Stephen Business is back! And he’s attempting to make a meme into a reality.
It’s a fishing minigame collection. The clubhouse attempts to answer the questions:
Lydia's nice list of games with fishing minigames
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.
Also in this episode: Mark is doing level design when he should be playing Donkey Kong Bonanza, new laptop(!), and the existential horror of the cozy game genre.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Freya Holmér is game developer, co-founder of Neat Corporation (makers of VR stealth game Budget Cuts), and creator of developer tools including Shader Forge and Shapes. She spends a significant amount of time interacting with people on her gamedev Twitch stream.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
The clubhouse welcomes Ashley Phipps, producer for the game Clock Out at 2, to discuss the topic of mental health and discrimination.
Good Reps for Mental Health depiction
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.
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.
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.
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.
(Stephen note: This is more of a set of notes taken during the episode outlining a game design document.)
