GMTK Update (Patreon)

Hey all! Mark here. I just wanted to give you an update on what I've been up to, and what you can expect going forward.

So 2023 has been an unusually busy year for me... so far. After a pretty normal January and February, things just went quite mad for then onwards!

In March I went to San Francisco for GDC, in April did a university talk in Norwich, in May I did talks in Belgium and London, and in June I had a holiday, travelled to... a place, and did a report for... a company.

Those last two have to be very vague as they are big consulting projects that I am not allowed to talk about. Though I guess I can talk quite generally about them.

One was for a game that is nearing release. I flew to the studio for a week to play through the enire game and provide feedback.

It was quite an interesting experience - the game's still not done, so the build was riddled with bugs, crashes, temporary art, and so on. I really had to squint my eyes to imagine how the game will be when all of this stuff is done. But I was able to play the whole thing and give my thoughts. I explained what I thought were the game's strengths and weaknesses, and it's up to the studio to take that info and decide where to go next.

The other project was completely the opposite - the game is only just starting development, and hasn't been announced, but the team is having problems figuring out the basic gameplay loop and so asked me to help out. My job was to analyse games in the genre and look for patterns that can be borrowed, combined, expanded on, and so on.

These have all been fascinating experiences! I've gotten to travel around the world, meet loads of interesting people, and get an incredible inside look at game development that will help me with GMTK.

But these opportunities also take up a lot of time. And I'm really bad at multitasking / context-switching, so I find it hard to work on videos or my magnet game while doing this extracurricular stuff. And that's why video output is a bit slower this year.

That's why I've started being much more fussy about taking on these opportunities. I want to do these things - I love travel and meeting GMTK viewers - but I don't want it to come at the expense of the channel.

Going forward, the only thing on my calendar is a couple days in Brighton next month for Develop, and a personal trip. I've turned down various talks, meet-ups, and trips. So the rest of the time I want to focus on video making and game making!

Next up, to be released in the next couple weeks, is an in-depth look at how the AI works in The Sims. I really wanted to know how the Sims make autonomous decisions and so have done loads of research into the systems of the four-game franchise.

I also want to do something on Tears of the Kingdom. I finally finished the game after a 100-or-so hours of play. I'm not sure exactly what form that will take... obviously I could do a Boss Keys video about the game's dungeons, but I'm not sure there's a lot to say on that subject. I think I'd rather talk about the wacky Ultrahand ability.

The Game Jam is fast approaching, too. So expect streams and my annual 20 game wrap-up video.

And at some point... I definitely want to get back to game development! I haven't looked at Unity since GDC, but i'm starting to get the game dev bug so will be jumping into that when I have a few more normal GMTK videos done.

Anyhoo. Thanks very much for your patience. Back to the videos!

Mark