GMTK Reading List (January 2024)

Metroidvanias! VATS! Piranha Plants!

Happy new year! It’s probably a bit late to say that - but hey, it’s the first reading list of 2024.

As always, this is a carefully curated list of articles, videos, podcasts, and more - all stuff that I recommend you check out. And it’s exclusively for people who back GMTK and help support me in my mission to make free, high quality game design information.

This month I’ve got stuff on that excellent new Prince of Persia Metroidvania, some leftover articles about last year’s games, plus lots of other random bits and bobs.

Mark

The Design of Games

[Read] Prince Of Persia: The Lost Crown Fixes The Worst Thing About Metroidvanias - "The genre’s notorious for making players retrace old paths, but Ubisoft Montpellier’s latest makes the process more bearable".

[Read] ‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ Writers Break Down the Craft of Video Game Sex and Romance - An interview with Baudelaire Welch, lead designer for the companion character and romance quests in Baldur’s Gate 3

[Watch | 15 mins] LADS - An Analysis Of Difficulty Spikes - Darkfry talks about how difficulty spikes can be used for storytelling purposes.

[Watch | 9 mins] The Origin of VATS - "I talk about the Fallout ‘called shot’ feature, which was renamed VATS from Fallout 3 and onward. I talk about where the feature came from, what we were trying to do with it, and how players could benefit from it."

[Read] Nintendo’s design guru Shigeru Miyamoto: ‘I wanted to make something weird’ - "Few people have influenced global pop culture as much as the creator of Mario and Zelda, widely considered the father of modern gaming. But when you have changed the world, what comes next?"