Designing the grind: productivity as gameplay

Rob, Sarah, and Doug chat with Jenny Jiao Hsia and AP Thomson about Consume Me, an award-winning autobiographical resource-management RPG about the pressure cooker of young adulthood. We discuss the game's ten-year development cycle, balancing dynamic difficulty in a game about overachievement, the complex dynamics of mining your own story, and more!

Heads up: This episode includes discussion of disordered eating and religious upbringing.

Audio edited by Dylan Shumway.

Mentioned in this episode:

Consume Me https://hexecutable.itch.io/consume-me https://store.steampowered.com/app/2359120/Consume_Me/

Prototyping Personal Experience – Jenny's talk at A MAZE 2017 https://youtu.be/iQ-PaGTr-iI?si=RIAWQMFZfMWCVCsN

Papers Please by Lucas Pope https://papersplea.se/

Nina Freeman's games on itch.io https://starmaidgames.itch.io/

Triad by Anna Anthropy https://w.itch.io/triad

Reigns by Nerial https://www.reignsgame.com/reigns

Long Live the Queen by Hanako Games https://hanakogames.itch.io/long-live-the-queen

Perfect Tides by Meredith Gran https://granulac.itch.io/perfect-tides

Look Back (movie) https://www.amazon.com/Look-Back-Kiyotaka-Oshiyama/dp/B0DH5DMSRW

Look Back (manga) https://www.viz.com/look-back

Jenny's TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@q_dork

AP's Instagram https://www.instagram.com/bad_tetris/

https://eggplant.show/

https://discord.gg/eggplant

https://www.patreon.com/eggplantshow

https://www.youtube.com/eggplantshow