Smart talk about games, whether or not you're playing them!

March 19, 2019 12:45 PM

Game Maker's Toolkit is a YouTube channel about how video games are made. In each video, creator Mark Brown intersperses interviews and quotes from developers with his own canny analysis to describe how Nintendo prioritizes "play", how games handle regenerating health, how game designers protect players from themselves, down to in-depth looks at, for instance, the design of single level in Hitman. His series "Boss Keys" explores world/level design of individual games, most recently Metroid Prime.
posted by Zephyrial (13 comments total)

(Mentioned previously-ish, but I've been enjoying these videos lately and thought they deserved their own FPP!)
posted by Zephyrial at 12:46 PM on March 19, 2019

GTMK is easily among the best video game channels on YouTube.
posted by tobascodagama at 12:50 PM on March 19, 2019 [4 favorites]

Yes, watching him growing in confidence as his videos progressed has also been great.
posted by pharm at 3:14 PM on March 19, 2019

This is a great channel and I feel sad that I've neglected it thus far. Thanks for sharing.
posted by Fizz at 5:14 PM on March 19, 2019

Adding my recommendation to the above.
posted by SonInLawOfSam at 5:24 PM on March 19, 2019

What Makes Celeste's Assist Mode Special was a good one about how to make games accessible while maintaining the creators' vision.

His Designing for Disability series is also good for making games less player hostile in general.

But mostly I like him because he talks about Spelunky and Breath of the Wild a lot.
posted by Gary at 6:13 PM on March 19, 2019 [2 favorites]

These are fantastic, thanks for posting this!
posted by Dysk at 4:18 AM on March 20, 2019

Would these be reasonably safe to show my six year old, from a language/violence/etc standpoint? She's becoming really interested in video games and designing her own levels (on paper) but I'm loathe to wade through this whole playlist to make sure I'm not gonna scar her.
posted by saladin at 4:34 AM on March 20, 2019 [1 favorite]

saladin: Some of them show/discuss some pretty grisly violence. The Nintendo “putting play first” I think would be 6yo-friendly. Same for most of the retro game or Nintendo-focused videos I’d bet?
posted by Zephyrial at 6:28 AM on March 20, 2019 [1 favorite]

I dunno, even the Nintendo putting play first video opens with a bunch of clips from other games, including the new Doom and a few other shooters, which might not be ideal?
posted by Dysk at 6:35 AM on March 20, 2019

I rarely get sucked into these but they are really good. Thanks.
posted by RolandOfEld at 7:27 AM on March 20, 2019

What I like most about these videos are when it throws some very brief shade.

In the BotW video for example when it talks about types of open world games, among others like MGSV it also says "just a way to dump a big checklist of content on the player" and shows a little bit of godawful Watch Dogs.
posted by fleacircus at 7:28 AM on March 20, 2019

He does a thing that seems obvious and easy (but is very difficult) in breaking down these topics and building them. It's the game equivalent of Every Frame a Painting which is my favorite film criticism YouTube channel.
posted by OnTheLastCastle at 9:34 AM on March 20, 2019 [2 favorites]