Podcasts on the Menu this Week

The volume of high quality, edifying editorial being recorded in podcast form has exploded in the past few years. I listen exclusively to gaming podcasts, and even when restricting myself to one genre the choice can be overwhelming. Thank goodness for the double speed playback: twice the information, half the awkward silences.

I try to concoct a mixture of content each week that covers news, reviews, features, and design focussed discussion. Over time I've established weekly staples that automatically get a listen, supplemented by more sporadically released podcasts that are a nice surprise when they drop.

My Staple Podcasts

Mobcast
Four rotating seats discuss four topics chosen each week, including a Bitmob.com community topic. The intelligent discourse examines videogaming trends that may not be covered by conventional news sources. This podcast takes me to a more contemplative place than my usual news-watching perch, and its variety is always a pleasant surprise. Senior members of the editorial staff from EGM and 1UP founded Bitmob after Ziff-Davis sold those properties to UGO.

Gamers With Jobs - Conference Call
Stalwarts of a community-written blog come together to discuss noteworthy news, what they've been playing, meaty feature topics, and listener emails. I particularly like the diversity of the ever-changing hosts and their insight into niche areas of gaming that larger publications often overlook.

The Joystiq Podcast
Joystiq.com is my favourite fire-hose of information. There are several uber blogs covering videogames in minute detail, but none has a podcast as consistently entertaining as Joystiq. Come for the chemistry between the hosts, stay for the comprehensive news coverage and bulletproof editorial.

Rebel FM
Irreverent. This podcast is stocked with the up-and-coming generation of young videogame journalists that talk about what they like, when they like, and only pay passing care as to whether they've offended their employers enough to lose their jobs by the end of recording. Also formed from ex-1UP journalists, this podcast takes a more organic approach to content than the structured Mobcast. Usual topics include games they've been playing, bombshell news items, and relationship advice for geeks, all delivered in a delightfully abusive tone.

Games, Dammit!
1UP.com still has enough quality broadcasters after the exodus to produce another top-notch podcast to fill the 1UP Yours shaped hole that was left. This is evidence that the blog was harbouring well above its quota of journo talent before their dispersion. The content is similar to the news-driven Joystiq podcast, but is delivered by a very different collection of personalities. These guys present opinions with a been-there, done-that attitude, meaning that iterative, uninspiring games are given short shrift. Quite right too!

Surprising Podcasts

A Life Well Wasted
This is Robert Ashley's vision for the maturation of videogame podcasting. The programme examines the human stories behind games, as Robert travels across the US to interview a wildly eclectic group of people. Every episode has a theme that each interview relates to, and is delivered with the level of production found in NPR's This American Life. It's an absolute treat.

The Brainy Gamer Podcast
Michael Abbott is a smart, prolific writer, who loves games and has an academic approach to his analysis. No wonder he's able to attract an incredible array of industry guests onto the Brainy Gamer podcast. His thoughtfully selected topics enable the show to break away from the usual regurgitation and prodding of the news. Listening to this well-schooled host always delivers a great return on your time.

Another Castle
Podcasts by videogame designers are a relatively new thing. Finding the time to externalise your own thoughts and processes when developing a game is difficult, and you're always conscience that your audience may not want to know how the sausage gets made. Another Castle takes the sausage, dissects it, and bombards it with discourse until its elements are known. Charles J Pratt has been a game designer since he graduated from NYU's famous ITP course. The host calls on luminaries associated with ITP to bring their scholarship to bear on the subject of game design, delivering gonzo one-on-one interviews.

Out of the Game
GFW Radio was the jewel in Ziff-Davis' podcast crown before the UGO acquisition. When GFW shed its staff they scattered like seeds, each sprouting new endeavours. Out of the Game is an audio record of the infrequent meeting of the bros. when they get back together to chew the fat. Tangential and enthralling, it's the closest you'll get to GFW Radio after they broke up the band.

Irrational Behaviour
One of the contributors to Out of the Game is Shawn Elliott. He was most famous on GFW Radio for his ability to tell surprising, and often morbid, stories that highlighted how strange life really can be. The breadth of the subject matter, and depth to which each story had been researched, alluded to Shawn not only being interested in games. When he did talk about games he did so in a similarly intelligent way, which put him in the category of critic rather than reporter. It was not shocking that he would go on to apply his critical ability and broader interests in the industry, at Irrational Games. Shawn now produces the Irrational Behaviour podcast to showcase Irrational's staff, and give an insight into how they make their games. Keep your eyes peeled for Irrational Interviews episodes too: Shawn Elliott and Irrational's main man, Ken Levine, endeavour to broadcast interviews with people in the wider gaming industry.

