Joe Martin – Product Marketing for Startups

Update: Unlimited Hyperbole is no longer available. There are two episodes preserved by the Thief community on Youtube which are linked in the episode index, however other episodes have since been lost to time.

As the Writer and Narrative Designer behind titles such as horror classic Penumbra, FTL and the recently announced The Swapper, you’d expect Tom Jubert to emphasise the importance of writing in scary games. In fact though, that couldn’t be further from the truth.

In the last episode of Season Two, Tom explains why he thinks interactivity and plausible environments add so much more than a few lines of dialogue, what narrative design is and why games such as To The Moon misunderstand what it means to be a game.

Unlimited Hyperbole is a weekly podcast about videogames and the stories we tell about them. The show is divided into seasons of five episodes, each with a topic that’s used as a prompt when interviewing special guests. This season we’ve been talking about “Fear Itself” – to find out what we’ll be talking about next season, read after the jump.

So.

Firstly, this episode did have some technical difficulties which is why Tom’s voice is indistinct at times. I polished it up as best I could, but this is the best that I could make it. Apologies if it’s still unclear.

Secondly: Phew!

This season was definitely a lot harder to put together than the first, largely because I didn’t leave enough time between seasons to actually get on top of things. As such, I’ve decided to put the show on hiatus throughout August so that we’re not sacrificing on quality in order to meet arbitrary deadlines.

The show will remain online and we’ll still be recording and editing throughout August, but Season Three won’t air until the start of September. You can, of course, follow both Harriet and I on Twitter in the meantime in case we manage to sneak out some little one-offs or extras.

On the upside, I can announce that Season Three will be titled “A Matter of Character” and will involve another five episodes with a range of guests from both in and out of the games industry. We’ll be examining what character is, why it’s so important, why we love it, hate it and all manner of stories on the topic.

If you’d like to be involved with Season Three, or just have a suggestion for how to improve the show, we’d love to hear from you. We love to hear from anyone, in fact. Get in touch!

Other than that, I’d like to thank everyone who helped me put Season Two, be it by starring in an episode or just providing feedback or comment. Jim Trinca also gets special thanks for helping to tidy up the audio on this episode.