Q&A – dot big blog

Behind The Scenes: The Making Of Pocket Garden

Pocket Garden is the new cozy faming game on dot big bang. It has a lot of interesting systems, from the UI, to the economy, upgrades system, and multiplayer aspects such as watering friends’ crops while they’re away. To find out more about the game’s development, we caught up with Ashley Koett, the dot big bang Community Engineer who designed the game.

Arfbot Coding Contest Teaches Game Development To 2000 Kids Using dot big bang

In the middle of 2022, we noticed many curious new creations being made on dot big bang with “Arfbot” in their title. A little investigation led to the source – a Turkish education initiative run by Dijital Çağ Atölyesi (“Digital Age Workshop”) in Ankara, Turkey.

Arda Aslan is the workshop’s founder (pictured above presenting dot big bang at various schools in Ankara). We caught up with them to find out more.

Global Game Jam Advice From Two Game Jam Veterans

Bradley Adams (Senior Software Engineer) and Heather Harvey (Community Designer) are two game jam veterans who entered the Global Game Jam using dot big bang and 2022, and ended up working here!

Based in Vancouver, Canada, they joined dot big bang in June of 2021 under their game dev pseudonyms booradley and punkerella. We caught up with them ahead of this year’s Global Game Jam to ask for some game jam tips.

Hey hey. The Global Game Jam is bearing down fast! How are you both feeling about what’s coming up?
We really enjoy game jams, so we’re super excited to jump in and get started. We have done GGJ every year since 2013 and it’s always great. Shout-out to the Vancouver organizers for doing an amazing job every year!

Meet McFunkypants, dot big bang’s First Gamedev-in-Residence

Breakdance McFunkypants is the pseudonym of Christer Kaitila, a prolific game developer and gamedev Twitter presence. Known for his imagination, positivity, and constant flow of interesting and creative new works, Christer is dot big bang’s first ever gamedev-in-residence. We sat down with him to ask about his process, ethos, and bright “gamedev optimist” outlook.

dbb x GGJ: Making A Game In 48 Hours

Game jams are a great avenue for established and aspiring game devs to learn, grow, and experiment. They providing the framework and motivation needed for quick iteration, working in teams, and focussed bursts of creativity and productivity. With this in mind, dot big bang Community Engineer Ashley Koett entered the Global Game Jam this year. The resulting game is “ESP”, a ‘single-player co-op’ puzzle-platformer on the jam’s theme of ‘Duality’ (play it here). We caught up with her to find out about how it went, and what unique qualities dot big bang brings to the table as a game jam platform.

An Introduction To Scripting In dot big bang

The first version of User Scripting with Typescript went live this week on dot big bang, opening up a lot of new possibilities for creators. We caught up with Lead Community Engineer Charles Palmer, aka meheleventyone, to talk about what this means for the platform, and what the future holds.

Meet Charlie Dean, Community Engineer

We caught up with dot big bang Community Engineer Charlie Dean to find out how the Hub World fishing mechanic came together, what choices were made, what challenges it presented – and what makes designing games fun.

Meet Charles Palmer, Lead Community Engineer

Charles Palmer is the Lead Community Engineer at dot big bang. Based in Reykjavík, Iceland, he joined dot big bang in 2018. We caught up with him to find out about what he’s been doing, making, learning, and playing lately.