Hosted by game design quickie · 🇺🇸 US · EN · 30 episodes
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This podcast is for those who seek to play new games and those who look for new ideas to use in their own games. I collect game design lessons from games on itch--ranging from mechanics to narrative to theme--and capture it in a 10-ish minute episode. zivanovic.substack.com
game design quickie hosts Scratching an Itch, a leisure show with 30 episodes published.
Doki Doki Literature Club by Team Salvato is perhaps the most famous visual novel dating sim game out there because there’s a big twist. I liked both the dating sim AND the twist! The dating aspect is operationalized as
Dice of Dusk by Kultisti is a puzzle roguelike game. It has random generated puzzles, progression, and builds! It also has a timer to create pressure, and one thing I forgot to mention in the episode is that this has ano
Star Realms has player life; Ascension has a victory point pool. Both games have the core mechanic of buying cards from the center row to build your deck in a play session. However, they feel completely different. Yester
Star Realms by White Wizard Games is a deckbuilding game just like Ascension. However, unlike Ascension, Star Realms is a confrontational game, where the goal is to deplete the other player’s authority. This results in s
Draftula by Jose Pacio is a tile-placing and drafting game. It’s a very fun game that made me realize why drafting has become a widely adopted progression mechanic for games. Get full access to zivan at zivanovic.substac
Ascension by Stoneblade Entertainment is one of the seminal deckbuilding games. I’ve played it a lot recently and in this episode I talk about why I like the honor point pool and how I think it allows for adjustable chal
Amalgamate by sunil. is a submission for the 2026 7DRL game jam. It combines a grid-based matching game with random loot generation and upgrades. There’s a small tutorial, but it intentionally holds back some key informa
Yellow Game About Falling Things by Evgenii Petrov is an abstract puzzly roguelike. Throughout the experience, it has zero words and zero numbers, but I still understood the gameplay and goal very quickly. Would it have
Cult of the Lamb by Massive Monster is a roguelite where you gather followers for your flock and defeat heretics. I ramble about what a break is in a game. In this one, there are two aspects of the game: the cult-buildin
Rogue Crawler by Vanialviv is a first person, roguelike deckbuilder. It’s a mouthful, but with a handful of cards in combination with the positioning in the game, it’s sure to provide a good time! I talk about what this
UVSU by dietzribi also has a mechanic where your past self becomes an obstacle to current you, but unlike Killover’s chaos, it’s a puzzle. In this episode, I talk about Metroidvania’s and what makes them fun. Get full ac
Killover by Quentin Delvallet is an action shooter and one of the winners of GMTK’s 2025 jam. It’s one of the craziest play experiences ever, with incredible amount of style and fun packed into a free game. I talk about
Winterwrath by DctrElectro is a point-and-click narrative game. It got second place in the winter game jam, and it has an interesting setting—folklore horror. Apart from having gorgeous graphics, I couldn’t stop playing
Rogue by Michael Toy, Glenn Wichman, and Ken Arnold defined the roguelike genre, so I wanted to see what it’s like—turns out it’s roguelike. Usually, I play itch games, but I decided to go rogue. Ok, that’s enough of tha
With Yokai Madness, I reached the goals I had set for myself before entering the jam: * Program a game from scratch (tutorials allowed, no AI code) * Submit a game that can be replayed multiple times * Rank in the top 30
Cookies Bakery by leafthief is a cozy Christmas game for this merry time. I hope everyone is having amazing holidays! Although it says that it’s a Visual Novel, I think it’s what GameDiscoverCO called a find-em-up. This
Picokaiju by spoik is very cool because it’s inspired by two other games and we get to see the evolution of a concept—its iterations! Very cool, that’s kind of what I talked about last week. Crush, crumble, and chomp by
Solitomb by Jakub Wasilevski is a roguelike deck-builder based on solitaire and using poker hand mechanics. That’s a lot of concepts, and while I don’t unpack them in this episode, I just ramble about what it means to ha
Dungeon Crawler on Demand! by redpangilian is definitely an interesting experience. Mostly for the fact that it crystalizes the very feeling that makes slot machines so addicting into a small mobile game. The variable re
Oh, the French! my first narrative game, and it’s inspired by absurdist fiction. You can play it in the browser on itch, and it (probably) takes less than listening to this podcast to complete one play-through. Please ch
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Scratching an Itch is hosted by game design quickie. The show is categorised under leisure (games) and has published 30 episodes.
Scratching an Itch has published 30 episodes.
Scratching an Itch regularly covers leisure, games, arts. It sits in the leisure category, with a games focus.
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