The Game Engine

With another Ludum Dare just passed, and game jams becoming more and more popular as a way for game developers of all skills to work on new original games, it’s high time we discussed the lovely jam of games. Join us as John and Andrew discuss tips and tricks we’ve learned from many mistakes and successes we’ve...

Mythbusters proved to us all that you can indeed polish a turd, but just because it’s shiny doesn’t mean it works. With just two of the regulars, Andrew “bittman” Bittman and John “gritfish” Kane, we discuss the purpose and definition of polish and how it compares to the concept of juice. Particularly we have a...

Great apologies oh great listeners! We have been super out of it last few weeks for various reasons. Hopefully this post is a sign to return to our regular schedule. In this episode, we are joined by special guest Dan Graf, a regular from season 1, ex-Halfbrick designer and newly independent developer. He brings forward...

Another week, and another guest with a return of health meaning we get our first 4 person podcast of season 2! This week we are joined by Dylan Bevis from Featherweight Games to discuss their recent release of Skiing Yeti Mountain with a variety of topics including amount of content, advertising strategy, narrative, conceptualisation and charity....

Another week, another format. This week, we’ve got guest Kim Brebach of Secret Base Games in to chat about his game Monstrous, a card game which you can find on Kickstarter right now! Along the way, we chat about the design process, names and how to use ‘Monstrous’ in a post title. You can find...

This week, we do something a little different: each of the Game Engine hosts challenge the other two to a design challenge. The result: surprisingly deep discussions of 3 very different aspects of game design. Some references, made without context: The Wattam trailer from E3 The volunteer’s dilemma Our listener question for this week’s topic is...

Space. The final frontier. This is not that sort of space. Rather, it is the construction of space we deal with in physical and digital form. Architecture looks at designing and constructing physical structures; a quite similar concept to games actually whilst additionally factoring majorly into Level Design. For Episode 2 of Season 2, Andrew Bittman,...

We’re back again, and about time too. And this time – it’s season 2! Season 2 delivers fresher voices and minds of old hats Paul Sztajer and Andrew Bittman, as well as new voice and new mind John Kane. Hiatus explanations notwithstanding, Episode 1 of Season 2 is one of a few format/style trials we’ll be...

Paul and Andrew are joined by the creators of local iPad hit Towncraft for an in-depth discussion of its origins, development and marketing. Two years ago, brothers Rohan and Leigh Harris set out to build a tablet game that harked back to the isometric wonders of the early 90s. Recently, they hit number two in...

For their discussion of two of the most interesting games of the year thus far – Papers Please and Gone Home – Saul, Paul and Andrew are joined by the enigmatic Tim Stobo (formally of Team Bondi and now of hard-to-articulate indie studio Quest’s End Games). Both games share a focus on minutiae and involve lots...