Thousand Ant Indie Dev Podcast

In this episode of the Thousand Ant Podcast Matt Mirrorfish speaks with indie video game developer Dan Cook, developer of Cozy Grove, Triple Town and Alphabear, among many others together with David Edery and the team at Spry Fox. We talk about indie game development theory, game design and Dan's story in the game industry.

Find Tom on Twitter: https://twitter.com/danctheduck

Read Dan's blog at: https://lostgarden.home.blog/

In this episode of the Thousand Ant Podcast Matt Mirrorfish speaks with indie video game developer Tom Betts, developer of Sir You're Being Hunted, Signal From Tolva and the Light Will Keep Us Safe together with the team at Big Robot. We talk about indie game development, ways of funding indie games, experimentation and more.

Find Tom on Twitter: http://twitter.com/tomnullpointer

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Learn Unity and game development with experienced indie game developers. Subscribe for tutorials, devlogs, and gamedev advice uploaded weekly.

Visit us on Discord, ask questions and share your work: https://discord.gg/AGHZvCf

Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/thousandant

Visit our website: http://thousandant.com

In this podcast Matt Mirrorfish sits down with Tory Vestergaard and Bryan Mehr of Sirenix, makers of Odin Inspector and Serializer one of the most popular and powerful Unity editor programming extensions on the Unity Asset Store. We talk about how the company got started, some of their ups and downs, what it's like working as a part of the Unity3D ecosystem and more.

Purchase Odin on the Unity Asset Store: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/utilities/odin-inspector-and-serializer-89041?aid=1100l3e8M (affiliate link)

Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/thousandant

Visit our website: http://thousandant.com

00:00 Intro
00:24 - Introduction to Odin
02:03 - The Inception of Odin
04:08 - The Origin of Odin and Norse Mythology
06:41 - Odin's Business Model: A Question of Sustainability
14:37 - The Enterprise: A Subscription Model
19:01 - The Stigma of a Third-Party Tool
21:46 - Tools Adapting to the Current Market Demand
24:07 - Generating Profit from Creating Engines and Tools
29:12 - The Open Source Initiative
36:18 - Unity's Shift to Packages
38:23 - Unity's Development First Culture
39:43 - Why Is Unity Not Making Their Own Games?
42:35 - Unity's Vision
43:36 - An Engine Company to Compete with Unity or Epic
48;53 - Unity as a Universal Engine
55:03 - Software Companies in the Future

In this episode of the Thousand Ant Podcast Matt speaks with Professor Michael Sellers who is Director of the Game Design Program at Indiana University. Mike has a long and storied experience in the game design field with stints at Maxis, Kabam and many others over his decades in the industry. He's also the author of  "Advanced Game Design: A Systems Approach".

Find Mike on Twitter: https://twitter.com/onlinealchemist

Advanced Game Design: A Systems Approach on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35135766-advanced-game-design

In this episode of the Thousand Ant Podcast Matt speaks with Kennedy from @cozy.games about her work as a content creator and the community she leads who love to play cute and cozy games like Animal Crossing, Stardew Valley and many others. This is a bit of a different episode speaking with a content creator as opposed to a developer or business person so let us know in the comments if you enjoy it.You can find Kennedy on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaMfX5Gmyll4ceAX_NIAU3gFind @cozygames on TikTok here: https://www.tiktok.com/@cozy.games?lang=enAnd also on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cozy.games/

In this episode of the Thousand Ant Podcast Matt Mirrorfish speaks with Thomas Reisenegger from indie games promotion agency Future Friends Games. Matt and Thomas discuss the fundamentals of marketing and promoting an indie game in 2021, how to succeed on Steam, what makes some games more marketable than others, what a PR agency even exactly does, the social video sharing platform TikTok, it's relevance to indie game devs and how to get started and draw attention for your game on the platform and more.

You can find Thomas and Future Friends here: https://www.futurefriendsgames.com/Thomas has a number of great talks about indie game marketing, PR and general tips on how to promote your indie game at GDC and other venues that are collected here: https://www.futurefriendsgames.com/#prtips

The Future Friends team also do a great and informative podcast of their own which can be found here: https://anchor.fm/futurefriendsgames

In this episode of the Thousand Ant Podcast Matt speaks with indie game developer Kyle Kukshtel about the indie game scene in New York, rants a bit about life in America (this was recorded pre-election 2020), indie game scenes in general, Kyle's awesome sci-fi spiritual strategy game Cantata, his free open source game data editor Depot and a whole lot more.

You can find Depot for free on the Visual Studio Marketplace here: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=afterschool.depot

And check out Kyle and his awesome game Cantata here: https://www.cantata-game.com/

Wishlist Cantata on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/690370/Cantata?utm_source=main_website&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=perpetual&utm_content=steam_cta

In this episode of the Thousand Ant Podcast Matt speaks with Jonas Tyroller, who is a game developer and content creator. He is currently working on Will You Snail, an AI driven platformer with rage-game-elements and runs a terrific YouTube channel publishing game development content. He was also part of the team at GrizzlyGames who released Islanders on Steam, an interesting minimalist city builder game. In the episode we talk about game schools, what makes a good game development university program, making and marketing games, optimizing your steam store page, and much more.

You can find Jonas on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_p_9arduPuxM8DHTGIuSOg

and you can wishlist his game Will You Snail on Steam here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1115050/Will_You_Snail/

Islanders, the project we discussed with GrizzlyGames is here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1046030/ISLANDERS/

In this episode of the Thousand Ant Podcast Matt Mirrorfish speaks with Jason Storey who you may have seen on Infallible Code, Jason Weimann's channel and many other respected channels of the Unity Gamedev sphere. He's also active on the Thousand Ant Discord, along with many others, in particular that of Infallible Code if you want to interact with him on there. Jason brings a great and thoughtful perspective to the topics of Unity3d, game development, coding and writing good C# code specifically for Unity. It was a real pleasure to have him on and hopefully you enjoy the chat!

0:00 Intro / Design Patterns
17:14 Working with other people's code
24:56 Agile Game Development
26:11 The Lean Startup in Games
30:40 Unity Build time optimization
37:00 Architectural structure for games vs enterprise
46:00 Which is the best C# editor for Unity
57:41 Programming: thinking or typing
54:46 Game Design Documentation using Nuclino 
1:00:00 Common Coding Challenges
1:01:00 Preemptive architecture
1:03:00 Writing Code that make your Games better
1:06 Good Player experience
1:10 How Smart should AI be in games?
1:12 Games as an artform/ Building an experience vs building a level
1:14 Applying other fields in game development
1:14 How interdisciplinarity can make you a better game developer




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Learn Unity and game development with experienced indie game developers. Subscribe for tutorials, devlogs, and gamedev advice uploaded weekly.

Visit us on Discord, ask questions and share your work: https://discord.gg/AGHZvCf

Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/thousandant

Visit our website: http://thousandant.com