Nice Games Club - a gamedev podcast!

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 when it comes to figuring out how to get out of your head.  0:09:...

Ellen’s back in the clubhouse, let’s see what she remembers. Lydia brings a Dungeons and Dragons mechanic about recovering memories called 'Untitled Mechanic,' Stephen feels part of a club that is not Nice Games Club, and Mark brags about playing 2nd Edition in middle school. Untitled Memory Mechanic Lydia's website Lydia Symchych Oneshot inspirtation ZacSpeaksGiant YouTube Lydia's google doc Lydi...

Your nice host return to the complex and sometimes underappreciated world of quality assurance in the game dev space, and also explore discovery as a design focus. In this episode: Lydia is still looking for recommendations while at the Serious Play Conference (answer in Discord!), Mark hates on Jira and Stephen finally catches up to the latest gaming trend a couple of months late. Chants of Senna...

We welcome Freya Holmér back into the clubhouse to talk about 3D game development for independent game developers. We get into the specifics of the tools available for devs and why they work and don't work for different teams, but it's mostly an excuse to talk about Freya's new 3D modeling software. Half-Edge  -  Freya Holmér Shapes  -  Freya Holmér ,  Unity Asset Store Shader Forge  -  Freya Holm...

This week, your Nice Hosts have a new prompt from a new source. Lydia's husband, Ian, draws from a rainy source of inspiration and the Hosts are all-in. We brush up on the water cycle, requisition the equipment, practice our Trans-Atlantic accents, dunk on hot dogs, and puzzle over water-based cloud economies. Big Pharma  -  Steam Le Ballon Rouge  -  Wikipedia Water Cycle  -  Wikipedia Loop Hero  ...

Your nice hosts talk about saving both your position in a game and saving your secrets from being spread around. Also in this episode: Stephen's birthday is coming up, Lydia's been presenting in webinars for a while, and Mark's got a new game coming soon! Category Quest  -  ELB Learning Webinar | Let’s Play! Category Quest: ELB Learning’s Newest Game  -  ELB Learning ,  YouTube Webinar | Escape Ro...

Mark rushes through the introduction to talk about his two rush projects, one of which, Blippo+ , was announced on Sunday during the PC Gaming Show! You'll hear more about that next week, but until then, Lydia talks about feeling seen in Anime, Stephen laments that his filmmaking class has not only ruined movies for him, but also music, and Dale does a good job editing out Lydia’s coughs. Blippo+,...

This week in the club house Adrian Sandoval describes how video games are speed running art history. Your nice hosts have their minds blown many times and Steven discovers he might actually like history!? Stay tuned to find out where the 90 day return policy came from. Little Nemo and the Nightmare Fiends  -  Team Nemo Chris Totten, co-author of Adrian's book, has been on the show Teaching Gamedev...

Your nice hosts all secured a Switch 2 pre-order... from a certain point of view. Then, Stephen examines the body, Mark attempts a vocabulary, and Lydia has recommendations. Chants of Sennaar  -  Wikipedia Nintendo Switch 2 preorders were a total mess — at first  -  Jay Peters ,  The Verge Missed out on a Nintendo Switch 2 pre-order? GameStop and Best Buy will have mo…  -  Demi Williams ,  TechRad...

The clubhouse welcomes Ashley Phipps, producer for the game Clock Out at 2, to discuss the topic of mental health and discrimination. Mental Health and Discrimination Game Design Gaming Narrative Clock Out at 2 Demo  -  Borderless Studios ,  Steam What to know about microaggressions  -  Anna Smith Haghighi ,  Medical News Today Queerty Gamers  -  Queerty Gamers Spooktober 2023 Clock Out at 2 Build...

In this episode the club house talks about the games that they have been playing. Mark attempts to define the terms good friction and bad friction, declares his distaste of rouge-likes, and talks about friction in his current projects. Lydia shows us how to make scoring sound way more academic. Civilization VII Age of Mythology Retold Blue Prince 0:18:21 Friction by Design Mark tries to define som...

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. Production The $10 Million Lawsuit That Hin...

A new Nintendo is on the way, and your nice hosts talk about both it and the world it's being born into. It kicks off a longer than usual episode where Lydia just wants a way to experience horror games, Mark has an unpopular opinion, and Stephen thinks players have too much agency already. 0:31:57 Let's Plays Endoparasitic miziziziz itch.io Let’s Plays: A Copyright Conundrum Alexandra Champagne Sl...

