I'm on Episode 69 of Game Design Archive With Edvard And Ludvig!

I was a guest on episode 69 of Game Design Archive With Edvard And Ludvig! You can watch it here:

In the episode we talk about designing, playing and programming arcade-style games.

The design portion of the episode touches on my How I Design Original Arcade-Style Games and Why I Love Unfair Traps in Arcade Games posts. We also discuss the differences in design philosophy between my games Hyper Bun Buster: Rocket Hammer Action and Chessplosion, despite them both being top-down grid-based action games and both sharing enemy types on paper. For example, Hyper Bun Buster's penguin and cat enemies are very similar to the rooks in Chessplosion that slide into you and shoot projectiles at you respectively, except they're much more unpredictable and less robotic.

We also talk about how during Hyper Bun Buster's initial prototyping phase, I was struggling to design enemies that challenged the player in meaningful ways because I was looking to console games such as the 2D Zelda games for inspiration. It was only when I played arcade games such as Capcom's Avengers/Hissatsu Buraiken, The Punisher and Gun.Smoke that I began to understand how to design enemies who can truly put pressure on the player in interesting ways. I would love to write a full blog post about this sometime when I feel more confident about this aspect of designing games!

When I talked about playing games, it was mostly about the games in my Game Journal posts along with a plea for people to learn how to 1 Credit Clear (1CC) arcade games, especially action game designers. It's the same type of thing I touch on in step 0 of my arcade-style game design article, but with more passionate pleading and more thoughts on why some game designers working in arcade-style game genres refuse to play those genres at anything beyond a surface level.

The programming section was mostly things I haven't touched on in this blog, like how I program my game engine and work on my game. If you want to know more about my code I talk about it in a few blog posts, such as What Tools Do I Use to Make Games?. The game development articles and resources that helped me and How to Fix Issues with your Game's Controls. You can also see my game engine's open source random number generator code for an actual example of my code.

Thanks again to Edvard and Ludvig for inviting me on the show. I hope you enjoy the episode!