You didn't miss it. We recorded Tim Hutchings (1000 Year Old Vampire), and it was unhinged!! Zoom holds recordings for about thirty days, but they used to hold for volume, and I wasn't paying attention and it ate it. Tim's agreed to come back and we'll pin the redo onto the end of the season. It won't be a recreation. That one got away, and the magicks are gone. So this episode is me and Sarah sitting with what we took from the Bakers and Tim for our own work.

Listen here → [Muses of Play 04]
Sarah Doom: [scorcha.net] · [patreon.com/SarahDoom]
Music this episode by [Musinova], [Bomb Sound], and [Ievgen Poltavskyi] via Pixabay.

Meg and Vincent Baker and their kids have the tightest creative feedback loop I have ever seen. A whole family who can say rethink this entire thing out loud and still be a family at dinner.
Tim is the other pole. Tim works alone, in a room full of things he is hands-on about, and he's honest about being selfish with that space. Sarah said there's a myth of the solitary artist who abandons everything for the work, and Tim is the closest thing to a warm, functional version of it. The Bakers recorded from their home, living rooms, bedrooms. Tim recorded from his workshop, the lab!

What I took from Tim: it's okay to be a little selfish about the work. I used to feel guilty about it. He also inspired me to reclaim my basement so I can sprawl out and be the mad scientist.

Sarah talks about the games industry being great at first-time designers. Metatopia exists. Mentorships exist. Conventions will hand a brand-new designer a table, an audience, and a stack of goodwill. The industry is also great at established designers, because established designers have a network and a mailing list and people who return their email. Game two? Game three? Nothing. No scholarships, no formal structures, no convention track.

I know that gap from three directions. Software has it: a thousand tutorials for beginners, nothing for the person who already knows four languages and is stuck on how do I approach this problem. Steam game dev has it. Newsletters have it — I've got two of them, I know how to get going, I've got subscribers, I'm trying to get from here to over there, and there's nothing out there for that.

Sarah's doing something about her corner of it. She's been documenting on her Patreon how she actually fills out an SRD, line by line, because nobody teaches that unless you happened to take a game design course in college.

My takeaway from the Bakers is that I want that level of collaboration, or some variant of it. Judd Karlman floated a recurring creative meetup going into 2026, and I think I'm taking him up on it. Maybe it's him and me. Maybe we add more. I don't know how big is too big — two might be enough. Sarah's version is a standing weekly call with another designer. Google Doc goes out a couple days ahead, both of them comment, and the feedback happens. 🤷🏾‍♂️

Public episode → Buzzsprout/Muses of Play
Full extended cut → Patreon/MadJayZero 🤬