“So just remember ‘I am Xenon,’ Wombo Combo, and if you don't want to play long video games, it's okay."
“I think it's very important as any sort of creator to always keep your tentacles on as many forms of expression as you can.”
“People would be like, “Oh, I don't play games.” and he'd be like, “you can drive a car!” and pulled them over and then they would be able to play. I think that's for me, what's exciting, to me personally about alternative controls is that they are a real democratization of what is happening in games“
“I think worldbuilding felt like my specialism. Telling stories through architecture is something I've always wanted to do.“
“I wanted to make a simulator of the game that asked the question, What if the cheerleaders were the players rather than the football players? “
“One of the big moments I realized is I thought I was making a game about, you know, you pursuing a relationship across the stars […] I realized I was creating a game about pursuing myself as like, yeah, as this career oriented person who nonetheless had a deep emphasis on the people in their lives and wanted to help them understand why this happened…“
“We just have to get more people in the industry and keep them there, because right now the biggest hurdle is access. I mean, you know, I'm sure a lot of people know, going to something like GDC, the game developer conferences, is super expensive. Even when you got your past coverage, you got to pay for a week in San Francisco. It's also making environments less hostile to people of color, queer folks, etc. and making sure we have a place to be in the industry and to exist.“
When I was talking about prototyping this system, you know, it had like, kind of like moves and HP and damage and stuff planned. And, you know, a lot of planning and not a lot of coding with that. And I feel like, I learned that, you know, there's a certain point you can feel where you should just try to design a few levels, and then use that as, like data without, and, you know, don't worry too much about setting up systems, because you're probably not even gonna need those systems that much, you know, like, there's only like, what 30 of these links in the game.
I can't help but—whenever an absurd situation is created—kind of think about what it would be like to actually live it and the feelings that it would pull out of you. And so that is where I think the the pathos of Octodad as an imposter in this world comes from, and the kind of absurdity that human life has when you're a tentacle being. Right, like as an outsider looking in. Because I think that that's what comedy is good at, is drawing out the empathy of absurd situations.
“We have a variety of people who are just speaking about topics related to game development. That's really important, actually, because a lot of times people of color are the folks who are just talking about what it's like to be a person of color in games. And we're like, No, we already know that we're here, we know what it's like, let's actually let them speak about their expertise.”
“Basically, practice absurdity. And don't worry about any sort of dumb result that you come up with, because honestly, that's where the best stuff comes from. I've never thought I've never had anything in my life, career wise or otherwise be like, Oh, I'm glad I planned that out, start to finish in a very serious way and it worked out great. It's always been that would be stupid, what if I did it? And it worked!”
I did something early on in the design [of 10 Mississippi], I was thinking about a lot of like having meaningful choice—this really key game design idea. But I thought that that was kind of adding another dimension to it that I didn't really want to bring in. I wanted to focus on the idea of the interaction, and turning and making a metaphor of the keyboard from this interaction as much as possible…
The term “industry standard” really holds a lot of people back because they're like, Oh, I can't do this. I don't have the proper gear. I don't have the right whatever, whatever. But you can kind of use anything to do anything. Kind of how bedroom pop artists are getting big from recording songs on their iPhone
“I really consider my art practice pretty separate from my academic side. And I always kind of wanted to have the goal of making pieces that weren't just serving the academic interests and they're like available to the public and can be consumed by people without reading my accompanying essay about it….”