GMTK Newsletter (June 2017) (Patreon)

Hey everyone! Doing this a few days early because I want to talk about my trip to Prague.

Post script

Looks like it will be just one video this month! It was about Donkey Kong’s level design. I shared lots of stuff about this video already, but suffice to say: I’ve played a lot of platformers this month. 

Part of the challenge with this video was not invalidating things I had said before. I didn’t want to be like “hey, you remember all of that stuff I said about Mario’s level design? Chuck it in the trash, it’s useless now”. And I don’t believe that, anyway: like I said, Mario’s levels are shorter, punchier, and have a old school purity. 

It also led to a good discussion on Discord with Hamish, and a few others, about the choices between starting with themes vs mechanics, which was good food for thought and will no doubt inform my thought process in the future. 

Oh, and I also teased some videos on other platformers at the end. Rayman got people most excited, so I’ll look into that one soon. 

What’s next

So, I’m currently working on a video that will be called something like “is Dark Souls a genre”, riffing on pieces like this which posit that games like Nioh and The Surge are more than mere clones but the start of a new genre, ala Doom-clones.

I plan to explore that idea a bit more fully, and talk about everything from the Berlin Definition of roguelikes to Metroidvanias to GTA clones to immersive sims, for a video that goes beyond answering the question in the title and talks more about how thinking about existing games and genres can help or hurt creativity.

As always, if you have any thoughts or things I might have missed, lemme know.

And then I better do that Zelda video. A Link Between Worlds I mean. And then who knows. I’m sticking to this thing of focusing on one video at a time which might be slowing me a down a tad but is much better for my brain!

Mark’s Month

So over the weekend I went to a game conference in Prague, to give a talk on game design to a bunch of HTML 5 and JavaScript developers.

Like many of my videos, the talk featured loads and loads of examples of good game design from a handful of excellent games - from Shovel Knight to Spelunky to Super Mario World. I think it was recorded? Will post it here if so. 

Thank you for your help with the slides last week. I added “playtest and iterate” as a lesson, as many designers in the comments suggested this as the number one lesson for new designers! And I changed “find the gameplay first” to “build the game around its core” to better reflect a wide range of games. 

It went well I think (other than the bit where I spilt water down myself) and I got to chat to lots of people afterwards who had nice things to say about the talk or about my channel. A guy brought a copy of his game for me to play, because my level design videos helped out. That was sweet. 

I also got the see the city a bit. A gorgeous place, with so much interesting architecture and history. Though I was disappointed that it doesn’t really look like Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. Or maybe that should be the other way around? Either way, it was very different to when I visited Tokyo which was like stepping right into a Yakuza game. 

But anyway, this was cool. I got to travel a lot with Pocket Gamer (I went to Paris, Cologne, Barcelona, Bilbao, Helsinki, San Francisco, Tokyo, Amsterdam, and probably somewhere else I’ve forgotten) and so it’s cool to keep that up with my new job. I don’t want to do it too much because it distracts me from my actual work, but I’ll hopefully get to do a few a year. 

What I’ve Been Playing

So, the ridiculous tidal wave of 2017 games has finally slowed down, giving me a chance to catch up with some older stuff. Including Donkey Kong and…

Devil May Cry! Some of the YouTubers I talk to forced me to play this one. And it’s pretty fun. The combat system is good (and full of nice versatile verbs), and fighting the bosses was a lot of fun. Unlike future games of this type, you can’t get away with button bashing through a boss - you gotta put in the time to learn your moves, learn the boss’s attacks, and find a winning strategy.

The game has got lots of nonsense though. A first-person swimming bit. Some platforming crap. And I’m not sure it needed the whole exploration / backtracking stuff, that likely came from it being a Resident Evil game mid-way into development.

Looking forward to playing DMC 3 and 4 down the line.

Another game that maybe didn’t need exploration is Ori and the Blind Forest. I mean, I dunno - the Metroidvania stuff is fine. But this game’s real thrill is the way you build up flow and momentum through platforming. And that could’ve worked better in a more traditional platformer set-up (see: N++, Splosion Man). Also get rid of the crummy combat.

But yeah, it can be super fun to double jump into the air, bash off of an enemy’s projectile, run up a wall, spring off, and keep going. It can get a bit complex with all the buttons though - if you have the definitive edition then, by the end, seven different buttons on the controller can do completely unique moves. It’s a bit much.

But yeah, looking forward to that sequel. Interested to see where they go with this. You certainly can’t start with the full move set and add more on top!

And ARMS is a lot of fun. I didn’t have much interest in this one as I don’t really play fighting games. But god damnit Nintendo, you’ve done it again. The simple set-up (no complex combos, super easy to learn) makes it very quick to pick up and play.

I really like the mind-games that comes out of it. For example: if someone has an ultra charge, there’s a few different things you can do to protect yourself like dodge, block, etc. So if your opponent gets the charge, you suddenly start anticipating that big ultra attack - and don’t want to be caught in the middle of an animation - and that can be used against you.

Sorry, this is hard to explain in words. It’s just super good. I’ve played a little online but it’s really a game you have to play in person I think. Proper Nintendo couch co-op goodness. The Switch is filled with this stuff. What a good system! 

Right, when I start going on about Nintendo games is when I know to wrap it up.

Thanks for your support this month. I am getting ultra close to 2000 Patrons which is such a huge goal. We’ll do something fun for that. Oh, and we have a game jam coming up soon that I need to talk about. And we better do a GameClub also! Ack! So much exciting stuff, I’m so glad you’re here for the ride :)