In this Episode, Ian once again joins the clubhouse as Dale and Mark are off on a nerdy vacation. Lydia wrestles with the term "cozy," and Stephen does some self exploration to determine why so-called cozy games make him more stressed out. Then, he creates a whole topic just to talk about the fast travel system in Dragon’s Dogma 2.

• Stephen pitched Sledgehammer Bride to Melanated Games Kitchen.

• Melanated Game Kitchen
• The clubhouse hosted a Nice Thinking episode about Sledgehammer bride back in episode 240 Nice Thinking: "Sledgehammer Bride"

• Lydia and Ian went to Con of the North

• Con of the North

• Lydia and Ian are playing Blippo+

• Mark was a developer on the PC version of Blippo+ which is a 2026 IGF award finalist.
• Blippo+

Mark rushes through the introduction to talk about his two rush projects, one of which, Blippo+, was announced on Sunday during the PC Gaming Show! You'll hear more about that next week, but until then, Lydia talks about feeling seen in Anime, Stephen laments that his filmmaking class has not only ruined movies for him, but also music, and Dale does a good job editing out Lydia’s coughs.

The clubhouse gets Cretaceous this week; your nice hosts have been challenged to create a game about dinosaurs and their feeding habits.

• Cretaceous period
  • Flowering plants evolved here
  • Early mammals here too
  • Velociraptors too!
• Different sized dinosaurs
• Name: Dinosaurs of North Dakota
  • Play as big (T-rex), small (dog-sized) and medium (triceratops)
  • Survive a day as each of these creatures
  • Order of play
    • Medium first (herbivore)
    • Big next (T-rex)
    • Small last (scavenger)
    • Then Paleontologist discovers (eats chicken with a PLASTIC fork)
  • Where you die determines how preserved the bones are during the paleontology phase
    • If you want more preserved bones you have to choose to not live as long (due to how the preservation works)
  • Gameplay
    • Play as the different creatures, the player chooses when that phase of the game ends
      • Can also end after a certain time played
    • Then you swap to a new creature and play as them, choosing when to end
    • When you get back to a creature, time has passed and things are different in the world (partly due to player influence from other creatures)
      • Player knocking down trees might be knocked down in future scenes, eating a lot of plants may make the area sparse in the future
    • Keep playing as the different creature until enough time has passed
    • Afterwards, play as a paleontologist and rediscover what you’ve done
    • Record what you’ve done with the knowledge the paleontologist has (and not the player), so it won’t actually be accurate to the player’s playthrough
    • Based on what the player’s done, it can affect what things the paleontologist will be able to say about the state of things after