Patreon Newsletter - March 2016 (Patreon)

Hello! What a fabulous month it has been. I played some cool games, made some fun videos, popped to San Francisco for a bit, and made some big changes in my life.

So, keep this on the down low, but from May I will no longer be the editor of Pocket Gamer. I'll still do a few days a week there, but just writing guides and stuff. This change will give me more time and energy to devote to Game Maker's Toolkit.

If you're reading this: you did this. So thank you!

Games journalism is fun, and I've enjoyed leading Pocket Gamer, but it can be gruelling. The constant chase for clicks and retweets and hot takes is exhausting. Your readers think you're corrupt, commenters are the worst, and you have to fight endlessly to maintain the website's quality and ethics.

GMT has been a breath of fresh air. People actually want, and fund, long-form, analytical content. They're genuinely nice in the comments. And while people still call me corrupt, it happens a lot less.

Anyway, I don't know what this will mean for the show just yet - we'll have to wait and see. But I'll spend every spare second I get on stuff for YouTube or Patreon.

Edit: I forgot to add - if I do end up using this extra time to produce more videos for YouTube, I definitely won't charge any extra on Patreon. No matter how many I make, I will only set a maximum of 2 a month as paid-for.

Post script

Some thoughts on this month's episodes

Why Jonathan Blow's Puzzles Aren't Just Puzzles

I wanted to make an episode about designing puzzles, with analysis of conundrums from lots of different games (Portal, Talos Principle, Braid, etc) - but, while doing research, I realised that Jonathan Blow's approach was so different and interesting that I just had to dedicate a video to his process.

This turned out to be a crazy ordeal: Blow is one of the most prolific indie devs online with dozens of lectures, talks, interviews, podcasts, and articles. I ended up watching more than 10 hours of footage of this guy and now his soft voice and mannerisms are lodged in my brain like a catchy pop song.

I felt like I was playing The Witness when researching the video. He'd say something like "I design puzzles by looking for consequences in the universe that have high surprise and low contrivance" and I'd just be like "...wut?". But then after hearing him explain the same thing in many different ways I finally pieced it all together and understood what he was on about.

This spurred me on to make the video: I knew that Blow's approach was fascinating (I've already had a number of devs tell me that they're using it in their design now) - and I fancied the challenge of explaining it in a way that didn't require you to watch 10 hours of interviews to grasp it.

Depth, Mastery, and Vanquish

Vanquish is a criminally underrated game. It came out in a flurry of cover-based shooters but few realised that this one was something special. That, by borrowing the best bits of Platinum's brawlers, it had more depth and opportunity for mastery than anything else on the market.

Sure, the game flopped. The blame can be shared there - by Platinum for making the story kinda generic and the score system kinda plain. By Sega for not marketing the game to its full extent. And by gamers for not realising that, dude, it was by the genius behind Resi 4 and God Hand!

But oh well, hindsight is 20:20 and all that. Just don't miss the game now, it's ultra cheap. Could do with a 60 FPS re-release, mind you.

Sneak Peak

Spelunky is one of my favourite games of all time and Derek Yu's book (see Reading List below) has spurred me on to finally dig in and explain why I think the game is so darn good.

I'm still thinking about how developers approach difficulty and ease in new players (did you see the kerfuffle surrounding Star Fox Zero having a mode that's impossible to fail?).

And I'm thinking about Hitman. A lot. Mostly because I'm slightly obsessed with it. Just trying to think of an interesting angle on it.

But who knows what I'll actually end up doing - I never have a long term plan for this stuff: it's just whatever gets me excited!

Mark's Month

So GDC was this month. I was lucky enough to go to San Francisco for a second time, thanks to Pocket Gamer. It was a really fun show, though I spent most of it in meetings or in my hotel room writing stories.

I didn't get to see a single talk (that's what the GDC Vault is for, I guess!), and I spent about 40 minutes on the actual show floor. But it's still a great show - loads of cool people are there (including fans of the show), the city is beautiful, and the atmosphere is great.

