Game Maker's Toolkit Newsletter - July 2016 (Patreon)

Hello! Apologies for the delay. Here's what I got up to in July

Post Script

As always, we kick off with some thoughts on the month's videos.

Downwell's Dual Purpose Design

As I said in the video, I was pushed to make a video on the crazy elegance of Downwell after seeing people not even recognise the game in my video on controllers.

I've long admired this game, especially after watching Ojiro's GDC talk where he explained how the game came together piece by piece just by asking the right questions and coming up with smart answers.

The video itself was easy to make. It always helps when you only want to show a couple games. Unlike…

How Health Makes You Feel

This one, which has loads and loads of games. Just getting all the footage took an age: including a few hours spent figuring out how to get 60fps, 480p footage out of a GameCube game. In the end I used a Wii to HDMI adaptor, and had to use some homebrew to force progressive scan output on my PAL copy of F-Zero GX.

The video turned out okay, but I forgot to learn my lesson from the death video I did ages ago. I think I should probably have focused on a handful of health systems and explained them fully, instead of briefly mentioning loads of different ones. Next time!

As I said in my update post earlier, I got quite stressed out trying to finish up this video before the end of July, which lead to the conclusion that I need to slow down before I explode.

Boss Keys - Link's Awakening and Ocarina of Time

Boss Keys is definitely the culprit. I underestimated how much time they'd take to produce (the same amount of time as a normal episode) and because of that I've literally doubled my output. Which was silly of me!

But I'm really enjoying doing this series and I definitely don't want to stop until it's done. It's getting a good response and I'm learning a lot about level design as I go.

Next time I need to talk about why I value non-linear design, as I got a bunch of comments dinging me for dinging Ocarina for being quite linear in its level design. A which is a fair criticism: non-linearity isn't anything. But I need to explain why I think it's a valuable commodity that's tied to the Zelda franchise.

Sneak peek

I don't really know what I'm doing this month. I'm gonna throw some ideas out there and let me know if any sound interesting:

Looking at different survival games to see how they handle different mechanics. A deep dive into why Mighty No 9 stinks. Something on emergent / sandbox games like Thief, Deus Ex, and Dishonored. More puzzle design stuff, perhaps looking at Limbo and Inside.

Open to ideas from you guys, also!

I'm also working on the Majora's Mask Boss Keys and looking forward to getting that out there. The map for the Great Bay Temple may end up being harder to make than the one I did for the Water Temple!

And this month I will be playing No Man's Sky and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (and Abzu, Grow Up, and Bound) so maybe some ideas will spark from those.

Mark's Month

Hopefully you saw my earlier post about my trip to Tokyo. That was an incredible experience. It also pushed me to start playing Yakuza 2. I gotta catch up!

I also spent a few days down in Brighton for Develop.

One of the games I played there was a truly bonkers Vive game called Unseen Diplomacy. It's a room scale game, but it cuts the playspace up into loads of tiny rooms.

So you might go through a door, take an elevator, or even crawl through a vent on your hands and knees.

It's interesting how despite the fact that there was nothing physically stopping me from just walking through a wall, I never did. My brain quite happily accepted that these were barriers and I should avoid them.

I also looked quite ridiculous crawling about, putting my hand up through fake laser wires, in the middle of a crowded conference hall.

I played some other bits, saw the folks from Edge (I still need to buy that new issue and scan my article), saw the students whose game jam I helped mentor, and saw some other press friends and developers. A good time.

In terms of games - and I'll go into some these more deeply in the Playlist for $3 backers soon - I enjoyed Insomniac's simple but comfortable Song of the Deep.

Ultra hard steam puzzler Snakebird and ultra stylish Vita dungeon crawler Severed are now on iOS and I'm digging them both.

I just started Quadrilateral Cowboy and that's a riot. It's like a slick spy thriller, but with programming. You have to write code to temporarily shut off doors and cameras, and then run through a maze as your leet hacking skills makes surveillance shut off just in front of you. It's fab.

I've also been playing Pokemon GO, but it's just not working out. Battery drain and server issues aside, the game simply isn't designed for countryside losers like me. Here's an article from me on that subject.

I completely missed Headlander, Death Road to Canada, Furi, I Am Setsuna, and others. Just aren't enough hours in the day!

I also may have my first consultancy gig this month. I can't talk about it, but if it goes through it will be crazy awesome.

A Thank You

Cheers for your supportive messages regarding yesterday's post about needing to slow down. A huge weight came off me when I got your messages and now I'm excited to start work on a new episode.

In retrospect, the stress is entirely related to Boss Keys and underestimating the workload there.

My remedy will likely be to slow that series down to one episode a month. But we'll see. Cheers!