Q&A Part 2 - How an episode gets made (Patreon)

Ever wondered how an episode of Game Maker’s Toolkit gets made? Well, that’s what I’m going to reveal  in this Patron-exclusive video (above, or article, below - whatever you prefer), which will explain the process behind my recent video - How Game Designers Protect the Player from Themselves.

And also answer some more questions from my Q&A post!

Getting The Idea

So step one is to get an idea. Sometimes it’s just based off of a game I’m playing. Sometimes it might be something I’m curious about, like what makes good AI, and the video is just an excuse to research an interesting topic. 

For this video, though, the spark came from a random comment on Turbo Button’s cover shooter video. Jon talked about Vanquish, and someone in the comments said that the game was all well and good but they didn’t feel like the game really made you play it like a crazy ninja badass.

And then someone replied to the comment with this:

“I think this is definitely a problem on your side. It isn’t the developer’s job to make you play the game creatively, their job is to provide you the sandbox in which to do so. If you have a dull time in a game while not utilising any of its hallmark mechanics, that’s kind of your fault.”

And I thought...I don’t agree with that! I think it IS a designer’s job to nudge you in the right direction. And most good games do just that! And so I wanted to make a video that would explore ways that game developers can encourage you to play in interesting, creative, and fun ways. 

Doing the Research

Richard Coles - What are the sources of your research that you find to be most fruitful? By which I mean essays/interviews/academic papers etc rather than the games themselves.

Raphael Tetreault - How do you keep up with all of the articles and videos you use as reference material? Moreover, how do you handle any backlog? I’ve been meaning to read more but with college work I have troubles even starting my design books, let alone an infinite bombardment of articles, interviews, and videos. Is there anything you do to help get through so much content?

Richard and Raphael asked about my research process. So here we go. 

First, I try to think of stuff I already know. So for this video, it was actually quite a bit. I knew I wanted to talk about games like Doom, Spelunky. and games with scoring systems. I wanted to talk about World of Warcraft‘s rest system. I remembered that Nels Anderson said some smart stuff in his Designer Notes podcast. And I would probably want to use Soren Johnson’s quote about optimising the fun out of a game. 

Now you might think that I would have some amazing archive of everything I’ve read or listened to or watched, which I can easily access. And I do have some stuff for that - I used to use Trello, which is pretty good, and these days I just have everything in Apple’s Notes app. I have a big list of “potential videos” and then paste links and slides and quotes and whatnot into those notes. 

But a lot of it is just in my head. Which is dumb but it actually works for me. I have a pretty good memory for this stuff and it’s not hard to track down an old article or video.

Beyond that, I needed to put in the research. This was a tough one to find good sources for because it’s quite a vague and abstract subject. It doesn’t have a pithy name or an obvious expert or anything like that. 

I often use the GDC Vault. You’ve got amazing designers and developers explaining their craft, on all sorts of different subjects. I plugged a few key words into the search and ended up with Sid Meier’s talk on human psychology which I would use for the intro, and a good video about how Blizzard tweaked the health system for Diablo 3 to encourage risky and aggressive play. I didn’t use that, but it’s good. 

Gamasutra is often a good source. I didn’t find much of use there for this video - but I could have been searching for the wrong things. This is another huge archive of developer interviews and post mortems and blogs, so that can be extremely useful. 

Emma Smith - Hey Mark! Do you have any recommendations for the person who a. loves to buy (not necessarily read) books and b. wants to think about games more than is probably healthy?

I had a look in a number of design books. So maybe this will answer Emma’s question. 

I like to flick through A Game Design Vocabulary by Anna Anthropy and Naomi Clark, The Art of Game Design by Jesse Schell, Game Design Workshop by Tracy Fullerton, and of course Spelunky by Derek Yu. I don’t use those first three books as much as I should - mostly because I’m too lazy to actually read them, and because I prefer to use concrete examples from existing games rather than abstract notions. But there’s still plenty of ways to use these books. 

Raphael asked about how to motivate yourself to actually read this stuff. And I guess, breaking it down into topics like I do is a good idea. When you desperately need to find some good quotes or examples for a video or an article, you’ll read anything! 

