GTMK Newsletter - November 2016 (Patreon)

Hello! Here's your newsletter update for November. I will be working on the Playlist this afternoon, and hopefully can release it later today (or tomorrow at the latest).

Thanks for all your support this month. The Patreon has grown enormously in November. It's incredible.

Post Script

Nintendo, and Putting Play First 

So anyone who follows me on Patreon knows what a struggle this video has been.  Lemme try and remember the way this one came together.

It all started with this random realisation that Samus opens doors in Metroid, by shooting them. Which is kinda weird, right? That's not how doors work.

But it's actually really smart. The game lets you intentionally open a door, but without using another button on the controller and without muddying any of the other buttons (i.e. it's not like the jump button magically becomes an "open door" button if you're close to a door).

And then they can do different doors that are linked to your upgrades. So instead of finding a key, you find a better gun - which is both a weapon, and a way to unlock doors. It's all very clever. 

From there I started thinking about how many Nintendo games are built around strong player actions, from Mario's jump to Luigi's vacuum cleaner to Splatoon's ink cannon. This was going somewhere.

As I started to read interviews, I got a whole bunch of quotes about how Nintendo starts with gameplay and then uses that to drive aesthetic decisions like character look, game location, graphic style, musical choices, and even narrative.

This was all super awesome but I kept running into an issue. Not every Nintendo game - including many of the games mentioned in the interviews - is built around a new mechanic. A big gripe with Nintendo is that they don't do a lot of new IPs. 

So I had all this really good stuff about building games around strong mechanics, and all this good stuff about deriving aesthetics from play, and I just found it hard to get them to fit together in a clear way.

Now that I'm writing this I'm wondering what my problem was. But I think that's kinda how stuff works - the video I made just now seems totally obvious. Of course that's the way to structure it! How else would you do it? But, I dunno, at the time it didn't work.

There was a draft where I had, like, one off-hand paragraph to say "oh, by the way, not every game is built on a mechanic but there is new gameplay". And another draft that was more about new IPs. Another that tried to talk about everything at once.

Structure is always a huge focus of mine. I very carefully think about how I'm going to lead the audience through my argument / opinion / research, and I try to avoid weird stumbling blocks, strange tangents, or stuff that will make the viewer confused. So, yeah, that can take a while.

Other challenges involved deciding what to use and what to cut. It's a quotation-heavy episode, but there are so many good quotes left on the cutting room floor, as you hopefully saw. Getting footage: the video features 51 different games. Getting good Gamecube footage - thanks to the emulator Dolphin for that. And editing it together nicely. The pop-up Miyamoto and Iwata were random ideas I had during the edit. They were a massive pain but worth it in the end. 

So yeah, I'm really proud of this one. It's one of my best episodes, and I'm so glad I stuck with it. I just don't think I'll be doing a monster video like this for a while ;)

Minish Cap 

I knew I was going to get some negative comments on the Wind Waker episode, but I didn't really foresee people saying that they didn't get WHY I preferred the more complex dungeon design of old Zelda games, over the simplistic design of Wind Waker. Like, it seemed obvious to me.

This is one of the benefits of Boss Keys, by the way. Getting comments between videos helps me make better arguments, and see things from a fresh perspective.

Anyway, I knew that I needed to meet this question head-on with this episode. I first needed to explain exactly why the dungeons are different (again - many YouTube commenters seemed to think that I only cared about whether dungeons let you make a choice in the sequence of events, so I needed to dispel that), and try and argue why I prefer find-the-path dungeons.

This was useful as it made me realise just how important branching paths are in dungeons. You can't have backtracking or choice without branches. And that, in turn, lead to me rethink my graph system to better show the branches. 

As I finished up the edit, I was getting a bit bummed out. I worry often that Boss Keys is very inside baseball, and that I'm just being madly self indulgent with my goofy graphs and everything. But as soon as the video came out and I got positive comments from you guys, and others on YouTube, I immediately wanted to get started on the Twilight Princess episode!

My plan for TP is to take the focus away from structure, and talk about other things. The architectural stuff in Lakebed Temple, the way the game helps you not get lost, the theming and atmosphere. Looking forward to it.