I didn't play much crazy stuff but I did manage to get in a little VR fun. I played Arizona Sunshine on the Vive... in co-op. This was my first time playing VR in multiplayer and it was a trip - there was something so natural about just waving at my partner as he beamed into the game. And something crazy about him throwing some ammo to me and then catching it in mid-air. Woah.

It really puts the idea of VR being anti-social to rest. Sure you're slapping a big mask on your face and escaping into a fantasy world, but if you've got a friend in there it's going to be an amazing experience.

I also met Monkey Island creator Ron Gilbert which was a bit... woah. Nice guy!

Reading List

We finish off with some recommended articles and videos from March.

Dear diary...

Derek Yu wrote a terrific little book about the design and development of Spelunky over at Boss Fight Books. It covers everything from the code that powers his randomly generated game, to the retro games that influenced Spelunky's design, to some smart thoughts on stereotypes in games.

Some ideas are simply there because they were the first ones to fit, not because they were the best solution. This is true of bad game mechanics and this is also true of clichés. In most cases, clichés can be easily replaced by taking a single step toward a more innovative idea. Does a platform game have to have another princess to rescue? Does a gritty game have to begin with another rape or murder? I can’t speak for developers other than myself, but I imagine that in many studios, these questions aren’t always being asked.

Developer diaries are usually promotional fluff, but Ninja Theory has been going all in with the dev diary for the upcoming Hellblade. It chronicles both the lows and highs of making the game, and is a rare look at the inner workings of triple A development.

But the king of all dev diaries has to be Double Fine's making of Broken Age. I wasn't crazy about the final game but I was totally happy with my $15 Kickstarter pledge as soon as those brilliant mini documentaries came out. You can watch the full set here.

Speaking of a Double Fine, this video shows just how much work went into the Day of the Tentacle remaster: from repainting every sprite and background to restoring the original voice acting from the 20-year-old tapes.

Anyway

I don't think I have the mental fortitude to play That Dragon Cancer. I almost blubbed like a baby on the train the other day when listening to this RadioLab episode about the game's production. It has the requisite "serious topics... in a video game?!?" talk but is otherwise a great look at the design challenges behind this challenging game.

I don't really play fighting games but here are two interesting videos on the topic - an analysis of why they are seen as brutally intimidating to new players, and a smart reminder that the dragon punch is less responsive than the fireball, simply because it takes the human hand a split second longer to input that weird Z wiggle on the stick.

Mechanically Speaking goes in depth on the nitty gritty of jumping in a platformer. Everything from frame counts to extended jump zones to air control is covered. A good watch for anyone making a platformer.

Another good watch would be Super Bunnyhop's look at the first level of every Sonic game to see how (in the main) not to do things. From roadblock enemies to crazy cameras to ridiculous spin-offs to annoying werehog segments, the Sonic series is a woeful story of catastrophic low points. I liked Sonic Unleashed's day time bits, though.

I've been having a rollercoaster of emotions with the new Hitman (the first I've played in the series), from not really understanding why people like it to obsessively playing the first episode over and over again.

The game's systems and AI leads to some funny emergent stuff like this hilarious video of a guy killing everyone in the level in the same electrified puddle. Oh, and you should probably watch this advert where The Chuckle Brothers play a live action version of the game. For some reason, I lost it when one of the Chuckles told Agent 47 to bleed the radiator.

Burnout Paradise is brilliant and Errant Signal expertly explains why. Innuendo Studios dives deep into the spider death scene from Limbo in his Story Beats series.

The scripting language behind 80 Days is now open source. If you decide to go make rad interactive fiction, read this account of 80 Days writer Meg Jayanth's GDC talk where she advocates giving the hero less agency, and NPCs way more agency. How often do you stumble upon a revolutionary war and end up winning it single handily? Yeah, let's stop doing that.

This guy injected a Flappy Bird game into Super Mario World by hand and I'm not even going to pretend I understand what's happening.

Finally, this GDC 2015 talk breaks down everything you need to know about making your game more accessible from closed captions to colourblind options to remappable controls. It brings up so many good points like: if an audio cue provides crucial information in your game, shouldn't you put it in the subtitles?

See you next month!