If you’ve not yet played it, A Short Hike is an excellent, relaxing game ostensibly about getting to the top of a mountain but really more about the journey itself. It’s kind of the perfect play for a holiday break. If you’re as enamored with the design of A Short Hike as I am then you should definitely listen to the episode of Eggplant: The Secret Lives Of Games featuring the game’s developer, Adam Robinson-Yu embedded below. It’s a great conversation about the game’s design, length, why it’s set on an island, the conversations/stories that emerge from the islanders, and how everything came together.
Once you’ve finished this episode I’d also highly recommend digging into Eggplant’s 60-ish episode back-catalog. The show began life as The Spelunky Showlike—focusing on Spelunky and the design of “roguelike”/Rogue-inspired video games there are loads of episodes with developer interviews covering the game design of games like Hades, RAD, ToeJam & Earl, Rogue itself, and more. But it’s evolved to cover other genres of indies on occasion too and there are several multi-part series diving deeply into games like Spelunky 2, Noita, and Mutazione. The hosts themselves are game designers—insuring that a lot of the topics covered really dig into the medium like few other podcasts do. Really juicy stuff that is perfect listening for any downtime you have during the holidays.
Eggplant: The Secret Lives of Games
by Nick Suttner, Andy Nealen, Zach Gage, and Douglas Wilson
Publishes weekly, on Friday/Saturday
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