We had several features go up in the last couple of days that I want to highlight, so, here we go!
First up is an in-depth feature story on Budcat Creations, who you may be familiar with if you played a lot of Guitar Hero back in the day (or DJ Hero! RIP). Budcat was also... so far... the only Iowa-based triple-A developer in history, and... well, it didn't last long. I had the pleasure of editing this one, and the writer, Nicholas Yanes, had a real, personal connection to the studio—having worked at it in his first game industry job. He interviews the founders and several senior folks from Budcat in looking at the birth, life, and death of a big-budget studio outside of the usual tech hub cities in the US.
We also published a SUPER in-depth breakdown of the economic simulation in Victoria 3, by the devs. It is... a piece I had to read certain passages like 4 times to get the information into my brain, but at the same time... pretty fascinating. I do not have the patience/stomach/aptitude for economics, but something about simulating this in a virtual environment tickled my baby coder brain a bunch.
My colleague Bryant also wrote a very cool design blog on a particular design decision he recalled from a few Game Boy Color games: the sort of "surprise" of making a particular starter build/character/ability the strongest and best thing at the end of the game. It IS a cool decision, especially when it supports (or is supported by) the narrative, as it is in the examples here.
I genuinely feel like we're firing on all cylinders here, content-wise. I still feel VERY new, and still getting my sea legs in several areas (GD.com is a very different beast than most of the enthusiast press sites I've worked at before! In a lot of fascinating ways, tbh!), but I am kind of in love with our content. We publish things every single day that I am actively excited (sometimes REALLY excited) to dig into, and I find a lot of inspiration for my own little design/dev practice from so much of it.