Everybody's Talking At Once

When David Galindo came by to reveal ChefSquad , he mentioned that his studio was working on its biggest game yet. We now know that the game in question is Cook Serve Forever , and game that isn't a continuation of the Cook, Serve, Delicious! trilogy—but it also isn't not a continuation of that series. Cooke Serve Forever is every which way an attempt to think beyond the Cook, Serve, Delicious! ga...

William Pugh's studio Crows Crows Crows has just released The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe . It's a remake. It's also a lot more than that. But like The Stanley Parable itself, what exactly it is can be slippery to explain, and slipperier still to talk around. Here William goes into that, as well as into Crows Crows Crows' other work, from their superlative newsletter , to The Temple of No, to Ac...

Marina Kittaka and Melos Han-Tani return to talk about their narrative-rich platformer-but-also-more-than-that, Sephonie . It's quite a different game from Anodyne 2 , and as such, this is a fairly different conversation than the one they had with Drew about Anodyne 2 . It's equal parts a conversation about oscillating between hope and not-hope, and about the arcana of platformer design—from the f...

Rather than try to cram all of what we've been playing into a single year-end round-up, this year we've decided to check in every three months or so. This time around, Drew, Lucio, and L talk mostly about Pokémon Legends: Arceus (with the two main Ni No Kuni games on the side), Graveyard Keeper , Death's Door, Dungeon Encounters , and Guilty Gear Strive —plus a bit about Yonder, Pupperazzi , Wytch...

Glen Henry is something of a leading voice in the Jamaican game development scene, partly by accident (by virtue of simply being a "persistent" voice in the space) and partly on purpose (by virtue of his own podcast Build It and They Will Play, where he talks to other creative folks in the Caribbean sphere about what they do, how they do it, and how they keep it sustainable). Here he talks about t...

Spenser Starke stops by to talk about his "silent role-playing game" Alice Is Missing , the importance of players' emotional safety, tabletop systems as "subgenre generators," and the undersung virtue of finely crafted vibes. You can get the digital version of Alice Is Missing on Roll20 and DriveThruRPG . You can get the physical version at Renegade Game Studios. ——— • Here's the first live-record...

Osama Dorias' career stretches back to the pre-iPhone days of mobile gaming, and on through a great many shifts in the industry—including shift he's been an instrumental part of, like improving Muslim repression in games and the teams that make them. (It's often two steps forward, one step back, as he says in this interview). He recent left WB Games after finishing up his work as Lead Designer on...

Dean Razavi is an indie-developer-turned-indie-producer, currently working at Akupara Games. Here is talks about that studio's newest release, Kardboard Kings , as well the "indies for indies" ethos that drives his work. Along the way, we talk about the importance of collaboration even on solo projects, the challenge of building and rebuilding communities around games, and the gravitation pull of...

Star St. Germain has worked in an uncommonly wide variety of media, from music to comics to gallery art—all within a consistent and unified practice, which she talks us through here, and which she also brings to ArcaniteCo's debut game HoloVista . In talking about that project, we also talk about the existential perils of social media saturation, the unique possibilities of generative image-making...

Victor Burgos stops by to talk about his studio's debut game, Neko Ghost, Jump! We get into the difficulty of figuring out who your game is for , the challenge of controlling scope and scale when working with a small, part-time team, and the perils of trying to live and work in the frankly-sometimes-pretty-hellish social space the internet has become. You can get Neko Ghost, Jump! now on in Early...

It's the Year in Review 'cast! Drew, Lucio, and Franny (along with her alter-ego Michelle) have gathered 'round to reflect on the games we played this year, the games we didn't quite get to, and the games we're definitely going to play once they're available to be played. 2021 has truly been the sequel no one asked for, from the protracted coronavirus crisis, to the Cambrian explosion of crypto-sc...

Whether you're a longtime listener or just tuning in—either way, thanks for that!—here's a roundup of our conversations from 2021. These are of course just samples, especially insightful or funny or surprising moments from their respective episodes. If you want the full context, and a whole lot more good conversation, then do check out the full shows. This is of course also a golden opportunity to...

