August 2025 Newsletter (Patreon)

Hello folks!I hope you're all doing well.This month I've tried to keep stream scheduling light, with only the Thursday Indies Under the Knife stream locked in place. This is to allow some wiggle-room around game jams. It's also because the kids are home for the entire month and I need flexibility to dip in and out of content creation when they're here. I'm trying to remember to use the @stream_alert tag in the Discord whenever I'm going live, but sometimes I forget; getting several demos ready and making sure OBS or Streamlabs is working properly is a lot of legwork. Today was my first successful multi-stream to a YouTube Live and the Twitch.tv channel; so if you use both platforms, go and follow me over there if you haven't already.Later this month on The Game Developer's Library we'll be checking out Blood, Sweat, and Pixels by games journalist Jason Schreier. The book is a very accessible introduction to how games are made, told through the development stories of a wide array of titles, from AAA titles like Destiny and DragonAge Inquisition to indies like Stardew Valley and Shovel Knight. After last month's 400 page epic Art of Game Design, this more journalistic approach has been a welcome change of pace. In terms of what's coming up in the mid-long term for the channel, I'm going to continue with the following assumptions;

Indies Under the Knife stream will run weekly on Thursdays [on YouTube and Twitch.tv].

Pre-recorded Q&A content will go out on YouTube on Mondays and/or Fridays, depending on availability.

I'll continue being present in the Discord most days a week.

I'll do a new "Not a Dev Log" episode around every 4-6 weeks [episode 2 is probably going to be about iteration cycles, and why you should work to keep these short/small early in a project.]

I also want to experiment with a new stream or video series called "Unusual Engines" where I see what I can make in a non-standard game engine in a day or so. I think this would be an interesting different kind of content, which I would find personally fun to make, and which would help provide something different from what folks are used to seeing on gamedev YouTube. I've been going through this wonderful list of alternative game engines and working out which ones would be the most fun to stream with.

Hope you all have a great month, whether you're doing something for MVG JAM or just continuing with you regular projects!