24. Walking with a Voiceover

Daniel Cook of Spry Fox joins us to discuss content-focused and system-focused game design. We talk about the rise of narrative games like Gone Home and Journey, and contrast them to system-centric games that offer deeper gameplay, at the expense of greater risk to game developers. We talk about how these forces have affected Spry Fox’s games, and dig in to their latest, Road Not Taken.

• Dan’s Lost Garden article, How game forms are shaped by their environment
• Full Indie Summit
• Machinations
• Dan’s previous game, Triple Town
• Great games that seems obvious in retrospect, like Letterpress and Threes
• Procedural level generation in Steambirds
• Road Not Taken
• Sam Machkovech’s Road Not Taken review
• Architecture and Forgiveness, our interview with Monument Valley’s Ken Wong
• Raph Koster’s theory of chunking and games
• Steambirds