GMTK Newsletter (April 2017) (Patreon)

Post Script

So, because I finished the Psychonauts episode quite early in the month, I decided to spend the rest of it on a more substantial project: playing, finishing, analysing, and comparing the Dead Space trilogy. 

I've put nearly 50 hours into all three games. I didn't just play through the games but also played bits again on higher difficulties, played the games in different orders to remind myself of how they feel, and played some Dead Space 3 in co-op.

I decided to turn it into three parts because while I had to loads to say on each game, I just don't do massive long episodes. Plus, I think each game analysis will largely stand on its own (though, I do come back to the first game in future videos). And Boss Keys showed how people like following a series from game to game.

The three-part series will make sense as a complete video if you watch them back to back, though, where things said in the first video will resonate in the third. Looking forward to people seeing that! But you'll have to wait a couple weeks for that. 

Fun stats

The Dead Space episode was actually the 50th episode of Game Maker's Toolkit! That doesn't count Boss Keys or bonus videos. Just mainline episodes of the show. Woo-wee.

To celebrate, I totted up some numbers about the games that have appeared on the show.

In total, 468 unique games have appeared on Game Maker's Toolkit - from Pong in 1972 to Yooka-Laylee in 2017. 

Games more frequently come from recent years. 52 of the games shown on GMTK were from 2015, which was the most popular year. The least popular year was 1984 with just one game (Marble Madness).

Here's a graph, showing how I favour more recent years

The game that most often appears on Game Maker's Toolkit is Super Mario Bros, having appeared in 10 out of 50 episodes. Bioshock and Dark Souls 3 appeared in 8 a piece.

Sneak Peek

Okay! So, I'm working on the Skyward Sword episode of Boss Keys. This is actually a return to form for complex dungeon design in the Zelda series, so it will be quite different to most recent episodes (thankfully!).

It will also involve some complex graph, map, and 3D map design. I should probably start with that. 

Playing What Remains of Edith Finch, and this (weird!) article from Ian Bogost, has inspired me to talk about walking simulators (wait, wait, come back!), and how most games ignored what Gone Home did so well. I'm sure the comments section on that one (if I end up making it) will be amazing. 

I still want to do the follow-up verbs video! And I've had this puzzle design video stewing for ages. I'm trying to focus on a single video at a time, though, as working on multiple videos at once is a bit of a nightmare. 

If the Dead Space series goes down well I'll consider doing videos on other franchises. When I teased on Twitter that I was doing a trilogy video many people guessed Mass Effect and Metroid Prime - so perhaps those could work. But much further down the line. 

What I've Been Playing

I've played a lot of indie stuff, which I'll be covering in the Playlist video. But for those who don't back at that tier: Snake Pass, Statik, and Sexy Brutale are all brilliant and inventive and I love them. 

I started playing Persona 5. It's pretty nifty, but I'm struggling to get into it like I did with Persona 4. Part of that is that I played P4 so recently, and the games are very similar - in both mechanics and story (so far). It's stylish and gorgeous but slow going. I'm about 10 hours in and basically just finished the tutorial. 

I'm also playing The Swapper. Which is a bit random but it's been sat on my PS4 home screen for yonks. It's pretty cool, but I find that being able to have 5 clones on screen, from the get go!, is kind of overwhelming and leads to rather fussy and overly complex (but not necessarily /difficult/) puzzles.

Some of the best puzzles actually are those where they cheat and force you to give up a clone or two before starting. The game is just as much fun when you have fewer pieces to work with (and the puzzles are still hard - if not harder). 

Yooka Laylee hasn't grabbed me. Remember in my video on nostalgia when I said it was a bad idea to trade on the memories of one specific game? Well Yooka does that for Banjo, and it didn't really work out. For me at least.

Simply bringing that old game and world design into 2017 graphics reveals them to be a mixed bag of ideas and a really barren and sterile set of environments. 

Some of it is just down to lacklustre game feel / juice, though: the sounds aren't right, the effects don't have the right punch, it all feels so quiet when it should be a bouncy, colourful party. Ah well. 

And I think that's about it!

Oh, and the gaming BAFTAs happened. I judged the British games award and the game I wanted to win - Overcooked - took home the prize! 

This was a weird thing to judge. Trying to compare Forza Horizon against Football Manager against Reigns against Warhammer against Virgina against Batman VR was just bizarre!

Ultimately I had to pick the game that I thought was most inventive and that I simply enjoyed playing the most. And that was Overcooked. Which is brilliant. Yay!