Sneak Peek

Okay, so last year in December I did two things: a video about 5 good bits of game design  of the last 12 months, and then a video on one of my favourite, and most interestingly designed games of 2015 (Her Story ).

I'm going to do that again this year. I'm calling them "innovations" rather than "good bits of game design", because the latter is clunky. It's all about clever little ways that developers have been innovative, through systems, mechanics, and more. 

I could just tell you what the games / innovations will be, but where's the fun in that? 

And then as for the most innovative game of the year - yeah, I'm looking forward to doing this. As a hint, it's a game that runs like a dog on my Mac and isn't on other platforms, so I'm not sure how I'm going to get around that. Ph well I'll figure it out! 

I've also been thinking about 2017's videos. There's so much I want to do! 

Without spoiling too much I want to do videos looking at the games of certain designers and studios, stuff about skateboarding games, that puzzle design video I keep threatening, a video that I have been meaning to make since the very start of the channel, something to go with this violence/combat/non-lethal topic I regularly bring up, a thing on environmental storytelling, and loads more.

Can't wait.

Mark's Month

As I've been doing more Patreon posts lately, you know more about what I'm up to. You know about Dishonored 2 and my university talk on Zelda and all that. I don't have much to talk about here

Oh, I got Titanfall 2! It's pretty cool - the level everyone loves is, yep, you're right, very good. I'm a little conflicted about the Titan stuff: I don't really like it. But I do appreciate that it's a nice mix up (if you were running along walls for 6 hours it would be exhausting).

But it's not really endearing me to BT as a character. When he goes away during the campaign I'm not thinking "yay! BT you're back!" when he returns. I'm thinking "ugh, this again?".

Also, here's a random thought. Did you guys play Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands? There's some jumping puzzles in that game that remind me of the wall-run-jump-time-flip-wall-run stuff in Titanfall 2. I think you made platforms turn to ice mid-jump? Or something? Maybe I should look into that game again. It seems to have been, AHEM, Forgotten.

I played Pokemon Sun. My review for Pocket Gamer is here . 

OH! And Owl Boy. Which, unfortunately, I don't really like. It's totally my jam - gorgeous pixel art, obvious Zelda and Metroid influences, charming characters. 

My main issue is that the game's got so many mechanics, and none are particularly well developed.

You can shoot, pick up stuff, throw stuff, dodge roll, spin, jump, fly. It's crazy. But no action is really given enough focus. The flying, for example, is endless and easy: it's like moving a mouse cursor around the screen. The throwing is cool, but barely used in the game. I forgot I could spin until I caught on fire and the game said "Press X to spin!"

Personally (enter a billion caveats here about the folly of being a backseat developer) I would have focused on a couple actions - probably flying, and picking up / throwing. And then made the game around those. So make flying more interesting (see: cape Mario in Super Mario World as an example), and come up with loads of puzzles, enemy encounters, and more about grabbing stuff and throwing it around.

I also found the constant interruptions annoying. The game's got a lovely story with great characters but - hold on! We've got to stop for 5 minutes to have a chat - and sometimes you just wanna play - hold on! let's chat! - the game and yet - wait! - the game keeps wrestling - hold on! - control away.

At some points, the developers show huge restraint. At a campfire scene, the game lets you ask questions and dive into the lore, or just choose "go to sleep" and skip it. And in the town sections you can talk to as many, or as few, people as you like. Sadly, this restraint isn't there in the more traditional action parts.

And finally, the game does this annoying thing where you can hammer the right trigger to shoot a lot of bullets, or hold the right trigger to fire bullets at a slightly slower rate.

It's putting the same function on two different inputs, but one is clearly advantageous over the other - you'd only hold the trigger if you have bad hands (me and my RSI) or no stamina. It would be more interesting to make the inputs different, such as having you hold the trigger for a charge shot. That wouldn't help me, but it would be more interesting.

I think Owl Boy is good, but I just don't see the game from the 9/10 reviews.

So, in conclusion, I did have a lot to talk about in this newsletter after all.