Talking Screencheat and Game Development with Samurai Punk


This week on the cast, I spoke with Nicholas McDonnell from the studio Samurai Punk about his thoughts on multiplayer design and how they figured into his studio’s online shooter — Screencheat.

Screen Cheat

We started off as always with introductions and how Nicholas and his friends got together to make Screencheat and we talked about the basic gameplay and unique balancing decisions that needed to be made given the mechanics of the game.

This led into a talk about Steam and developing on the platform and how it has been great for them as a relatively new Indie studio. Speaking of Steam, we also talked about the challenges and expectations of developing games that are meant to be a one and done deal vs. developing a title that is meant to have continued support.

And that brought us to the topic of talking about the changes in multiplayer and digital distribution that have happened to the game industry over the last decade and how Steam has really changed everything. And our final topic/tangent was a brief talk about why we enjoy rogue-like design and how that has changed over the years.