• Brontosaurus amoeba
• Cat and soulless dog 
• [Pizza] donut
• Pizza Knight with an axe, maybe
• Ice cream leaking out of the cone
• Pizza t-rex
• Pizza crocodile
• Pizza shark
• Pizza rock, since upgraded to pizza geode
• Pizza pyramid
• Man made of pizzas x 2

• Ellen's drawings
• Sea of Sauce
• Garlic Bread Grove
• Pizza Dough Desert
• Calzone Quarry (not pictured)
• and here's a link to the spreadsheet mentioned in the episode

• Players start out with a random collection of ingredients
• They collect ingredients as they go through the game
• Everyone’s delivering a pizza and they start with a crust
• The Pizza Knight has specific interests & tastes in each game, so different ingredients are more important in each playthrough
• If a monster catches you it eats a certain number of ingredients (0, 1, 2, or 3)
• A grading scale for the team; the pizza knight filling out stars on the app

Movement with d6s. When players move, they can roll 2 dice and choose the result, moving forwards or backwards.

Unspoken, but maybe good ideas?

• Monsters all move on the same die roll, and they only move forward.
• Players have to be on the same tile to give an object to another person.
  

This week, your nice hosts talk about last week and next week. Mark wants you to frame things, Stephen wants a definition, and Ellen wants you to start a fight with her on Discord.

• Ellen's team made a gross game for Global Game Jam 2023!

• Star Trek: Picard, Final Season Premiere (full free episode) - Paramount+, YouTube

Your nice hosts invite Zachtronics founder Zach Barth to discuss the closing of the studio and the logistics of moving on from that. In this episode, you'll also hear about ruminations on what success means as a game dev, a theory about how great walking is and exclusive news about Zach's future plans.

The year 2022 in review! Yes, it's now halfway through February, but being a few weeks late is part of the annual "Nicest Of" tradition. Your hosts (plus guest Holly Harrison) revisit their notable games and goals from 2022, and make some plans for 2023.

• • Holly is here in the clubhouse for this recording!
  • Things that happened in 2022:

• We sold GLOM! It's coming out in 2023.
• Mark announced a game (Dreamsettler) and released Noble Engine for the Playdate
• Stephen became a co-owner of Future Club
• Ellen got a new job as a game designer with The Game Agency
• Holly moved into a new place—one without unwanted insects and thieving neighbors

Ellen's Nicest:

• Metroid: Dread
• Flappy Dragon
• Banner Saga 1
• Endling: Extinction is Forever

Mark's Nicest:

• Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope
• Stray
• Last Call BBS

Stephen's Nicest:

• Kirby and the Forgotten Land
• Splatoon 3
• Rumbleverse
• Spirit Island

Holly's Nicest:

• Ooblets
• Splatoon 3
• Bear and Breakfast
• Cult of the Lamb
• Slime Rancher II

Ellen's picks:

• Mars First Logistics
• Banner Saga II and III
• Ori and the Will of the Wisps
• Slime Rancher II
• Cyberpunk 2077

Mark's picks:

• Horizon: Call of the Mountain on Playstation VR 2
• Assassin's Creed: Mirage
• Season: A Letter to the Future
• Dreamsettler

Stephen's picks:

• Dragon's Dogma II
• Street Fighter 6

Holly's picks:

• Mineko's Night Market
• Thirsty Suitors
• Hades II
• Sea of Stars

Picked by everyone:

• The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

Your hosts recall what they did over their winter break this year (aka hiatus). Ellen played video games and games with her dogs, Stephen watched and reviewed some movies (please tell him what to watch next!), and Mark mostly watched Doctor Who.

Big news for the show: We now have ad-free episodes on Patreon!

Ellen played video games

Stephen watched movies

(Scoring is out of four stars.)

• Dual (⭐⭐⭐)
• Sharp Stick (⭐⭐⭐)
• All My Friends Hate Me (⭐⭐⭐)
• 7 Days (⭐⭐)
• The Drop (⭐⭐)
• Darby and the Dead (⭐⭐⭐)
• Sex Appeal (⭐⭐⭐)
• We Broke Up (⭐⭐⭐⭐)
• Mark, Mary and Some Other People (⭐⭐)
• Single all the Way (⭐⭐⭐)
• Sex Guaranteed (⭐) - “Did not like it”

Mark re-watched Doctor Who

Your nice hosts' pronunciation is on point this week as they say a really hard word a large number of times! In this episode, Mark and Ellen BOTH introduce even more complicated words to the other hosts, and Stephen admits to losing an argument (which he'd done on the show before but still don't tell his brother).

This week, we invite our first guest for Nice Thinking! Adam Clewes-Boyne is putting together an initiative for neurodiversity advocacy and education in the games industry, specifically focused on ADHD. It started as a meetup at a conference, and Adam wants to see where it can go next.

As the podcast approaches its fifth anniversary, your hosts get a little (more) frivolous. Mark shares some industry news about hardware releases. Ellen prompts everyone to share their experiences of learning development tools and examine their process of learning through the lens of Maximum Whooo. Stephen explores the difference between cooperative and collaborative gameplay, and invents something called a Feedborm. Dang!

Your nice hosts talk to Andrew Eiche, COO at Owlchemy Labs (Job Simulator, Vacation Simulator, Cosmonious High) about the state of VR in 2022, and where VR and VR development tools may be going in the coming years.

Andrew talks about how industrial design should influence VR design, why you shouldn't take inspiration from movies, and how ergonomics are important. Also, Ellen takes a hard stand on the right way to use a dial.

Headsets

VR Engines

Cosmonious High

Game designer Osama Dorias returns to the clubhouse to help design a game that can be played remotely, and provides some (much needed?) structure to the Nice Games Jam process. Stephen is obsessed with Bananas, Ellen contemplates her mystery banana gift, and Mark realizes some of these concepts might be too complicated for small children.

Playtest Materials

Electronic system for sharing slides (such as Google Slides)

A voice connection with remote players

A set of slides or icons/drawings/clipart to create the set of slides

A system for privately messaging players

• Create a set of slides (12) with icons, drawings, photos, or clip-art, if not using a pre-made slide deck. Each slide should contain 3 items. Pick a Game Master (usually one of the adults playing the game).
• The Game Master comes up with one group objective with two parts:

• A protagonist/hero.
• A conflict for the protagonist.

• Each secret objective should start with the phrase “The hero should...”
• Ideally these will be randomly assigned.

• Player order goes to the left and does not change
• The game ends when you run out of slides
• Each slide should be a simple phrase or sentence

• Play starts with the Game Master describing the first slide, starting with the phrase “Once upon a time..”
• Play continues to the player on the Game Master’s left and the slide progresses.
• This player chooses one of the three pictures on the slide to incorporate into the story with a phrase or sentence.
• Play continues to the left with a new slide. And continues around the circle, with each player getting a new slide (the Game Master may now sit out of the storytelling), until there are no more slides left.
• The Game Master may provide an epilogue (and explain what an epilogue is to the children playing the game) as desired.

• Note: Defining 'Epilogue' will not be out of character for this game, as in this episode's run-through Mark would have had to explain to kids: headbanging, Ska, life in 1998, mosh-pits, micro-cassettes, and a reference to 'Spaceballs.'