The Dialog Box

Real talk. Gwen talks about the mental fatigue of shipping a title, recovering from an "okay" indie game launch, and the struggle of figuring out the second project for a studio.

Today: Esports are weird. Using a pre-built game engine does not stop you from developing new tech. And wtf is going on in China?

A light conversation about heavy topics: When is fan art theft? What can indies do to protect themselves from real theft? Why is Discord terrible? Are people more depressed today, or are we just on the internet more? Also, pie!

Loot Boxes, or the discussion of them, is here to stay and Gwen and Chris somehow have more opinions on them! The Videogames Awards, the rise of China in the games industry, history and politics in games and more are discussed!

Listeners asked us questions: Are games too cheap? What is the future of the games industry? How is going indie from AAA different today than it used to be. And why wont anyone break NDA and talk to Gwen about the frostbite animation system? We answer these questions and more (except for the Frostbite one. That remains a mystery.)

This week we discuss many topics: Paris game week, violence in games, reader mail, and indie game dev marketing.

Things get a little rowdy this time. Gwen and Chris discuss Visceral's closure, layoffs, the theoretical death of single player games, and Twitch-con. Gwen: remember to take this down if you ever apply for EA.

Gwen loves the Unreal Engine and Chris isn't fully sure exactly why or what it is an engine does. Many questions and many answers are given as to why you may use one engine over another.

This podcast is more personal than usual. Chris is creatively stagnating and looking for ideas. Gwen offers up a few insights based on her career.

Steve Gaynor of the Fullbright Company joins Gwen and Chris to discuss launching Tacoma, distributing games world wide and eating bones.