Hello! Another month over, another newsletter. It feels like I'm speedrunning through this year. Any%, all glitches allowed. I cannot believe we're in the sixth month of 2026. What!
Work
And it's been a very busy month for me, starting with my massive Grand Theft Auto III video. This was so much fun to make - I got to do deep research and motion graphics and writing code and doing creative things on camera. It's the full package. And luckily people dug it - the video has already surpassed 800k views, the comments are really positive, and I even got a nice tweet from Rockstar's former technical lead.
This video also unlocked a new type of content for me.
The heart and soul of GMTK is really this idea of "revealing the secret genius of game makers". Like - people who make games are super smart, but most of their hard work is invisible. The psychological tricks of a puzzle designer, the invisible tutorial of a Valve game, the secret handholding of coyote time, etc. So let me show it to you.
Now for most of GMTK, that has focused on game design. Adaptive difficulty in Resident Evil 4 or protecting players from dominant strategies. But there's just as much cleverness and creativity in the more technical aspects of game development, like using streaming to make an entire city work in 32MB of memory!
So I'm looking forward to doing more videos on this sort of topic. How do games do massive crowds? How does pathfinding work? I can tackle subjects like rendering and AI and cameras and so on.
This all comes off the bat of me getting into game development myself - really learning how games work, from a firsthand perspective. I simply wouldn't have been able to recompile GTA 3 with my own code before I made Mind Over Magnet and Word Play.
So that's exciting! Watch this space, I guess. To start, I've made a playlist with my videos on this subject, "looking at systems, technology, and optimisation".
I followed that video up with a quick one on Cyberpunk 2077's montage. I explain the genesis of that video in the video itself. I suddenly remembered the game's show-stopping cinematic montage and just had to figure out how they did it. A few days, a lot of mods, a bunch of video footage later and I had a quick bonus video!
After that I took some time off the main GMTK videos to do a few other tasks.
I received an email from Humble Bundle asking if I wanted to put Mind Over Magnet in a puzzle game pack they were about to launch. It was a no-brainer: MOM is quite old now and so sales on Steam have slowed down, so it wasn't a big loss to put the game in a mega discounted bundle. And it's ended up making about $7000. Which is awesome. I'll definitely be keen to do more bundles in the future.
And yeah, I made a quick video to promote that. It was also a chance to play with camera stuff - I decided to give it some nostalgic colour correction and a 4:3 aspect ratio. Kinda wanted to differentiate it as an "ad", instead of normal content. It will be delisted from GMTK in a few weeks.
Next, I finally announced the date for the 2026 Game Jam. The jam date is always announced a little late as it needs to fit around my life and my schedule. And this year that was particularly tricky as I dunno what's happening from moment to moment! So it's come pretty late.
But sign-ups are already strong, so hopefully we'll still get some great numbers. And I enjoyed making the jam announcement video - I used shaders (another skill from game dev!) to make my motion graphics look like an ancient pixelated monitor.
And then, finally for May - it was time to do something I've been putting off for the best part of a year: bringing Word Play to mobile! I dusted off Unity, desperately tried to relearn my tangled code base, and put in the work to make this thing work properly on iOS.
Luckily the main stuff is already done. The game was developed for the Steam Deck and other touchscreen PCs, so all the touch-based code has been implemented and tested. So it was more the iOS specific things: like making the achievements talk to Game Center instead of Steam, and dealing with the fact that modern iPhones have a big camera blob in the middle of the display. Oh, and the the big one: making it so the game starts as a free trial with only one mode and a handful of modifiers, and then allows you to unlock the rest with a single in-app purchase.
All of that is now done, so my job this week is to get it to Apple for review. And that means all the boring metadata stuff - taking screenshots, writing descriptions, etc. I can copy and paste from Steam for some bits, but I think the screenshots will need to be specific to iPhone and iPad resolutions.
Anyway - I'll tell you more about that when it's ready!
Other stuff
I'm still not back into gaming in a big way. I did start Mina The Hollower and I'm enjoying it a lot - but hard games are a tough sell when you only have a limited time to play. When I can find an hour or two in the evening when baby is in bed... it's tough to play a game where I'm having to constantly re-play the same area or boss fight over and over again.
I don't even know if the game is particularly hard or if I've just got terrible reaction times from the lack of sleep!
The game's got a lovely art style, though, and lots of clever mechanics. Its healing system is a mix of Dark Souls and Bloodborne. And it has so many sub weapons and perks and whatnot to let you make a varied build. I guess my only disappointment is that the art style screams GBC Zelda... but it doesn't really feel like Zelda. This isn't a new Oracle of Seasons - it's more like a Dark Souls demake for Game Boy Color.
Otherwise, I'm building up a bit of a backlog of games I want to play when I'm feeling like gaming again. That new Bond game looks neat! And that new Forza looks mighty fancy!
I caught some more movies. Project Hail Mary is one of the best audiobooks I've listened to in some time, so I was excited for the movie. And for the most part it doesn't disappoint! My only complaint is that there's so much book to fit into 3 hours - everything goes by so quick. I'm not sure I would have understood everything, or gotten fully invested in the central relationship, if I didn't have the context from the book.
I also watched The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. It's... a lot. Like the previous film this is a hyperactive TikTok stream of fast cuts and colourful montages. And it's pretty brainless with almost no depth to the story and all narrative tension resolving itself within 10 minutes of anything happening. But, hey, I got to see Wart and Fox and the guys from Mario Sunshine in glossy Hollywood CGI so it's not all bad.
Otherwise, life is good - if still busy. But every month is easier than the one before. I feel more comfortable and confident as a dad. And I'm super excited for what the future holds!
Chat soon
Mark