Curating Games and Open Ended Development

This week on the Perceptive Podcast, I was joined by returning guest and owner of Arcen Games Chris Park to catch up and had several fascinating discussions on game development.

We started off catching up about what’s going on at Arcen Games including the expansion for The Last Federation and their upcoming 4X game which still needs a title. After that we turned to the Spacebase DF-9 announcement from last week that I couldn’t talk about due to the live streaming with the Spirit Siege people.

We talked about the challenges a game company must face when over promising and some of the hurdles that newer developers tend to make. Chris also shared some of his experiences at Arcen with dealing with bad news to his fans and what happens when plans change.

Keeping in line with talking about fan bases we then talked about the new Steam features, specifically the Steam Curator option that is helping improve visibility such as with Arcen. Chris talked about his thoughts on it and why he feels this is an amazing improvement that other stores should adopt.

Lastly we had a great discussion on the challenges and thought process behind developing open ended games or titles without a linear path. Chris shared his thinking and gave some really helpful tips for developers in terms of how to best start working on a game idea and avoiding setting yourself up for trouble later into development.

On an editing note, I decided to keep the podcast in a stereo format as opposed to mono this time as I think the audio sounds clearer that way. Let me know what you think and if it’s preferable, I’ll keep it like this.

• As we talked about on the cast, here is the link to the Tom Chick Gofundme campaign to help him while he is dealing with stage 4 cancer
• Here is the newly designed Arcen home page along with the page for The Last Federation
• For more about my thoughts on Early Access, Spacebase and Double Fine, here is part 1, 2 and 3 of a piece I wrote for Xsolla on the matter
• Lastly I created a Game-Wisdom Steam group to start looking into the curator features

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