Who are the 'old gods' of gamebooks? Why can we mess with rules in Travelling At Night but not in Cultist Simulator? What's 'combinatorial explosion', and why is it ruining your life?

Join Alexis and Lottie for these questions alongside a potted history of text-based games, the perils of voiceovers in CRPGs and Lottie's most important rule for marketing.

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What's the 'double or half' rule? Why is game design like Khazad-dûm? What the hell is a quaternion? No, really, we don't know. Join AK and Lottie for another jaunt through game dev, via narrative modifiers, infinite nuns and 'entering the Mansus', for the first time ever...

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"There are games where the player is having fun and games where the designer is having fun." - Sid Meier

Maps! Music! British pre-decimal currency! We discuss planning game narratives around major player choices, Mike Rosewater's 'complexity budget' and why putting little stamps on bank notes is not a good idea.

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"What we want is a sort of semi-glutide octi-frenetic image that is kinda made of lighting and also is a baby..."

This week AK and Lottie discuss how art direction works, how to balance being weird with being commercially viable, how we're building Travelling At Night's entirely 2D visual world, and how to paint a tree. All while accidentally revealing what we suspect might be our next Weather Factory game and answering our first batch of mail bag entries.

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'My fingers are worn to bleeding nubs. I am typing this with my tongue. my keyboard is sticky with game dev drool. Do you not understand...'

Thus did 2026 begin. Welcome back to the world of game dev, this time about 'murdering darlings', the Curst curse and why Newt will always trump Aliens' M577 Armored Personnel Carrier.

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Our final episode of 2025! Talking Travelling At Night's alpha, the sine wave of game dev, where Fallen London's Overgoat came from and how we're attempting to solve the 'layer of plastic' in AAA RPGs.

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This week in the life of jobbing game developers, we reach ALPHA. Cue period appropriate beatnik slang, a disagreement about potato croquettes and why 2D and 3D are such frenemies in isometric CRPGs.

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Skeleton Songs is BACK with a game-dev-centric season all about the inside story of making an indie RPG. In this episode, find out why CRPGs are such hard work, why UI eats time, why we're scared of Disco Elysium, and what's up with Travelling At Night. Also we have a fight about jazz.

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