Architect Address - March 2020 (Patreon)

Well well well, what do we have here? Another episode of the architect address you say? Wow! Better catch up on the previous videos that have been released, huh?

Yeah, only two - unfortunately, I've spent the last month gradually moving house and so videos unfortunately got slowed down a bit - but as you can hopefully now hear, I’ve got a fancy new recording setup that makes me sound like a REAL PROFESSIONAL. So yeah- that’s something!

First up in terms of videos is Why Celeste makes us feel anxious. There’s a bit of an interesting story behind this video - because it’s gone through several iterations. So, I wanted to make a video all about the different ways the characters in shovel knight move, but I couldn’t really make it work, I’d already done a shovel knight video and Mark Brown turned out to be doing the same thing. So - I transitioned into making one about Celeste and other platformers like it which use negative emotions to make a point.

So, as you are probably aware, the video doesn’t really focus on the nitty gritty of the mechanics, because Celeste doesn’t do that much of interest there - what it does do, is leverage the design of Madeline’s core functions into creating a highly specific emotional experience, namely one that’s all about making peace with the inherently stressful nature of hardcore platformers. This was also a great excuse to talk about Getting Over It, a really great game that got kind of overshadowed by the likes of PewdiePie and Markiplier and made people think that it was a lame ragebait game. 

Overall, whilst the video didn’t do that well, I’m pretty happy with making a unique take on a fairly established format. 

Next, we’ve got What Makes a Good Secret. This video was a bit weird to make, because it’s really difficult to pin down any concrete argument that I could keep referring back to here - Ultimately, I sort of had to pin it down to the three vague types of secrets because otherwise it would just be me listing a bunch of secrets for 15 mins and that wouldn’t be any fun to watch, right? As a result, I ended up skipping a bunch of cool secrets like all the nutty ones in Environmental Station Alpha, Hell in cave story or the Legendary Chris Houlihan room in a link to the past.

However, the research process for this one was actually really fun - I loved going through a bunch of great games and hoovering up all the cool secrets I could find - going back to fez in particular was great fun because that game is pretty much one giant secret. One thing I did NOT find fun was trying to get the fucking lord of the fucking mountain to spawn. It turns out that the way breath of the wild’s event system works means that the glowy mountain that signifies the lord of the mountain’s arrival is actually pseudorandom, and I have hours of footage of me waiting on a tower for that damn thing to spawn on my hard drive forever now. 

It was almost worth it though because man is that a cool sidequest. If you’ve not hunted him down in-game I recommend doing it because that two-headed weirdo is very fun to ride around.

But, my favourite part of making the secrets video was the super special secret at the end - good god did people both love and hate it and I am all about that. There’s something so special about messing with my audience that I will do at every possible opportunity, it’s entirely unprofessional and I just don’t care. Go and have a look at the secret if you haven’t already, it’ll be worth your time, promise.

Right - I’m off to get to work on the next video and if you take a look at this footage - you might be able to guess the topic! Ooooh!  That’s a special patreon preview. That is of course assuming i don’t get distracted and do something else which is so often the case. Anyway, I won’t keep you - have a nice day, and I’ll see you around, bye!