The Creative Coding Podcast

The Creative Coding Podcast sits where programming meets visual craft, game feel and hardware. Iain and Seb are the two hosts, and much of the pleasure is how little they take themselves seriously. One episode starts with them tripping over their own names and blaming Skype latency. Another begins with the pair celebrating that they have an actual subject for once. That subject is photography and video, which they present as a skill worth having for installations and side projects. The hosts reckon technical people drift toward cameras because cameras are great gadgets. From there the talk covers a magnetic clamp that holds a camera to a railing, motorized phone gimbals that can produce steadicam-like shots, and the thicket of 4K, recording formats and color profiles. The closing advice is disarmingly simple: open the aperture, get a blurry background. Game design gets a multi-part treatment led by Iain, based loosely on a talk he gave in London. The first part deals with juice. It points to a presentation on shooter feel by JW, a programmer at the studio Vlambeer, and argues that an enemy needing ten hits to die just is not much fun. A later part turns to animation, explaining drag and follow-through with a dog's jowls and a trench coat mid-jump, and suggesting rain as an easy way to make a game environment more interesting. Several episodes are interviews that Iain hosts without Seb. Katie Goode, creative director at Triangular Pixels, and John Campbell, who handles technical direction there, talk about their VR game Unseen Diplomacy, early positional-tracking demos and how quickly the hardware keeps moving. The same conversation sorts VR into two broad classes, with mobile options like Gear VR, Cardboard and Daydream on one side. Iain explains that he came across Daniel Leaver of the indie studio Dreadbit through a trailer for his game Seraph on Twitter, and that its auto-aim ideas echoed a platformer of his own. Their talk takes in a prototype built during a weekend game jam and a firm warning against going indie without covering basic living costs. Stacey Mulcahy joins Iain for his favorite Unity asset store picks and a talk about code education. Iain, who taught programming at a university for a while, and Stacey imagine the best order in which to learn things if a beginner somehow knew what to pick. Patreon backers get read out by name, and supporters are offered early access to episodes. The result is loose, chatty and often funny, with the useful detail arriving between the jokes. What sticks afterward are specifics: a clamp, a rule of thumb, a principle borrowed from animation.