Reading List (March 2022) (Patreon)

Greetings Tarnished. You would be wise to ponder this reading list, for the articles contained within offer a bounty of advice for your travels - *mysterious chuckle*.

Ah yes, it’s the release of a new Souls-like game, which means the gamer discourse is well and truly in full gear. I’ve collected a bunch of stuff about Elden Ring below - but if that doesn’t tickle your fancy, there’s a whole lot of other stuff to keep you busy too.

Enjoy!

The Forgotten Lands

[Read] Elden Ring’s Undying Quest for Drip Extinguishes Black Self-Expression - Elden Ring is full of crazy armour combinations. “Miserably, it also continues the industry-wide trend of unfairly treating Black people like a trivial afterthought”.

[Read] How Torrent Satisfies Gameplay Needs but Fails at Horse Movement - A website dedicated to virtual nags does a deep dive into Elden Ring’s fantasy mount.

[Watch | CC | 11 mins] Why Exploring in Elden Ring Feels So Good - Hamish Black discusses the way Elden Ring makes exploration feel surprising, satisfying, and endlessly enjoyable.

[Read] The Toughest Boss In 'Elden Ring' Is Also One Of FromSoftware's Best Ever Enemies - This is about Malenia, a boss I haven’t fought yet, so haven’t read this article!

[Read] There's no such thing as an Elden Ring cheese - “Once I abandoned the idea that I needed to prove myself by defeating bosses purely with dodges and timing, I let loose and started actually having fun.”

[Watch | CC | 9 mins] Why Margit is so good at killing you in Elden Ring - This is Elden Ring’s first big “gatekeeper” boss. Polygon breaks down its menacing design.

The Design of Games

[Watch | 16 mins] How This Game Controls Your Heartbeat - “It looks like it came out on the PS1 and it plays like modern Doom. So, how can Devil Daggers, this one level arena shooter, be one of the best designed games I have ever played?”

[Watch | CC | 18 mins] How Do You Improve Turn Based Combat? - “Let's talk about some common game design problems turn-based combat games run into and how you can make JRPGs, tactics games, and more the best they can be.”

[Watch | CC | 17 mins] Thief: Looking Through the Eyes of a Burglar - Eurothug looks at how the level design of Thief perfectly puts you in the shoes of a, well, thief.

[Read] Exploring the origins of the "mythical fridge door" in Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy - “How Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Modern Family inspired the fridge door joke”.

The Development of Games

[Watch | CC | 41 mins] Investigating Three Indie Superstars Accused of Emotional Abuse - Stories of toxic workplaces in games usually revolve around massive AAA firms. This video shows how things can go horribly wrong at the indie level, too. Tough watch.

[Read] Video games keep getting longer. It’s all about time and money. - “Adding another 10 hours to an Assassin’s Creed game is a lot less expensive than trying to build the first 10 hours of the next one.”

[Read | Long Read] Can Dreams teach you how to become a game developer? - “Creating for hobbyist pleasure and creating for game design study are two very different processes.”

[Watch | 9 mins] How Water Works (in Video Games) - A technical look at making liquid work in games.

[Watch | 26 mins] Minecraft terrain generation in a nutshell - A behind-the-scenes look at procedurally generating blocky worlds for Minecraft.

[Watch | 14 mins] How my Game Launch Went on Steam - Jonas Tyroller’s been working on Will You Snail? for four years. Here’s how the first week of release went.

[Read] What you should take out of Pre-Production - “Let's talk about Vertical Slice, pipelines, documentation, and more.”

[Watch | 16 mins] Unity Code Optimization - Do you know them all? - Unity devs have heard all the rumours about how certain functions will tank your game’s performance. Tarodev puts them to the test.

The Playing of Games

[Read] Games that avoid capitalistic design - “Work is also inherent in filling a skill tree, or a progress bar. The satisfaction you feel at levelling up is engineered by an inherently capitalist reward loop”.

[Read] Why do some of us want easy games? - “Little can match that feeling of besting a particularly difficult foe… but sometimes, you want an evening without stress headaches and sweaty palms”.

The History of Games

[Read] The jolly co-operation of localising Dark Souls - Ryan Morris, lead translator on all the FromSoft games - talks about the tricky art of localising Soulsbourne dialogue into English.

[Read] Inside the fight to save video game history - Over at The Verge, Ash Parrish finds out how “publishers and preservationists are fighting over how old video games can be saved from digital obsolescence”

[Read] Gunpei Yokoi x Kenji Eno – 1996 Developer Interview - An interesting interview from the time of Nintendo’s biggest flop, the Virtual Boy.

[Read] Ten years later, Jenova Chen reflects on Journey - “We removed the gender and age identity in the way the avatar is designed. We also removed the arms of our players, so they can't punch and push each other for fun and to be rude”.

[Watch | 17 mins] The Other Mystery House: Japan's First Graphical Adventure Game - “I talk about Japan's first graphical adventure game, the company that made it, and how the title caused an "adventure game boom" in Japan's PC market during the early 80s.”

[Watch | 1 hour] GoldenEye 007 - Errant Signal continues his year-by-year history of the FPS, by looking at the development and design of this much-loved N64 entry. Also features other 1997 games like Shadow Warrior, Turok, and Quake 2.

Beyond Games

[Watch | CC | 20 mins] How this font became the face of Chinese food in America - “Chop suey fonts are a subcategory of so-called "ethnic" display fonts, and are a unique American invention with roots in the 170 year history of Chinese migrants in United States.”