Tom Brien

Compiling extremely heavy docked variant of the moon shader...

Great cover for anyone releasing an album named HEAD DEMAGNETIZER

I spend a lot of my time strapping a bunch of debug stuff to the animals and watching them move around the world in slow-motion.
That's proc animation for ya!

Iconic image. Burned into my brain with the Nintendo Horse Bag patent

Ugh this is rampant! It really broke something for me when I used to flip between different game podcasts and I noticed they'd all go to a preview event, and come back with the same words, analogies, comparisons, predictions...

This guy seems to mainly hate colour variety

"The Artistry Of" does sound a little bit more cool than "The Art Of"

Cool!
I remember I was into that for a while, but it was just throwing time in the trash. Even an hour doing nothing can be a benefit to your well-being, while an hour being high always felt like a waste.

Thank you for your gift to culture

Monkeys will steal items from your inventory now!
(You can get them back)

Those games where you raise a princess, but badass and for boys somehow.

Monkey chasing gameplay is in!!!!!

On my planet it means cor blimey

If you have 2 friends and they're not The Rumor Meister... it's you.

More game footage tomorrow, so in the meantime here's the bunnies eating lunch

Actually I didn't touch on modern algorithms being built around addictive products being good. And culture is lining up to agree with it, that's kind of the main awkwardness here.
I guess I just went on a big tangent.

Haha, I dunno! I'll close BlueSky, I dunno lol.

Designers are still doing weird stuff, and a small percentage of people still like them.
Sometimes Papers Please makes a million dollars while Farmville makes 100 million dollars and that's fine.
There are still strange new games every year, and that's still good news.

So that's the market and audience. Did design change?

Yes! New designs like Amnesia, Minecraft, Spelunky, Dear Esther hit around 2010, and I think designers ran with those weird, new shapes. More recent stuff like Teardown, Peak, Despelote, Outer Wilds, 1000x Resist are still carrying those torches

What changed is that more people are making small games. So you see a lot more of every type of solo-developer project. Also more people are buying small games. So the $10 space is more filled out, and looks more like the whole. That changed. It's not just for DIY hobbyists any more.

I've been thinking about this, and it's good to split apart what changes over time from what doesn't.
Let's say ~2% of games are doing something really personal or innovative today: that was also true in 2005! Addictive games hooked players and sold well then and now too. Some things remain true.

You can like small games because they get to try weird things, and you can like them because they get to be addictive slot machines for only $5.

It's strange. It feels strange to be at this part of the ongoing "indie games" roller coaster. Like you said, it's too big of a topic to summarize!

Just trying to imagine what kind of guy is reading this and genuinely taking notes for their stream.

The very first prototype of the first monkey is in!!!
It looks hilarious today, but once I spend time smoothing things out, seeing a dozen monkeys flowing around you in the environment is really gonna sell the game.

Really makes you reassess Oasis lyrics. They are working class old bloke songs... but WITHOUT something to fight for?

I never thought about it, but it's a weird thing to spot.

Brilliant

I've painted the squirrel now. Get ready to catch these guys around the world!

I only just got into photography, so hey 10/10 !

Great art as always, really inspiring to go out and pay attention to the world

Always coming across work I never planned in this game. Like writing a dictionary of animals who sit, and animals who usually don't sit.

Kojima Productions has done very well to integrate product placement as part of their whole style over the years

He looks good for 57