Coffee with Butterscotch: A Game Dev Comedy Podcast

This week, we talk about summoning a dragon and a stochastic parrot. If you give an AI some data, it can recognize patterns and generate output with selective randomness. But that doesn’t mean you always get something coherent or intelligent. Turns out the best Turing test is whether or not you know what a hand looks like.

In this episode, we discuss easter eggs, a snowy wonderland, and the brand-new tagline for the brand-new year! Legacy systems keep the current work going, but one catastrophic event and the whole system collapses. Clearing the tech debt not only prevents the big explosions but also makes every working moment better. When you don’t have any baggage then you don’t have to worry about losing your bags.

This week, we talk about the old accomplishments, current predictions, and new themes for the new year! 2022’s moniker was “Twenty Twenty You. Take the nuanced view” – what should 2023’s call to action be? We’ve got some ideas, but we want to hear your suggestions! Submit your taglines at podcast.bscotch.net

In this episode, we discuss giving experiences, autonomy, and gifts. Effective planning requires knowing what you want. If you’re entertaining, what kind of experience do you want from hosting? What kind of experience do you want to provide to your guests? You can’t create a specific vibe without thoughtful curation. Enjoy the holidays!

This week, we talk about a scavenging cat, a punchy octupus, and a critical bug. Repeating the same process over and over doesn't change the outcome. And just pointing out bugs won’t solve the problem. You need a feedback loop that allows you to address the root cause of an issue - that’s where a quality pipeline comes in.

In this episode, we discuss time perception, time estimation, and time reality. During game development, there are deliverables set on a timeline. People’s perceptions of time are notoriously inaccurate, which means that estimations of how long something will take are usually wrong. Instead of focusing on estimating time, ask yourself how long your timeline is and what can realistically be accomplished.

This week, we talk about the meaning of exploration, the need for a third place, and making the work visible. You can’t solve a problem that you can’t see. If you don’t have a clear mental model of ALL THE THINGS and how they interact with each other, you can’t make decisions about the next steps. That’s where great tooling comes in!

In this episode, we discuss technical gains, inventory management, and game loops. No game is perfect. You need to identify the things that players can’t forgive versus the things they can forget. With thousands of other choices out there, keeping players hooked into your game requires a good loop.

This week, we talk about management no-nos, government restrictions, and developer limitations. A responsive, immersive world is a game developer’s dream, but when you build tons of AI and add large numbers of things to the game, optimization becomes a nightmare. You have to ask yourself, are we looking at the right problem? The most powerful lever to pull is a good design.

In this episode, we discuss air travel, corporate greed, and the Twitterverse. A CEO is like the wind, either guiding a company in the right direction or smashing it on the rocks. Visionary leadership that lacks context, nuance, or an actual vision isn't really visionary. Or leadership for that matter. Even if you're officially bluecheck mark verified.

This week, we talk about conflicts of interest, typing speed, and a living hell. Doing new things is good and cool! But it’s important to understand that the context you’re coming from and the one you’re going into are different. Some things can transfer, but assuming expertise in one field just because you’re an expert in another can be costly. That cost is mostly paid in failure. The question is, who’s paying for it?

In this episode, we discuss hitting stuff with other stuff, gameplay archetypes, and decoupling. The hard part of everything is integration. With the right tools, making the thing becomes easy, but figuring out where it fits into the world and how it works with everything else is tricky. But at least that means that it’s the difficult thing that’s actually difficult now!

This week, we talk about being your own Petri dish, the explore/exploit model, and lunch debt. Institutions ossify over time and end up more interested in preserving their own existence than fulfilling their original purpose. Similarly, if you don’t design for human interaction right from the beginning, it’ll be much harder to change that community culture later on. The result is a lot of wasted human potential, and NOBODY’S GOT TIME FOR THAT.

In this episode, we discuss metaverse, deep fakes, and the displacement problem. What it means to make and consume art has always changed as technology advances. With the arrival of AI art generators, that change might be more aggressive than anyone can anticipate. Change isn’t inherently bad, except we live in capitalism. So…universal basic income?

This week, we talk about working on legacy games, the power of success, and the business of education. There's no single right path for getting into the games industry. Everyone’s needs are different! The one thing that is guaranteed to help you make games is making games. Approximate knowledge of A WHOLE LOT of things doesn’t hurt either.