"I never felt like I was a game designer, really."
- Game developer Davey Wreden, opening a conversation about game design with fellow developer Steve Swink.
Where does a game like The Stanley Parable come from, and what makes it tick?
How do game makers value their work, and how do they square the day-to-day realities of trying to make games with their own desire for happiness, comfort or company?
These questions and many more are brought up in a recently-published recorded chat between game devs Steve Swink (Scale) and Davey Wreden (The Beginner's Guide, The Stanley Parable.)
"William and I -- he was the other main guy on The Stanley Parable -- like we would sit down and we would just thrown the weirdest ieas out there that we could come up with," says Wreden at one point, speaking about how he used to approach game design. "We would set these stupid goals for ourselves, like 'make this work,' and sometimes it did!"
It's the first episode in a series of video podcasts about game dev that Swink aims to produce, and it's well worth watching for fellow game makers who want to learn more about how (and why) their compatriots work.