GMTK Insider - 3 times I screwed up in October (Patreon)

For this month’s Insider post, I’m going to talk about the videos in made in October, and - for the sake of transparency and learning - highlight the things I got wrong.

How Game Designers Protect Players from Themselves 

So, my first video in October was all about how developers try to get you to play their games in the most interesting way - and stop you from spoiling your experience by using cheap and repetitive tactics.

The project evolved a lot over time - I explained as much in this behind the scenes video - and quite a late change was to make XCOM 2 the real lynchpin of the story. It was a good move, because the timers in that game are a great example of how not to do this.

Unfortunately, because XCOM 2 became the main game after much of the research process was finished, and because I’m not as familiar with tactics games as other genres, and because I’m just a bit dense, I missed a great opportunity to talk about XCOM-like games that do a good job of this (with more lenient timers, or rewards for playing fast). 

This would have been a perfect note to end the video on, but I missed it. The commenters brought up games like XCOM: Enemy Within, Invisible Inc, and Mario + Rabbids and, for once, the “you forgot game x” comments were super valid! 

That’s why I decided to do a follow up video, to talk about these games. It would have been better to have this stuff in the main video, but a bonus video is better than nothing!

I made this video in a much shorter period of time than it usually takes, so I could get the update out while the video was still fresh. 

So, on Wednesday morning I played all three games, captured footage, and took notes. Then I looked for developer quotes (found two!) and wrote the script. In the afternoon, I recorded the vocals. 

Then on Thursday morning I processed the vocals, and edited the video together, before releasing it in the afternoon. I learnt a lot from this exercise, and it should speed up video production in future. 

But in general, I learnt that I need to keep researching things as the video goes along, and be more open to adapting things as I go along. 

I’m a big proponent of kill your darlings (which means, don’t become too attached to any paragraph, example, quote, etc - everything can be removed if it’s taking the video in the wrong direction), but this was a slightly different lesson to learn. 

Find new darlings, and then fully embrace them.

How Cuphead’s Bosses (Try to) Kill You 

Next up, is Cuphead. When you’re playing this game, you become so familiar with a boss fight - as you try to memorise its patterns, phases, weakspots, etc - that you feel you could write an entire book on the subject. Or, at least, a YouTube video. 

So I was originally going to just break down a boss fight from the game (the Sugarland Shimmy fight), but decided in the end that I could do that and talk about boss design in general. So the scope expanded somewhat. 

This one’s got a lot of visual flair in it. I found some pencil test GIFs on Studio MDHR’s Twitter feed and wanted to incorporate them. It was pretty easy: I just synced up the animation of the pencil test and the final game, and then wiped the video across to make it look like all the ink and colour suddenly filled in.

The cut out boss images are from this TIME magazine article on the game. You could do it with After Effects’ roto brush but it’s never going to look as clean as that. 

And finally, I made the trails to show the path of the game’s projectiles. I think this is a really cool effect because it clearly shows how the game works. Here’s how I achieved that, in Premiere and Apple Motion. 

Okay, so what was the screw up? Calling stuff by the wrong names. I called a barrel a treasure chest, a cat a mouse, a pufferfish a sea urchin, a peppermint a rock candy, a jawbreaker a gobstopper, and a waffle a chocolate bar (though, I put up a message for that one). There’s probably a few more.

How does this happen? Well, I write my scripts by just remembering what the game was like. I‘ll sometimes find that my memory doesn’t correlate with the game itself and so rewrite the script (or, if it’s too late, re-record the audio or put up a little message). 

But in this case, I genuinely didn’t notice the mistakes! I guess that it’s because they’re so irrelevant to the point of the video (I’m not getting a mechanic or system wrong) that my brain must have simply skipped looking at the artwork. But the commenters do pick up on this stuff and they won’t stop correcting me in the comments!

But, ultimately - it does detract from the polish and professionalism of my videos. So it’s something I should do better in future. I shouldn’t just assume I know what a rock candy looks like or what a quarterback does - Google it. And go over my script with a fine tooth comb for things I could be mistaken on. 

These videos will be up for years, and so what’s a few extra minutes to make sure they’re as good as I can possibly make them?

Boss Keys

Okay, so my final screw up was not sticking to my guns. 

When I made Boss Keys, I decided to skip the first two Zelda games because the dungeons were not that relevant to the topic I was trying to explore.

Sure, the dungeons in Zelda 1 and 2 are non-linear and interconnected, but they are little more than building blocks on the road to the stuff that I find truly interesting - the mad architectural puzzle boxes that, for me, define Zelda dungeons. 

So I skipped them. But then people kept asking me to talk about these two NES games to make Boss Keys complete and so, eventually, I gave in and promised I would. And I regret it. 

I’ve finished the games, took notes, and have written a script. But I just don’t think the video will be massively interesting! And that has made me not want to work on it, which has sapped my energy a bit and killed the momentum I built up in October. 

For the first time all year, working on this video has felt like a job. And I’ve been so incredibly fortunate with GMTK that I love it so much that - normally - it never feels like working. 

Luckily, Mario Odyssey happened. And I definitely want to talk about that game. So my juices are flowing again! I just gotta figure out what to do with this Zelda video… Shouldn’t take too long. Just need to force myself into it. And, lesson learned, don’t promise stuff until I’m absolutely sure I want to do it!

Wrap up

There we go. It’s important to talk about failures as much as successes. And it has been a successful month! I made two episodes of GMTK, a bonus video, two extra videos for Patrons, and a third for $3 backers. And October saw a whopping 2.9 million views on the channel, and a new subscriber milestone: 300,000 subs! Wow, what a crazy number. 

But I’m always learning, always getting better, and never resting on my laurels. 

Thanks so much for your support this month,

Mark