novameow

holy fucking shit i need you to look at this prototype design for Remy from Street Fighter III

Fat women. You agree. You rechost.

hey man i just invented something called “violent wednesdays”, wanna come over and we’ll figure out what it is

i feel like the game design content that gets recommended to me on youtube is really just taste validation for gamers. who want to feel smart for liking a game with a smart thing.

rather than focusing on how to design things, how to go from a blank slate to mechanics, levels, useful data input, docs, team communication, or whatever, instead it is an excuse to just describe back the final player experience of popular games (souls or nintendo properties) with some often interesting, yet surface level observations and speculations.¹

and i get it. it's fun, easy to digest content with an obvious emotional investment, for an audience that actually exists! you're not going to get mass appeal going after actual game designers. who probably could figure out that mario jumps in a vague parabola.²

and i don't think this content is bad or cynical. it's nice to know i'm cool for liking various best-selling games. and it's nice that people are passionate about design. buuut it does bug me that it's often dressed up as teaching the craft.

if you are thinking of becoming an artist there are an amazing amount of resources. you’ve got experts in the field, sometimes literally the artists you are a fan of, producing tutorials, time lapses, process pictures, art live streams, theory explanations, shaded spheres, arrows on colour wheels, diagrams of coloured lines bouncing into eyes, light going into prisms, source files with layers for penis on/off, etc.

given all that, it would be odd to instead watch someone who has never drawn anything before, zoom in on a finished piece of art they had no involvement with, to say it uses brushes (and brushes are also techniques found in dark souls).

i realise this comes across as gatekeeping. i don't think you need experience to talk about design or judge if a design is good, and i appreciate it is hard to get experience because to practice and learn you often need other disciplines and skills. but if you're going to act like a design resource... err. hey, look over there

1. did you know that in a "metroidvania" -- a portmanteau of metroid and castlevania; you get items (keys) that allow access to new areas (doors)? yes. because that is what the genre name means.

2. mario’s jump actually has a lot of complexity with horizontal momentum and button release but that stuff is hard to put on a prageru-ass graph