Mark gets back to Metro Nexus, Stephen explores the strange land where in-game and real-world economics overlap, and Ellen makes sure we have good posture.

• Metro Nexus is running on the Switch!
• Global Games Pitch
• IGDATC Widget Satchel Postmortem - igdatc

Mark interviews Sébastien Deguy and Jérémie Noguer, the Vice President and Principal Product Manager of 3D & Immersive at Adobe, about developing Substance, the leading suite of tools for 3D texturing and material creation.

In a wide-ranging discussion, your nice guests reveal what it's like joining a big ol’ company like Adobe, how to design a tool for multiple audiences, the difference between "black magic" and "white magic," and how COVID-19 is impacting their teams.

They also share a peek into the future of licensing and subscriptions for Substance and Adobe's other 3D tools, and the reason they haven't been able to release a Blender plugin yet.

Founder of Allegorithmic, makers of Substance. VP 3D & Immersive at Adobe.

Principal Product Manager of 3D and Immersive at Adobe.

This week, it's Ellen's first rodeo as your permanent nice host, Stephen looks forward to watching someone else play The Last of Us Part II, and Mark is a bad VR person.

Remakes:

• FFVII Remake
• Persona 5 Royal
• Saints Row: IV - Re-Elected
• Doom 64

Delays

• Last of Us Part II
• Iron Man VR
• Marvel’s Avengers

Events

Confirming your nice hosts' suspicions, just after this episode was published, GDC announced that GDC Summer will be an online-only event.

Media drama!

Jason Schreier (and co-hosts) took his podcast to the Maximum Fun network.

Valorant

Hardware Shortages

PS5

Martha has a big announcement, Mark tells the story of Babylon 5, and Stephen owes everyone a hug. Also, Ellen is back in the (distributed) clubhouse with her own big news!

• Stephen didn’t know what the word "Emeritus" means, so he put it in the notes: "Holding, after retirement, an honorary title corresponding to that held last during active service."

• In Animal Crossing: New Horizons, NPCs can be seen breaking character after you walk away from them (via Twitter).

Mark's "Noble Menu" system for Unity is available on Itch.io.

Ellen Burns-Johnson joins us once again in the virtual club house to discuss Redundancy and Arcades! Ellen teaches us about how we learn, Mark balances the game, Martha only plays the best character, and Stephen has a revelation.

• Photo Credit: Michelle Bruch, from this Southwest Journal Article about the Donutron

The 'Donutron' Arcade at Glam Doll Donuts in Minneapolis

This week, your nice hosts put together a design document for a co-op game of corporate espionage. Martha wants to crawl through vents, Mark wants low stakes moral choices, and Stephen wants everyone to yell at everyone.

• On Wednesday this week, Mark presented a in-depth postmortem on the production of Widget Satchel for the April IGDATC monthly community meeting, held remotely on Twitch. You can "attend" the meeting ex post facto on the IGDATC Twitch channel!

• Two players, who are a team of freelance infiltrators.

• One player is out in the field doing their thing (1st-person perspective).
• One player is a hacker at home base, providing assistance to the field player (in VR).

Players see information about future missions, the team chooses the next mission, but the hacker player literally picks it, opening up potential conflict between players.

Throughout the campaign, various moral choices can crop up. The team can choose their missions based on which client they support, or they can chose to become double agents, thwarting their client's goals.

Infiltrate a restaurant that actually is a complicated science lab to steal a secret recipe.

• First task: sneak past into the entrance of the lab:

• Hacker player needs to manipulate orders and customers so that few people see the field player.
• Field player observing the state of play in the restaurant and doing the actions.

• Hacker player can take out some lasers and protect the field player using shields.
• Field player gets past the lasers through first-person platforming actions.

• Field player is sneaking past guards or other security obstacles.
• Hacker player is opening vault with the recipe and doing stealth gadget things.
• Getting to the recipe, do you steal the recipe or copy the recipe down?

• Do you want to simply defeat opponents, or destroy them?
• As with mission selection, one player (the field player in this case) literally makes the call, but the game encourages the team to choose their course of action together.

• Option for field player: could sneak through vents, or take the same way out, or run past guards in a mad dash to escape.

Your Nice Hosts are still recording remotely while we physically distance ourselves! We talk about our new normal and give each other advice on Working From Home and Games to Play while we stay inside. Stay safe out there, Nice Listeners! We are all in this together.

• How did Animal Crossing’s Isabelle and the Doomguy become best friends? - Julia Lee, Polygon

Because Internet, a book by Gretchen McCulloch

This week, Stephen is crowned the new King of Transitions, Martha gets around to playing two games she'd been meaning to for awhile, and Mark briefly impersonates a saxophone.

Stephen's Unlock Taxonomy:

• Achievement-based: Do a thing, get unlock related to thing.
• Experience-based: Play the game, get a thing based on how much you've played.
• Loot-based: Play the game, get random thing.
• Currency-based: Earn in-game currency, pick an unlock to purchase.
• New Game Plus: Complete the game, get new content on second playthrough.

Yes, yes, we know GDC was cancelled, but your nice hosts still had plenty of stuff to talk about, including how GDC itself adapted itself into a non-event, how some business still got done, and next-gen hardware news from Microsoft and Sony that was too big to be rescheduled.

• As part of an industry-wide effort to give people something to do while they're stuck inside, Mark gathered a few Twin Cities indiedevs to sell a bundle of their recent titles at a deep discount. It's the Twin Cities Indies Say Stay Inside Bundle! It includes 5 full games (Adjacency, Joggernauts, Newt One, Verdant Skies, and Widget Satchel), and it's available on Itch for the next two weeks at 84% off the normal price. Stay home and enjoy!

• Mark joked that the Summer Olympics would be the next thing to be postponed, and sure enough, a day after we recorded this episode, they were.

This week on Nice Games Club, we talk about Naming Things and Rhythm Games! Stephen lays down a beat, Martha brings up fuzzy math, and Mark uses every excuse to talk about Star Trek.

• We mentioned the previous Train Jam episode (#17):GDC 2017 Special (Part 1)

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