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Best Developer

Best Developer

Josh Ge of Grid Sage Games – “Cogmind

When we started Spitball Sessions, I hoped that developer driven initiatives were the future of game design. And I think over the last 3 years, we’ve seen that the indie revolution has started to truly sweep aside the dusty cobwebs of the “triple-A” space – leaving them to evolve or die.

We haven’t given a developer award before, but as a site that has always been pro-developer and strongly believes in the importance of the developer’s hand, it is now more fitting than ever to do so.

And really, there is no one more appropriate to recieve the inaugural Best Developer award than Cogmind’s Josh Ge.

As a developer, Josh releases regular patches, communicates with his customers and is polite, courteous and professional. Obviously, these are all important basics for a developer to even be worth considering for this award. Anyone observing him can tell that he deeply cares about his game, and is (usually) having fun working on it, and he’s excited to share that love. He also clearly cares about his players and their experience: highlighting people who do cool things, reacting to various exploits – sometimes to fix, but other times to facilitate the fun of using them – and even running streams to show off interesting playstyles.

But it goes deeper than that. After all, many good developers do those things, even if only for marketing reasons. A great developer is about more, and Josh Ge does more. He is also a great evangeslist for the roguelike genre. He goes onto podcasts to discuss roguelikes. He posts dev diaries discussing mechanics and game design for his game in great detail – letting people see why he made various choices and what the results were. And he happily highlights other good roguelikes, not just selfishly trying to market his own, but showing people there’s a whole genre worth discovering.

Which brings us to the third point that makes Josh Ge worthy of this award – he is an excellent role model. In the last few years, we’ve seen various initiatives to get more people into programming, or get more diversity into game design, or to incentivize people to mentor other programmers. But Josh has always seemed willing to help people, if they want it. In addition to answering questions on Twitter or the Roguelike Discord, he also runs weekly information sessions on RoguelikeDev on Reddit. He is already walking the walk – first getting people into playing roguelikes, and then encouraging them to make one as well.

With all the above being said, it is only fitting to give Josh Ge the first Spitball Sessions Best Developer Award.

Considering that this was also the year we gave Chrono Trigger its Lifetime Achievement award, I feel comfortable saying that Josh Ge is the Chrono Trigger of game developers. In 20 years, perhaps we’ll look back on him in the same light – as someone who is remembered with great fondness and often imitated, but never quite surpassed.

Speaking of which, if you’d like to hear our opinions on the games of the year, you can find our podcasts to the right, or just click here.

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