Anyway, my main source is usually Google, but this was near impossible because the search terms were just too broad. Searching for “encouraging player behaviour” and stuff just lead to articles about games that make you quit smoking or whatever. I don’t think I really dragged up anything of value, other than this video with Blizzard’s Bill Roper which helped cement this idea that reward is often better than punishment. 

A really good source is just to ask people. I’m a bit wary of doing this for stupid reasons like it will give away the next video. But I need to get over that because it’s very handy. In this case, I asked for examples of games that encourage play styles on the GMTK Discord, and megazver mentioned XCOM 2’s turn timers. 

This was a good call, evidently! I did vaguely know about this - I played some XCOM 2 at launch, and I knew the timers were controversial. But megazver totally gets credit for jogging my memory. 

I then went back to Google, searched for something like “Jake Solomon turn timers” and found the perfect article on Rock Paper Shotgun. It explained why the timers were added, and why they went wrong, and - yeah, this was gonna end up in the video for sure. 

I’m not very tidy with my note taking on all of this stuff. It’s just dumped into various text files. Links, quotes, random thoughts I have. It’s a bit of a mess, but again, it works for me.

One last thing is playing the games themselves. For this one, I played XCOM 2 to remind myself how the turn timers worked and how they made me feel when playing. 

Ivan Navarro - Can you elaborate on your note taking skills? When playing a game how do you know when to pause a hot something down? What are you actively thinking/asking yourself when you play?

Ivan asks about taking notes and my general approach - for a game like Donkey Kong or a Zelda dungeon - is to try and play through once just completely without notes. Play it... like I’m playing it. I think this is important, I want to have a normal experience and be able to draw on that later. Was it hard? Did I get lost? Did I enjoy myself? How did I feel? Things like that. 

Then I’ll play through again and take notes. Maybe even draw maps or charts. Whatever the case, I don’t really like to pause and take notes all the time when I’m first playing a game because it disrupts the typical experience of playing. Oh, but capturing the video is good. I can play, and then watch the video back and take notes from that. 

Writing the Script

Mathew Dyason - You've had experience as a writer and editor with Pocket Gamer, and now your own videos have incredibly well-written, tight scripts. Do you have any writing advice to give, specifically in regards to editing your own words?

So Mathew asked about writing scripts. Once I feel I’ve done enough research to be able to talk about the topic, I start to plan out the structure of the video. 

I find structure to be the most important thing. I want to grab people’s attention, carefully guide them through the information, segue seamlessly from point to point, address caveats and confusion, make a strong argument, and hopefully keep the person interested until the very end. 

I’ll often figure out the structure in a handwritten form. Well, I use an iPad app called Paper and my Apple Pencil. I like being able to make doodles and sketches, and when I have a text editor in front of me I have a habit of writing too much when I really just want to be thinking about the main ideas and bullet points. Hand writing the notes stops me from getting too wordy. 

So my structure at the beginning was this. 

Game designers want you to experience their games in the most interesting way. (Left: That’s a man being a ninja badass). But players often play in more boring ways Right: That’s a man hiding behind cover). I’d use the Soren Johnson quote to back this claim up. 

Then I’d say: So we encourage players to play closer to the intended experience by encouraging and discouraging.

Initially I was into this idea of encouragement and discouragement being split across different layers of a game. I dubbed these the immediate level, the mid-term level, and the structural level. I like to group and categorise and name things. I think it helps people remember stuff more. 

Then I would kinda wrap it up. But add in this caveat that it’s hard to get it right - and look at XCOM 2’s turn timers and Breath of the Wild’s durable weapons. I’d talk about forcing things and rewards versus punishment. 

Talking about the Mark of the Ninja stuff, and then an actual proper wrap up. 

Before I moved on to writing the script, I decided on the video’s title. I like to think about titles and thumbnails and descriptions and how I’ll explain the video in 140 characters quite early, because this helps me nail down the core point of the video.

I also sometimes write a thesis statement or a question or something like that, to help guide me and make sure everything in the video points to the same thing. 

I’m still not perfectly happy with the title, and in retrospect, the title and thesis statement aren’t actually that close. So, I maybe messed up there.

I then wrote the script, using my notes as the template for where to go next, but of course I’ll make lots of changes to make stuff flow better.

