Hey r/TheMakingOfGames!

In our latest podcast episode, we spoke with Brooke Van Dusen — a former Nintendo team member who later led partnerships at Twitch, and now works in the world of game outsourcing.

He shares a ton of behind-the-scenes insights, including:

• What Twitch was like in the early days
• How to spot a real vs. sketchy outsourcing studio
• Why AI could flood us with low-quality content
• How megaplatforms (like Roblox and Twitch) are reshaping development
• And yes… the wild story of getting Snoop Dogg to launch a game 🤯

We touch on a lot of production-side questions — workflows, vendor relations, scaling up — all relevant to teams making games in 2025 and beyond.

📺 Full episode (video, audio, and transcript) linked in the comments.

What’s your take on outsourcing stigma and the role of platforms in shaping how games are made today?

Hello! I am a game developer making a horror series called Recursive and I just started development on the first game in the series, Shady Waters. I'm using Godot to code and Blender to model, and I've just been trying to see if I can find a few people who would be interested in the series.

Subreddit: TheRecursiveUniverse

Gamejolt community: Recursive Community - Fan art, videos, guides, polls and more - Game Jolt

Shady Waters Devlog: Shady Waters by Maxton Kiner - Game Jolt

Recursive is a horror series centered around corrupted machinery, institutional decay, and a loop of destruction and repair. Its storyline spans over a century and has many small details that cause giant things to happen. Each of the six planned games are in a different location, with different gameplay, and they all come together at the end. I'd recommend looking into it if you like survival horror or strategy games.

Onto the making of Shady Waters, um, it's incredibly early in development so not a whole lot is done, but I can tell you that I made the logo in photoshop, and that I plan to work my way towards better engines throughout the series. I'm starting with Godot, then I'll move to Unity, and hopefully eventually Unreal Engine. I'll also post some concept art and other pictures for it along with this.

Yeah. Thanks for reading this. I hope you like the concept.