October 2026 IGC Updates (Patreon)

Greetings! Here's a quick look at what's coming up in the Indie Game Clinic community this month, and a round-up of what happened in August in case you missed anything. There's also a code at the bottom for Free members to upgrade in the first week of September.

October Stream Schedule

Thursday 1st - Live Design Workshop on the Progression Design/Balancing for Golem Gourmet.

Monday 5th - 8th, Indies Under the Knife - 4 Days of Deckbuilders [check the YT channel to see which day your game is on]

Tuesday 13th - IUTK: Blunder Construction, Derelict Scrapper, Grave Juice

Tuesday 14th - IUTK: WyrmWorm + Minez

Thursday 16th - IUTK: So Many Cat Games

Thursday 20th - IUTK: UberLoop, Arena, Frostine, Aetherdale

Don't forget to click "notify me" on the streams you're interested in. There's always a chance I may have to mess around with times, so please trust the times listed on YouTube rather than anywhere else [I'm still in the process of trying to automate the calendar which posts event reminders on Discord] The only Patrons' games which are currently on the waiting list and not scheduled for an October stream are the ones submitted in the last week of September, and those will be prioritised in early November.

🩺New Playtesting Process on Discord

Massive thanks to Rakops for all of the help this week building a bot to help automate Playtesting requests and to ensure people are making them in a conscientious way.

You can now use the command /playtest in 🐞playtesting-and-qa to set up a new playtest for your game, which will be automatically threaded and time-limited in 🧪playtesting-requests. This requires you to state some sort of goal and test length for the playtest.

Members who playtest other people's games are the lifeblood of our community. Unfortunately we occasionally see testers put in effort to help developers who then do nothing with it. I've issued very few blocks and bans since the community started, but one particularly nasty one from a few months ago involved someone who had zero intention of iterating on the game based on feedback, and was instead using playtesting as a pretense to attempt to get visibility or wishlists. This isn't normal behaviour, but its also the sort of thing which happens if you don't have measures in place to stop antisocial people trying to take advantage of prosocial people.

It's totally fine for your playtesting goal to be "to see if people like the game", but people will be more likely to give you their time if you're clear about why you're asking and what project stage you're at. So the new system should help to remind people of that.

❓ Members' Q&A

This month's Q&A Questions from folks in the 🔵 Cardio and 🟣 Neuro tiers will be:

Shen on "broken builds".

Trash Bandit's question on how to make a game feel "frantic".

Willow's question on art direction and "warmth".

These are questions sent in from members in the 🔵 and 🟣 membership tiers, but the video responses are for all members. You can find the videos-so-far over here. People seem to be finding them useful so far.

This month, those of you in the 🔵 and 🟣 tiers can also suggest things for my ongoing game project Golem Gourmet; a national dish, favourite fantasy creature, or even an easter-egg reference to something from your own games.

📼 Other Videos and Podcasts

This month we'll be wrapping up and recording our Game Developers Library episode on Achievement Relocked by Geoff Engelstein, a book all about loss aversion and how it's used in game design. Tonight we're recording an episode of One More Run! on Despots Game, where we'll probably cover a few other autobattlers too.

🔐 Bonus BTS Material: Book Chapter Drafts

Folks in the 🟠 and 🟣 membership tiers should be able to expect a big chunk of book draft at least once a month in the run-up to me submitting the manuscript for Game Design for Indie Developers. One of these dropped in the last day of September, which was an essay on the various things "indie" can mean. Later in October there will a chapter up called "5 Big Questions for Indie Game Designers" which is the book's top-level introduction to design thinking.

Thanks for your continued support!

- JBW