Now, this is just the first draft and will go through many changes before I’m happy with it. I like to think of my video as being big blocks of text, which are about different things, that I can then jumble around and put in a different order. 

So the video started like this - an intro. Different types of encouragement, and discouragement. Getting it wrong by forcing the player. Getting it wrong by punishing the player. Ending. 

This kinda worked, but it also felt weird because I talked about how to do stuff and then, halfway through the video, backtracked on some of those ideas and said they were actually bad. It just didn’t sit right. 

Eventually, after a lot of juggling, I realised a better way. I should start with a game that gets it wrong, by discouraging a playstyle. Then talk about why - it’s because it punishes you when it could be rewarding you, which lets me talk about encouragement. And also because it forces you. Which lets me recap the episode and then end it. 

XCOM 2 proved perfect for this. It provided a pillar for the video. Something stable and familiar to keep coming back to. 

I actually use this framing a lot in my videos. I’ll say, Mario sucks because its levels are boring, instead, look at Donkey Kong! Dead Space sucks because its tutorial is heavy handed, instead, look at Half Life 2! These detective games suck because they’re too simple, instead, look at Her Story!

It’s a bit of a cheat but it’s very effective. I’ve now ruined GMTK for you, sorry about that. 

Anyway, the script felt pretty good at this point, so it was time to move on. 

Capturing the footage

Jezza - How do you manage all the footage you capture? Do you keep all of it to reuse in future videos?

Jezza asked about capturing footage, which is the next step. Yes, I do keep footage to reuse in future videos. I have a pair of 4 terabyte hard drives full of game captures. I leaned on these quite heavily in this video. 

I needed other games, too, though, like XCOM 2. Well, I actually got this footage while I was researching the game. Kill two birds with one stone and all that. I record absolutely everything an Elgato HD 60. 

It’s a device where you plug an HDMI cable in one end, and then on the other you connect it to a computer via USB and your TV via another HDMI cable. This means that you play the game on your TV just like normal, while your computer grabs the footage in the background. 

And yes, I even capture PC footage on this, rather than a program like FRAPS, because I capture and edit on a Mac. 

Most of the footage is just general gameplay but sometimes I’ll go in and grab something specific. Like, “I need footage of me running out of time in an XCOM 2 mission”. I always get more than I need because you never have enough video footage when you start editing. 

Sometimes I’ll need footage from a specific part of a game and if I don’t have that footage and I don’t have an appropriate save game this can be massively annoying. Sometimes I’ll download save files off the internet, or use cheats to speed through the game. Sometimes I just have to play the game for many hours, or ask friends if they have the footage I need. 

Recording the audio

Bryce Taylor - What tools do you use to make your videos?  What do you edit with,  make titles, capture game footage, audio etc? Also what kind of microphone and other audio equipment do you use?

Ah! My least favourite part of the process. Recording the audio. Thanks for the question, Bryce. 

Okay, so I put my microphone, which is a Blue Yeti USB mic with a pop filter, in a wardrobe because the clothes provide good audio insulation. I also got some acoustic foam panels off Amazon, which I hang on the doors and cover up the bare wood. I put a small foam mattress over the top and drape a blanket over the whole thing. 

I actually record on my iPad because the warddrobe isn’t near my Mac. But that’s okay, because I need the script on the iPad anyway. 

I generally record the audio once as a practice and a warm up. This also helps reveal bits I cannot easily say, and so I’ll find replacements.

I then record the whole thing properly. If I make mistakes I back up and try the sentence again. The raw audio file is generally twice as long as the finished file, once I’ve removed all the mistakes. 

I drag the audio into Audacity and put a few effects on it. I generally use a noise removal tool. A compressed. And a tiny bit of bass and treble. I then go through once and remove all the mistakes. And then go through again and remove the breathing, mouth noises, any plosives that the pop filter didn’t catch, and stuff like that. It takes forever and I procrastinate like crazy. 

Making the video

Jan Gloger - How did you learn to create videos with such beautiful animations and cuts? All by yourself or did you attend classes? 

Thijs Lagrand - Hey Mark! I've always wondered how you make and edit your videos, as well as how you make these gorgeous animations (for example, the water wheel for Majora's Mask Boss Keys). Could you do a behind the scenes sort of video where you talk through the process of making your videos?

