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Reading List (August 2023)
🕑 Added 2023-09-02 06:47:50 +0000 UTCHi all! Apologies for the delay on this one - I've been battling the coronavirus. And mostly losing. Starting to feel better though and so will be back to video making from next week! To make up for it, here's a bumper edition of the reading list.
Critical Roll
[Watch | CC | 10 mins] How Save Scumming Makes Baldur's Gate 3 Better - " I see save scumming as less a tool for cheating, and more as a pacing device".
[Read] Playing a halfling in Baldur's Gate 3 has given me a new, shorter perspective - "Whenever I enter conversation with a human, elf, tiefling, githyanki, drow or half-orc, the camera sits behind my head, tilted upwards to meet the gaze of the other, taller party".
[Read] How Baldur's Gate 3 morphed Larian Studios into wild new shapes - "Developers that rapidly expand to meet a project’s needs often go through cultural convulsions - losing part of their identity in the process."
[Read] The not-quite-making of Baldur’s Gate 3 - (From 2018) "Chris Avellone, Feargus Urquhart, and Chris Parker reflect on the RPG series, its long legacy, and possible future".
[Read] Yelling is not journalism - "If I worked as a journalist, and I had a question, and that question had been asked by players constantly since the advent of DLC, I would attempt to do some journalism to find out the answer."
The Design of Games
[Watch | 14 mins] The Underappreciated Sports Fantasy - Leon Massey looks at the difference between sports simulations and sports fantasies.
[Watch | 14 mins] The Design Behind Immortality's Occult Secrets - "Sam Barlow walks us through the inspiration for Immortality, and how the game's systems cleverly lead you to uncover its secrets."
[Read] It's okay to be bad at games - "A Q&A with Bennett Foddy, the high priest of videogame difficulty"
[Read] To Understand Zelda’s Future, Look to its Handheld Past - "Minish Cap approaches the entire Zelda experience as if it was all a dungeon, packing lateral-thinking challenges into every corner."
[Read] The tutorial leash is getting longer - "The dissonant open-world graduations of Jedi Survivor and Ragnarok"
The Development of Games
[Watch | 6 mins] Creating Hey Listen - Mix and Jam missed the deadline for GMTK Game Jam, but kept going with development and shared their story, and demo.
[Read] What Does it Mean to be Wholesome in 2023 - "To identify what are the recurring features of the games showcased I watched the direct three times through with a spreadsheet of every game appearing at the show."
[Watch | CC | 11 mins] Super Smash Bros. for 3DS / Wii U - "Not only was this the first-ever handheld Smash Bros. title, it was also the first time I ever developed a game for two consoles simultaneously".
[Read] The making of Hi-Fi Rush with director John Johanas - "The most important thing we wanted is for people to remember the game fondly".
[Read] Media Training for Humans - "Treat [interviews] as a conversation between two human beings, both of whom have specific objectives that may overlap or diverge at different points."
The Playing of Games
[Read] Venba and Papers, Please Flex the Same Emotional Muscle - "You’re made to inhabit the character’s head by the menial labor they perform in a day."
[Watch | CC | 40 mins] Rekindle the Light - How Studio Ghibli Inspired Tears of the Kingdom - "I look at the many ways the work of Studio Ghibli helped shape this duology, the themes they share, and the lessons they impart." (Featuring a GMTK cameo!)
[Read] Diablo 4's Season of the Malignant is a hell of my own making - "It's true that Diablo has always been about the unending grind, but in season one, the tedium has never been so pronounced".
[Read] Remnant 2’s Wild Data Mining Puzzle Was Solved by Someone with No Coding Experience - "When data miners foiled Gunfire Games in 2019, they decided to bake a secret into Remnant 2 that only data miners could find."
[Read] Have You Danced with Devil Daggers in the Pale Moonlight? - "My relationship with Devil Daggers is perhaps best described as a performance."
[Read] How Yakuza Made A Legend Of Its Long-Time Hero Over Two Decades - "Few video game characters stick around as long as Kazuma Kiryu, the long-time lead of the Yakuza / Like A Dragon franchise--and even fewer have as commanding a presence as him."
The Art of Games
[Watch | 4 mins] How Overwatch broke everything to animate its characters - Using smears and noodle bones to make Overwatch's bonkers animations.
[Watch | 8 mins] The “Secret Sauce” In Modern Sound Design - Marshall McGee looks at a popular sound technique (over)used in modern games.
[Watch | CC | 4 mins] Damage Animations - "With how many unique body types there are in Smash Bros., it tends to be a lot of work to make animations for them all..."
[Watch | 17 mins] A Recipe for Animal Crossing Music - "The music always has this slightly tainted undercurrent - a kind of world-weariness that punctuates the optimistic exterior."
The History of Games
[Watch | CC | 17 mins] How Advance Wars Fixed Nintendo's America Problem - "Without Advance Wars, many of Nintendo's most popular games would never have been released in America and across the world."
[Read | Long Read] Diablo - A long history of Blizzard's dungeon diving RPG.
[Read] Barbie Games Changed My Life, Now They’re Gone Forever - "Adobe officially stopped supporting Flash Player in 2020, and the majority of Barbie Flash games are currently considered lost media."
[Watch | 1 hour, 30 mins] The Two Sides Of Tomb Raider - "A look back at the creation of the Tomb Raider franchise, the studio behind it and how it all turned into insanity and burned to the ground in the span of a few years."
Beyond Games
[Watch | 48 mins] A.I. Filmmaking Is Not The Future. It's a Grift. - "Let's talk about those A.I.-generated Wes Anderson parodies."
[Read] The 100 Best Movies of the Past 10 Decades - "TIME’s Stephanie Zacharek on the top films from the 1920s through the 2010s".
[Watch | CC | 11 mins] I tracked my mood every day for one year. - Matt D'Avella looks at the power of mood-tracking.
[Watch | CC | 14 mins] Why your driver's license is badly designed - Designer Linus Boman explains visual hierarchy through US ID cards.
[Watch | 20 mins] David Fincher - Actor's Director - A look at how Fincher uses (and rarely re-uses) actors across his work.
[Read] Oppenheimer undoes decades of American denial - "American popular culture has long wrestled with The Bomb, but largely from the perspective of its wielder, the only world power to have unleashed it on human victims."
[Watch | 39 mins] I used AI in a video. There was backlash. - Austin McConnell used AI for a book trailer. In this interesting video he recounts the experience and rebuffs the comments.
[Watch | 11 mins] When the director forgets to call cut - "The film Victoria, directed by Sebastian Schipper, is the real deal. One 2 plus hour film shot entirely in one go."
[Read | Long Read] Tell Me Why It Hurts - "How Bessel van der Kolk’s once controversial theory of trauma became the dominant way we make sense of our lives".
Comments
Théo
Didn't expect to see Bessel van der Kolk appear in a GMTK reading list, I'm gladly surprised! Hope you got over this last COVID iteration ✊
Critical Kate
I have also been having a very COVID week.
Lukáš Kušnier
Get Well soon!
