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GMTK Newsletter (April 2017)
🕑 Added 2017-04-26 08:34:23 +0000 UTC Hey everyone! Here's the newsletter for April.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!
Comments
I read this article on dungeon design, locks, keys, cycles, trees, and backtracking. Naturally, I was reminded of your Boss Keys videos, so I thought you might enjoy it: <a href="https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/03/10/how-unexplored-generates-great-roguelike-dungeons/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/03/10/how-unexplored-generates-great-roguelike-dungeons/</a>
Theo Gerome
Count me in for the first person narrative games video as well! I feel like most analyses I've seen of these come from a narrative standpoint, which is fine all things considered, but it would be nice to see things from a different angle.
Manuel Alcoba
+1 for an episode on Walking Simulators or, as Brooks says, FPN from a design perspective. I really enjoyed Gone Home and I think that it was because it is really well designed, using the capabilities of the medium.
Siph
I had a similar initial impression of P5, and it only really started to click after the Kamoshida chapter. I also got way more satisfaction bumping the difficulty to Hard, which you can do on the fly now. In a way, it totally feels like the "Uncharted 4" of the Persona series: a relatively safe set of new gameplay features, but wrapped up in a far more engrossing story that was clearly given more attention than ever before. The coming-of-age aspect of P4 is still present, but instead of young adults coming to grips with what they cannot control, P5 is about characters who can change the world "for the better", which is the literal opposite takeaway. Also like U4, it places more emphasis on storytelling than player agency, and the game feels very on-rails for the first 15 hours. At any rate, I'm 33 hours in and it definitely has its hooks in me.
Game Maker's Toolkit
Not yet but I have also completely ignored the story so I doubt it will mean much :P
What I found interesting with The Swapper is how the story is built around the Swapper device, and slowly explores the impact of using the device on your/others consciousness. Have you reached the ending?
Game Maker's Toolkit
I haven't! I'm tempted to get it again on Switch. Seems like the perfect platform for it...
Zach Stasz
Hey Mark, have you gotten around to playing the Spector Knight levels in Shovel Knight? I wasn't a fan of the Plague Knight ones (controls were funky and the levels were practically the same in Shovel Knight), but Spector Knight rocks! Great controls, interesting story, and funny dialogue. It's crazy how many good games there are to play right now, so I wouldn't be surprised if this doesn't get more attention. Here's to another great month!
I hope you do make that video about First Person Narrative games! (I prefer that term so much more than the pejorative "Walking Simulator" label) And I would absolutely love to see you break down the Metroid Prime series in its own batch of videos. Can't wait for the playlist!