SlamBamActionman - Hey Mark! One thing I've always thought about your videos is how they have such high "production value" for just a one-man job. Fonts, images and editing quirks all seem to be consistent and well thought out. I know you've said that people have helped you with 3D-rendering in that past, but even without that your videos have been very well made from the getgo. Did you just sit down and start video editing when you made your first GMTK video or did you have some previous experience? 

Kerry Palmer - How did you get your start at video editing, and what helped you improve your efficiency/skill set the most in the early days?

Okay! So, Jan, Thijs, Kerry, and SlamBamActionman all asked about video editing. I use Adobe Premiere and I learnt the very basics from someone at Pocket Gamer. He taught me how to drag in clips, apply effects, and things like that. 

Beyond that, I learnt more by just playing around and messing with stuff. I use some tutorials sometimes for more difficult edits but I’ll get to those in a bit. 

Okay, so I first drag on my vocal trick. Then I’ll grab a bit of game footage and find a small clip I need. I use the I and O keys to set the in and out points, and then drag that onto the timeline. And then repeat about 100 times. 

I don’t often work chronologically, or alphabetically, or anything like that. I just jump around the whole thing. I often focus first on stuff that needs to have relevant footage behind it - like, if I’m talking about the Spelunky ghost I’ll find a clip with the ghost in it. And then once all of that is in, I’ll fill in the blanks with more general footage. 

I’ve often thought about what footage will go where, while I’m writing the script. But every now and again I’ll be stumped. At one point I say ”this is not to say that games should never punish the player” and I couldn’t think of what to put behind that audio. After a long time I realised I could use a game that penalised you for killing innocent civilians.

In terms of transitions, fonts, and quotes, I try to use stuff that’s pretty unobtrusive and clean. I like white text on a dark background. I like cuts like a cross dissolve or just a simple wipe across the screen. I don’t like text and images just appearing, so I’ll have them pop up or slide on and then off the screen.

When quoting a website, I’ll edit the HTML to get rid of ads and images, and make it black and white, and then invert the image and apply an opacity effect to get that nice see through effect. 

I just try to make it look posh, but not over the top. 

For the more intensive motion graphics, I start by figuring out what it should look like in Photoshop. This lets me figure out composition and fonts and colours and everything really easily. I’ll then export out the individual bits as PNG files and drag them into Premiere. And then animate them! 

For the World of Warcraft thing, it’s just lots of different bits of text and then I made the lines rotate but I moved their anchor points to the centre of the clock so it rotated properly. 

I made the minute hand rotate a certain number of times, and then divided by that 12 to make the hour hand move around once every 60 minutes. That’s probably more detail than anyone would notice but it’s important to me that I get it right. 

For stuff that Premiere can’t handle, I‘ll make the effect in another program, and then import the video. I use After Effects for some stuff, but I actually like this thing called Apple Motion which is a bit easier to use. My 3D guy uses 3D Studio Max for the Zelda dungeon stuff. 

Another thing to think about in the edit is pacing. You gotta give the viewer some time to breathe, and you can let them know that you’re transitioning into a different subject if you fade out, stop the music, and then fade back in to different footage. 

Oh, yeah, music. I use stuff that’s either free to use, or I ask artists for permission. When it comes to game music, well, I technically shouldn’t use this stuff. Even if I’m making a video about Cuphead, i shouldn’t use the Cuphead music as a backing track. But, at this point, everybody does it. That wouldn’t hold up on court, but there we go. 

One final thing is that I’ll sometimes record some extra lines and put them in. Maybe I made a mistake, or maybe I’m just not happy with it. In this video, the entire ending was rewritten 

Everything else

Finally, I export the video and watch it through once to make sure it’s okay. If there are any issues I’ll fix them and export again. I upload the video to YouTube, write the description, make the thumbnail if I haven’t already, apply the subtitles, and then get it out there!

Phew! If you saw my bonus video you’ll know that I didn’t nail this video on the first go. But I’ll come back to that in the GMTK newsletter later this month. For now though, hopefully that explains just about anything. Any questions? Drop them on the Patreon post or just DM me on Twitter and I’ll try and help you. 

Cheers

Mark