Everybody's Talking At Once

Xalavier Nelson Jr. is an absurdly prolific artist and an inveterate collaborator, having left his creative stamp on Hypnospace Outlaw, We Are The Caretakers, Can Androids Pray, Mr. Bucket Told Me To, and so, so much else, from tabletop RPG systems to comics to games journalism. Currently he's working on SkateBIRD and Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator , plus something else that he'll be announ...

Yadu Rajiv does a whole lot of different things, all of them to do with games and the people and technologies that make them possible. By day, he's a Lead Game Designer at BYJU'S, working on educational games that toe the line between physical and digital, and the rest of the time he acts as an ambassador and an organizer for India's fast-growing indie scene. Here he talks about what it means to w...

Santago Zapata stops by to talk about the history of roguelikes, his own expansive body of small works for the 7-Day Roguelike Challenge , and his larger works, from  Castlevania Roguelike, to  Ananias , to his current project NovaMundi: The Spear of Chaquén. Is it a roguelike, this new game? The purists would say (and have said) no, but it's certainly philosophically adjacent to roguelikes—with i...

Jeremy Warmsley's music has spanned pop (or more broadly, the whole touring band thing ), film, television, radio, and recently, games. He's an inventive, thoughtful, ever-expressive voice wherever he shows up (including on podcasts, as it happens). Here we mostly talk about his game soundtracking work on Russell's Quinn's Linda & Joan , and on Minskworks' historically situated, abstract-yet-s...

Russell Quinn has had a unique career as a technologist enabling stories, building the underlying systems for the ahead-of-its time McSweeney's app, as well as for the equally-ahead-of-theirs, novel-adjacent multimedia projects The Silent History and The Pickle Index. He's brought remarkably inventive and playful stories to the world, though not as a storyteller, exactly. That is, until his curren...

Chevy Ray has been making games for a long time now—though most of them are currently tough to play; RIP Flash—but is probably best known for Ikenfell, a tactical RPG about going to magic school, working through difficult relationships, and petting a great many cats. Here Chevy talks about what it means to keep an RPG character-focused, the difference between nuance and subtlety, his love of "setp...

Anisa Sanusi is an accomplished UI/UX designer, probably best known for her work on Elite Dangerous and Planet Coaster —two utterly different games that bring with them utterly different challenges in terms of usability, accessibility, tone, and scope. She's also the founder of the Limit Break mentorship program, an organization dedicated to providing guidance, access, and support to underrepresen...

Chris King of Batterystaple Games shares a chunk of his time to discuss 30XX, the reimagined, souped-up sequel to the Mega Man X -esque roguelike-alike 20XX. We get pretty far into the weeds as far as the differences between the two games, the double-edged beam-sword of encouraging player-created content from day one, the advantages and disadvantages of working with an engine built from scratch, a...

Our America puts you in the shoes of a Black father driving his son to school—and if that doesn't sound potentially harrowing to you, then you might be exactly the project's intended audience. It's a work that means to illuminate, instruct, challenge, and speak simple, difficult truths. In this interview, Bryant Young talks about why he started developing Our America, who hopes will hear its messa...

You might know Chel Wong from her rightly-celebrated, highly modular soundtrack to Kine, and some more people are about to know her from Watch This Space. But you definitely already know her if you're even tangentially involved in the Boston-area indie scene (or for that matter, the New England Smash scene). She's in some ways as accomplished at fostering community as she as at crafting intricate,...

For our hundredth episode, we're trying something a little different and editing together some of our favorite moments from the past year of the 'cast. If you've been looking to catch up but haven't had the time to dive into entire longform interviews, then this should provide a good place to start?and even if you've already heard these clips and the episodes they come from, this format should hig...

2020, everybody. It was a weird year for lots of things, we think it's fair to say—including but by no means limited to games. So in this episode, we take a moment to recap the games we played this year, the games currently glistening atop (or languishing deep within) our to-read piles, and the games of the future we're anticipating. From the blockbusters to the altgames, and from the newest newne...

Like Eliza before it, Möbius Front '83 is a Zachtornics game that longtime Zachtronics fans probably didn't expect—though also like Eliza, it has more than a few themes in common with the rest of the catalog, and beyond that, Möbius Front '83 adheres to Zach-like conventions more closely than you might expect. Like a lot of the studio's recent work, it's at once familiar and unfamiliar. For that m...

