Architect Address- November 2019

And we're back with another Architect Address! I've also gone through the liberty of posting the transcript here in case people would rather read than watch:

 

Iiiiiit’s been two months since my last architect address and I guess… sorry about that. Yeah. I really need to get better at doing these, but it’s hard to find the time between working on actual videos and doing other stuff, I’ll try and do better in future. Anyway, what things do I want to talk about? Let’s start with a little bit of a thing I’ve been concerned about and that’s the number of videos I’ve been putting out

This year, assuming nothing completely crazy happens I’m on track to put out a decent number fewer videos in 2019 than I did in 2018, and I’m not entirely sure how to feel about that. On one hand, I think the videos released this year have been better, both in terms of content and production quality, but I also think that I really could stand to make more and generally have a better work ethic, particularly as I’m kind of shifting into making youtube a career. It’s a difficult balance to strike and whilst people will tell me I can take my time, I do think I need to up my game a bit and stop pissing around quite as much.

Speaking of which, let’s talk about the things I should’ve been pissing around on, and that’s the videos that have come out in the last 2 months.

First up, rediscovering the joy of exploration. Hmmm, this was an interesting one, namely in of the fact that it didn’t turn out at all like I expected. I was originally going to make a video all about why Skyrim’s exploration worked so well, but I ended up making one about why it didn’t work! What a world. In terms of my personal game design knowledge, this video was a pretty big learning moment. I’ve always considered making fun worlds to be about just having a space that has a bunch of cool stuff to see in and then letting the player go nuts, but I couldn’t have been more wrong.

In a lot of ways, it’s worlds that feel restrictive and intimate that are the best ones to explore, and working for those cool moments over a long period of time makes them so much better- like in the case of Hollow Knight’s blue lake, which is just a fantastic piece of design, I love it so much. Focusing on interesting stories the player can discover is much more important than just making a theme-park, who knew?

Next we’ve got Bat to basics. I’m going to be real with you here, that pun was the foundation of the entire video- I wanted to make something about stealth and it just didn’t really come together until I thought of that pun, I love it even in spite of how obviously terrible it is. Long story short with this one is that I freaking love the Arkham games, even Arkham Origins which some people cleverly noticed didn’t make it into the final video because it’s a bit rubbish and looks identical to City because it’s in the same engine. 

They’re just so good at making stealth feel dynamic and engaging rather than a boring waiting around simulator. I really wanted to talk a little bit more about insta-loss stealth mechanics because they’re a classic gaming bugbear, but I actually couldn’t find that many examples, they’re so frustrating that I’ve tricked myself into thinking bad stealth mechanics are more popular than they actually are. Maybe there was a few years where a bunch of games got released at the same time that all did them badly, that’s a mystery to figure out because this particular gaming sin has all but vanished from recent titles and… well good riddance basically. 

Finally, is how systems saved Zelda. It’s a bit of a clickbaity title because err, I never really explain *how* they saved Zelda, that bit got cut because the answer is obvious. This video is a bit of a departure because it’s focused on a Nintendo game, which as you can see from my 60fps footage was captured on a real SNES, and I definitely didn’t emulate it. Basically I’m too poor to buy a switch capture device so, this was my only option. Sorry Miyamoto.

Systemic games are fascinating for a whole host of reasons and I really could’ve done this whole video on Zelda or Noita or Spelunky, but it felt more natural to talk about the genre in broad strokes. I was surprised to see how few people had heard of systemic games before to be honest, and there’s a very interesting topic in what really distinguishes a systemic game from a sandbox or an immersive sim, but that is a topic for another day. This video was kind of bad timing on my part because a lot of the best systemic games are also stealth games- so I felt like I was repeating myself a bit with the Dishonoured talk, but hey, what are you going to do, right?

Aaaanyway, those are some videos that I made, as well as my thoughts on them. I hope you enjoyed, I’ll endeavour to get another one of these done by Christmas, hopefully I’ll have some stuff to talk about then! Bye!