Up Up Down Down – Détails, épisodes et analyse

Malin Sundberg joins us to discuss Two Spies, the new turn-based iOS spy strategy we’ve made, along with its UI, Swift as a game development language, and the pros and cons of shipping a game as a side project.

• Two Spies
• The game on the App Store
• Steamclock

Soren Johnson joins us to discuss making strategy games. We discuss his new game Offworld Trading Company, touch on his work on the Civilization series, and the challenges of balance. Afterward, we express our early bewilderment at Overwatch.

• Offworld Trading Company
• Designer Notes

Michael “Rands” Lopp joins us to talk Destiny. We briefly discuss its budget and profitability before digging in to the question of why, despite its problems, it’s a fun game. We dissect the Crucible PvP mode, matchmaking, the story or lack thereof, leveling, and bullet sponges. Afterwards, we fail at going off topic and talk about the expansion, raiding, voice acting, and the surprisingly clever UI.

• Rands’ take on Destiny
• Bungie on weapon tuning and TTK
• Bungie on game modes over on Planet Destiny
• The long, long, grind of Burning Crusade’s Netherdrake mount
• Rands’, Nigel’s and Allen’s Destiny profiles
• Rands in Repose
• @rands on Twitter
• The 100 Destiny matchmaker
• Polygon’s negative Destiny: The Dark Below review

John Walker, co-director and editor of Rock, Paper, Shotgun, joins us to discuss the state of PC gaming. We talk Early Access, Kickstarter, preorders, and the many pitfalls therein. We dig in to the profitability of PC ports, dismiss various kinds of football, dissect the longevity of old-school games, and try to guess the fate of Oculus. Afterward, we discuss terrible Early Access games, terrible hilarious games, and Allen’s latest terrible game idea.

• Rock, Paper, Shotgun
• Spacebase DF-9’s early access ending in a final 1.0
• John’s Let’s Play: Salt
• Flow Free
• Stranded Deep
• Time Ramesside’s bad Early Access reviews
• Why Didn’t Everyone Play Kingdoms of Amalur?
• Retrospective: Soldner
• The Magic Circle

Noel Berry, developer of the upcoming procedural platformer Skytorn, joins us to discuss procedural content in games. We talk about Skytorn and how its levels are built, and discuss many other indie games with procedural levels, from Minecraft to Don’t Starve. We dig in to what kinds of games generated content works for and what kinds it doesn’t, and how to model Paris with only a few hundred artists.

• Noel’s upcoming game Skytorn
• The edge of the world in Minecraft
• Spry Fox’s Road Not Taken
• Klei’s Don’t Starve
• Crossy Road, the “endless arcade hopper”
• No Man’s Sky
• Ken Levine’s article on Shadows of Mordor and its procedural content
• Noel’s website

Maya Kramer, indie game marketing extraordinaire, joins us to talk PR and marketing. We discuss conferences and expos, getting the word out about indie games, the story of Towerfall, and how games filter up from the noise to journalists and platforms. Afterwards, we talk PSN outages, getting killed by dragons, and dystopian nudity.

• GDC, PAX, and the many conferences for game developers
• Rami Ismail, Vlambeer’s developer and prolific business guy
• The Frankfurt Book Fair
• Devolver Digital
• The wonderful Towerfall
• Indie House Vancouver
• Maya’s Patreon and Twitter
• PSN’s extensive downtime this Christmas
• Spider 2 - Rite of the Shrouded Moon
• Papers, Please on iPad

John Moltz, co-author of The Visual Guide to Minecraft, joins us to discuss the weird and wonderful world of Minecraft. We discuss why kids are obsessed it, managing servers, mods, Java, and trolling. Bonus: Nigel does a special interview with three further subject experts - his kids.

• Moltz’ book on Minecraft, Visual Guide to Minecraft
• The bizarre world of Minecraft mods
• The Bukkit Minecraft server
• The Rasberry Pi Mineblock server Indiegogo
• Attention Mining, John’s article for The Magazine on Minecraft streamers
• ROBLOX
• Dave Wiskus’ Podcast Intervention
• John’s podcasts, Turning This Car Around, The Rebound, and frequently The Talk Show
• The Low Earth Orbit podcast
• The Silent Age’s mustaches
• Old Man Murray’s Death of Adventure Games

Matt Comi of Big Bucket joins us to discuss developing games on Apple platforms. We talk about Matt and Neven Mrgan’s new game Space Age, porting games written for iOS and the Mac, Swift and Objective-C as languages for game development, and building the game engine and level editor for Space Age. Afterwards, we talk about a couple of the recent game industry travesties.

• Big Bucket’s new iPad game, Space Age
• UpUp #12, where we talked to Neven Mrgan about Space Age and retro games
• Mike Bithell on porting Thomas Was Alone
• Letterpress
• Big Bucket Software
• The dumb one star reviews on Monument Valley

This week Federico Viticci joins us to talk digital distribution. We discuss about Nintendo’s attempts to court indie developers compared to Sony and Microsoft’s, the programs that make cross-plaftorm development plausible for indies, the various digital download platforms both on the consoles and the App Store, curation on the App Store and Steam, the effects of discounting on games.

• Federico’s shows Connected and Virtual on Relay FM
• Gamasutra’s interview with Nintendo on indie games
• Shovel Knight on Gamasutra
• Unity on 3DS and PlayStation
• Directional’s interview with Shahid Ahmad of PlayStation
• The Nintendo Seal of Quality
• Overwatch
• Assassin’s Creed Unity
• Fantasy Life

Desert Golfing’s Justin Smith joins us from an alien spaceship to discuss reward in games, or a lack thereof. We talk about the world’s reception to his game Desert Golfing, and game design tools like high scores, story progression, leveling up, and sparkles. We also touch on Justin’s games No Brakes Valet and Enviro-Bear 2000, and the inherent reward you get from watching an indie developer you love succeed.

• Desert Golfing on the App Store
• Desert Golfing is Life on Medium
• The history and rebirth of pinball on NPR
• Desert Bus
• Enviro-Bear 2000
• “F**k You Desert Golfing” on Kotaku
• No Brakes Valet