Architect Address - September 2021 (Patreon)

Look what we have here, if it isn’t an Architect Address moseying on into town. Hello! In case you aren’t aware, the architect address is a thing I do every now and again to sum up the last couple of videos I’ve released, my retrospective thoughts on how they did and some unstructured rambling about the state of the channel and the patreon.

On that note, hello new arrivals - there’s been quite a few of you lately and I’m not entirely sure why - I think maybe a part of it is down to a new thing I’ve started adding to my ending spiel about how patreon is a much better way to support the channel compared to ad revenue - maybe it’s a coincidence but I noticed a bit of an uptick when I started including that. Either way, welcome newbies.

I’ve been having a bit of a think more generally about the patreon stuff, particularly at the top end because I don’t quite feel like the ol’ ten and five dollar people are getting their moneysworth but if people like just getting their names read out then I guess I can’t complain. I came up with the patreon rewards basically on a whim three years ago so I’m not sure if they’re actually good - let me know I guess? I’m up for changing them but if you do enjoy just getting random bullshit then I guess I’ll leave them alone.

Oh, before I forget- I’ve time traveled to add this in. I forgot some five dollar people in the last video  because my internet was down and I couldn’t update the master list so here’s a special limited edition thank you to the following people: Ben Pace, Pet Pumpkin, Riley Peters, Ryan Mcadams sorry I forgot you, you’ll be in the list for the next video!

Anyway, what about the videos that came out recently? The first one is called the Ugliest Game I’ve Ever Played in a bit of a break from the usual titling format and it’s entirely based around the premise that I played cruelty squad, hated it, then played it a little bit more and loved it.

I’m one of those people who loves the masochistic exercise of watching bad movies or playing bad games and trying to find some interesting angle or shred of fun in them that makes the experience worthwhile and I think more people could stand to get in that habit. If we fill our lives with only worthy 10/10 universally acclaimed art, then chances are we’re actually going to get a very shallow appreciation for what the spectrum of culture can offer us.

Cruelty squad might be, on every objective level confusing and bad but it remains a worthwhile experience if only for the fact that it can help us appreciate the games we do love even more. I do think that sentiment isn’t the whole picture though, by virtue of their ugliness, ugly games can also do weird things and take interesting risks that other games simply can’t. I’ve been playing through the original psychonauts recently as two has just come out and that game controls like crap, has horrible offputting character design and is just… *weird* but out of that comes this utterly unique feeling psychedelic drug trip of a game that’s almost designed to make you feel disoriented. If double fine played it safe then psychonauts might’ve been less of an abject financial failure, but it wouldn’t be remembered as a diamond in the rough either.

Overall the video did… okay, I guess? I think it’s mostly due to the fact that everyone and their mum was making a cruelty squad video at the time so mine sort of got lost in the churn a little bit - either way I think it’s a worthwhile topic and it came out okay all things considered.

The other video is a little thing I like to call Building Better Crafting Systems and the first thing I need to address is the potential title that is crafting better crafting systems. A lot of people brought it up but I actually don’t think it sounds very good with the repeated word and no alliteration so I went with what I have.

As far as the actual video goes, this one was pretty tough to put together on the editing front because in case you weren’t aware crafting is mostly just boring user interfaces which aren’t particularly nice to look at, seriously I had to use a bunch of unrelated B-roll in this video which I don’t normally like doing because otherwise there would be a lot of dull staring at menus which viewers may or may not be able to even comprehend.

The writing process was pretty interesting too, this is one of a small handful of videos that’s actually inspired by other video essays - crafting systems and how they’re bad is a fairly common topic and whilst basically everyone gets the reasons why right, I feel like the conclusion they often come to is that crafting shouldn’t be used at all or doesn’t belong in certain kinds of games which I feel like couldn’t be further from the truth.

If you ask me, crafting mechanics are incredibly versatile and can work just about anywhere, developers just need to be able to implement them in a way that enhances, rather than detracts from the primary arc of the game. In a scrapped segment that didn’t even make the director’s cut, I talked about how crafting is kind of like a loop de loop within a larger dramatic journey for the player. It offers a change of pace, it breaks things up and provides a different kind of excitement whilst still fundamentally being a part of the same overarching structure.

Honestly I think my favorite crafting system I tried has to be Final Fantasy 14, that game is really good at having zero trash items - anything that drops from monsters or found in the world is used in a crafting recipe somewhere - that really helps the things you create and collect feel meaningful and makes the ingame economy much more robust - pretty much all the crafting specs require a bunch of stuff from the other crafters so you’re constantly having to wheel and deal to make things or put in the work of leveling them all up yourself.

Performance wise this one inexplicably did very well, I thought it’d be pretty boring but I guess when minecraft, final fantasy 14 and a lot of other big trending games all happen to pop up in the same video it’s guaranteed to do okay.

Right that’s me done if you’ve got any questions you’d like me to answer feel free to drop them in the comments - I don’t think I’ve said that in a while but it’s a thing and I will see you all iiiin the next video!