Jake

You don't have to play it.

Was the game missing one orange wine bottle card when you were playing? Our friend Glenn was trying to build an immaculate orange weinhandle but failed, and we eventually realized it was because the PAX deck was incomplete. I did all the UI design and UI art in the game, as well as what I guess would be called the art direction, though there wasn't a ton to direct. Over the course of a couple weekends, I also built the exterior environment myself (including the mine shaft down to the bar, and the elevator) which shows up on the main menu/opening cutscene. I didn't make many of the decks or tables myself but I worked with an illustrator on staff (Stephen Whetstine) to figure out what they would all be and get the details right. That's why the default deck of cards features the Weinhandler as the Jack. I also spent a lot of time early on working with the tech art guys and our animators to make sure we did things like actually animate and manage the poker chips as unique objects (instead of just displaying stacks as cylindars or the sorts of other shortcuts a lot of poker games take), and do other early setup stuff like set up the scale of the characters relative to each other, make sure their cards were rigged to be bendable and other weird things. Any overarching visual detail, I probably had my hands in in some capacity. Also any big visual bug was probably a result of my meddling. These days we just use a Zoom recorder (the H2 in particular). As for the old setup, Chris would have to list it all out. It was four mics and a 4 channel mixing board, going into his PC I think through an audio in box of some sort but I don't know any of the models.

That trailer's not doing it for me at all, but I've heard so much positive stuff about this game I don't really care that that's the case. Really looking forward to this.

You will spend forever trying to find a perfect portal. The two places to look seem to be just cruising Kickstarter, or cruising the entire rest of the internet (good places to start probably include trying to find indie developers who tweet a lot about other peoples projects, and read TIGSource).

Thanks everyone who showed up! It was great to hang out with folks on Friday. Thanks also to Marven for setting it up! There were fewer people there this year (probably because we don't do podcasts anymore) but it was especially fun for me since this year had the biggest quotient of actual Thumbs alumni -- Chris, Steve, Me, David (Metallus), Spaff, and Marek. If Nick had made it (sadly he couldn't due to a Bethesda party) it would have been the first time the people who started Idle Thumbs were all in the same room as the people who regularly did the podcast. A near miss for worthless-beyond-being-personally-meaningful-to-me history, but an extremely fun time all around. Sorry we weren't able to squeeze out a PAX cast. We never had high hopes of one happening which is why nothing was ever said. The timing never worked out -- almost all of us somehow have jobs now which actually cross over with doing things at PAX. Unrelated to Thumbs in particular: Big thanks to any Thumbs listeners who went to the Poker Night panel. It was awesome, and slightly flattering, to see familiar faces from the meet-up also appear there to hear us say a bunch of crap about that, too!

That's not Spaff, that's an impostor, but we must always be vigilant.

This is the worst but is it AT ALL possible to move this to Friday? If not, that's cool, but Chris can't make it on Saturday evening. Let me know! Thanks/sorry.

The Somethig Awful games forum is very different from re Something Awful homepage! A good Let's Play is usually either a well annotated or well commentated (depending on the style) long-form playthrough of a complete game. I think they started with forgotten classics and games too old for younger members to have played, but at this point its basically anything, good or bad, forgotten or not. There are some snarky/goofy ones but most are normal/lighthearted with the sass.

Chris appears on another podcast, like he does! http://flashofsteel.com/index.php/2011/02/10/three-moves-ahead-episode-103-community/ Rob turtles up for a free-for-all discussion of RTS multiplayer gaming with Tom Chick and Chris Remo. What really powers the Starcraft II community, and why can’t other RTS games match it? It looks unstoppable, but does a challenger arise with League of Legends? 3MA favorites Supreme Commander II and RUSE depress the panel with their multiplayer front-end, but Chris cheers himself up by building a cathedral in Dawn of Discovery.

Nah I'm all set up properly in that regard. My PC (i think the video card, I think the video accelleration playback portion in particular) has issues and hard locks all the time right now. It must have hit premiere at the point when it was doing a write to my project file.

:(

Video delayed a bit. Guess I'll be starting over. I forgot that I didn't have incremental save backups turned on on my home PC, and that I was using Premiere. FML.

If anyone wants to plan a meet-up please do and we will promote it on the tweets/blog/etc. I don't think any of us has the mental energy available to put it together this year but a Thumbs get-together would be fun/rad/:tup:.

50 minutes resynced so far, out of 61. This is taking a while. Hopefully tomorrow it will appear though. Prepare to be whelmed.

Massive audio sync issues unfortunately. Soon, though.

Is that a new dance? THE BUGABOO?! That's the last of those from me for a couple years, I guess.

I don't think we're quite at 100 unless you count out of office contractors I don't know about or something. But yeah its close.

For whatever it's worth, our core teams are usually about 20 people, with high and low tides greatly inflating and deflating that number over season production. Thats been the case on most all titles for the last few years and continues to be the case on the new ones. (Bone, sam and max season one, and most of season two probably all had smaller core teams. Puzzle agent and Poker Night were also smaller.) We probably bite off more than we can chew on occasion but the number of people on a project has been and will remain pretty consistent with what it's been since Sam and max season two. We're at over 80 employees now (expanded the office down to a lower floor, which is weird) and I think the plan is to grow to more than that (100+? I don't really know). We make games with smaller teams than the rest of the industry obviously, but we don't stretch as thin as you think. QA weeps a bit though. I wouldn't complain.

Joe's the lead designer on Jurassic Park, but he may make an appearance later in tue Walking Dead season.

Its going to be a game targeted at kids. There is mo secret deeper meaning in sesame street. That said, the original intentions behind Sesame Street were really awesome, and I think if DF is going to do a licensed game, this seems like a cool fit.

I don't see Valve letting you spawn two copies that way. It seems very likely that it will require logging in to Steam in some capacity to play. If not, then they must be confident enough that they won't get screwed by it. What I mean is that Valve has surely thought about it and made the decision either way with that in mind. If it's allowed, nobody will be being sneaky by doing it, because every game developer who allows that to happen at this point knows that they are doing it. The days of accidentally letting you turn your retail game into multiple simultaneous copies without cracking it are long behind us.

Because if you can fit them both into memory, the time it takes to save/unload and then later reload a huge photoshop document could make it not worth playing Mass Effect. It's easier to just leave PS open. More dangerous, sure, but easier.

Who should I adminify in the Thumbs group?

NeoGAF also has a really well maintained PC building thread. http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=417014