Hello folks! Joe here from INDIE GAME CLINIC.

Here's a little update on what's going on this month, and what already go'ed on in the month before the month we are currently in.

What's Coming Up in August

🎧 OMR! Hits the Trail Mix

This month on One More Run! we are playing The Oregon Trail! and some follow-on games which are similar. We also say farewell to Deathbulge's Dan Martin, who must leave us to go and do something very secret and probably art related.

Trail is an interesting curiosity in the history of procedural and run-based games. While Rogue and games like it were about simulating a D&D style dungeon crawl for a single player, OT have a lot more social storytelling in them, and focus on different types of world situation and emergent drama. I didn't play it as a kid, but I did play some of later highly variable map-centric sims like Sid Meier's Pirates! which feels like it's a close cousin, with some of the same interests (although much more open world).

I know there are a few folks in the community who are working on similar games, but one which really sprung to mind when I which most spring to mind for me would be Well You Can't Stay Here, and even games like Knick Knack Stack which use touristic travel as a frame story for a linear progression of episodic levels.

If you want to play along with this month's games, you can play the original OT here online. Rather than all playing the same Trail-like, we're going to be taking turns to talk about 80 Days, Organ Trail, and Keep Driving, and community members are welcome to discuss the games with us over in the OMR! channel in the Discord.

📽️ New Content Workflows & Collabs

If you see a bunch of IGC shorts start to pop up on the channel, don't worry - I haven't gone completely Tiktok Brained. I'm in the process of onboarding an editor who is going to help with some larger video projects moving forward, and the shorts are a way of starting that process. This will be super helpful, especially as I need to free up some time, what with Golem Gourmet hopefully launching in early 2027, and a book contract to fulfil. I'm not allowed to share too much from the book ahead of time, but if you're in the EPIC (🟣) support tier or above there are some draft chapters in our Behind The Scenes archive, and there will be a few more added before the manuscript for Game Design for Indie Developers goes to the publisher in March next year.

For those of you unfamiliar, the BTS archive is where I put things which I know some of you are interested in. I keep most of it limited to the highest Patreon tier because it's the stuff which I don't want outwardly available to most people online. This includes things like early scripts for videos and early drafts of essays I'm working on but unsure about.

The BTS archive is also where I re-upload stuff I've taken down from the YouTube channel, sometimes because I think I've remade similar content in a better format, or because it just doesn't fit the current direction of the channel. Sometimes it's stuff which I still think is good or useful, but which new developers might find confusing or misleading without having it in the right context.

As with most things on the Patreon, I try to keep stuff in the cheapest tier if I think it's something everyone will have a use for, and this more esoteric stuff is there as a way of saying "thanks" to our EPIC supporters by offering some stuff I'm not really willing to share with more than a few dozen meganerds.

📚 The Game Developers' Library Continues...

Tom and I are just finishing up our reading of Next Level - Mike Cook's very excellent design-theory-meets-games-history-meets-technical-primer book about procedural generation in games. Before the episode is recorded and edited, I'll also post a quick summary of my favourite aspects of it over in the Book Reviews collection (available to supporters in the pro tier and above, i.e. 🔵).

We've already picked the next book, which is Engelstein's Achievement Relocked: Loss Aversion and Game Design. It's a light one weighing in at <150 pages, so worth checking out if its a topic you think will interest you or be specifically relevant to your projects. There's also a pretty good GDC talk Geoff did 8 years ago which will give you a good idea of the types of things he covers in the more recent book.

🔪 Upcoming Games on Indies Under the Knife

We continue our new schedule format, where IUTK streams prioritise Patron's games, occasionally slipping in games sent from the wider gamedev community. Please keep an eye on when the streams occur in terms of times of day as I'm continuing to move them around due to other commitments. If you've submitted your game to the Playtesting form on the community Discord, and its not on the list below, then it's already marked to be streamed in September.

The games scheduled for August include:

Iron Dogs and Legacy of Sail, for lovers of historical boombooms.

Echo Extract + Maniqua Defence

Games in mundane everyday settings with Chair Champions, Driving Test Simulator and Leaky Business.

Plants and/or Zombies with Goreticulture and a Walking Dead fangame.

Space mining in Project Restart and Sonar Mining Co and space-based engineering type puzzly things with Department of Gravity Management and MOBO Moon Machinica.

Games of gambling and risk with House of Die, Dice for the Dice God, and Debtician.

A bit of a Prototype Amnesty on August 17th. At the moment this is planned to include Klinge, the "Birding Game", Lantaka and Amaranth... but if you submit something in the first two weeks of August and clearly mark it as a Prototype Stage project, I'll try to slot it in on this day.

I've gone a bit wild on the thumbnails this time around. Sometimes it's more enjoyable to put a bit more effort into being silly than to try to do everything in an efficient way. But also, the longer I do this channel for, the more I'm convinced that being a bit silly attracts a nicer audience, like your fine self.

❓ August Q&A Topics

This month's Q&A Questions will be posted on Friday 7th/14th/21st, and will include (in no particular order):

c64 cosmin and JonPatrick had similar questions; (do you think games are art? and is game design about subjective taste?) so I'm going to try to tackle these at the same time.

Evil Art Bunny asked what markers might we use to tell when a prototype should be made into a full game?

Jur Van Ouerle and Pangbot asked two questions which I think might be interrelated; How do you know when a game system is "done"? and "whether it's possible to come up with a consistent set of rules for your project to define boundaries like "minimum juice required", "good feel", or "commercial-ready"."

The way the new Q&A works is that folks in the 🔵-🟣 support tiers can send the questions, and everyone else gets the video responses. Folks in the eligible tiers, please pay attention to which month you are posting questions for - the request for questions will go up in the last week of the month and will have next month in the title. If it's August already and you're posting new questions in the August call-for-questions post, I'm just going to have to ignore them in the interest of fairness (rather than rolling them over to September, which isn't fair on people who respond to the right post!)

If you haven't seen last month's videos, you can find them here. We covered topics including: decision making vs aimlessness, scope and knowing how long to spend on a game, and "aura"/creative direction.

ICYMI in July

Last week I put together a new IGC Discord Quickstart Guide - for anyone who's new to the community or considering joining. This will give you a quick sense of the events/tools etc. available to people in the Discord. It's not exhaustive, but it covers some things that people tend to miss when they're new.

For some reason, July's Voidigo episode of One More Run! did not automatically post to Patreon, but you can still find it on YouTube or any of the normal podcast platforms. If you do listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and you're enjoying the show, please do leave ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review as it helps us get noticed. I would like to keep doing this one as I think it's important that IGC be the "indie game dev community for devs who love indie games" (you wouldn't think that would be a differentiator but I think most of us have been in enough tech/business-centric communities to know that it is!).

If you didn't check out the video about Challenge & Difficulty yet, please do (and leave a like and a comment). This one felt a bit meandering, but every topic in it also felt like it was worth spending a little bit of time on. I'm happy for these longer essays to just be a bunch of kickoff points for different things you might need to think about. Some of that is about analysing how other games work, sometimes its more about understanding your own project and personal context... and it always feels insufficient for me to talk about one without the other!

Thanks for your continued support!

- JBW