500 Patron special - How Game Maker's Toolkit started (Patreon)

Hey! Oh my giddy aunt, I thought I'd have more time - I was thinking I might hit 500 Patrons next month or in August but, holy crap, here we are.

This is so awesome. Knowing that a whole bunch of people appreciate my stuff to this extent keeps me making stuff at the rate I do, and helps me push on when an edit is dragging or I have to play 2 hours of some game to get 5 seconds of footage.

For this milestone, I thought it might be nice to look back to the beginning of the show and reminisce about how this silly nonsense got started.

So, like most things in life, it started with a tweet. Well, the idea for a tweet.

I randomly thought about how Skyward Sword's music in the shopping district would seamlessly transition between different versions of the same song when you moved from shop to shop, and wanted to tweet about how cool that was. But I couldn't find a YouTube video to illustrate the point.

Then I thought, I have a Wii. I have a capture device. I could make a quick video. I'll do that later.

But then I started thinking. What about how the music in Portal 2 builds up as you solve the puzzle? And how about how the music in Mount Wario in Mario Kart 8 changes as you hit invisible triggers? And wasn't Monkey Island doing this with iMUSE back in the 90s?

I was supposed to be working but I started researching instead. I read up about adaptive soundtracks and found more examples - Spirit Tracks! Mario World! Mario Galaxy! - and realised that while a lot of games did simple soundtrack shifting these days, a few games went above and beyond and were worthy of mention.

Also, I had been watching a lot of Every Frame a Painting. This show was a huge influence for three reasons: 1) it's awesome. 2) it's about the design of a film rather than story analysis, and I could do the same for games. 3) Tony never shows himself on camera and still gets bazillions of views.

And so I started thinking about how I could do this as a video essay with voice over and everything. I knew a little about Premiere (thanks to James at AppSpy for teaching me the basics), I had a nice microphone and a capture card (courtesy of Pocket Gamer), and I had most of the games I needed. Just had to borrow a couple off of my brother.

And so, that weekend, I got to work. I don't really remember making the first episode other than saying "don't be lazy Mark. Don't be lazy". I was saying that because ages ago I was going to make a video about crappy free to play games but I got lazy and just turned the script into a blog post.

http://infamousgoat.tumblr.com/post/75361790843/why-i-dont-play-free-to-play-games-i-dont-play

So I decided I had to see this thing through. And boy am I glad I did.

It got like 3,000 views in its launch window which is actually really good for a first video in retrospect. And that reaction and the immense amount of fun it was to put it all together made me want to do more.

I actually made a list of potential video episodes. I could only muster 10 (hah!) and thought that if I could come up with 2 more based on 2015's releases I'd have enough for one a month for a year.

I can't remember the 10 but these were definitely on there:

Toki Tori 2. That became my second episode.

Detective games. My white whale. I still intend to do this

Super Metroid. A bit vague. I talked about SM in my Axiom Verge episode but this game deserves its own video one day.

Treasure Maps. I made most of this video before deciding it was too short. It sat on my hard drive for months before I realised it fit snugly in an episode about the little dotted line.

Demakes. Like, how the Gameboy Advance version of Tony Hawk's 2 lives up the original. I like this stuff a lot but I don't think it really fits GMT.

Rebrands. Like how The Real Ghostbusters for Gameboy became Garfield Labyrinth in Europe and Mickey Mouse IV in Japan. Again, interesting but not quite relevant to how the channel turned out.

Twists on player death. This became an episode.

So it's a good job I came up with more ideas later, eh? Luckily, when I started to really establish what GMT was about the episode concepts started to flow. And now I have enough ideas on my Trello board for about 4 years worth of videos. Yikes!

Thankfully, I still find this stuff as much fun to make as I did for the first episode. Just the other day, I couldn't concentrate at work because I was so excited to go write up my script for my Star Fox Zero video.

Like, this is an incredibly, absolutely ridiculous, awesome thing to do and you guys have been so generous and supportive and helpful to let me do it and I can't thank you enough. If you're pledging $1 or $10, if you've been around since the start of if you're new, if you can support me for ages or if you can only afford to pledge for a month, I am forever grateful to you.

Thanks. But the princess is in another castle.