Everybody's Talking At Once

Greg Haynes is the Lead Games User Researcher at AbleGamers, an organization dedicated, simply but profoundly, to making sure that everyone can play video games, regardless of disability. That's a huge mandate, serving a dauntingly large and diverse group of players. So in this interview, Greg talks us through AbleGamers' philosophy and approach, from research via Player Panels, to workshops and c...

Animal Crossing: New Horizons has been stealing hearts, blowing up timelines, and filling in blanks in our shared social fabric for about two surreally protracted months now. For once, the zeitgeist hasn't outrun our goofy, research-heavy way of picking topics! So in this episode, Lauren Villegas joins in to talk about Animal Crossing, inclusivity, games-as-platforms, our shifting notions of gende...

Nikita Mikros and Josh DeBonis created the original field game Killer Queen, before adapting it into the venerable indie arcade esport institution that it is today. They were a bit less involved in the home game adaptation, Killer Queen Black, since to them, Killer Queen was a fundamentally face-to-face experience, communitarian to the point of being politically radical in its own way. But then th...

Treachery in Beatdown City is a beat-'em-up/turn-based RPG mashup that combines a vast array of Shawn Alexander Allen's preoccupations, from a shifting and in some ways radicalizing political consciousness, to questions of hybrid identity, to frustrations with an ever-gentrifying New York. It's a game about the world going strange, and about when violence is not only justified but necessary, and n...

Tijmen Tio is one quarter of the game dev collective/boyband Sokpop, who've been putting out a game every two weeks since 2018. It's a way of working that requires a great deal of trust among the developers, and between them and their audience—which makes it unique, and beautiful, and especially worth exploring as the world continues to go fully nuts. We talk about how Sokpop started doing what th...

Olof Karlsson autoruns on over to talk about Wunderling, the puzzle-platformer where you're a not-a-goomba with some ambition (or maybe just some especially good-bad luck). We talk about the finer points of movement code (and the oft-subliminal nature of gamefeel), the art of building on what you like in other games (and excising what you don't), and how to design in collectables in ways that are...

Arvi Teikari is here to talk about Baba Is You, as well as Environmental Station Alpha, its forthcoming sequel, and the bonny pile of other gamic delights that he's made and is making. Along the way we also talk about the function of criticism and reviews, the ever-befuddling burlesque of spoiler avoidance, and icebergvanias (a semi-obscure maybe-genre that I'll definitely revisit in more detail i...

Adriel Wallick has been running Train Jam, a game-make-a-thon on a train traveling from Chicago to the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, since 2014. The event has produced a truly staggering number of weird and wonderful creations , and just as importantly, it's been creatively and socially reinvigorating foe a whole lot of people who make games. This year, though, Train Jam has had to...

William Chyr's long-in-the-works puzzle-exploration art installation of a game, Manifold Garden, has been out in the world for a few months now—which means it's the perfect time to talk through how the game came to be, how it changed over the past seven years, and how it fits into the tradition of mysterious garden games (let's call them) like Starseed Pilgrim. Along the way, we discuss the questi...

Game Workers Unite is at the forefront of the effort to unionize the games industry—and according to Emma Kinema, the best way to do that is to treat it as an industry, organized under a single union rather than broken up by role or discipline. Why is that the way to go? How could the change improve game development, not to mention games themselves? Emma is one of the most recognizable and convinc...

Neo Cab is the debut game from Chance Agency, about the last human rideshare cabbie in an aggressively automated, vertically integrated, near-future California city. In this episode, Vincent Perea discusses the game's visuals (a masterclass in scale, scope, and focus), and Paula Rogers discusses the game's writing process (which, by design, more closely resembled a TV writers' room than a traditio...

David Galindo's exacting, deadpan-absurdist Cook, Serve, Delicious! series is officially a trilogy, with Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3?! taking the at-the-margins dystopian elements from 2 (or 2!! actually) and running with them, full-tilt into a tale of human-robot partnership and combat-ready foodtrucks. In this episode, David talks about the difficulties of balancing difficulty, the importance of a...

In this episode, we take stock of what we played this year, what we didn't get to, and what we're looking forward to playing next ( just like we did last year ). Our lists here aren't comprehensive, because wow there are a lot of games worth playing, but we do try to highlight some of our favorites, and especially some of the games that we think deserve more attention and love than they've gotten....

