Beasts of Balance Game Design | Ice Cream for Everyone

Ice Cream for Everyone Podcast

Beasts of Balance Interactive Game with Tim Burrell-Saward, Lead Designer at Sensible Object

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I’m not usually superstitious but this week’s episode of the podcast could give me new insight into being triskaidekaphobic. It’s only as I finished editing the episode I realised it’s the thirteenth!

I was really excited to meet the team at Sensible Object for this episode, the recent studio behind a new type of game blending physical and digital elements called Beasts of Balance. I’ve been following what happening with it and as you might imagine I’m pretty interested in new types of games.

Beasts of Balance (previously called Fabulous Beasts) is in the last few days of a crowdfunding project and I encourage you to go check out the game and participate in the Kickstarter to support them.

I visited their studio at Somerset House in central London and had a fun conversation with their lead designer Tim Burrell-Saward. A few days later when I started working on the sound editing for this episode, I realised like 80% or more of the episode had almost constant background clicking sounds that I find really annoying. I’ve spent hours on trying to remove them, reading and watching tutorials, etc. I don’t know what it’s due to, it’s the first time that it happens. It’s a real shame – though maybe I’m over-dramatising.

At least I thought it’s ok to listen to a few minutes of this at a time so rather than imposing the whole thing or throwing it away altogether I opted for a slightly experimental third option, I kept only what I considered the most important and best parts of the interview, and talked in between paraphrasing some of the things Tim and I talked about.

To complement the audio podcast, I recommend watching a few videos with reviews and play tests of the game, which hopefully will give you a better idea of the way it works and the reasons why I think it’s an exciting project.