The PlayStation 5 is out, as is the Xbox Series X and Series S Series! That's exciting, at least for those of us who can get our hands on them. Drew's been PS5ing, and he and Lucio both built new PCs this year, so now seemed like a fairly ideal time to take stock of the state of consoles, and of gaming machines more generally—what they mean to us now, what they meant to us growing up, and what the...

After a decade working on the Assassin's Creed games, Nick Guérin joined Thunder Lotus Games as the Creative Director on Spiritfarer, a farming and management sim about death, kindness, labor, wants, needs, and all manner of other things that Assassin's Creed (venerable though it is) rarely finds the space to explore. (What a moment it is, going indie). Here we talk about the thrills and pitfalls...

Brian Handy stops by to discuss Wild Honesty, his game of, well, wild honesty. Just how do you design an experience of radical openness and ever-expanding intimacy? How do you then adapt that networked play, with all its extra layers of isolation and all the kinds of human connection it lack by default? (Brian would argue that it means intentionally not drawing in the player into the game's fictio...

Oskar Stålberg builds little town dioramas, as he puts it?or more exactly, he builds the procedural generation tools that allow him, and his algorithms, and you the player to build little town dioramas together. You could call this an extension of his work on the "megamap" in The Division, and certainly of his smaller projects such as Brick Block , and of the elegant map generation in his first co...

Nils Deneken has been working on Mutazione in one way or another since 2008. (You might have heard 2009, but in this interview, we set that particular misconception straight!) Through more than a decade of reinvention and revision, the game has retained its core of ensemble-cast intimacy and gorgeous mutated nature (rendered in desaturated vectors and a sense of figure that it at once weighty and...

Damon Reece is the lead writer on Necrobarista, a visual novel about death and coffee (and therefore the rest of life) rendered in a bespoke-unto-madness 3D anime style and set very definitively in Melbourne, Australia. It's in most ways a visual novel, but there are key ways in which it couldn't be written or built like an ordinary one of those?or indeed like a movie, or quite like anything else....

Drew and Lucio check in on the state of co-op games, especially online ones, in this strange isolated times. How has co-op changed over the past few decades, both in character and in quantity? Why are we so drawn to cooperative games, and why (for us) does team competition just not scratch that same itch? And when you get right down to it, what the hell is up with the guys who grab you and throw y...

Warren Arnold has been with Jackbox Games since they were Jellyvision, having worked first on the Facebook iteration of You Don't Know Jack, and later on every Jackbox Party Pack, including the forthcoming seventh one. Here he talks about the peculiarities of Jackbox Games' design process, the finer points of comedy writing in big, collaborative projects, and the ethical mandates of moderation—wit...

Ilan Eshkeri has had a storied career in film and television—from Layer Cake, 47 Ronin, and Ninja Assassin, to Black Sea, Still Alice, Austenland, and the Shaun the Sheep Movie —and has recently been working in video games as well. He's now taken the playful reactive soundtracking tricks he honed on The Sims 4 and applied them to the samurai-epic hypercinema of Ghost of Tsushima. This score, a col...

Brendon Chung is the main creative force behind Atom Zombie Smasher, Gravity Bone, Thirty Flights of Loving, Flotilla, Flotilla 2, Quadrilateral Cowboy, and the upcoming Skin Deep. Laura Michet is an accomplished writer, and a perhaps equally accomplished editor, having lent her talents to Industries of Titan, Frog Fractions 2, and Where The Water Tastes Like Wine? not to mention her really excell...

Bobby Fowler and Brenda Noiseux outrun the Hunter to join us again and talk about Space Chase, their co-op tabletop map-'em-up and the delightful follow-up to their assiduously PvP card game Wicked Apples. This is, to put it mildly, a strange time to be making indie tabletop games—not only because tabletop games are irresolvably social (much to the fear-then-joy of introverts such as myself) but a...

Moo Yu stops by to talk about his work on Knights and Bikes, Subsurface Circular, LittleBigPlanet, and several of the Ratchet & Clank games?plus his advocacy, activism, and mentorship via POC in Play . Beyond that, he gets into a deep, generous discussion about the strange position of the code itself in how we understand games. Obviously the code is necessary and important, but it's not necess...