Mark's Month - August 2024

Hello Patrons! I'm here with a quick check in for August.

What I Made This Month

August was almost completely and utterly taken over by GMTK Game Jam 2024!

I'll do a proper post mortem soon but the main things to note were: this was, once again, our biggest jam ever with 32,000 sign ups and 7,700 games. People generally appreciated the extra 48 hours. And we saw some really creative and enjoyable games.

I thought I would get more normal GMTK work done but ultimately my month was taken up with creating the jam page, helping out with moderating the Discord, dealing with technical issues, and streaming. So much streaming!

I actually started a new channel this month - GMTK Live - which is literally just for live streams. I was getting comments from people who were subscribed to GMTK just for my usual in-depth videos and then got bombarded with invitations to join streams they weren't interested in. So I started streaming on a new channel just for live videos.

I ended up streaming for 8 hours over the course of the week, which was pretty exhausting! But it's always so much fun to see the games, share my views in real time, and chat to the community.

Sadly I have yet to finish my round-up video where I pick my 20 favourite games. I have now played the top 100 rated games and picked my 20 favourites - I just need to write up my thoughts and make the video. Hoping to get that done next week!

What I'm Working On

The Game Jam round-up is my primary concern. And once that's out of the way... I'm making a pretty cool video that's all about mystery in games. How do games like Tunic, Fez, and Outer Wilds capture a sense of mystery and unknown? It's looking to be a bumper video with loads of details on the designs of these games.

That should be done in September.

And then it's all steam ahead on doing the final touches on Mind Over Magnet, throughout the end of September and all of October, ahead of its November 6th release. Really appreciate your patience on this one.

What I've Been Up To

I started the month with a trip to Glasgow to meet up with some fellow YouTubers. You might know Video Game Story Time and Writing on Games, as two examples. We had good fun, ate lots of food, and played plenty of arcade games.

I actually played Crazy Taxi as an arcade machine for the first time and wow, it's even better than I thought! That forward / reverse physical lever just feels so good.

In terms of other games - well I've dabbled with a bunch of new games like Black Myth Wukong (I don't think I have the time to get good at a new Soulslike!), Thank Goodness You're Here (very funny!), and World of Goo 2 (it's World of Goo... 2!). But one slightly older game has really taken up my time.

It's the 2023 remake of System Shock. And I'm really enjoying it.

Primarily it's because the game trusts you to figure things out for yourself. The game has a laundry list of tasks to do in order to defeat the evil AI SHODAN and escape the space station. Like turning off a laser, setting a reactor to self implode, and so on. But instead of giving you a quest log, map markers, and a compass, the game expects you explore, keep track of what you're doing, and make smart decisions.

Part of this comes from the space station being designed like a real space. Where will I find a radiation-proof suit? Probably on the storage floor. Things like that. But also from reading emails, parsing information, and following clues.

And that just feels great! I really feel immersed in the world. It feels great to make decisions. And really satisfying when you get it right.

It's also got a great survival horror vibe with a cramped inventory of items, limited ammo and health items, and money. I can be pretty intense at times. A good game to play in the dark!

And finally - as someone who digs immersive sims, it's fun to play one of the earliest entries (I have tried playing the 1994 original before but it's pretty hard to get into thanks to funky controls and abstract graphics). It's very clear that games like Bioshock and Prey are really riffing on this game.

Anyway! I've still got more to play so I'm gonna go boot it up right now!

Thanks for your support, chat soon

Mark