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!
Event deck
Resource Deck
Shuffle the event deck and the resource deck separately. Deal 5 cards from the resource deck to each player.
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.
Some of Lydia's escape room props!
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.
Stay tuned to find out!
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.
Blippo+ (Mark's game) released, and you can buy it:
Lydia:
Stephen is:
Your nice hosts talked about these health systems:
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.
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!
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.)
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...
Joanna and Mark debated a concept called "Utility-first CSS"
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:
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. ;)
Lydia played some Dutch games
Stephen is very excited about Kirby Air Riders. Is it as good as he anticipated? Past Stephen sure hopes so!
Mark went to L.A. for the Blippo+ Exhibition
Nice Games Alliance
The reasons Lydia doesn't use the Potion:
And more reasons:
Combatting the natural emotional response for players to keep their stuff
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.
