July 2026 IGC Updates [+ Video Preview] (Patreon)

Hello folks!

It's a very very hot start of July here in the UK, and that means my brain no brain good. Here is an update on various things, and a little video preview!

What's Coming Up in JULY

The BIG VIDEO ESSAY on Challenge and Difficulty will be be out... soon. It's been a monster to record and edit due to the complexity of the subject, and I thought it would be better to experiment with a very long but chilled-out take on the subject, rather than something more focussed. For the time being, you can get a sneak peak at a small segment of the video in the sneaky link above. Thanks to Maddy Vian for drawing Angelo and Damien, who are my co-hosts for this video essay.

Throughout this month we're going to continue to trial the new Q&A system. Question 1/3 went out last Friday. Questions 2 and 3 will go up on Fridays 10th and 17th, and then new questions will be picked between July 24th and the end of the month. The Q&A is a way of doing something which benefits all supporters - everyone gets to actually watch/use the videos... but only supporters in the 🟣&🔵 tiers get to set the questions. If July goes well, we'll repeat this in August, and make it a rolling feature until we hit a point where either I feel like we need to take a break, or we're having too much repetition of topics.

The Shape of IGC Over the Next 6-9 Months

Two major developments have, uh, developed... both of which are probably good for the community and the kind of stuff I post here, but are also meaning I'm going to have to be more focussed with my time for the rest of 2026.

the book contract with Taylor and Francis has now been signed, and I'm now obligated to deliver a full draft of Game Design for Indie Developers by March 2027.

the Steam page for Golem Gourmet is now in the Steam review queue, meaning it should be live in the next week or so, and I intend on trying to launch the game in Q1 2027.

This means two big overlapping deadlines coming up in early 2027 for me, and that means I'm going to have to slightly tweak the focus on IGC for the rest of the year. MOST things will stay the same as you expect them to. Here's what you can expect to stay how it is;

Indies Under the Knife streams will continue to happen once or twice per week, prioritizing patron's games but blending in games from the public list when it seems relevant to do so.

The podcasts Game Developers Library and One More Run! will basically continue, as long as our co-hosts are happy to keep doing them.

The Q&A thing will continue as a way for you to get more personalized takes out of me, without me having to worry about making those into creatively interesting or topically "evergreen" public content for the channel.

As I work on the book, I'll continue to feed small draft elements into the BTS archive collection for folks subscribed at the 🟣/🟠 tiers (the publisher has OKed this, and has also indicated that I can do some patrons-only discounts once the book is out).

I will probably be back to Golem Gourmet dev streams more regularly as we build the remainder of the content for the game. I'll probably also do a few dev logs on the game as we go, if I can focus them on specific interesting topics.

The main thing I want to cut back on in order to focus on the book, the game, the streams and regular shows, is the larger video essays. These are my favourite thing, and I love doing them, but they are very labour intensive to do the way I want to do them. The time it takes to really settle on the topics and work out how to approach them in a way which is creative and interesting is MUCH longer compared to editing the equivalent footage from something in a more straightforward recurring format.

That doesn't mean no more IGC video essays at all; I will probably still pop out the odd one every month or so, but chances are they will likely be much shorter stuff like the video on BiteMe's MMO98 I did a little while back.

Game Recommendations...

Normally I'd have some Game Recommendations from June 2026 for you here, but I'm going to put these in a later update so that they're more likely to reach a general gamer audience who might want to learn about the games!

Discord Housekeeping

Thanks for the patience regarding all of my recent tweaks over on Discord. I've never been a massive fan of hierarchy or rankings, but the Discord has had the 🟢/🔵/🟣 role-tiering kind of baked in ever since I set up the link to Patreon. Although some folks might not be motivated by having a special coloured name, I know they are probably a point of pride to others.

If you haven't noticed yet, the recent set of changes are mainly about taking that principle and making sure people can earn the higher blue and purple ranks through contributing to the server in other ways. I took a look at our reputation bot (Polite Keanu) and noted that the scoring so far does map quite well onto who is most active helping other folks in the Discord. So you'll see some folks with blue or purple rank names who have earned them by being helpful community members consistently over a long period of time. Some folks have also been given blue names for contributing to IGC content in some way; hosting a show, adding their perspective in a video, or providing art or animation stuff I use in my indents. I want to make sure people's contributions are recognized beyond what they pay into the Patreon pot.

There's also a bunch of you with the "guest" role. This means you're on thin ice, buddy (just kidding!). The guest role was originally there for me to track collaborators who I'd manually added to the server, and many of the guests are still that. But I've also seen folks who were chatty or helpful lose their patreon roles for whatever reason. Sometimes cards are declined, sometimes you get a long subscription and cancel it so the repayment won't be automated, I can't always see how things are working from my end.

In most cases, if I've interacted with you on here or there, I'll try to make sure those folks get guest roles so they can stick around and post in all the relevant places. The only exceptions, really, are folks who seem like they've just payed for one month to get access so that they can spam the server with marketing stuff. It's only happened a few times, but it will probably become more frequent as we grow.

Anyway, that's what's occurring. I hope you all have a great rest of the week, and watch this space for Friday's Q&A video when it drops; it's about what to do when you keep changing a prototype into a fundamentally different game, and you feel like you're not making any forwrd progress.

Thanks for your continued support!

- JBW