Reading List (April 2023) (Patreon)

Hello hello hello! Time for reading and watching! Yay!

The Design of Games

[Watch | 16 mins] / [Read] Alien: Isolation’s Terrifying Introduction to the Perfect Predator - "How Creative Assembly crafted the ideal hunting ground for the perfect organism".

[Read] Why do so many modern games have tiny text? - "Miniscule text is by far the most common accessibility complaint".

[Watch | 12 mins] Our Minimalist Base Defense Game is Taking Shape! - "In this devlog we keep working and expanding our minimalist medieval base defense game, Thronefall"

[Watch | 10 mins] City Builders Breaking the Mold - "Do mechanics limit our understanding of genre? Or can we re-invigorate and reinvent genres without harming the core of what players expect? "

The Business of Games

[Read] GDC is exorbitantly expensive — but still vital for many game developers - "San Francisco, which has hosted the event every year since 2007, is one of the world’s most expensive cities."

[Watch | CC | 29 mins] What Is It Like to Actually Attend GDC? - "I give you an insight into what it's like during my first-ever visit to the event." Includes blink-and-miss-it Mark Brown cameo!

[Read] The face of PlayStation: Shuhei Yoshida on the joy and future of video games - "He’s been at PlayStation since the beginning, and seen the games industry transform beyond recognition. He talks unlikely successes, AI, and gaming’s future"

AI and Games

[Read] AI is already taking video game illustrators’ jobs in China - "“AI is developing at a speed way beyond our imagination. Two people could potentially do the work that used to be done by 10.”

[Read] The Indie Developers Who Are Using AI to Make Living Cities, Tactics Machines, and More - "Indie developers explain how AI has historically, and currently, transformed how they conceive, prototype, and create their games."

[Watch | 7 mins] Can AI code Flappy Bird? Watch ChatGPT try - "I didn’t write a single line of code myself, all code was given to me by ChatGPT."

[Watch | 8 mins] How to use AI to easily learn any skill you want - "I've been attempting to self-educate myself for years and haven't really been successful, but ever since getting my hands on tools like ChatGPT, self-teaching myself has honestly been easier than ever."

The Playing of Games

[Read] The Last of Us on HBO - "The biggest issue in The Last of Us is a consistent issue in a lot of Naughty Dog titles – a scorched earth approach to narrative design"

[Watch | CC | 21 mins] The Games I Wish I Never Replayed - "The thing about having a favorite anything is that there is a more than decent chance that one day it no longer will be your favorite, and that shift can be jarring."

[Read] Nuts to Mario: How a £10 discount made me a 'Wario Kid' for life - "Mario’s just a bit of a square, a bland normcore hero. Meanwhile, Wario couldn’t care less what people think of him"

[Read] ‘A space to feel at ease with dying’: how video games help people through grief - "Players have long found a refuge from grief in video games – and a recent wave of games is tackling this difficult theme head-on"

[Watch | CC | 20 mins] How Lollipop Chainsaw Remains Iconic In Spite of It All - "Lollipop Chainsaw is one of the most insane games I've ever played, but for a title so unserious, I was surprised to see how much detail and heart the game had."

The Art of Games

[Watch | CC | 31 mins] Four-Byte Burger - Ahoy recreates a lost of piece of Amiga art, and it's weirdly satisfying to watch.

[Read] ‘Muted, soft, like watercolours’: The Last Guardian’s soundtrack was an appeal to the heart - "Composer Takeshi Furukawa talks about creating the soundtrack for Fumito Ueda’s touching tale about the relationship between human and beast"

[Read] World of Warcraft’s most notorious bug inspired this cursed piece of modern art - "Artist Harris Rosenblum gets under the (gross) skin of his creation, Relic of the Corrupted Blood"

[Watch | CC | 48 mins] If The Mario Movie Was Made By DIFFERENT Animation Studios - How would the Mario movie look if it were done by Disney... or Aardman?

The History of Games

[Watch | CC | mins] Development Secrets of the Original Kirby - Sakurai celebrates 100 episodes on YouTube with a look back at how they made the very first Kirby game.

[Read] King's Field: How FromSoftware’s first game started a cycle that's still in motion - "From King's Field to Elden Ring, there's more to the cycle of mythology than you may have realized"

[Read | Long Read] The Next Generation in Graphics - A super nerdy look at how we got to 3D graphics in games like Quake.

Beyond Games

[Read | Long Read] What Was Twitter, Anyway? - "Whether the platform is dying or not, it’s time to reckon with how exactly it broke our brains."

[Read] Chasing rainbows - "Apparently, the very idea of colorblindness is hard to visualize. Take a shot at looking through my eyes."

[Read | Long Read] You Have a New Memory - "I ask the internet about myself far more often than I ever ask any human about myself."

[Watch | CC | 8 mins] Why is "Choppy" Animation Better? - "With the release of Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, we've never been closer to completely blurring the line between 2D and 3D animation."

[Watch | CC | 25 mins] Communicating Your Vision as a Director - "Using the work I did on Shazam! Fury of the Gods as examples of communicating ideas in various ways."