GMTK Reading List (July 2023)

Power weapons! Digital snow! DeltaTime! Barbie!

Hey! This has been a busy month for me. Most of my time was spent with the GMTK Game Jam. But I also popped down to Brighton for a few days to check out Develop. It was lovely to meet so many GMTK fans and catch up with some industry friends.

Still - I found plenty of time to read articles and watch videos about game design, development, and culture. Here's the best stuff I saw in July.

The Design of Games

[Watch | 15 mins] Alan Wake 2 And The 13 Year Journey To Make It - "Remedy’s Sam Lake joins us to discuss the long and winding road to making Alan Wake 2, the change in genre, and the introduction of a brand new co-protagonist."

[Read] What Makes Games Easy to Learn And Hard to Master - Marcin Jóźwik (SUPERHOT) tries to unpack this oft-repeated bit of game design wisdom.

[Read] Tears of the Kingdom shows that without change, accessibility in Nintendo games will remain accidental - "All of which paints a remarkably inaccessible picture in 2023, one made all the more ironic by a game that centres on a main character experiencing disability."

[Watch | CC | 30 mins] The Making of Vampire Survivors - Noclip uses a puppet to portray the reclusive developer Luca Galante.

[Watch | 23 mins] Missing: Power Weapons - "A staple of the 90s FPS, a touchstone to gaming's adolescence, and yet when it went missing... nobody seemed to even notice. Or was it that they simply didn't care?"