The audio is a bit low on this recording, you’re gonna want to crank it way up! Shortly after Fantastic Arcade we traveled to New York City to present at the NYU Game Center lecture series. My good friend and collaborator Andy Nealen has been teaching at Game Center for a while now, but last time I visited they had not set up their new lab, nor acquired their current faculty lineup. I don’t visit a lot of academic institutions but when I do I rarely get the sense that all is well, or that the teachers are properly equipped to actually teach game design, much less independent game production. Game Center is a big exception to this rule, especially now that they’ve added a smart little incubator. The lab itself is fantastic - lots of open play areas for digital and analog games, private studio spaces for teams and collaborators, none of the weird traditional computer lab spaces that normally plague game programs. Combined with faculty like Frank Lantz, Eric Zimmerman, Bennett Foddy, and more, I’ve never seen anything like it. Was an honor and a pleasure to get to speak to them and work in that environment for a little bit. The one thing I question was Frank’s decision to take us all out to Hill Country BBQ, a weird like mirror dimension since I currently live in actual Hill Country in Texas. But it was pretty delicious. I also owe Andy a big thank you for introducing us all to One Night Ultimate Werewolf at EVO last summer, which has gone on to become one of my favorite games of the year, if not decade. Smart, tight, funny, hectic, a true gem. Fortuitously that intro ultimately led to Ashly Burch’s voicing the new narrator for the expansion pack too!