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Reading List (April 2023)
🕑 Added 2023-04-28 07:52:46 +0000 UTCHello 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."
Comments
JC
I always love these reading lists. The one that shook me to my core is the one published by RestOfWorld titled "AI is already taking video game illustrators’ jobs in China." What an utterly miserable, depressing state of affairs. It's exhausting to be living in a world where real human beings with dreams and families are being worked to death trying to make a living wage while the very things that give life meaningful (i.e., art, music; creativity in general) are being delegated to soulless machines. We're living in a dystopia.
Mark M
I love those colour blind "here's what we see" things, where for me both of them look the same lol. I remember Mark did that with Cuphead in one of his videos.
