Dev Game Club

Welcome to Dev Game Club, where this week we continue our series on Majora's Mask. We finally get into a dungeon and also talk more about tone, weirdnesses in the save system, and other topics. Dev Game Club looks at classic video games and plays through them over several episodes, providing commentary. Sections played: Past the Swamp Dungeon Issues covered: the horror of becoming a deku, the Lynchian lens, production realities and narrative, liminal spaces, archetypes, Nordic or Tolkienesque influences, turning down the audio, thinking about other Zeldas, being exposed to something edgy as a youngster, parenting influences, being unclear about how one beat a boss, not teaching the player, feeling punished, overindexing on character, trying not to blame the player, feeling the time pressure, layering gameplay on the world, the strange ways the faeries are hidden, discussing what persists, the notebook and the perfect day, being weird that you can leave and not knowing the rules, having to make a 60 hour game,

Welcome to Dev Game Club, where this week we continue our series on Majora's Mask. We talk a bit about getting stuck, the structure, and do some extended catch-up on email. Dev Game Club looks at classic video games and plays through them over several episodes, providing commentary. Sections played: Up to Swamp Dungeon Issues covered: making it feel different, long-winded save mechanics, interrupting your play, expecting it to be okay to let the world end, the threatening moon, how games hold up, the usual strategy for reuse: more of the same, making the main mechanic out of a minor Ocarina mechanic, recontextualizing models and similar locations, the groom mask and the new interactions, constraining locations you can reach, the audio mix, being able to control for when certain events happen or not, being unclear on whether the water is poison, searching high and low for a bottle, a non-Nintendo moment, implying that the player could have been prepared, looking forward to more masks, reusing your engine, plat

Welcome to Dev Game Club, where this week we begin a new series on The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. We of course set the game first in its time and at Nintendo before turning to the opening and the feel of the game. Dev Game Club looks at classic video games and plays through them over several episodes, providing commentary. Sections played: Through the first Clock Tower entry Issues covered: our ten-year anniversary, 2000 in games, a little timeline of Zelda, making a sequel on a short development cycle, reusing engines and making a better version of your game, reusing technology, switching from cartridges to optical media, asset reuse for characters, pricing changes and getting your money's worth, falling into the warm bath, consumptive conservatism, the strange opening and some title cards, us not remembering things about Navi, choosing the legend based on the hardware or the design idea, fitting the legends together, a continuation of Ocarina, film analogues, wanting to be in the room where it happened

Welcome to Dev Game Club, where this week we comment on ten years of doing this podcast. Dev Game Club looks at classic video games and plays through them over several episodes, providing commentary. Note: we recorded our first podcast on Feb 26th, 2016. This episode reflects that date. At the time, we actually banked a few episodes, and decided to hold off a week to do that. We never banked an episode again :)   Issues covered: ten years of podcasting, counting series and games, what kind of gamer are you?, balance in all things, the types of games Brett went deep on, games that exemplify Tim's games, first-person shooters and third-person action adventure, earliest games we played, latest game we played, surprise moments, the butter knife returns, knucklehead stealth, crazy world-altering moments, singing reviews, our longest series, how many interviews, the backstory of Daedalus, cultural sensibility, a grotty fish stew, staying under the radar, cramming features in at the end, pitching vs shipping, how ma

Welcome to Dev Game Club, where this week we complete our series on 1985's Ultima IV. We delve into dungeons, pilot ships all over, explore the later-game evolutions of the quest, and share some stories before turning to our takeaways. Dev Game Club looks at classic video games and plays through them over several episodes, providing commentary. Sections played: Many hours more Issues covered: the literary help on the game, requiring 64K, having a consistent voice, how long a game it is, losing a ship, the Gate spell, needing to go back to every town, talking about towns and understanding the shrine quests, locking in elevations, getting later-game quest info, influencing the Triforce, keys without keys, naming dungeons to be the antithesis of the virtues, being unable to take risks like these, rich and dense theming and intricate reinforcing design, dungeons being near the virtues they oppose, requiring a ship to get to many dungeons, using the sextant to get latitude and longitude, mapping the dungeons, dung

Welcome to Dev Game Club, where this week we continue our series on Ultima IV. We talk about the boat, we talk about dungeons (a tiny bit), we deep dive into NPCs and consequences, we talk about the quests and how everything is in the world, and answer some listener email. Dev Game Club looks at classic video games and plays through them over several episodes, providing commentary. Sections played: More of Ultima IV (Much more, in B's case) Issues covered: revisiting locations and finding new things, a game that does a lot with a little, everything existing in the world, getting to know the world, NPCs sharing sprites and being hard to remember, getting a ship and fighting your way on, broadside combat, dying to a waterspout, wanting to search the oceans, badly simulating tacking, riding a horse, being interrupted in any location, trying to replicate the tabletop experience, feeling like a "yes" game, whether what you do matters, can you be a thief, watering down a morality system, having a limited palette of

