Mark's Month - May 2024 (Patreon)

Hey! Welcome back to Mark's Month, my newsletter about what I've been working on in the last 30 days. Let's get into it!

What I Made Last Month

So my big project for May was a massive video on "the 100 games that taught me game design".

Lemme explain where the idea came from. One of my current consulting gigs is for a big AAA game at one of the major publishers, and the whole thing started with a pitch deck to explain what the game will be like. And as part of this presentation the creative director used a bunch of games as examples for how the final game will work.

Like: it will have a similar structure to Mega Man, and a dialogue wheel like Mass Effect, and combat like Batman: Arkham Asylum, and so on. And I thought to myself: 'it's a good job I've played all of these games or I would be totally lost!'.

And so it struck me: I could make a video that helps people know which games they should play if they want to be fully literate in the world of game design. A monster 'recommended reading list' for game developers.

After some research, some thinking, some chatting, and a big Google form, I started to realise that such a list - a definitive, objective, universal list of must-play games... was just impossible. It would always be incomplete. Plus - in truth, I haven't played every single noteworthy game myself!

So I decided to just focus on the games that were most important to me. These are the games I talk about the most on GMTK, or think about when discussing game design. Everything from Space Invaders to Crazy Taxi to Far Cry 2 to Fortnite.

Once I had the list I started to write the entries. I wrote a few of them, only to tot up the word count, do the maths, and realise that it would lead to a four hour video! That just seemed way too much (and the video probably wouldn't be done yet if I kept going at that pace), so I gave myself a tight word count limit for each game and started again.

Once I had the whole script finished it was time to start making the video. Luckily I already had footage for a lot of the games (I keep a big archive of everything I've recorded for GMTK) but others required me to get new video.

This actually led to a problem I've never had before: I usually keep all of the footage for the current video on my Mac hard drive as a I edit. But with so many games (the final video has something like 250 different games...) I couldn't keep everything on the drive at once. It was terabytes and terabytes of data. In the end I had to have an external drive running at all times to handle the overflow.

• The complete Adobe Premiere timeline for the video.

I made the video in 10-game chunks. Each day I would record the script for 10 games, and edit the entries for 10 games. I mostly kept to that schedule and so got the whole thing made in a couple weeks.

An interesting byproduct of this process was that I ended up inventing some new tools and new systems to make editing the video faster. My old workflows were just dragging me down and so I decided it was worth spending a bit of time developing new ones. And those will be useful going forward. So even if the video was a complete flop it would be totally worth it in the long run.

But luckily... the video wasn't a flop! It's had a really strong start with over 660,000 views in the first two weeks - and 73% more views than my typical upload. I doubt I'll ever do a 2 hour video again, but I'm glad this one was worth the time investment.

Once that video was done I had one more thing to do before the end of the month... announce the GMTK Game Jam date for 2024! I put together the usual announcement video and pushed the page live on Itch.io. The jam already has a power level... I mean sign-up count of over 9000, which is pretty awesome.

This year I decided to increase the length of the jam from 2 days to 4. As I explained on Twitter... "I've never been particularly comfortable with the fact that the 48 hour jam encourages harmful, crunch-like working conditions. So this year I'm giving you 96 hours - time to make an awesome game AND take breaks, live your life, and go to sleep."

The response has been mostly good. There are definitely some people who are disappointed with the change - but hopefully, on the whole, jammers will be into it. We'll see how people get on and change things accordingly in the future.

Oh... I said that the jam announcement was my final task for May. But I ended up with a free day on Thursday so decided to bang together a new episode of Weekender to recommend the game Isles of Sea and Sky.

As I explain in the video, I really enjoyed this game. It's a mix of Sokoban, the Game Boy Zelda games, and The Witness - and I couldn't put this thing down. And it just felt criminal that it was getting overshadowed by (also excellent!) bigger games like Animal Well. So I decided to make a video.

And this was also the perfect demonstration for my new workflows! I was able to make the video a lot quicker than usual - so expect more episodes of Weekender going forward.

What I'm Working On

Right now... nothing! Well... literally this Patreon post is the last thing I need to do. Because next month I am excited to get back to Mind Over Magnet and focus on it until the game is finished.

And while I haven't done any game development in May, things have been moving. I've got even more music from my composer. And some new promotional art from a 3D artist.

I also put the Steam Next Fest demo up on Itch.io to make sure it works. It does (well, the Mac version is broken - I'll figure that out in the future), and the demo has now had over 7000 downloads. It was even featured on the homepage for Itch. Neat! I haven't had a chance to look at the feedback.

I submitted the demo to Steam... only for the submission to fail as I somehow didn't upload any files. So I did it again... and failed again because I accidentally uploaded the Mac files instead of Windows. Once more... and failed again! Because I set the wrong path in the execution thingy. It's with Valve now - what do people say? Fourth time lucky?

I'll take full responsibility for one of those failures, but the others came from Steamworks just being really complicated to figure out. This meant that I missed entering another cool Steam showcase I had been invited to. And now I'm starting to sweat - the demo has to be on Steam by June 10th for the festival.

I'll talk all about this in a future episode of Developing. So watch this space!

What I've Been Playing / Watching / etc

Hopefully by now you should know that I'm a big fan of puzzle games. So May has been brilliant for me. I really enjoyed Animal Well (an enigmatic Metroidvania with all sorts of cryptic secrets), Lorelei and the Laser Eyes (Professor Layton with a Twin Peaks vibe), Crow Country (a PS1-style horror game with loads of riddles), and the aforementioned Isles of Sea and Sky.

Sadly I couldn't get to everything I wanted to in May - there are just too many games!

I also had a quick holiday with my wife and - as is tradition - I took my Game Boy Advance. This time I finished up Wario Land 2. It's fun! And has a pretty interesting structure. Maybe I should make a video about the Wario games one day...

In terms of movies, I heartily recommend Challengers - it's the new Luca Guadagnino film: a sexy, enthralling tennis movie that's definitely not about tennis. And as for TV I recently loved Shogun and Ripley.

Oh and it was also my birthday in May - and my brother got me this. One of the last boxed Mario games I need!

Thanks everyone - see you next month!