Game Dev Unchained

Press Start Legal is a law firm based in the United States for Interactive Entertainment Industry. Zac Rich is the cofounder and sat down this week to educate the legal side of indie development, contractual agreements, forming a new company, and many many more about what it takes to make a company legitimate.

Tapas Media is an indie digital comic book company who has just expanded their business to co-develop and publish some of their biggest titles into mobile games.  Tapas has around 2.1 Million active users on its platform, and I think this is a very interesting and unique brand that bridges comics and manga, to indie gaming.  Their newest game is called ‘Dungeon Construction Co.’ and it is an adven...

Immigrants in the United States are facing tougher challenges in recent years as they are up against bigger obstacles. Cecillia Peng was almost forced out of the country even though she has been at one of the top mobile company in the industry for several years now as a UI/UX Designer. We were honored to have her on to tell her story of how her competence in performing her job in a specialized ind...

This Roundtable News brings you discussions from game industry vets about last months biggest news. We talk about the biggest headliners starting out with what's going on with Activision and its split from Bungie. Blizzard getting peanut butter and jealous of that split, and how Epic Games Store is swooning Ubisoft away from Steam.  This episode is brought to you by Quixel Megascans.

Ushering the New Year in traditional fashion we review 2018 news that affected game developers and gamers alike. What the podcast's past and current goals are, and finally semi-announcing our indie game and Games Unchained initiative.

Super.com is a non-traditional indie publishing firm that invests wholly into a game. Recently established in mid 2018 Super.com is offering seed investment for new studios, or venture capital for more mature companies. Hear all your questions answered now on how to get your game funded! You don't want to miss this episode.

Alex Jerjomin is a Senior Environment Artist working at Digital Extremes on Warframe. He has spent 7 years in the industry living on different continents working on the Fable franchise to working on the Spyro series. In this episode we talk about his struggle to get freelance to work as a side hustle and his general view points on where we are as a industry.

Su and Peter both have full time jobs and have had illustrious careers spanning across gaming, film, and tech companies. Their partnership started over four years ago and currently their company, Ugo3D, has a potential valuation of $200 million dollars. Now fresh from their release of GameFace, an app that turns any player into a playable avatar on every smartphone available, they are on the cusp...

Roundtable News brings you discussions from game industry vets about last months biggest news. We talk about the biggest headliners from Epic Games announcing their game store, Fallout 76 upsetting their fanbase, Obsidian being bought out by Microsoft, Game Awards and new game announcements, and the crew's 2019 game predictions.  

Brackeys is one of the fastest growing tutorial resources in game development. Brackeys provides the tools and knowledge needed to program, shape, and design cross-platform applications from ground up using state of the art software. This week we discuss the transition from running a studio office versus renting an office space and how they are advancing to their next goals.

Jonathan Hawkins is the founder of White Elk Studios and have been decorated with high praise and awards from his first VR game Eclipse. His second game Covert for the Occulus GO has been freshly released and is picking up a lot of buzz. This week, Jonathan having spent over a decade working on the God of War series as a designer, has a real conversation with us of what it is like leaving AAA to e...

When the folks over at thatgamecompany start moving on a new project hoping to follow up the success of their previous games Journey and Flower, there was only one person they trusted to help head up development, Eric Koch. Eric’s career started out in QA testing, but later transitioned into design and then production as well before joining up at the good folks at TGC.

Roundtable News brings you discussions from game industry vets about last months biggest news. We talk about the biggest headliners from the recent backlash from the Diablo Immortal PR blunder. Our panel also discusses about the Red Dead Redemption 2 Crunch, Blackout update, Riot gender lawsuit, Jade Raymond leaving EA Motive, and how relevant is game unionization.

The non-gaming industry is a big industry that is growing. There's a huge sector of game developers that are transferring their skills and are prospering in stability and real-life applications. John Podlasek joins us from Level-Ex , a company that produces applications for the medical field to train doctors and medical professionals.

We continue to investigate what went wrong at Telltale Games leading up to the layoff of 275 game developers. Our panel includes previous developers from Telltale Games, Emily Grace Buck and Travis Goodwin. We also welcome back our friend Emma Kinema from Game Workers Unite to explain how Unionization could have helped and what we could do as game developers to be safe in the workplace again.

Brian Canary is the Lead Designer at Splash Damage and have been working in the industry for over 20 years. His career has taken him into all aspects of the game development space and has worked on many distinguished MMO, console, and mobile games. He shares with us in this episode his thoughts of the current trend, and a glimpse of where we are heading as a industry.

Sean Han Tani is a composer, independent game developer, writer and teacher. He is best known for making Anodyne and is currently working on the sequel, Anodyne 2. His past work includes All Our Asias- a surreal, lo-fi, 3D adventure, about identity, race, and nationality. Including also, Even the Ocean, a narrative action platformer about balancing the Light and Dark energies that hold the world t...

Gavin Goulden is the Lead Character Artist at Insomniac Games, having recently released Spiderman PS4. Prior to this, he was the Lead Character Artist on Bioshock Infinite, Character Artist on Dead Rising 2, The Bigs 2, Damnation, and contributed to titles like FEAR 2, Dragon Age, and many independent projects.

Telltale Games recently shut its doors and laid off 275 full-time employees with no severance and week left on health insurance. Although, this type of malpractice and ill treatment of game developers isn't new, the lasting impact is being felt throughout the industry. Larry and Brandon sits down this week to give a game developer's perspective on what needs to change and what developers need to d...

If you are curious about working in AAA, startups, or in the mobile industry then you have to tune in to this week's episode with Richard Khoo. He is a Game Design Director that has been working in the industry for over 15 years. He spent a decade at Blizzard shipping StarCraft 2 and was the lead systems designer for Heroes of the Storm. His extensive experience working in AAA led him towards cons...

In honor of our 156th episode, we’ve pulled some of the interview highlights from our past year episodes to share.

This Roundtable News brings you discussions from game industry vets about last months biggest news. We talk about the biggest headliners starting out with condolences to friends and families of the victim during the Madden tragedy. The new RTX graphics cards, Riot Games and how they are battling sexism at the workplace, also on how to behave outside and inside of work. We conclude the episode with...

Deep Dive is a segment where we breakdown the success and game design of a genre-defining game. This week we analyze Heroes of the Storm made by Blizzard Entertainment with Richard Khoo. He is one of the lead designer that worked on Heroes of the Storm and a veteran of the industry that has spent over 10 years at Blizzard working on many other titles there. His resume includes being at Riot as wel...

Pop Culture Thoughts is about all things that are news in entertainment and nerd culture. In this episode we discuss how discussing taboo subjects can be dangerous. The hype vs quality on movies like the Black Panther. Cultural representation and impact on Crazy Rich Asians. Racial undertones in Zootopia. What you are missing out on UK's 'Love Island.' We also briefly touched based on the Battle R...

Would you believe a team of game developers in Egypt came together to form a company and development academy in order to create their very own AAA action adventure game? We do now, thanks to the story of Ahmed Fouad and the team members of Rumbling Games. He sits with us this week to go over the humble beginnings of an Egyptian game development community, making the switch to Unreal and what it me...