Trying Your Best and Helping Somehow, with Megan Fox

Everybody's Talking At Once

ETAO PODCAST, EPISODE 118.

Megan Fox heads up Glass Bottom Games, the small-core-team-and-a-cloud-of-contractors behind SkateBIRD. (They were a larger core team for their first-person brawler/roguelike Spartan Fist, it should be noted). Here Megan talks about how SkateBIRD first came to be, and the nuts and bolts of bringing it to life—not only from a technical and artistic perspective, but also in terms of running a studio in a fair, equitable, robust, and sustainable manner.

We don’t talk much about Glass Bottom Games’ previous works (the cat-rescuing auto-runner Jones on Fire, the first-person brawler/roguelike Spartan Fist, and the comedy-noir adventure game platformer Hot Tin Roof: The Cat that Wore a Fedora). But that makes a certain sense, given how close to SkateBIRD’s launch we were speaking. Megan was (and is) in it.

You can get SkateBIRD on Steam, Switch, Itch, Luna, and Xbox (where it’s on Game Pass).
You can hear the game’s soundtrack on Spotify, Steam, and Bandcamp.
You can also follow Megan (and Glass Bottom Games, and SkateBIRD) on Twitter.

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• Here’s prototype maestro KevKev on Twitter.

• Here’s the Kitfox crew on the baggy, the shaggy, and the craggy in game design.

• If you haven’t already, do check out our talk with Xalavier Nelson Jr.

• And for more about how Blendo Games is operating these days, here are Laura Michet and Brendon Chung talking about Skin Deep.

• Meanwhile, our talk with Laia Bee covers the topic of why small studios generally can’t juggle two games at once was not (among a whole lot of other topics).

• We didn’t get to talk about Ultima, even though I wanted to. So regardless, here’s Megan talking about Ultima VII.

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“All The People Say (Season 4)” by Carpe Demon.
“Atlas’ Gospel” and “Strut” from the SkateBIRD OST by Nathan Madsen.

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