Welcome to Dev Game Club, where this week we continue our series on 1985's Ultima IV. We talk a lot about the mysterious sense of the game, the talking interface and mechanics, and dive a bit into combat before turning to reader mail. Dev Game Club looks at classic video games and plays through them over several episodes, providing commentary. Sections played: Another number of hours Issues covered: missing out on talking to someone, sleeping sprites, having a talk prompt and fallbacks, having generic topics per town, putting together with nouns and verbs, adding to world-building, introducing riddles and puzzles, having a sense of what's going on under the hood, exploring through talking, the technical implementation issues, the letter limits, likely implementation details, iterating on a design, fast travel, the many eights, explaining the moon gates, fleeing a boat, the ways you can pause the game, how the moon states work, the persistence of the world, the long table, more arguments for the persistence of

Welcome to Dev Game Club, where this week we begin a series on 1985's Ultima IV. After talking about the recent Defeating Games for Charity, we set the game in its time, talk about our encounters in the past with the series, and then dive into the manuals and the start of the game. Dev Game Club looks at classic video games and plays through them over several episodes, providing commentary. Sections played: The first couple of hours and the manuals  Issues covered: Defeating Games for Charity, the first pancake, our experiences with this series, an opaque franchise, mainlining a game, opacity being part of the point, performance characteristics of the PCs of the time, the importance of the manuals, entering the world as yourself, using the manual to reinforce the role-play, not requiring graphics, priming the player, describing the geography of different areas, imposing importance on a handful of pixels, the quest of the game, sublimating the quest of the game, a less traditional RPG experience, after reading

Welcome to Dev Game Club, where this week we continue our series on Pikmin. We talk about building back from loss, a rough ending, and compact level design, amongst other things. Dev Game Club looks at classic video games and plays through them over several episodes, providing commentary. Sections played: Finished the Game (B) or Played a bit more (T) Issues covered: the charity stream, how many parts do you need, maybe less necessary ship parts, coming back from a bad day, combat and losing units, strategies to build up your armies, fighting the slog and demoralization, the tyranny of the day timer, stats at the end of the game, having a day to rebuild, a mismatch of tone and play, figuring out how the conversion flowers worked, an economical game with economical levels, playing against enemy ecologies, small footprint with lots of overlay, a daily bombing task, a player type that interacts poorly with the game, not handling the vertical well, the first iteration, thinking about the unit types in other RTSes

Welcome to Dev Game Club, where this week we return to our series on Pikmin. We talk about returning to the game after a break, the macro structure and persistence of the levels, and other topics. Dev Game Club looks at classic video games and plays through them over several episodes, providing commentary. Sections played: Several more hours Issues covered: Defeating Games for Charity, relearning the controls, figuring out what you were trying to accomplish, naming buttons, persistent units and worlds, exploratory sandboxes, reinforcing replay, Nintendo creating something new, things that are hard to classify into genres, the order of operations, plate-spinning and de-stressing, gameplay paradigms, not knowing when you have the right tools, the ticking timers, limited knowledge to find, the puzzly boss, learning how well you can recover, gentle fail states, not telling you everything you might want to know, the un-Nintendo timers, day/night cycles, hitting enemies out of the air, loss aversion, Olimar salting

Welcome to Dev Game Club, where this week we recap 2025 through our interviews. Dev Game Club looks at classic video games and plays through them over several episodes, providing commentary. It's all about our takeaways -- I'm going to let the clips speak for themselves and remove the usual stuff from here. In the past year, we interviewed eight people across seven episodes: Sean Vesce and Zack Norman, Karla Zimonja, William Pugh, Erik Wolpaw, Chet Faliszek, Kim Swift, and a new type of interview with Ed Fries. Next time: Back to Pikmin! Links: Defeating Games for Charity Twitch: timlongojr and twinsunscorp  Discord  DevGameClub@gmail.com

We are off for one more weeke, so we are again reaching into the Discord Game Club interview archive. This time around, BioStats and Calamity Nolan interview Carlos from the Discord, an independent graphic novelist and publisher and former AAA game developer. Twitch: timlongojr and twinsunscorp  Discord  DevGameClub@gmail.com

We are off for the next few weeks, so we are again reaching into the Discord Game Club interview archive. This time around, BioStats and Calamity Nolan interview RobotSpacer, who talks about his streaming, his hobby game development, and other topics. Twitch: timlongojr and twinsunscorp  Discord  DevGameClub@gmail.com

