All of your hosts are together in the Clubhouse for a special interview! Lydia Symchych is an impact game designer who has been working with Ellen over the last year. Today, she shares her experience of making an escape room that needed to be rendered in both "physical" and and digital environments. Also, sound effects and pillows.
In this end-of-year tradition, your nice hosts talk about the games they played and the things that they accomplished in 2025, as well as the games they're excited to play and the things they hope to do in 2026.
Stephen and Mark both had an up and down year and both picked predictable nicests (if you know anything about them), while Lydia realizes that she missed the show's orientation day.
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Part 3 of what your nice hosts are calling "Giving Lydia Therapy," we get into Lydia's thoughts on calling herself an artist and what it may mean to think of yourself in this way.
Lots of thinking about thinking in this episode as the Nice Hosts attempt to define some core concepts to gameplay. What even is a game? Interactivity? Play? A failstate?!
Buckle in for an intellectual conversation, and remember to go to nicegames.com/feedback to tell Stephen exactly why he's wrong about any of it.
Mark DeLoura's decades-long career in games includes roles ranging from Nintendo engineer to White House senior advisor. A longtime and passionate developer advocate, this year he's been tapped to help reinvent the industry's largest annual gathering, GDC.
DeLoura outlines the changes coming to this year's conference, defines what "festival" means in the context of GDC, and previews the ambitious goals for its future. But your nice hosts also raise concerns about the elimination of the lowest-priced passes, the accessibility of new programming, and the critical issue of attendee safety now that more official GDC events serve alcohol.
Whether you have or are planning to attend GDC, are one of its critics, or just want to know more about how the industry creates and manages its community, this episode is a must-listen.
Mark DeLoura also co-hosts a podcast! His weekly gaming news/discussion show, Boss Rush, is available on YouTube!
After the discussion, DeLoura turned the tables on your nice hosts and asked a few questions of his own. It didn't fit into the episode, but we saved it and put it up as a Patreon exclusive bonus segment!
This week the clubhouse is filled with emotions. Lydia was frustrated that she did not recapture the magic of her first escape room game, Stephen was frustrated that finding his critical eye makes for a different movie watching experience, and Mark was frustrated by the acoustics at a football stadium.
In other news, it's time to make your GDC Plans! Mark and Dale will be there, and probably some other nice hosts, too.
CHEST Conference
Escape room games
Stephen has previously talked about his filmmaking class in:
This week, Lydia provides all the fun facts about living on a boat while your nice hosts develop a card game based around scurvy management!
Event deck
Resource Deck
Shuffle the event deck and the resource deck separately. Deal 5 cards from the resource deck to each player.
This week features a timeless topic followed by a timely one, both of them pretty important. Lydia prepares for Chicago, Mark shares his slides, and Stephen gonna chill.
Some of Lydia's escape room props!
In this episode, Lydia and Stephen are rubber ducks for Mark as he talks through his ideas for a suite of Unity plugin tools. Buckle up, there's a lot! They also discuss whether to bundle or not to bundle tools, considerations of scope and price, and the deep appreciation for easy-to-use interfaces.
Stay tuned to find out!
Sam! returns to the clubhouse to help your nice hosts decide that Lakitu is no longer a savoir that comes down from the clouds, but since he has a job as a referee, should therefore be wearing a little ref shirt.
Blippo+ (Mark's game) released, and you can buy it:
Lydia:
Stephen is:
Your nice hosts talked about these health systems:
Your nice hosts welcome 3D artist and Nice Games Alliance board member Sam Baeseman into the clubhouse to talk about how online Discord communities become available and how to become a part of or lead such communities.
It's been awhile, but it's time for another video episode! This week, Mark's colleague Mike Lasch enters the clubhouse to build a digital prototype live on-air!
We invite Joanna May into the clubhouse again in this supersized episode to design a game about stowing illicit goods into spacecraft as it's being built!
(Note: Minor hiccup with the audio recording in the first 2 minutes, so Lydia is off mic briefly but it fixes itself.)
Joanna May returns to the clubhouse as a guest host! Your four nice hosts chat Tetris, knitting, and CSS, but also have a pair of actual topics to discuss...
Joanna and Mark debated a concept called "Utility-first CSS"
Your nice hosts Lydia and Ellen are on a seriously playful adventure in beautiful Rochester, New York for the Serious Play conference! They discuss game accessibility, D&D therapy, lexical gaps, validation, and more.
In addition, Lydia beats the pavement and gets the hot scoop on what attendees learned at the conference and the games that shaped them.
Many thanks once more to:
In this episode, Mark and Stephen talk about what they are excited about. Lydia deals with a existential crisis about keeping too much stuff. And nobody talks about the full motion video game that Dale made during a Global Game Jam during the topic on video content, where they talked extensively about FMV games. Don't worry! Dale edited this episode and linked the game in the show notes below. ;)
Lydia played some Dutch games
Stephen is very excited about Kirby Air Riders. Is it as good as he anticipated? Past Stephen sure hopes so!
Mark went to L.A. for the Blippo+ Exhibition
Nice Games Alliance
The reasons Lydia doesn't use the Potion:
And more reasons:
Combatting the natural emotional response for players to keep their stuff
Stephen Business is back! And he’s attempting to make a meme into a reality.
It’s a fishing minigame collection. The clubhouse attempts to answer the questions:
Lydia's nice list of games with fishing minigames
It is a joyous day for pancake lovers everywhere, and a joyous week in the Clubhouse for Lydia who successfully made a thing using code! WOW! She shares her experience learning how to make buttons (and everything else) in microStudio. Then the Nice Hosts get real about their experiences with min-maxing in games. You know it's a good topic when it promises at least one spinoff topic so buckle up.
Also in this episode: Mark is doing level design when he should be playing Donkey Kong Bonanza, new laptop(!), and the existential horror of the cozy game genre.
Returning "favorite" Laura Onderwater re-enters the clubhouse to talk about task tracking, naming conventions, and paper trails of various kinds in an engaging discussion on concept art workflows. Even if you’re not part of an art team, there’s a lot to take away from this one!
As promised, the three Korths, Andy, Beth and Gabe, join us in the clubhouse for our hundred and two or so episode tradition! The clubhouse was too crowded to fit Mark in, but having five hosts makes up for it. Your nice hosts design a game about fixing the messes your child makes and then returning the favor as you age.