The RPS Electronic Wireless Show
PC gaming is great. The walled garden of console gaming is fantastic for a no-fuss, high premium experience, but if you're a gamer and you're not getting your hands dirty in the crash-happy world of personal computer gaming, then you're only scratching the surface of the marvels available to you. The audience for computer games is enormous as almost everyone with electricity has a PC; even my parents! Combine this with an open platform without licensing fees, and the PC is fertile ground for the weird and wonderful world of niche gaming. Let Rock Paper Shotgun be your guide. The Illuminati of the British gaming press nail proper journalism and criticism with aplomb, and occasionally connect their minds directly to their mouths and record it.

GWJ Podcast Mention: "Your Friendly Neighbourhood Developer"

The Gamers With Jobs Conference Call is a stud in my stable of weekly podcasts. Key members of the community-written blog come together and dissect their week's worth of gaming in a digestible radio show. They cover games they've been playing, noteworthy news, and discussions they've had within their group. There's very little room for puffery in their densely packed programme.

It's because of their enthusiast background that the podcast is so refreshing. While other commercial podcasts strive to cover all the bleeding edge news, the Conference Call only reports something if it sparks interest within their community. This means that they often give coverage to titles that may be overlooked by the mainstream press for being too niche, but merit a mention to the GWJ audience. If you like good games, and your not listening already, I heartily suggest you become a member of that audience.

Before I started developing games, I used to listen to the Conference Call because their tastes were aligned with my own. I enjoy games that offer interesting decision mechanics, and I often discover new titles to play through their coverage. Now I'm designing my own games, listening to the podcast has taken on another aspect for me: market research. Stargazy Studios was founded on the premise that there is a significant population of gamers who, like me, are hungry for innovation in their games. The Gamers With Jobs community fits this profile perfectly, and it follows that Huscarlas is being developed for them.

I think that the Conference Call podcast is successful because of the diverse mix of gamers they can get around a mic'. There are zealots of casual and core gaming, of the PC and console platforms, and they all bring a different perspective to the show. A small portion of the contingent even venture into technical commentary, the like of which is more often heard at a developer conference. It was one of these discussions that was so relevant to indie development that I thought it warranted a response.

The topic concerned attempts by platform holders to lock in content creators, by tailoring their SDKs to be incompatible with others. An SDK is a library of code provided to developers from which to start your own program. It usually takes care of providing the very basic building blocks so that you're not working from a cold start. If you write a game for any of the major platforms, you'll be given an SDK by Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony, Apple, or Google. If a platform holder ensures that a developer is unable to write a piece of code that can be compiled with more than one SDK, they gain exclusivity over your content.

Each platform holder implements their shackling of developers to different extents. The example used on the Conference Call was Apple, who have recently taken the stance that it will not allow any third party SDKs to create programs for its iPhone. This resulted in a vocal, and not overly adult, to-and-fro between Apple and Adobe, whose nose was put severely out of joint by this decision. Adobe's Flash SDK would have let you create games that could run in a web browser, as well as on the iPhone. The unique selling point of a third-party SDK is often that you're able to compile your program to be run on more than one platform. This is great for developers, but not so great for exclusive-hungry platform holders, and seems to be the reason for Apple's lock-down.

The conclusion on the podcast was that you were now unable to develop a game for both the iPhone and Android by writing a single piece of code. Without a cross-compiling third party SDK, it would seem that you need to write your iPhone application using Apple's Objective-C language, which does not have a compiler on any of the other major platforms.

However, there is hope! The iPhone is one of my target platforms, so I was presented with the very same dilemma during my development, and I have a solution. A wise man once said: "To write a C++ compiler, you must first write a C compiler.". This still rings true today, and it's highly likely that a C compiler will be one of the first things written for any new platform. Objective-C is different to C++, but is also built on top of C. This means that all of the building blocks you'd expect to have in a C implementation are in the iPhone SDK. Guess what else has a C compiler? Google's Android has its own C library it calls the NDK (Native Development Kit). And there's more good news: both iOS and Android support OpenGL ES, an open source 3D library. So, with a C codebase that leverages OpenGL ES, you've got yourself a cross-platform game engine for the market-leading smartphones.

Some SDK calls will still need to be made using platform-specific languages on both iOS (Objective-C) and Android (Java). These must be wrapped in C functions to be called from your pure C codebase. My experience has been that there is not an awful lot of this to be done, and the versatility of having a C and OpenGL engine does not end with smartphones. As well as PCs and Macs, Nintendo's and Sony's home and portable consoles can be targeted. Even Microsoft's Xbox 360 has a C compiler, though it muddies the waters a little with DirectX rather than OpenGL.

After emailing the Conference Call crew with my solution, they intend to write a follow-up article on the Gamers With Jobs blog examining the subject of monopolistic platform holders in-depth. I look forward to reading their insights, as this is a war that all developers suffer in, especially indies who don't have the resources to write their code more than once. In the end, if it's too costly to bring your game to a bespoke platform, then it's the gamers who don't get to play it who lose out.

You can check out the initial discussion of Apple's exclusivity grab in episode 194 (00:55:27), and my response read out in episode 195 (01:00:31).