ETAO PODCAST, EPISODE 109.
Yadu Rajiv does a whole lot of different things, all of them to do with games and the people and technologies that make them possible. By day, he’s a Lead Game Designer at BYJU’S, working on educational games that toe the line between physical and digital, and the rest of the time he acts as an ambassador and an organizer for India’s fast-growing indie scene.
Here he talks about what it means to wear those different hats, the unique pressures of running a community in times of isolation, and the odd, undeniable role of bootlegs and piracy in game history—as well as what it means for a game to be recognizably Indian, given both the cross-cultural nature of games as a medium and the extreme heterogeneity of Indian cultural identity.
You can find Yadu’s work on his website, and the community he’s building at gamedev.in.
You can also follow Yadu (and BYJU’S) on Twitter.
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• The header image is from Yadu’s excellent development blog post, about SpellDown, and the body image is from Venba by Visai Games.
• You can see Osmo’s games on their website.
• You can find the BYOG 2020 games I mentioned right here.
• Do definitely check out the Video Game History Foundation and the utterly wonderful Video Game History Hour podcast.
• Here’s that post Yadu mentions, about recent and upcoming indie games by Indian developers.
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“All The People Say (Season 4)” by Drew Messinger-Michaels.
“Groovy Drive” and “Low Growl” from Yadu Rajiv’s collection of Mini Loops.
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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 