September 2025 Newsletter (Patreon)

Hello!

Hope you're all doing well. As the British summer grinds to a grey and sloppy halt, I sit reflecting on an August containing many events... only some of which will make it into this newsletter, for which I am currently writing the introductory paragraph! (Nailed it).

What to expect in September? The schedule looks something like this;

• Indies Under the Knife stream every Thursday. Some are multi-game streams, some are deep dives on longer more polished projects]

• Supporters' Community Stream is on Wednesday 10th and 24th. This is replacing the monthly, which we were quickly running out of space and time for!

• GameMaker/DirtWorld Dev Streams are going to happen every Tuesday this month. People seem to enjoy hanging out in this format; I'd like to do it even more regularly than weekly (I'm working on the game every day) but I like to commit to things in the smallest way possible in the first instance.

• Video Essay style content will be coming every 3 weeks (roughly) with a bit more focus on editing and entertainment value. The no-nonsense Q&A videos were a good stop-gap while I was split between YouTube and contract work, but slightly more polished (and eccentric) edutainment is really the heart of this channel's philosophy.

• Stream Clips will slot into the schedule as and when it seems relevant, only from now on we'll have the clips related to gamedev and the surrounding culture on IGC, while game-showcase clips will be appearing on Dr. Joe Plays instead.

What's been going in the past month or so?

Well, as mentioned above, I've set up a second channel, Dr. Joe Plays. My intention for this channel is for it to be reasonably low-effort on my end, but for it to be targeted more at gamers. Every month I usually spend a fair few hours editing down stream content from Indies Under the Knife. This is meant to serve two purposes. Sometimes we just have a great discussion about game dev and it leads to some clipworthy moments. Other times the game is just very promising and deserves showcasing in a shorter and more accessible format. Unfortunately, the algorithm only really serves IGC content to a "learning about game dev" audience rather than a "gamer who wants to know about new indie games" audience. So Dr. Joe Plays should hopefully give me a place to put this second kind of content where it's more likely to get watched by the right people.

Over on Say it Like You Play it we talked about Blue Prince. which has probably been my favorite new game of the year so far. If you don't mind having some puzzles spoiled, it's probably a good conversation for those of you designing puzzle games or interested in doing so in future. We talked a lot about signal-to-noise ratios, stretching puns across multiple dimensions (e.g. linguistic and visual) and how this makes the game effectively untranslatable.

Well done to everyone who got entries in for Music Video Game Jam 2025. My intention is to do a stream of all of the playable music videos later this week (weekend covering the 5th-7th) to take a look at what everyone made. I've had a lot of fun previously making games with specific artists in mind, and I hope you did too. I liked that this jam forced people to focus on quite minimalist, easy-to-grasp mechanics and art direction. I'm not sure when our next game jam will be - I felt a bit unfocussed during this one and later in the jam I realised I had missed some messages on their community noticeboard. I still intend to run more jams in future but maybe one every few months is organizational overkill. As a community it might also be good if some of us in the Discord start to look at collaborating on external jams, to give us chances to work together and form new creative partnerships.

Regarding Patreon on the whole; thanks to everyone here who supports the channel and enables me to keep putting out content. Slots for the 1:1 Mentorship program are currently full, but hopefully those of you who are paid members and in the Discord already get enough support from the community and myself. I am in there pretty much every day giving feedback. When there's a question or query I don't answer myself, it's usually because someone else has already given a better response than I could. It's a great community and I'm really proud of what we've built and grateful to everyone who helps maintain it, including our mods and everyone who's signed up for a helper role.

Special thanks to Tylers this month for developing LensBot (which you can trigger with /lens to give you a prompt from Jesse Schell's card deck of game design prompts). I've also activated a module on one of our generic bots to award folks with REP whenever you thank them for something... the REP leaderboard doesn't have anything you can "win" yet (so it's a tap with no sinks, in game economy terms) but hopefully it should help keep track of the folks who are more active and make sure they are acknowledged in some way!

I hope you all have a productive September, and best of luck with your current projects.

>Joe