We are off for the next few weeks, so we are again reaching into the Discord Game Club interview archive. This time around, BioStats and Calamity Nolan interview Brad Smith, who talks about his independent developer life, art, punk, and skateboarding, among other topics. Twitch: timlongojr and twinsunscorp  Discord  DevGameClub@gmail.com

Welcome to Dev Game Club, where this week we revisit our series on Portal with another bonus interview with Kim Swift. We get a look at the game from which it came before hearing about the development proper. Dev Game Club looks at classic video games and plays through them over several episodes, providing commentary. Podcast breakdown: 1:23 Interview 1:03:02 Break 1:03:25 Outro Issues covered: Kim's history, deciding where to go to college, learning to program, working with a team over multiple years, pitching each other, mixing interests, learning to work together, figuring out collaboration, the student showcase, showing to Valve, a sudden audience of twenty, walking away with a job offer, taking away only the ideas, showing at the IGF while building the new game, acquiring in Valve, a six month tech demo, borrowing the art direction, a useful constraint, extending six months more, the everyday feeling and being able to have fun, getting another year to go in the bundle, adding the behind the scenes stuff,

Welcome to Dev Game Club, where this week we try something a little different. Unattached to any particular game, we chat with Ed Fries, a long-time video game developer most well-known for his work  shepherding the early days of Xbox and Microsoft Game Studios. We talk about five games of his early years that particularly affected him. Dev Game Club looks at classic video games and plays through them over several episodes, providing commentary. Podcast breakdown: 1:16:35 Break 1:16:48 Outro Issues covered: a new model for interviews, productivity software wars, a child of engineers, Lunar Lander on a calculator, 6800-based kit computer and programming in assembly, cardboard computer, jumping from BASIC to assembly language, using a print terminal, modem sounds, competitive Asteroids, the first real video game, oscilloscopes and radar, complaining to the dentist, inspiring a generation of programmers and engineers, learning by typing from magazines, the 8-bit microprocessor, getting a 6502 square root routine

Welcome to Dev Game Club, where this week we begin a new series on 2001's Pikmin. We set the game in its time and then spend a lot of time talking about putting Nintendo's spin on the RTS on a console. Dev Game Club looks at classic video games and plays through them over several episodes, providing commentary. Sections played: The first few days Issues covered: a well-trod year, some MMO history, the GameCube at LucasArts, playing PC vs console, playing PC RTSes of the time, history with Pikmin, keeping an eye on Nintendo making and entering genre spaces, making a thing on controller first rather than jamming in a KBM game, Tim talks about his favorite controller again, inspirations, being embodied in the world vs the god's-eye view, the simplicity of the ship pieces and setup, Nintendo's open world game, meteors vs meteoroids, the puzzle RTS, making the environment more of the enemy than the creatures, lightly building an army, trading pikmin for time vs the heavy pieces, task-based challenges, spreading yo

Welcome to Dev Game Club, where this week we add to our Portal and Portal 2 discussion with an interview with Chet Faliszek. We cover tons of Valve time. Dev Game Club looks at classic video games and plays through them over several episodes, providing commentary. Podcast breakdown: 0:45 Interview 1:09:15 Break  1:09:45 Outro Issues covered: text-based football, all the early computers, programming for the first time, committing fraud, the first zombie game and losing it all, campaign finance reform, getting an opportunity to practice your shtick, selling gray market games, dissing games you're selling, going back and forth with Valve, petting the dog, thanking yourself for being awesome, the Crab Cracker, walking out, diving in on a team, thinking everyone is smarter than you, iterating on Team Fortress and finding its identity, archetypes/stereotypes, multiplayer silhouettes, game lineages, iterating dialogue systems, pushing against the need for a story and being challenged, not having QA and dealing with

Tim is traveling this week, so we are reaching into the Discord Game Club interview archive. This time around, BioStats and Calamity Nolan interview N0isses, who talks about his streaming, music, music streaming, and lots of other stuff. We expect to return next week. Twitch: timlongojr and twinsunscorp  Discord  DevGameClub@gmail.com

Welcome to Dev Game Club, where this week we finish our series on Deadly Premonition. We talk a bit about the main story, the life sim, how we get around and more before turning to takeaways. Dev Game Club looks at classic video games and plays through them over several episodes, providing commentary. Sections played: To Ch 21 (Tim) and only Ch 8 (Brett) Issues covered: Cry-baby Timothy, pre-show announcements, the game coming more quickly at the end, prime time television and Twin Peaks, describing an actual puzzle, the feeling of a web of connections between people both surface and hidden, the Ingram twins and their grandfather and Kaysen, dialogue with characters on their life sim paths, having the spatial awareness of the town vs not in television, you get to live in the town, the limitations of the driving model, wanting a simpler driving model, having conversation while the character is being driven instead, an unpolished gem, when time pauses vs when it will advance and keeping you unsettled, dealing w