Architect Address- January 2020 (Patreon)

We're back with the first Architect Address of the year!


Transcript:

 

 Hello Folks, wow it’s been a while, huh?

Yadda yadda yadda I’m bad at these, you get the picture by now, but I’ll make it up to you by quickly running through the four videos that have come out since I’ve last had an opportunity to chat to you all and just go through my thoughts and any extra observations that I feel like making, whatevs. Let’s get started with...

How gameplay loops keep you playing. Whilst this ended up as more of a mechanic overview video where I just talk about a particular facet of game design, it originally started as a video all about the Supergiant games design process. Ultimately, I think supergiants games are so compelling because they nail those medium length loops, bastion and transistor are built around the loops between new weapons and story beats, pyre has the rites to sort of ground things and Hades is a roguelike which are all about loops. Buuuut, the tone of the video just came off as sort of sycophantic - I love Supergiant as much as anyone else but a video all about me breathlessly praising a dev that’s universally liked already… is going to get a bit boring. So I broadened the scope a little, got to talk about DOOM which is a fave of mine and Pikmin which I was really happy to have an excuse to go back to and all in all we got a pretty solid video that did alright out of it Nice. I’m a fan. 

Then, we had how Platinum designs a combat system. This is probably a great example of why making a video all about a specific dev isn’t such a great idea. I think there’s some really cool stuff in this video and I’m a big fan of Platinum’s whole theme first design philosophy but man did this video just do… kinda bad. Like, really bad. Maybe it’s just because the topic isn’t super grabby or maybe because I explained things in a boring way, who knows. I’d like to revisit some of these concepts at some point, particularly about designing skill sets for characters but I’ll let the idea rest for now, because…. I’ve got to find a way to make it work, basically.

Next was 2019 Games you should have played, which was, predictably, a massive hit, yay! Seriously though, last year was an absolutely insane year for games, I had so many brilliant games on the initial list i had to cut to get down to 20 whereas in 2018 I kind of felt like I was padding it a little. between Baba is you, Disco Elysium, Outer Wilds and a bunch of others there were several 10/10 games of the year contenders in 2019 and it’s great to see so many utterly unique games coming out and blowing our socks off, and it makes me really interested to see what 2020 has to offer, eventually, given that literally everything is getting delayed right now.

Finally, there’s why Mystery games don’t need mechanics which is… ehhhh, I kind of hate that title because it’s just accurate to be technically representative of the video but it’s still clickbaity as shit. That aside, I did get to talk more about a weird theme I noticed in a lot of my favourite games from the 2019 list and that is how a bunch of them are about solving mysteries. Honestly, that’s really really exciting, because good mystery stories - and by that I mean mystery stories that don’t just steal the noire aesthetic are something that only a medium reaching true maturity can pull off - you need concrete narrative rules, a well of cultural ideas to pull from and a lot of other cool theoretical stuff I won’t go into. All I’ll say is that I think the next few years are going to be very interesting for video games and I can’t wait.

And as for the channel this year, what’s to say, we hit 100 subs, I finally made it my full-time job and things are looking better than ever! Seriously, thanks for all your continued support it amazes and mystifies me to this day, you do know that you can get the videos for free, right? Anyway, there’s your updates. HOPEFULLY once I’m done moving house and stuff the schedule can get a bit more organised but until then, I’ll see you in the next vid, okay? Right, bye?