tberton

I think it's funny that Sean chides Chris about Doge 2048, but seems to have forgotten that he once talked about Snoopy's Flying Ace for like 20 minutes. Idle Thumbs has always talked about weird games.

Good episode guys, even if it wasn't the 150 Megacast we were all hoping for. One thing: I'm not sure if it has to do with the new set-up, but Sean was sounding really mumbly this episode. I had to strain to hear what he was saying. Just a note.

Endnotes/footnotes is only a significant distinction if there are lots with pertinent information in them. If it's just citations, you're not supposed to read them anyway, so it's fine for them to be endnotes. You only read citations if you're specifically critiquing the book/article or researching the topic.

I'm hoping for Zoe Quinn. I know from Twitter that she and Steve are friends and I'd love to hear more of her story.

Yeah, I think what Chris was getting at is that to be a professional player you need sponsorship deals and those only happen if their's a viewing audience, which is tough to generate if you're not streaming.

I just wanted to chime in on the whole "could Hearthstone be Blizzard's DOTA" thing. I think you guys were conflating a competitive scene with a professional scene. A game can have a very robust and successful competitive scene without having any pro players. For instance, people run Netrunner tournaments all the time and it's very successful for Fantasy Flight (although obviously not at DOTA levels), but there are not to my knowledge any professional Netrunner players, as in nobody makes money off of playing Netrunner. But that doesn't mean that people don't take the competition seriously. Also, you guys should totally get Nels to play Netrunner with you! I think there's a lot there for you to like.

According to the print available in the merch store, this game takes place in 1989, the year I was born. Cool.

The word on Twitter is that we have to start a Sasquatch rumour, to get back at Vanaman for the Gone Home ghost.

All I know is that the newsletter headline had better be "Campo Santo announces cool cool cool game".

I think it's more that Best Buds doesn't work as a two-week prototype. I think it could still work as a full game.

I wouldn't recommend making teaching decks with less than the minimum deck size and agenda count. I think that distorts the play experience too much.

Great interview Steve! It reminded me how excited I am for Transistor.

Well, whenever you want to represent something on a board but keep it secret, you need there to be multiple things you could place that look identical so that the secret is maintained. How about this: each Trap Card has a "Trickiness" value. That value is equal to the number of tokens you can place on the board, with one of those tokens being the actual trap and the others being dummies. That way, people know a trap has been played, it can be paid for immediately, and planned for, but there's still uncertainty and surprise. Does that work with your ideas for the game?

Sorry, feelthedarkness, I'm not sure I quite follow the idea. Are traps something sprung on players when they're trying to draw Action Cards, or are they a subtype of Action Cards that they can play on the board to hurt the other players? I get the feeling it's the latter, but I may be wrong. The first question you should ask yourself (forgive me if you've already done this) is: what do traps add to the game? Are they necessary for the feeling you're trying to evoke, the story you want to tell or the strategies you want to encourage? Any time a mechanic is tough to implement, it's good to ask yourself if it's worthwhile in the first place. For more specific advice, I'd need a better idea of the flow of the game. Unfortunately, your image didn't load for me so that might be contributing to my confusion.

Oh yeah, I remember Jake talking about that now.

Oh man, that's a great idea to have one player look at the deck and the other player shuffle it! I was thinking it would be more of a Hanabi-style thing, where one player is holding their cards so that the other player can see them, but I like your idea better. I think for a game like this, the goal would have be defined by the story first and the mechanics second. It would have to be related to why somebody came back from the future. Another suggestion a friend had was that there are two people from the future, but only one of them is telling the truth about being "you" i.e. the player from the present. The other is trying to fuck you up. And don't worry about hijacking: ideas are cheap and mine are vague enough that there are a million ways you could go with them.

I think you got Telltale mixed up with Traveller's Tales, who make the LEGO games.

Hmm, I hadn't thought of it in a loose rules way, but that could be the way to go with it. I was thinking of a card-based action system, where one player (the one from the future) has more information about the cards that are coming up (because they know what happens) and uses that information...somehow. I hadn't really thought of a goal for the game, but storytelling might be the answer.

That actually sounds like a cool idea. I'm not sure exactly how, but I think you could make the prophecy thing feel like more than just flavour. Having some way of misinterpreting the prophecy (because that's what happens to every prophecy in every story ever) and getting unexpected results could accomplish that. Just for fun, here's the list of game ideas I have from my notebook. Some of these are garbage, some really excite me, some are more developed and some are just the smallest seed of an idea: -Real-time capture the flag -Election game based on polling -3 player abstract game -Semi-team-based prohibition game. -Semi-co-op zombie game where people turn into zombies. -Federalism game with assymetrical negotiation -Negotiation based worker placement. -Crusader Kings II meets Risk Legacy -Quite a Handful! -Roll a lot of dice and don't let them fall -One player is the other FROM THE FUTURE! -Yo dawg, I hear you like board games so I put a board game in your board game -Something with coasters -Spy network game -Sending orders war game -Co-op theatre production -Taylorism: factory owner vs. workers -roguelike board game

I could be making that up, though, and in any case I wouldn't be surprised if it started in Magic.

I'm pretty sure "recursion" meaning "getting something back you've already used" is a fairly common term in tabletop gaming.

"Keeping your job while everybody under you gets fired" is not being a fall guy. Being a fall guy is taking responsibility for the unprofitably of the comapany you controlled and leaving yourself. At best, this is PR spin, placing the creative "needs" of one person over the financial needs of dozens. At worst, it's Levine being an egocentric asshole. Neither makes me think better of Levine. In the first case, I'm not interested in a "visionary auteur" who covers for the shady dealings of his parent company. In the second, I'm not interested in the work of an egocentric asshole that let down everybody who worked under him.

Wait, who at Campo Santo worked on Bioshock 2?

Blackguard is actually coming in Fear and Loathing, the very next data pack. Get excited!

That's awesome, I'm glad to hear it! Can't wait to see what you guys do next. I hope that the sales of Gone Home give you as much freedom as possible to do what you want with your next game. Speaking of sales, I have a question, which you can feel free not to answer if you'd rather not: did you explicitly think about sales when pricing the game? As in, did you set Gone Home's initially price at $20 rather than, say, $15, because you knew it would be featured in sales and wanted that "75% off!" to lower it $5 rather than $3.75?