Author: Joe Mahoney

I like things made by people who love their work

Frankly, trying to compress their work in a 15-second video is quite reductionist

~ Joe Mahoney
@kelletubbie

Malleable little boy #kitten #catsoftiktok

♬ original sound – bleu

On MeFi I posted about how TikTok people have discovered The Mountain Goats’s No Children and the reaction to that from Mountain Goats fans and John Darnielle himself.

My favourite comment:

I am Downy. There is no sign of lint. Your clothing down with me. Part of in my huggable plan. And I hold their dye.

Interrogative Mood on Metafilter

Making Accounting with Emma

~ Joe Mahoney

My buddy Dan Jacka recently finished making a video game called Accounting With Emma and he’s published a wonderful write-up about why he made the game, the tools he used, and what he had to learn to finish it

This is the first game I’ve ever polished. I’ve made throwaway efforts before, but for Accounting with Emma I was motivated to produce an appealing and useful resource for people trying to understand accounting. Polishing meant having decent graphics and music, flourishes with hints, sound effects and animations, and a story with beginning, middle and satisfying end.

You can play Accounting With Emma on itch.io. Give it a go! It’s really well polished and you might even learn something!

Classic Game Postmortem: Sid Meier’s Civilisation

~ Joe Mahoney

Civilization’s 1 and 2 were perfect games for me. I spent hundreds of hours building empires and crushing my neighbours beneath the tracks of my tanks. The later versions added concepts I loved but the endgame became tedious. I haven’t played versions 5 and 6.

In this GDC talk Sid Meier and Bruce Shelley go fairly deep into the design, programming of the first Civilization, talking about the constraints and design philosophy that made the game a hit and set the series up for success.

Double Fine Adventure

~ Joe Mahoney

Double Fine Adventure is a behind-the-scenes documentary series chronicling the making of Broken Age, from Kickstarter promotion through to distribution on multiple platforms.

It’s a 20-episode series and it’s as bingeable as anything you’ll find on Netflix. All the nuts and bolts of making a game are covered but, more importantly, you feel like you get to know the Double Fine team as they put in the work to create a game they are proud of.

Double Fine Adventure is about those people, more than anything else. I’d work there in a heartbeat.

I tend to watch the series every year or so and I always come away with a renewed appreciation of the fact that good things are made by people who really care about what they’re doing.