GMTK Digest (February 2025)

Hello GMTK supporters!

It feels like the games biz just woke up from its post-Christmas slumber. We got massive new Monster Hunter, Civilization, and Kingdom Come games, plus big industry news. To help you make sense of it all, here's your monthly digest.

I'll start with my takes on this month's new releases. Then there's the biggest news headlines you need to know. And finally, the best bit - 28 articles and videos that any GMTK fan should enjoy.

New Releases

Guns of Fury

Imagine Metal Slug as a Metroidvania and you're about 90% towards knowing what Guns of Fury is all about. It's a crunchy retro run-n-gun game with detailed pixel art and a campy story about a lone gun man taking on an entire army of baddies, tanks, helicopters, and mechs. And it's also a Metroidvania with lots of abilities, secrets, and a sprawling map.

I think I've decided that Metroidvanias are my total comfort genre - I can just zone out and tick off upgrades and abilities. And so while Guns of Fury is not going to win any awards for innovation... I had a really good time with it. It was also fun to find a weapon that was basically completely overpowered and let me stomp everyone in my sight. Hooray!

Avowed

Obsidian - of Pillars of Eternity and Fallout: New Vegas fame - is back with a big new game. It's basically the studio's take on The Elder Scrolls: a massive first-person RPG with quests and companions and spells and... uh... guns! Those are definitely not in Skyrim!

This was sadly not for me. I'm not a big fantasy guy. As soon as people start talking about "realms" and "elves" I start to nod off. And this one is just utterly steeped in fantastical lore and verbiage. It doesn't help that the game takes place in the Pillars of Eternity universe and every character speaks to you like you have an expert understanding of the world's places, people, and conventions.

Though, the game does have one clever little design trick to help with that: if a character uses an unfamiliar term, you can hit a button to bring up a dictionary of terms and get an instant definition. It feels a bit like doing homework, but at least you won't be scratching your head.

OpenCritic has the game on 82.

Sid Meier's Civilization VII

This is perhaps the biggest shake-up yet to Sid Meier's excellent history-spanning strategy epic. Basically: in all previous Civ games you would pick a nation (say Egypt, Spain, or England), and then ferry them from antiquity to modernity. But in Civ 7 you will actually change nation as the game goes on. Perhaps you'll be in charge of the Greeks in ancient times, but then swap to the Americans during the age of exploration.

This has some interesting pros. It splits a long Civ campaign into shorter sub-games. And it gets away from the weirdness of founding Washington in 4000 BC or being an Aztec warrior in the nuclear age. But, for me, the cons were too big: it just breaks that perfect Civ power fantasy of leading your nation from a single village to a space-faring superpower. And it leads to an even bigger weirdness: because the leader doesn't change, you might have Ben Franklin leading India or Japan.

It'll be interesting to hear what Civ experts think of it (right now they're mostly mad at the game's finicky UI), but as a casual fan of the franchise... it just doesn't do it for me. I'll stick to the earlier games!

Bonus design tip: I wrote on Bluesky about how a subtle shift in where the leaders look completely changes the Civ experience.

Terry's Other Games

Terry Cavanagh is an indie superstar. If you don't know his name, you'll know his games: VVVVVV, Super Hexagon, Dicey Dungeons. But he's made more than that: game jam games, Flash games, experimental stuff, and unfinished prototypes. And he's bundled them all together into one Steam release. Complete with "developer notes" that explain each game's reason for being.

None of the games in the package really grabbed me for too long. And some titles... well you can see why they never got a glitzy Steam release. But this was still a fascinating package and a great way to chart a developer's wide and varied career.

Also this month:

• Goro Majima gets amnesia and a pirate ship in Yakuza spin-off Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii.

• Capcom scores the first big critical hit of 2025 with Monster Hunter Wilds.

• More Eastern European RPG goodness in Kingdom Come: Deliverance II.

• Lara's lesser games get a look-in with Tomb Raider IV-V-VI Remastered.

• Ex Life is Strange developers get together for Lost Records: Bloom and Rage.

Headlines

Warner Bros. closes Monolith Productions and MultiVersus studio, cancels Wonder Woman game - Monolith is the storied developer behind FEAR, Condemned, Shadow of Mordor, and more. I made a video about what the studio meant to me, through five of its best games.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 paid for itself in a single day and Monster Hunter Wilds smashes World's player numbers on Steam - A nice antidote to the doom and gloom we usually read about. Here are two, critically acclaimed, single player games selling a whole lotta units.

PEGI Complaints Board Amends Classifications of ‘Balatro’ and ‘Luck Be A Landlord’ to PEGI 12 - Common sense prevails: the ratings board previously gave any game that "teaches gambling" an automatic 18 age rating. But now things will be more granular and nuanced.

Here's everything shown at this year's Pokémon Presents - Pokémon Legends Z-A is the next big Pokemon game: another open-worlder like Legends: Arceus, but this time in a modern urban setting.