Phoebe Watson joined the team at DragonBear Studios for the expressed purpose of making sure that the indigenous cultural elements in Chaos Tavern are meaningful and on-point—and that's meant everything from discussing aesthetics with the rest of the team, to shaping culturally syncretic (yet specific) lore, to soliciting the opinions of elders (and therefore having to explain to said elders what...

Another dose of Zach Barth, this time focused on MOLEK-SYNTEZ, a Zachtronics game that plays a bit like Opus Magnum but was made more in the spirit of TIS-100 —which is to say quickly, with extreme focus, and driven by Zach's primordial need to make games, games forever, games all the time. (Also, like TIS-100 before it, it's presented in purest, starkest black and white, to the confusion of some...

If you only know the arcade version Killer Queen by reputation, then you might assume Killer Queen Black is simply a home port of the same game?but in fact is Black another game entirely, albeit one that carries over many core mechanics from what is now officially called Killer Queen Arcade, and one taking place in the same surreal universe. It's not a port, nor is it really a sequel, nor it it ex...

Joe Russ is deeply invested in narrative, and also in animation—so it makes all the sense in the world that he would co-create something like Jenny LeClue, a lovingly and distinctively animated, meta-meta-narrative detective adventure. (And yes, I do mean that it's in large part a narrative about narratives about narratives). In today's episode, Joe sits down to discuss the intent behind the hame,...

kalin is the co-founder of Funktronic Labs, best known for their ambitious VR fare, from the consummately simulated garden-'em-up Fujii to the real-ass-RTS-but-in-VR Cosmic Trip. Here he stops by to talk about Wave Break, which began its life as a VR Wave Race -alike and gradually morphed into Tony Hawk on jet skis, by aesthetic way of Miami Vice. We talk about how the game has changed over its un...

We cross paths with Max Krieger and talk CROSSNIQ+ and the so-called, much-lately-in-vogue Y2K aesthetic. Come for the discussion of how aesthetics and attitudes toward technology are inextricable from history and politics, stay for a spirited endorsement of the indie game development scene in Cleveland (and of Cleveland in general). Let's Cross! Aim for THE TOP! You can get CROSSNIQ+ on Steam, It...

Sam Rosenthal shuffles on over to talk about Where Cards Fall, a reflective, touch-native narrative puzzle game almost a decade in the making—as well as his previous work on the fiercely and rightly beloved What Remains of Edith Finch. Along the way, Sam talks about how Apple Arcade could offer new opportunities for smaller, weirder games, how working on Skylanders taught him the finer points of g...

Ricky Haggett takes stock of his work on Wilmot's Warehouse, Hohokum, Loot Rascals, Frobisher Says, Tenya Wanya Teens, and his other odd, wondrous work. We talk about the primacy of collaboration in his games, the importance of making game development rewarding (practically and financially as well as creatively), the "repetitive stress injury for your brain" that prevents developers from enjoying...

Matthew Seiji Burns is responsible for some of the best and least-discussed narratives and soundtracks in games, namely those in the beloved-for-other-reasons Zachtronics works Infinifactory, TIS-100, SHENZHEN I/O, and Opus Magnum? not to mention the generally under-discussed Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, his Twine work , and his past-life AAA work on the Call of Duty, Halo, and Destiny series...

Melos Han-Tani and Marina Kittaka worked together on the original Anodyne, its under-appreciated follow-up Even the Ocean, and now their latest Analgesic Productions joint, Anodyne 2: Return to Dust . It's a game about getting to know the world in its infinite strangeness, acquiring and shedding preconceptions, and meeting new people who radically alter your sense of what's right, what's wrong, an...

Alan Dang emerges from the shadows to talk about his work on the Skullgirls mobile game, the VR garden-'em-up Fujii, and the indie arcade esport stalwart Killer Queen. Plus, we talk about the broader possibilities for virtual reality, the criminally ignored potential of games for education, and the fact that a gimmick is only a gimmick until someone uses it really well. ——— • Guilty Gear XX Accent...

Bryant Cannon joins us to discuss Oxenfree, its follow-up Afterparty, and the licensed, now-delisted Night School games that came in between—not to mention his previous mobile work, much of it also now delisted. As such, we talk about the melancholy weirdness of games being delisted, and more broadly, of games being treated as products first and foremost. But mostly we talk about narratives, and h...