An audio blast from the past - a design chat about All For One

Back in... I want to say 2007 [edit: turns out it was may 2005!], I thought it would be cool to do a podcast about game design. At the time, podcasting had started to become a thing, and a few people were starting up podcasts about gaming - mostly gamers talking about games they play, or games they like. Not much about design though.

Years later, there are now literally hundreds of podcasts about gaming, but still a relative dearth of shows about the design of games. There are some - I recently discovered Ludology, with Geoff Engelstein and Ryan Sturm (now Mike Fitzgerald), a show about games from an academic point of view. I enjoyed that one, consuming 4 years worth of episodes over the course of the summer.

Another one I found is Building The Game, with Rob Couch and Jason Slingerland, who document their trials and tribulations as they navigate the amateur design community trying to ascertain the golden formula to create a publishable game. After about 3 years at it, I believe each of them has gotten to the point of getting a game signed by a publisher, so props to them. One feature I like about this one is their Practicing The Pitch segment. Every week one of the guys pitches a game idea, either one they've just come up with (sometimes with a constraint from boardgamizer or a listener challenge), or one they've been kicking around for a week or so. It's a neat design exercise, though perhaps it leads to a little too much invention and not enough development.

So, back to 2007 [edit: 2005!]. After listening to an episode of Board Games To Go with Mark Johnson, I downloaded a program called Audacity and I recorded a half hour of myself talking about my big game project at the time, All For One. At this point some of the information about the game is well out of date, but such is life when you dig up old posts. Other then myself, nobody has ever heard that recording... until now:



Feel free to leave comments, either here or on SoundCloud. I don't know if I'll try this again, but talking through design ideas is something I'm interested in, so you never know. Ideally I'd like to team up with someone else (maybe someone who's savvy with sound editing) and talk design with them once in a while.

Anyway, enjoy this slice of history!