Your nice hosts settle their differences in opinions when it comes to food to serve up a fresh game design document in a new Nice Games Jam episode. Prompt Create a game with one of my favorite things, food! It cannot be about/or have mechanics that are cooking. Think: growing food, pairing foods, making an international food court, menu design, using foods in season, etc. Game type Design documen...

Mark is still out sick, so Dale takes his place in the clubhouse and brings a topic! The club makes a prediction that by the time that this episode comes out, Mark will still be sick, and if you are listening on Patreon, that is absolutely true. If you aren't listening on Patreon, you probably should be. The group talks about how often and when to say no. Stephen admits that he is the bottleneck,...

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 Fun Prompt "Come up with a game where the winner is the pla...

Beth leads Mark and Stephen through a therapy session. Stephen talks Kickstarter, Mark talks Patreon, and everyone agrees Beth's game  Verdant Skies  is great.  Part-Time Hero: I'm Broke But I Have To Save The World!  -  Future Club ,  Kickstarter Dreamsettler  -  Tendershoot ,  Patreon 0:06:40 Begging for Money 0:52:09 Quality of Life Quality of Life Michael “Kayin” O’Reilly Kayin Works Verdant S...

Beth Korth, board member of Nice Games Alliance, enters the clubhouse to talk about the purpose of the NGA and how to best fulfill that mission. They discuss how workshops, talks, and conferences fit into their plans. And how they can provide unique experiences and services that the gamedev community can't get elsewhere. They also emphasize the importance of lunch. Nice Games Alliance Workshops

Lydia joins the clubhouse for her first regular episode as a host (it's calendar math)! The clubhouse discusses the release of Civilization VII and how it is taking up all of Stephen's time. Lydia brings to the table the question of how she can learn more games, and how tutorials don't work for her. Stephen regrets not being able to fully develop the world which is the setting for his five-minute...

The clubhouse gets Cretaceous this week; your nice hosts have been challenged to create a game about dinosaurs and their feeding habits. Prompt Make a game about the feeding habits of dinosaurs or of paleontologists, bonus points if all the dinosaurs are from the same era. Game type Design document Player count 1 Rules Cretaceous period Flowering plants evolved here Early mammals here too Velocira...

NEWS! New episodes now come out a week early on Patreon!! Sign up to listen to next week's episode now! We talk about why, and the silly reason why now , in this episode, along with another, much bigger piece of NEWS . And of course, your nice hosts continue the show's annual tradition of recounting what they did during hiatus. SO. MUCH. NEWS. Nice Games Club on Patreon What We Did On Our Winter B...

#373 Puzzle Systems Interview 2024.11.15 Releasing 2019's "Baba is You" after more than a decade of making puzzle games was a milestone for this week's guest, but it was also just the beginning of his design journey. Arvi "Hempuli" Teikari talks to your nice hosts about the balance between giving players freedom and constraining their expression, the pacing and sequencing of individual puzzles, wh...

#368 “That’s way too many pawns.” Roundtable 2024.10.11 This week, Ellen kicks things off with a chat about how games tell players, “This might be tough!” and how to make that fun and fair. Stephen and Mark jump in with their takes on what makes difficulty settings shine. Then, Mark thinks about the practice taking familiar game mechanics and twisting them into something fresh. Think pacifist runs...

#366 Optimization Interview 2024.09.26 Entering the clubhouse this week is our the third Owl (employee of Owlchemy Labs) and first Peabody Award winner (as lead developer for We Are OFK ), to talk about the "dos," "don'ts," and "good enoughs" of optimization. Cleveland video game designer Jarryd Huntley wins Peabody Award for ‘We Are OFK’  -  Joey Morona ,  cleveland.com We are OFK  -  Peabody Awa...

#349 Dialogue Through Goals Nice Thinking 2024.05.29 Stephen brings a half-baked thought into the clubhouse for this Nice Thinking episode: how can we improve dialogue systems? He's got some opinions, which Mark and Ellen immediately debunk, but it leads to some engaging conversation. Dialogue Through Goals Stephen McGregor Game Design Narrative