Posted By Jared Barboza, 26, January, 2014, in fragcast
FragCast is a weekly podcast where the founders of Frag Castle Games talk about the latest progress on their games, the video game industry, pop culture and the ups and downs of running a super-small, lean startup.
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In This Episode
Jared, John and now Keith(!!!) talk about transcredible topics like:
- FragCastle Games, now with 100% more Keith Murphy!
- We welcome our newest member to a life of indentured servitude aboard the S.S. Frag Castle
- Keith brings Game Design, Voice Acting, Coding and Art skills to the team!
- The gang talks about Braid and Indie Game: The Movie and Phil Fish rage-quitting Fez 2.
Currently Playing?
- John has been too busy working to really play any games this week, but he recommends Ray Man Run
- Jared hasn’t played any games in almost 2 weeks, too busy being sick and working
- Keith highly recommends Rogue Legacy which he beat this last weekend! WHY ARE YOU STILL HERE GO AND GET IT!!! He also beat Braid and is playing through the Marvel Lego Game.
Listener Questions
@codeimpossible @fragcastle take on Unity2D vs custom game engine. #monogame
— kunjee (@kunjee) January 20, 2014If you’re weighing your options between writing your own game engine and using Unity2d or insert-another-game-engine-here we all think that learning a popular game engine is almost always going to be easier than building your own. However, if you’re more focused on learning the fundamentals of game engine design then you can certainly build your own and Jared thinks this is one of the better ways to learn but there are also a bunch of open source game engines that you can use as reference:
- Duality
- Fail Engine
- Cocos2d - not based off of XNA but still a good open source 2d game engine to learn from
- NetGore - again, not based of XNA but another good engine to look at
@codeimpossible @fragcastle future market mobile games vs console games. Is console is coming back to hit hard?
— kunjee (@kunjee) January 20, 2014Console are still a big market, but it seems that the people interested in consoles are also interested in having a “all-in-one” entertainment device (Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, etc). Mobile seems to be focusing more on satisfying gamers when they aren’t at home. Also, mobile is just a larger market to play with than console at this point. Pretty much everyone on the planet has a mobile phone. We’re thinking that consoles are here to stay but mobile has the numbers to make things very interesting. Ask us again in 5 years :D
How do you handle being burnt out by industry stuff? I need some tips.
— Zoë ʻDuckButtʼ Quinn (@ZoeQuinnzel) January 21, 2014- Jared tends to crawl into a cave and do nothing to recharge himself when he gets burned out.
- John points out that it could just be all of the baggage you’re dealing with and not necessarily the workload itself. John says that taking a timeout and refocusing yourself on whats actually important can help you keep your sanity.
- Keith mentions that people recharge differently and that you should figure out what works best for you. Keith loves to hang out with a bunch of energized people to get his energy levels back up.
Legal Beagle Stuff
Opening Song by RoccoW - “Create A Song in A Day Challenge #1”. This song is shared under a Attribution Share A like 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0) license. We sampled a 20 second clip from the middle of his awesome track to open our podcast. RoccoW does not in any way endorse our podcast. The opinions and viewpoints expressed by the Hosts of FragCast are theres and theres alone.