Nice Games Club - a gamedev podcast!

#384 Time Traveler Estate Sale Nice Games Jam 2025.04.10 Roles reverse as Dale joins Stephen and Lydia for a Nice Game Jam prompted by Mark. The results are an antiques-fueled jaunt through time, and an unexpected win for Stephen. Costcodle  -  Zak Kermitz ,  Costcodle Timeline Inventions  -  Zygomatic ,  Zygomatic Hypodermic Needles  -  Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine ,  Maximum Fu...

#388 Video Game IP Law Interview 2025.05.08 Your nice hosts get a crash course on video game IP law from lawyer and MinnMax cohort, Haley MacLeon. We learn about incorporating, publishing agreements, the difference between a lot of commonly used terms like "copyright", and the joys of contract templates.  MinnMax  -  MinnMax Game Informer Revival  -  Game Informer Video Game IP Law Marketing Misc....

#399 "Half trash compactor, half empty." Roundtable 2025.07.24 Ellen's back for a serendipitously in-sync pair of metacognition-rich roundtable topics. In this episode, Lydia shares a chapter from one of her favorite books and tries to explain ganache while Stephen laments how easy it is to duct tape on features instead of solving problems. Together they discover four brains are better than one wh...

#375 Digital Escape Rooms Interview 2024.11.28 All of your hosts are together in the Clubhouse for a special interview! Lydia Symchych is an impact game designer who has been working with Ellen over the last year. Today, she shares her experience of making an escape room that needed to be rendered in both "physical" and and digital environments. Also, sound effects and pillows. In the USA, Novembe...

In this end-of-year tradition, your nice hosts talk about the games they played and the things that they accomplished in 2025, as well as the games they're excited to play and the things they hope to do in 2026. Stephen and Mark both had an up and down year and both picked predictable nicests (if you know anything about them), while Lydia realizes that she missed the show's orientation day. For 20...

Part 3 of what your nice hosts are calling "Giving Lydia Therapy," we get into Lydia's thoughts on calling herself an artist and what it may mean to think of yourself in this way. Straight Line Was A Lie  -  The Beths ,  Bandcamp The ADA: Your Responsibilities as an Employer  -  U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission 0:13:28 Lydia is an Artist Part 2 of "Giving Lydia Therapy" "I saw a Beatle...

Lots of thinking about thinking in this episode as the Nice Hosts attempt to define some core concepts to gameplay. What even is a game? Interactivity? Play? A failstate?! Buckle in for an intellectual conversation, and remember to go to nicegames.com/feedback to tell Stephen exactly why he's wrong about any of it.  Word Play  -  Steam This Is Minnesota Orchestra: Søndergård and Symphonie fantasti...

Mark DeLoura's decades-long career in games includes roles ranging from Nintendo engineer to White House senior advisor. A longtime and passionate developer advocate, this year he's been tapped to help reinvent the industry's largest annual gathering, GDC. DeLoura outlines the changes coming to this year's conference, defines what "festival" means in the context of GDC, and previews the ambitious...

This week the clubhouse is filled with emotions. Lydia was frustrated that she did not recapture the magic of her first escape room game, Stephen was frustrated that finding his critical eye makes for a different movie watching experience, and Mark was frustrated by the acoustics at a football stadium. In other news, it's time to make your GDC Plans! Mark and Dale will be there, and probably some...

This week, Lydia provides all the fun facts about living on a boat while your nice hosts develop a card game based around scurvy management! Hoyle's Official Book of Games  -  Wikipedia Prompt Create a pirate themed game about food and scurvy management. Game type Card game Player count 2-4 Materials Event deck Resource Deck Setup Shuffle the event deck and the resource deck separately. Deal 5 car...

This week features a timeless topic followed by a timely one, both of them pretty important. Lydia prepares for Chicago, Mark shares his slides, and Stephen gonna chill. CHEST 2025  -  American College of Chest Physicians Some of Lydia's escape room props! 0:05:26 Naming Files Museum Accessioning: Numbering Systems Oklahoma Museums Association Rice County Historical Society Montshire Museum of Sci...

In this episode, Lydia and Stephen are rubber ducks for Mark as he talks through his ideas for a suite of Unity plugin tools. Buckle up, there's a lot! They also discuss whether to bundle or not to bundle tools, considerations of scope and price, and the deep appreciation for easy-to-use interfaces.  Will Mark complete these tools by Christmas? Will Stephen get a reprieve from the nagging about hi...

