Hello GMTK backers! Here is your Digest for November.
This month was actually a little light on new releases - the biggest new games were COD BLOPS 7 and Kirby Air Riders. So I've picked some different, but still recent, titles for the new releases section.
Hope you're doing well and keeping warm and cozy in these winter months. Chat soon!
New Releases
Read - Call Of Duty: Black Ops 7’s Awful AI Use Is A Watershed Moment - "Without question, Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 is the most egregious use of AI I’ve seen in a mainstream game".
Watch (41 mins) - Silent Hill 𝑓 & Women as Suffering Machines - "Silent Hill f is the story of women as machines for suffering, of women as goddesses and doormats, and the men who tread upon them".
Watch (35 mins) - What Is Silent Hill f REALLY About? - "It's a horror game about the curses we carry in our blood and how we kill them when we transition between the past and future".
Read - Hades 2's Story Mistakes Repetition For Revelation - "Hades II isn’t a story—it’s maintenance".
Behind the Headlines
Watch (19 mins) - The Rockstar Workers Fired Before They Could Finish GTA 6 - "Rockstar claims these firings were due to "gross misconduct", but the workers have another two words they prefer to use instead: "union busting".
Watch (16 mins) - What Pokémon learned from the disaster of Scarlet & Violet - "This new Pokémon game is far from perfect, but it’s a huge improvement, technically speaking, over Scarlet & Violet. So what changed?".
Read - Metroid Prime 4: Beyond’s chatty NPCs aren’t as surprising as you think - Metroid Prime 4 features a quippy sidekick character named Myles. And franchise fans aren't happy! Polygon looks at the history of NPCs in this series.
Watch (20 mins) - What I learned analysing 10 Years of The Game Awards - With the Game Awards nominations out, here's a video on what we can learn from the past winners.
Design
Watch (13 mins) - The Weird Problem With Sports Games - "The best football game in years isn't Rematch or EA Sports FC—it's BABY STEPS. Let's uncover the secrets of why, how you missed it, and why sports games are so weird".
Watch (14 mins) - Why Nemesis Is The Best Stalker - "Nemesis is an insurmountable, inescapable nightmare, a relentless presence who in 1999 completely redefined what was possible from a video game horror antagonist".
Watch (22 mins) - What's The Deal With Corpse Runs? - "We’re going over a bunch of different styles of corpse runs in games, and see how series with different tones, difficulty levels, and eras all handle implementing their versions of a corpse run".
Watch (9 mins) - Donkey Kong Bananza Has The Best Nintendo Companion - "Let's take a look at how other companion characters have evolved over the years to see why [Pauline] reigns supreme".
Watch (9 mins) - Good Luck Modernizing Silent Hill 1, Bloober Team - "Bloober Team is remaking the original Silent Hill... that's going to be a real tough job".
Watch (24 mins) - Pointless Mechanics That Make Games Better - "Whether it be the salute in Hades 2 or playing Gwent in The Witcher 3, mechanics like these present a way to engage with games that isn't fuelled by the desire for progression".
Read - Game design is simple, actually - "So, let’s just walk through the whole thing, end to end. Here’s a twelve-step program for understanding game design".
Read - Against 'Metroidbrania': a Landscape of Knowledge Games - "You'll never convince me that these games form a coherent genre, or even that you can group them under a general umbrella term".
Development
Read - What even is game direction? We asked 16 game directors - "We asked 16 directors across the industry two simple questions: how they define game direction, and what constitutes “good” game direction".
Read - As viral hits like Escape from Duckov and Megabonk change the industry, Falconeer developer Tomas Sala has found another way to survive - "In the 10 years he's been making his own games, the market has changed in dramatic ways".
Read - Indie game developers have a new sales pitch: being ‘AI free’ - "Ignoring all of the ethical, moral, and legal concerns of using generative AI, it’s a huge waste of effort".
Watch (16 mins) - I Downloaded EVERY Silksong Review, Here’s the Data - "From boss fights and difficulty complaints to pricing perception and memes, we dive deep into how players around the world are experiencing one of the most anticipated indie games of all time".
Critique
Watch (1 hour, 20 mins) - Blue Prince is the Best (and the Worst) of Exploration Puzzle Games - "A video about obsession, game design, work-life-puzzle game balance, and why Fez’s monolith needs to answer for its crimes. And also Blue Prince is there".
Read - A Game Of The Year Contender Is Passing Right Under People's Noses - Kotaku - "The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy is too ambitious to be ignored".
Read - Thoughts on Lee Petty's "Keeper" - "A guiding light in a new theoretical approach to game design that is less persuasive and less dogmatic than its contemporaries".
Read - 2025 Is Full Of Historical Blockbusters Trying To Rewrite Old Myths - "Ghost of Yotei, Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, and Mafia: The Old Country each, to different degrees, complicate our vision of the past".
Artistry
Watch (28 mins) - Behind The Graphics Of Silksong - "How does a game like this actually work behind the scenes and how can we use shaders to fix some common problems plaguing them?".
Watch (17 mins) - The Animation in Silksong - Dan Root breaks down the tiny details that make Hornet and Trobbio look so good.
Watch (16 mins) - Game Animation Breakdown - "Let's break down some gameplay animations from Horizon Zero Dawn, Pac-Man and Kingdom Hearts II to see what makes them good! Or possibly bad? We'll find out".
Read - The strength of Super Metroid's soundtrack is in its silences - "In addition to pure silence, huge portions of the Super Metroid soundtrack make use of long, sustained, low notes that evoke the industrial sounds of a machine hum".
History
Watch (21 mins) - What Happened To The Simpsons Hit & Run? - "With over 10,000,000 copies sold, you'd expect there to be a Hit & Run 2 by now, right?".
Read - The Death of Adventure Games: The Cat Mustache Was Never the Issue Here - "The world needs a whole lot more whimsy after all".
Read - How Mortal Kombat (and moral panic) changed the gaming world - "On its release in 1993, Midway’s gore-filled fighting game ushered in a new era of hyperviolent gaming that continues to influence the industry to this day".
Read - Fighting game preservation and the tyranny of choice - "So many ways to revive a game, and yet, so [few] fighting games brought back to life".
Beyond Games
Watch (38 mins) - Why AI "Art" Feels So Wrong - "Is AI "just another tool" or something else?".
Watch (14 mins) - The Incredible Engineering Behind The Nightmare Before Christmas - "In this episode we take a closer look at the materials and engineering behind the sets and puppets in the movie...". The creator has more videos on this classic movie.
Watch (32 mins) - Long Takes Aren’t All the Same - "Though these are indeed impressive technical feats, they are not as fluent in film language as you would imagine".
Watch (29 mins) - Why Movies Just Don't Feel "Real" Anymore - "A deep dive into the first principles of movie immersion: on perceptual realism, indexicality, haptic visuality, and cinematic qualia".
Watch (16 mins) - You didn't lose your attention span. It was stolen. - "By looking at the history of newspapers, and then looking at how marketing works in the 21st century, we can see what we're up against".