I'm not a huge gamer. But I do love video games. I'm more of a narrative focused guy. I don't care too much about gameplay. As long as gameplay is smooth and its the type of genre I like, I don't bother with gameplay. I'm even in favor of seeing more games where gameplay itself take a backseat. I love all the cutscenes of Metal Gear games and I'm super hyped for Hideo Kojima's next game, Death Stranding. But that's not what I'm going to talk about today.

Today I'm going to curate some articles and videos related to video games. I don't see many articles on steemit that dive into the BTS stuff and the history of these productions. Nothing pops into existence out of thin air. When you understand the work and effort put into this lovely interactive medium, you will learn to respect even the bad games (most of the time). Some games does deserve the insults they get. A perfect example would be Metal Gear Survive. Most games (even when they fall short of expectations) can give insight into getting our own creative lives in order. That's why I love to explore the stories behind the interactive stories we get. But before we go for that, you can check out my 2 articles on Metal Gear Franchise which had tons of content in them :-)

A Tribute to The Metal Gear Franchise that changed gaming forever

The Genius and the Prophecies of Hideo Kojima and Metal Gear

Gamasutra - Postmortems

If you've ever been interested in making video games or even had a curious desire to take a look behind the curtains, the most insightful look would be going through some postmortems. These things cover the entire process and re-evaluated everything that happened during the production. Even if you are not in the game industry, these postmortems can still help you at any creative leadership positions.

Instead of letting you go through everything on your own I'll pick some of my favorites for you. First let's start with a 6 page postmortem on DOOM and Id software. Although they didn't invent FPS, they are the reason you are seeing tons of COD, Battlefield, Overwatch, CS:GO, PUBG etc.

One feature that was built in from the beginning was a multiplayer option. Id added this feature with an eye toward the future. The Doom designers felt that multiplayer games would become increasingly important as Internet and other forms of commercial networks become part of more homes.
Although Id expects less than 10% of players of Doom to make use of the ability, up to four players can join the same game over a Novell IPX network. Id designers felt it was important to start working on multiplayer games now, so they would have the experience when it was more crucial to their development.
As soon as the network option was added, however, more complications cropped up. For example, the line-of-sight checks that the monsters' AI programming went through were slowing the game because they had to scan for every player. Another problem with the AI routines was that monsters were targeting some players, but ignoring others. These problems were fixed, but there was a minor problem that had to stay in the game.
-Monsters from the Id: The Making of Doom

Resident Evil 4

One of the most influential and one of my favorite video games ever. I just LOVED everything about the design of the game. Graphics are dated and some extra features and better story would have been awesome. But this was 13 years ago. Most things regarding modern horror games were invented or re-invented by Shinji Mikami's RE 4

Here you can read Resident Evil 4 cinematics lead Yoshiaki Hirabayashi present 5 things that went right and 5 things that went wrong with the game.

Treyarch's Spiderman (2002)

The studio has not made anything not COD since 2008. But they did make all 3 of the Spiderman movie tie-in games. They were OK. You can read a list of 5 things that went right and 5 things that went wrong here.

Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs

I'm not a fan of run and hide horror games. RE 4 is more of my thing. A Machine for Pigs wasn't that succesful at the time. The team also had to go through a bunch of stuff.

As development continued however it was clear that the system simply was not integrating well into the rest of the game, and felt too much like a "mechanic" for the sake of being a "mechanic." The infection-based attacks from enemies for example, felt weak and unthreatening at best and downright confusing at worst. Similarly, environmental infection events, however they were framed, could not shake the feeling of players walking through luminous green toxic waste in any number of classic shooters. After many attempts at integrating the system more convincingly into the game, the decision was taken to remove it. This removal, while certainly not trivial, allowed much more focus to be paid to the core essence of the game -- the story, and the environments through which it is told.

These discussions could not have been achieved however without ensuring communication between the team was simple, reliable and fast. Throughout development, the entire team was working remotely with staff working from the UK in Portsmouth, Brighton, London, and Winchester, along with others in Belgium and FG based in Sweden. Communication was carried out primarily through Skype, with email used when paper trails were necessary. The majority of communication occurred in this Skype "virtual office" however and it proved successful. Such a setup has evident drawbacks over a normal co-located office setup, such as not being able to simply turn to a colleague's screen and explain something, instead having to draw elaborate diagrams (often in Paint) to try and explain the functionality of a particular puzzle or the sequence of events in an area. However, given the limitations the team had to work with, the communication methods were fit for purpose and served the development of the game well -- as well as generating a number of excellent pieces of programmer-art and stick-man diagrams to boot.
-Postmortem: The Chinese Room's Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs

Somehow the game did end up doing over 3 million copies. So I guess all the troubles and sort of mixed reception at launch didn't matter too much. I personally liked the environment and world building. But the gameplay was totally not my thing.

Super Meat Boy (2010)

This indie mega hit started out as a flash game in 2008. The game sold 2.8 million copies on Steam and it was also released on Xbox 360, OS X, Linux, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, Wii U, Nintendo Switch. You can play the original game at: http://armorgames.com/play/2388/meat-boy

Here is the postmortem: https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/134717/postmortem_team_meats_super_meat You can find more sketches like the one above and an interesting story in the postmortem.

How to save your Kickstarter

Crowdfunding is getting big. Apart from Kickstarter, there is https://indiegogo.com and there is https://www.fig.co which gives the opportunity for uncredited investors to invest as to obtain a shares of future revenues for successful projects. But those have only funded multi-million dollar projects. EOS became a multi billion dollar crowdfunding. I think ICOs can learn a huge lot from Kickstarter and similar projects.

Camouflaj started a half a million dollar Kickstarter to make a high quality mobile game that was later released on PC. I'd describe it has solid world building, gripping narrative and gameplay that is Metal Gear Solid on touch screen with no guns and no boss fights. The game had 5 episodes and I got bored after the 1 episode. But I must say that the production quality was at the level of an Xbox 360/PS3 level. I totally respect the devs for the effort.

https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/176187/how_camouflaj_saved_rpubliques_.php

Just leaving you with this much content doesn't feel enough for me. (Actually I just ended up finding way more stuff to write about and I'm feeling sort of frustrated about it) So I decide to leave you with a small quick but also very informative. I've got to go back to my research (which has sort of become a soft-addiction for me). So I'll leave you with the story of a pioneer of the video game industry.

The next one is going to give you a bunch of facts to show off around your gamer friends. So watch and remember :-)