Steam Next Fest - February 2025 - Steam's showcase for upcoming games is happening right now, with over 2000 games to pick from. Notable titles: Wanderstop, from the creator of The Stanley Parable, and heist sequel Monaco 2.

Reading List

Design

Read - I Hope Every RPG Steals Avowed's Brilliant Inventory System - "You won't be wasting your time managing 300 swords in Xbox's new Game Pass RPG".

Read - Too many RPGs don't get that 'choices that matter' isn't just about cause and effect, but Avowed does - "I want choices that matter to me, not just to the game".

Watch (18 mins) - How to become a GAME DESIGNER - Luke Muscat (Feed the Deep, Fruit Ninja) tells you what a game designer actually is, and what you can do to become one.

Watch (22 mins) - Why Slay The Spire’s Old UI Ruined The Game and How a Server Fixed it - "Thanks to their QA background, they knew player feedback would be the key to success".

Development

Watch (17 mins) - How Game Engines Make Shaders Easy - "Shaders are difficult to get a handle on but modern commercial engines have done as much as they can to make them as easy as possible".

Watch (20 mins) - My Sister Learns Game Dev In 25 Days - An inspiring video about Jonas Tyroller and his sister. She makes some amazing progress for under a month!

Watch (50 mins) - How to make 3D Games in Godot - Brackeys is back, with a look at how to make beautiful 3D stages in that game engine everyone keeps telling me to use.

Watch (40 mins) - The Making of Animal Well - "We sat down with Billy Basso to tell the story of the development of his critically acclaimed game, Animal Well".

Business

Watch (12 mins) - Over A Million Players Wasn't Enough for Prince Persia: The Lost Crown - "J & Ludo dive into the often-forgotten work of Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown to see why it was such a travesty that its team was disbanded".

Watch (1 hour) - Actually investigating "Gaming is Dying" - What's really killing games? Greedy corporations? "Wokeness"? Bad games? NeverKnowsBest investigates.

Watch (20 mins) - Most common reasons Steam users write bad reviews - "By avoiding them, and prioritizing the right things, you can secure a solid review score with relative ease". From the dev behind Choo Choo Charles.

Read - The History of Like a Dragon’s Failed Attempts To Break Out in the West and How It Finally Succeeded - "The Like a Dragon franchise is almost 20 years old; however, it wasn’t always one of Sega’s premier franchises and spent years trying to break out in the West."

Culture

Read - The Save File Knows More Than You Do - "Every time we replay a game, we’re revisiting a different version of ourselves".

Read - I cooked recipes from Indiana Jones and the Great Circle and made some wonderful fishcakes – and got food poisoning - "The recipes you can find in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle are written authentically, but are they actually any good?"

Critique

Watch (32 mins) - Deadlock - FUNKe Study - TF2 mega fan FUNKe breaks down Valve's new MOBA-ery hero shooter.

Watch (8 mins) - Balatro Has Cost You Thousands of Years - "Balatro's impressive roguelike deckbuilding action is endlessly compulsive. In this video essay, let's discuss whether that's necessarily a good thing.".

Artistry

Watch (19 mins) - How Civilization VII's animation MAKES its leaders - Civ 7 needs to tell you a lot about its leaders through understated and silent idle animations. This video goes through the cast, looking at their poses.

Read - How Viktor Antonov turned from building cities to planets - "After learning of the sad passing of Viktor Antonov this weekend, we're republishing this interview with him from February 2019 to celebrate his life and work".

Watch (14 mins) - How to make Chrono Trigger sprites - "Chrono Trigger is one of the best RPGs and has one of the most quintessential 16-bit pixel art styles that I can think of.".

History

Watch (28 mins) - The Accidental Multiverse of Diddy Kong Racing - "We look at the weird and winding history of Diddy Kong Racing [and] how it accidentally served as a backdoor pilot for multiple other series".

Watch (14 mins) - The Timeless Beauty of SNES Graphics - "Transparencies, masking, pixelation effects and yes MODE7, but the hardware was capable of much more".

Watch (24 mins) - Destroying and Reprogramming the Sprite Engine of Ghosts 'n Goblins - This old Capcom NES game ran like a slideshow. So in this bonkers video, the host literally rewrites the game's code to give it a respectable frame rate. Madness.

Beyond Games

Watch (38 mins) - Algorithms are breaking how we think - Why think when you can scroll.

Watch (9 mins) - why nobody knows what curry is - "What even is a curry? A dish? A spice? A colonial mistake? Or something that’s always been part of who we are?"

Watch (40 mins) - You are a better writer than AI. (Yes, you.) - A poetic and inspiring video about how AI writes, and how humans write.

Watch (8 mins) - Why don't movies look like movies anymore? - "Rich shadows, bold colors, and depth. But now? A lot of films and shows look flat, dull, and lifeless".

Watch (34 mins) - How many died in the Mongol conquests? - "A lot of people SAY it was 40–60 million, but what is that actually based on?".

Watch (34 mins) - How CGI made TV ugly (and then pretty again) - A funny and well-animated video about the use of CGI in (mostly children's) TV.