ETAO Podcast, Episode 86.
Moo Yu stops by to talk about his work on Knights and Bikes, Subsurface Circular, LittleBigPlanet, and several of the Ratchet & Clank games—plus his advocacy, activism, and mentorship via POC in Play. Beyond that, he gets into a deep, generous discussion about the strange position of the code itself in how we understand games. Obviously the code is necessary and important, but it’s not necessarily what we talk about when we talk about games, exactly. So how do we talk about the work a programmer does on a game, without necessarily going all the way down some highly technical, domain-specific rabbit hole or other? That seems important.
You can get Knights and Bikes on Steam, GOG, PS4, and Switch.
You can learn more about POC in Play on their website.
You can also follow Moo (and Foam Sword) on Twitter.
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• Here’s Moo’s talk at GduX.me.
• The video I was thinking of was not the big player-facing PlayStation 5 hardware reveal, but that vastly more developer-facing Unreal Engine 5 demo.
• In the spirit of keeping the notes quasi–game-related, here’s Polygon’s roundup of ways to support the current protests.
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“All The People Say (Season 3)” by Holly Hyperion.
“Theme from Knights and Bikes” by Daniel Pemberton.
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Logo by Aaron Perry-Zucker, using Icons by by Llisole, Dávid Gladiš, Atif Arshad, Daniel Nochta, Mike Rowe, Jakub Čaja, Raji Purcell and IconsGhost from the Noun Project.
Everybody's Talking at Once 