Finally, someone said it: Great games are found, not manufactured. Focusing on the process of discovery over a rigid, pre-planned destination makes so much sense

I enjoy hearing Connors perspectives and takes as a beginner working around another job.

The best parts of jams are the mindset it puts you in:
brainstorming
openness to changing anything
ruthlessly cutting anything non-essential (anti-scope-creep)
no analysis paralysis, just make game NOW
quick iteration
openness to feedback and changing things based on that

Ideally, we should all have these attitudes at the start of a new project, and only set things in stone and start thinking of fine tuning things/not making them slapdash after you're sure you have a great idea and are at the production point.
How do you make yourself act like you're in a jam when you're not?

Good points on today's topic!  I enjoy your experienced views!  It's coming along like practical advice to the means of game production methods.

Thank you so much for sharing that talk, it was great to watch Kenneth's video and then come back and hear you guys talk about it in the context of game dev, feel like I got an extra episode this week. Well done once again, thank you!

Good episode.. I agree with a lot of the stuff Connor said. I really hope you find success soon ❤

I like the idea of a video game book club, I'd totally join that!

anyone else got mic popping near start of video?

Weird that there are no auto-generated English subtitles O_O

Can't get better than this!

In a business, it is strictly controlled with layers, lawyers and levers.
I had it honed down and could find bottled lightning in the worst project by studying the evergreen and powerup progression.

At home as an indie you don't have any constraints. some say that is actually harder given you have more decisions to make.
A decision pool being much larger without all the extra constraints is a much harder problem to start from, compared to commercial and legal barriers in a business using intellectual property

Oh what a treat another Thornity and Connor podcast. Fun Saturday brunch. Now this is a good take, haha. Coming from a Starcraft/Warcraft/Jamming background, lots of sub genres and game mechanics from the most popular mods made it's way to Steam, and the gameplay for most of these were an experiment, it wasn't about making money when modding, so we see a bunch of weird and unique ideas, though we were definitely inspired by each other, just adding our own different tweaks, sometimes high risk drastic gameplay adjustments, accidentally landing on something really fun, and now we have Dota, LoL, and diverse tower defenses. TDs existed before but they really pushed TDs further.

I feel like that's the true artistic spirit of game dev, but like Thornity said, while it is underrated indeed to do a bunch of game jams, and I think it gives you the mindset and habit of exploring more gameplay iterations, but being commercially viable with just a jam game is statistically very low, and it is indeed survivorship bias that the few titles really shine coming from jams like Baba is you, Inscryption, Celeste. Yeah like Thornity said though, I am often in gameplay iteration hell as a frequent game jammer.

Pros and cons, too long in exploratory phase can waste time I guess,  I like doing so though. Yup like you said Connor I'll make like 15 prototypes, maybe 2 a day, after a week or two, cut it down to the top 3, and so on, and then consider how they'd play once you go beyond the 80% state to the last 20%. So many considerations, theme and setting (like you said, picking the theme and ensuring its a good one is tough too and there's indeed a skill to it), artistic style, gameplay hook, market analysis of the genre. Honestly been a huge struggle to lock down a final choice, for example I've got a few prototypes, Arcade Simulator, PoE/Diablo simulator idle incremental or roguelike, Horror Farm Sim friendslop, it can feel really hard to decide which to go with. As they say, the last 20% takes just as long as the first 80%, though I think with some game genres it feels like the last 20% is a much longer stretch even, and some feel a bit shorter. Incrementals, simulators, "friendslops". Incrementals need the most game feel polish out of the 3 but the loop is simpler than say an open world, or roguelike variant.

A game design document will never be articulate enough or have enough accuracy / resolution as actual code. If the design document was written from a developers perspective, you would have a closer gap. Some places I worked at took the wordy design document and started blocking out code solutions to the concepts until everything was clear. This is the point where on the fly ideas start after that initial brief.

I changed like one thing about my game and I've been dealing with the ripple effects of the decisions for over two weeks now, exploration overload, send help xd

Another great talk!  The way I see it, the absolute ideal situation is money and time are ample enough to maximize the game's potential, but not unlimited, as then there is no incentive to reach the end point.  

As for most of us, time and money are quite limited, it makes the most sense of spending brief amounts of time verifying a game design's potential before committing to it, as often,  it makes more sense to spend three months trying 5 designs then choosing the winner than it would spending 6 months on one game that went from drawing board to published with no proving going on.

My own game (RoadHouse Manager), started as an open-world CRPG super-complicated cooking sim game with 1500 ingredients and many dice rolls and ended up as a roguelite time management game set in a single location of a roadhouse, and that's awesome, but took much more time and money to get there so realistically will probably be my one and only big steam game I'll ever do in this lifetime as I gotta go back to FT work now!

gamejams are a good and bad experience wheel. you may get lucky and be the only one with a game in the team

@14:05 Fallguys :D

This podcast should be called "The Lisp and the Rambler"