Carlos Bordeu is the C in ACE Team, the studio behind Rock of Ages, Zeno Clash, The Deadly Tower of Monsters, SolSeraph, Abyss Odyssey, and most recently, The Eternal Cylinder. The studio's projects are reliably-original-unto-earnestly-bizarre, going full-tilt at strange, wondrous ideas and preoccupations. They're fascinating when they fail in places (Carlos' own main example being Zeno Clash II)...

Masao Kobayashi co-founded the indie studio Cut to Bits after about 15 years at Ubisoft, where he worked in a wide range of roles that often redounded to some form of project management and/or being a liaison between North American and Japanese teams and companies. That, and community management about as early as that became a thing, during which time (fun fact) he may have made the first page abo...

The Mechanical World of Dr. Gearbox is first and foremost an attempt to rethink educational games, and specifically to rethink them into something that kids would actually want and choose to play. This is of course far from the first time that a game developer has attempted that lofty, elusive goal—so in this interview, Mike Grieci explains Flamehawk Studios' plan for building a game that not only...

At midnight tonight, David Galindo and his team are surprise-releasing ChefSquad , a collaborative cooking game that can only be played on Twitch. "Wait, what?" you might reasonably ask—and by way of answering you there, David has kindly stopped by to give us the scoop on this weird, joyful, formally inventive, genuinely new creation. ChefSquad shares some DNA with David's Cook! Serve! Delicious!...

Aaron San Filippo is currently working on Whisker Squadron , a roguelike-alike riff on the arcadey corridor space-shooter genre (of which there are fewer examples than you might expect, given how large Star Fox looms). Before that, his studio Fippfly put out the similarly low-poly purist flight game Race the Sun, the console reimagining of minimalist overhead racer Absolute Drift , and the similar...

Megan Fox heads up Glass Bottom Games, the small-core-team-and-a-cloud-of-contractors behind SkateBIRD . (They were a larger core team for their first-person brawler/roguelike Spartan Fist, it should be noted). Here Megan talks about how SkateBIRD first came to be, and the nuts and bolts of bringing it to life—not only from a technical and artistic perspective, but also in terms of running a studi...

Laia Bee is one of the three co-founders of Pincer Games , who've debuted with the card-based brawler Fighters of Fate . She's also deeply involved in the project of fostering a sense of community in the Uruguayan game development scene, and among South American game developers more broadly, and even more broadly than that, among Latinx game developers. Here she talks about the process of launchin...

Don Bellenger stops by to talk about his upcoming "open-world gardenvania," The Beauty Cult , as well as his cyberpunk roguelike-shooter-platformer (and nihilistic synthwave multi-media project) Black Future '88. Along the way, we discuss the importance of game developers taking inspiration from things other than games, the joys of disengaging from monoculture, the unique appeals of disreputable a...

A Musical Story takes place in the mind of a musician, and it also takes place in an era when rock as a wide-open experimental space, and the album was the thing, and every album was in some sense a concept album. The game is likewise an experiment in telling a story—here a wordless, internal, emotionally raw one. It's a work about how music relates to memory, and what both music and memory mean,...

UNBEATABLE is a rhythm game, and an adventure game, and it's serious about being fully both. More than that, it's a game about the emotional truths of music, and of being in a band, and a piece of art about the connection between making art and doing crimes . In this episode, to get at some of those truths, Andrew Tsai, RJ Lake, Rachel Lake, Jeffrey Chiao, TJ Maddux, and Mireille Arseneault from D...

Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is a big heartfelt spectacle of a game—you've likely seen some of its dream-vibrant, mirror-polished visuals, and a bit of its cartoony gunplay—and as the game's Lead Writer, Lauren Mee had a huge amount to do with the heartfelt part of that equation. Rift Apart is a game about blowing stuff up and about difficult friendships. It's wacky and warm, at once a relentle...

Tali Faulkner (better known in internet circles as Veselekov) knew he had something timely on his hands when he made Umurangi Generation, but he couldn't have known how timely. The base game was inspired by the fires in Australia in 2019, not the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020—but with its themes of friendship and creativity in the face of apocalypse, and neoliberalism ruining everything, it did speak...

Amid the E3 madness, this crush of new games and games yet to be, we thought we'd take a moment and think a bit about games that are, in one way or another, not new. Let's talk about games that we replay, and especially the ones that we keep revisiting at different points in life. Why do we replay games? What kinds of play aren't quite replaying , but are closely related? Certainly there are lots...