Behind the Scenes - The Games That Designed Themselves (Patreon)

Hey everyone! 

I  wanted to give some behind the scenes info on my new video, The Games That Designed Themselves.

I came up with the idea for this episode when listening to the interview with Crypt of the Necrodancer designer Ryan Clark, on this podcast. On the episode, he revealed that he didn't exactly dream up the idea of a rhythm-based roguelike, but instead stumbled onto it when messing around with a prototype.

That was fascinating, and it reminded me of some other stories I had heard about developers stumbling onto game ideas. Like how Into the Breach wasn't always about telegraphed attacks, and how Gunpoint wasn't always a puzzle game. Oh! And what about those games where bugs were turned into features? This video just, ahem, wrote itself.

I don't know every game's story, of course, so I went to Google and searched terms like "designed itself". I also asked for help in the GMTK Discord, where someone suggested the term "follow the fun". That led to more discoveries when searching. Finally, I made a list of the biggest indie games from the last few years and then looked up their origin stories - revealing more games that "designed themselves", like Ape Out and Crashlands.

There's this wonderful feeling you get when researching a video, where you watch a talk or listen to a podcast or whatever, and someone just has the perfect quote that validates everything you've said and lends authority to your point. It happened over and over in this one, which is why the final video has so many developer quotes!

Making this video did present me with a problem, though. I was going to be talking about early prototypes and game ideas. Often times, I'd have very little footage to work with. Or none at all! For example, the Into the Breach prototype looked like this…

Cute pixel art, but it's low resolution and just a static image. Not ideal. So in the final video, I represented it like this…

Let me back up a bit, though.

Initially, I thought about commissioning an artist to make these images for me. I'm not an amazing artist, by any means. But I do like to do as much of GMTK myself as I can, for two reasons: 1) I love to learn new things, so I have to push myself to figure out new editing techniques. And 2) I don't like relying on other people to do things as they have let me down in the past.

But then I watched the trailer for Ape Out, and saw these graphics…

Hey, I could probably do that! I loved the Saul Bass-inspired artwork, not just because it looks great, but because it's simple enough for me to emulate! Sharp, bold lines. Simple colours. Little definition. And the texture of the fuzzy paper background will hide my bad artwork. So I gave it a shot!

First, I drew the original image. I used an Apple Pencil and the iPad app Paper. 

Next, I imported the drawing into Photoshop and traced over the lines with the pen tool to make the shapes.

It looked a little flat, so I used a charcoal brush to provide some shading

Finally, I put a fuzzy paper image behind it - and then a folded paper image on top. This gives the image a lot of texture, hides my bad art even further, and fits the theme of ideas being quickly hashed out - as if scribbled on a scrunched up piece of paper.

This was all good. Until I showed them to my dad. He asked if they were going to be animated and I said no: if I had to draw multiple frames of animation for these things, the video would take two months to make! And so he suggested the puppet tool in After Effects. Basically, you place these joint nodes onto your artwork, and can then bend and twist the art.

I gave it a shot and it actually looked kinda cool… but didn't really fit the style. Running at the usual 60 frames per second frame rate that I make GMTK episodes in, it just looked way too smooth. 

But if I ran the same animation at only 10 frames per second, it looked pretty cool! Like stop motion! I decided to go with that, and that's what ended up in the final video.

This helped dictate some of the other decisions. Like opening the video with the story of Ape Out's development, using jazzy drum-beat background music, using a paper cut-out font for the title cards (which people keep confusing with "the Spongebob font"), and so on. It's almost like the video made… okay, I'll stop.

I'm really pleased with the video. Not just because it's interesting and looks cool, but because it fills an important gap in my video catalogue. 

Because video essays on game design have a bit of a problem: they're all inherently retrospective. How do you make a Metroidvania? Let's look at Super Metroid and Hollow Knight. How do you make a good tutorial? Let's look at Half-Life 2 and Breath of the Wild. This analysis is important and valuable (I hope!), but the obsession with stuff that already exists can unintentionally put the focus on emulating existing ideas, rather than coming up with brand new ones. 

So I want to have more videos that give people the tools, the mindset, and the methodologies for coming up with the next leaps in game design. This is a good start!

Happily, the video is doing really well. The click-baity title (wait? How does a game design itself?! I must click!) has given it a high click-through rate. But the interesting content and strong video flow has kept people watching after finding out the answer, leading to high retention and watch time. These are the two factors you need to nail for YouTube to hit the gas on recommending your video, which has lead to the video gaining 80% more views than usual. 

Thanks to everyone who watched it and left lovely messages of support. I'm now off for a quick holiday, and then it's back to more GMTK goodness.

Cheers

Mark