HomeTeam GameDev Podcast

HomeTeam GameDev Podcast is an interview show about the routes people take into making games, and much of its time goes to the detours. The host calls the format a sampler platter. Guests come from different corners of the industry, and the idea is that listeners will skip around and search for the one conversation whose path looks like theirs. You can hear that approach in how the interviews open. When Brice Morrison mentions coding little games in middle school, the host says those early projects interest him most, because that is where a listener is most likely to recognise their own starting point. Morrison's path then runs through EA, where he worked on The Sims 3 and MySims Agents, and on through Zynga and Warner Brothers Games before he turned to indie development on a deck builder. His advice rests on two ideas. The first is career capital, which he takes from Cal Newport's So Good They Can't Ignore You and compares to earning XP. The second is moonlighting, so a side project has room to get better. He also admits that one of his games was a success he privately thought was a disaster. Anna C Webster arrives from somewhere else entirely. She trained as a theater performer and studied opera at university before turning to writing, and she draws a direct line from stage to game: both lean on dialogue to move the plot and have to deliver information, sometimes instructions, while still sounding natural. Like Morrison's, her conversation is split across two parts, and the second half spends time on freelancing. She says she genuinely loves the freedom, but she knows many people freelance only because a layoff left them few other options. Her advice is blunt and useful: read contracts before signing, ask another freelancer when a clause is unclear, and remember that an objectionable non-compete can sometimes be removed just by asking. She makes the point with the story of an Atari founder who was barred from video games and started a pizza company with arcade games in it. Mike Mika, president of Digital Eclipse, which remasters classic games for new audiences, goes back further still: to a Radio Shack Pong clone, and to a classroom computer on a wheeled cart that a teacher casually said could be used to make games. The mood throughout is easygoing and encouraging. In 'Looking back on 10 years of the Podcast and ahead to DevPods.GG', the host looks back on a run that began in June 2015 and is candid about its limits. A show built for people early in their careers was never going to reach sponsor-sized numbers, he says, and listeners outgrowing it meant it was working. That episode recalls the introduction by Krister Kytila, also known as McFunkyPants, and points toward DevPods.GG, described as a streamlined next version of what HomeTeam GameDev did, where people can team up and keep game projects going. The archive works best as a menu: find the guest whose background sits closest to yours and start there.