Sam! returns to the clubhouse to help your nice hosts decide that Lakitu is no longer a savoir that comes down from the clouds, but since he has a job as a referee, should therefore be wearing a little ref shirt. Sam Baeseman is a member of the IDGATC board, the Nice Games Alliance board, and founding member of JAMA Jam. Nice Games Alliance IDGATC JAMA Jam Sam! joined us last week to talk about: C...

Your nice hosts welcome 3D artist and Nice Games Alliance board member Sam Baeseman into the clubhouse to talk about how online Discord communities become available and how to become a part of or lead such communities. Blippo+ (Out now!)  -  Panic Creative Peer Communities IRL Misc. Sam's Social Links  -  skrimbus ,  Linktree JAMA Jam  -  itch.io International Game Developers Association, Twin Cit...

It's been awhile, but it's time for another video episode! This week, Mark's colleague Mike Lasch enters the clubhouse to build a digital prototype live on-air! Ladder Game Playable "Ladder Game" prototype Michael Lasch Construct 3 Kuru Kuru Kuruin Wikipedia Roundabout No Goblin Steam Sokoban Wikipedia

We invite Joanna May into the clubhouse again in this supersized episode to design a game about stowing illicit goods into spacecraft as it's being built! (Note: Minor hiccup with the audio recording in the first 2 minutes, so Lydia is off mic briefly but it fixes itself.) Tangrams  -  Wikipedia We mention Dogpile!, a game we made in a previous game jam. Dogpile! Prompt Design a puzzle game about...

Joanna May returns to the clubhouse as a guest host! Your four nice hosts chat Tetris, knitting, and CSS, but also have a pair of actual topics to discuss... Mark's game Blippo+ is out NOW ! Go buy it on Switch and Steam ! 0:13:36 Role-playing Complete History Of The Soviet Union, Arranged To The Melody Of Tetris Pig with the Face of a Boy YouTube Tetris (film) - Historical accuracy Wikipedia 0:35...

Your nice hosts Lydia and Ellen are on a seriously playful adventure in beautiful Rochester, New York for the Serious Play conference! They discuss game accessibility, D&D therapy, lexical gaps, validation, and more. In addition, Lydia beats the pavement and gets the hot scoop on what attendees learned at the conference and the games that shaped them. Many thanks once more to:  Serious Play for Ly...

In this episode, Mark and Stephen talk about what they are excited about. Lydia deals with a existential crisis about keeping too much stuff. And nobody talks about the full motion video game that Dale made during a Global Game Jam during the topic on video content, where they talked extensively about FMV games. Don't worry! Dale edited this episode and linked the game in the show notes below. ;)...

Stephen Business is back! And he’s attempting to make a meme into a reality. The clubhouse attempts to answer these (and other) questions: How many fishing minigames is too many fishing minigames? Is it okay to shoot fish with lasers? Who are those teenagers with emo hair in the Bentley? Should Stephen make something on the Playdate? Why do people go fishing? Does anyone actually like fishing? You...

It is a joyous day for pancake lovers everywhere, and a joyous week in the Clubhouse for Lydia who successfully made a thing using code! WOW! She shares her experience learning how to make buttons (and everything else) in microStudio. Then the Nice Hosts get real about their experiences with min-maxing in games. You know it's a good topic when it promises at least one spinoff topic so buckle up. ...

Returning "favorite" Laura Onderwater re-enters the clubhouse to talk about task tracking, naming conventions, and paper trails of various kinds in an engaging discussion on concept art workflows. Even if you’re not part of an art team, there’s a lot to take away from this one! We spoke with Laura previously in an episode on Visual Worldbuilding Concept Art Workflows Art Production Laura on Artsta...

As promised, the three Korths, Andy, Beth and Gabe, join us in the clubhouse for our hundred and two or so episode tradition! The clubhouse was too crowded to fit Mark in, but having five hosts makes up for it. Your nice hosts design a game about fixing the messes your child makes and then returning the favor as you age. Andy had brought up a chaotic game where you need to prevent your infant from...

As is tradition, a couple of episodes after a hundredth we invite one or more of our pals the Korths into the clubhouse. This time we were lucky enough to have all of the family Korths (coming soon), and a bonus interview with Andy Korth! We talk with him about his recent work updating Verdant Skies. Revisiting Your Games Game Design Production UI / UX Verdant Skies  -  Howling Moon Software Previ...

It's a big one for your nice hosts... and your newest nice host wants to know more. Lydia takes Mark and Stephen though the history of the program, in three acts. 0:02:04 Act I: Interview 0:57:38 Act II: Quiz 1:12:47 Act III: Jam