Feb 2026 Newsletter (Patreon)

Good morrow to all, and a happy February indeed.

January was a strange month, but I'm back to working relatively normally again, now with a better space to do it in.

I wanted to start the newsletter off by saying thankyou to everyone who participated in January's Test Buddies. This was a trial run for a (hopefully) regular internal playtesting jam just for community members, using Discord and itch.io. The jam was initiated by cheese and cabbage (both of whom are people, not foodstuffs, as their names might suggest). Most of the games in the jam received feedback from several different other community members, and this was great to see. The rating system was of varied usefulness, and I'm sure it's something we'll tweak for future events. But overall I think everyone who was involved got a lot out of it.

I'm almost certainly repeating myself when I say that critical playtesting of others' games is a really good way to hone your own design thinking. It forces you to think about what's best for a game in relation to its intention - rather than (as we often do with our own projects) getting too bogged down with which changes would be technically easy or hard to implement. When you do little bits of design thinking on projects where you are not the primary programmer, it gives you an opportunity to think in pure design terms, outside of the practicalities of implementation.

From a personal perspective, I'm just really happy to see initiatives like Test Buddies (with which I had very little direct involvement) take off within the community. It's validating for me to see that Indie Game Clinic is starting to become autonomous and self-supporting in this way, so I can only say thank you so much to everyone who engaged and made it so useful to everyone else involved.

On a similar theme (i.e. Indie Game Clinic becoming a bit more expansive than just "the Dr. Joe Show") I'm starting to have meetings with some folks who can help me bring my video essays to life, and just generally make them a bit more interesting. The streams over the next few months will likely stay as they are now, but I intend to put a bit more pizazz into editing and animating when it comes to video content.

To do this, I'll be working with some folks who are local to me, and who can contribute editing and motion graphics skills. These changes will be small at first so we don't blow the budget, but I hope it will make what we do here more engaging, allowing it to reach a bigger audience, and also help to get me out of the "guy who sits in front of a camera and gives advice" YouTube category which, to be totally honest, I've never been full comfortable being in.

I'll still be aiming to put out a video essay every month. The only change you'll see from your end will be an increase in quality, as we develop more capacity to demonstrate points using animatics, diagrams and so on. I always had this idea of Indie Game Clinic being more of a "magazine show" mixed-media format with little animations, skits and songs and so on; and its only because of you guys that we're now getting closer to achieving this.

In February we're going to be thinking more about Playtesting as a general theme, and I've already had literally dozens of you getting back to me offering to help with that video. Thanks for all your interest so far; once I've seen your videos (due on Friday 13th Feb) I'll have some hard calls to make about what to use - and maybe we'll even have to split it into two separate videos.

Have a great start to the month, and I'll see y'all in the Discord!