Some misc. Game Development Videos

Just a small collection of Game Design related videos I found interesting. There is a large wealth of great talks on YouTube and GDC Vault, I picked these because I watched them very recently and there were one or more great points.

Sequelitis: Mega Man Classic vs. Mega Man X

This is hilarious and uses Mega Man X to show how you can teach your players the rules and limitations of the game through good gameplay rather than annoying tutorial prompts. I laugh every time I see the MEGA MAN! MEGA MAN! tutorial prompt and the reaction of the protagonist (because that’s what I want to do everytime I see a modal tutorial prompt)

Classic Game Postmortem – Maniac Mansion

http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014732/Classic-Game-Postmortem-MANIAC

Ron Gilbert talks about the first SCUMM Adventure, Maniac Mansion. This goes into the scripting part a lot, and I found the clock tick script interesting as an illustration on how many, many tiny pieces of code made the world alive. Some other rather anecdotal parts deal with censorship that required a box art change.

Sid Meier – Everything you know is wrong (GDC 2010 Keynote)

This deals with some balancing and rewards issues in game. For example, it deals with “My strength is 1.5, his strength is 0.5, so I should win all the time vs. My strength is 1, the enemy has 3 and when I’m winning, that feels right. Also, 2 vs 1 is different from 20 vs 10”. Some really good stuff.

Basically, it’s a panel about psychology in something that’s normally driven by hard math.

Happy Video Game Nerd: Earthbound

Earthbound did a lot of things really right, including the fact that trivial battles are simply skipped and the player wins by default. The first half contains 5 reasons that made Earthbound special. The second of the video concerns Earthbound and why it struggled in the US and is not interesting from a game development point of view.

BlizzCon 2007 – UI Panel

World of Warcraft wasn’t the first MMO to allow a customizable UI or to use LUA, but since the original release in late 2004 it had a lot of polish going into it and is extremely powerful.

The UI Panel at Blizzcon 2007 isn’t simply useful for World of Warcraft, but it includes a few neat ideas on how Lua can be integrated into an existing system and augmented with some custom data (in their case, XML data for a UI interface)

GET LAMP: The Text Adventure Documentary

Jason Scott is one of three men I have a man crush on, and his documentaries are top notch. GET LAMP is a documentary about text adventures and contains many interviews from the people. Of course, a big focus on Infocom, but a few other bits and pieces as well. This isn’t strictly a game design video, but it contains some great insights into their thought processes and limitations (which is why they made the Z-Machine).

If you liked it, I recommend buying the DVD from http://getlamp.com/ since it’s a beautiful package.