Bennett Fadi is a legendary game designer known for creating wholly distinctive games, such as

Quap, Getting Over It with Bennett Fadi, and the recently released Baby Steps.

He's also a former professor at the NYU Game Center, where he taught game design alongside

developing his own experimental work. In this episode, Bennett joins Joe Nash to discuss his systems-driven approach

to game design, why frustration and difficulty are often misunderstood, how streaming and

speed running have reshaped how games are played and experienced, and what makes his games

stand out. Joe Nash is a developer, educator, and award-winning community builder who has worked at

companies including GitHub, Twilio, Unity, and PayPal. Joe got a start in software development by

creating mods and running servers for Gary's mod, and game development remains his favorite way to

experience and explore new technologies and concepts.

Welcome to Software Engineering Daily. I'm your host for today's episode, Joe Nash, and today I'm joined by Bennett Foddy.

Bennett is a game designer infamous for titles like Quop, Gurp, and recently Baby Steps, as well as an educator at the NYU Game Center.

Bennett, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me.

So let's get started with what your game dev journey was. How did you get into making? What we'll cover is a very frustrating

selection of games. It started in around 2005. I was started to become aware that something

was happening in the world of video games, really kind of lifelong passionate gamer.

But one of the things that started to come through were that there were free games.

There were games that were made by very small teams that were starting to kind of gain attention.

And I think we started to call them indie games in around that period of time.

But some of them were coming out of the Dojin scene from Japan that was a little older.

Some of them were coming out of a kind of independent

practice that flowed from, you know, shareware in the in the 90s and so on. But there was

...