Stay ConnectedOur podcast breaks the mold of don’t ask don’t tell about the video game industry. We give everyone the real inside look at what its like to be a professional game developer, Every week we’ll interview pro and indie developers, we’ll talk jobs, studios, salaries and of course crunch horror stories. Tune in!
Hosted by Brandon Pham
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Jonathan Hawkins is the founder of White Elk Studios and have been decorated with high praise and awards from his first VR game Eclipse. His second game Covert for the Occulus GO has been freshly released and is picking up a lot of buzz. This week, Jonathan having spent over a decade working on the God of War series as a designer, has a real conversation with us of what it is like leaving AAA to explore the new frontier of AR/VR.
When the folks over at thatgamecompany start moving on a new project hoping to follow up the success of their previous games Journey and Flower, there was only one person they trusted to help head up development, Eric Koch. Eric’s career started out in QA testing, but later transitioned into design and then production as well before joining up at the good folks at TGC.
Roundtable News brings you discussions from game industry vets about last months biggest news. We talk about the biggest headliners from the recent backlash from the Diablo Immortal PR blunder. Our panel also discusses about the Red Dead Redemption 2 Crunch, Blackout update, Riot gender lawsuit, Jade Raymond leaving EA Motive, and how relevant is game unionization.
The non-gaming industry is a big industry that is growing. There's a huge sector of game developers that are transferring their skills and are prospering in stability and real-life applications. John Podlasek joins us from Level-Ex , a company that produces applications for the medical field to train doctors and medical professionals.
We continue to investigate what went wrong at Telltale Games leading up to the layoff of 275 game developers. Our panel includes previous developers from Telltale Games, Emily Grace Buck and Travis Goodwin. We also welcome back our friend Emma Kinema from Game Workers Unite to explain how Unionization could have helped and what we could do as game developers to be safe in the workplace again.
Brian Canary is the Lead Designer at Splash Damage and have been working in the industry for over 20 years. His career has taken him into all aspects of the game development space and has worked on many distinguished MMO, console, and mobile games. He shares with us in this episode his thoughts of the current trend, and a glimpse of where we are heading as a industry.
Sean Han Tani is a composer, independent game developer, writer and teacher. He is best known for making Anodyne and is currently working on the sequel, Anodyne 2. His past work includes All Our Asias- a surreal, lo-fi, 3D adventure, about identity, race, and nationality. Including also, Even the Ocean, a narrative action platformer about balancing the Light and Dark energies that hold the world together.
Gavin Goulden is the Lead Character Artist at Insomniac Games, having recently released Spiderman PS4. Prior to this, he was the Lead Character Artist on Bioshock Infinite, Character Artist on Dead Rising 2, The Bigs 2, Damnation, and contributed to titles like FEAR 2, Dragon Age, and many independent projects.
Telltale Games recently shut its doors and laid off 275 full-time employees with no severance and week left on health insurance. Although, this type of malpractice and ill treatment of game developers isn't new, the lasting impact is being felt throughout the industry. Larry and Brandon sits down this week to give a game developer's perspective on what needs to change and what developers need to do now to prepare themselves for what will eventually happen to all of us.
If you are curious about working in AAA, startups, or in the mobile industry then you have to tune in to this week's episode with Richard Khoo. He is a Game Design Director that has been working in the industry for over 15 years. He spent a decade at Blizzard shipping StarCraft 2 and was the lead systems designer for Heroes of the Storm. His extensive experience working in AAA led him towards consulting, helping indie projects and pitching to investors.
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