GMTK Digest (March 2025)

Hello GMTK supporters! 

March was a busy month for me. I was either prepping for GDC, attending GDC, or recovering from the jetlag of GDC. But I found some time to play a few games and watch a lot of YouTube videos (I used that 10 hour flight well!)

As always I'll start with my takes on this month's new releases. Then there's the biggest news headlines you need to know. And finally, the best bit - a whole bunch of articles and videos that any GMTK fan should enjoy.

Also: a shout out to people who give me article and video ideas for the Digest. Really appreciate it. Best way to reach me is either as a Patreon DM, or in the GMTK Discord's GMTK channel!

Speak soon!

Mark

New Releases

Two Point Museum

A few years back some ex Bullfrog developers made the Theme Hospital spiritual sequel Two Point Hospital. Since then we've also gotten Two Point Campus and, now, Museum. These are cute, charming, and reasonably laid back management games. 

They're way more approachable than Frontier's games (Planet Coaster / Zoo) on account of having fewer moving parts, and a simpler grid-based layout.

In this new one you'll have to send archeologists off to remote locations to dig up dinosaur bones and the like, to expand the showcases in your museum. It adds a clever new twist as your crew can be injured while on exhibition. 

Wanderstop

This one's a bit of a who's who of indie game talent: with direction from The Stanley Parable creator Davey Wreden, writing from Gone Home's Karla Zimonja, and music from Minecraft's C418. 

The game itself is a classic cozy sim - this time about planting seeds, growing fruit, and using those to brew herbal teas. But the story is very smart: it's about a warrior who suffers from burnout and exhaustion, and must come to terms with the fact she needs to look after her mental health.

It's apparently an autobiographical tale from Davey's own experience with making games. But it really spoke to me. Sometimes it's okay to slow down. Sometimes it's okay to take a break. Right?

Assassin's Creed Shadows

It's the game that inspired endless articles and videos, thanks to the most boring discourse imaginable. But put all that noise aside and this game is... pretty good! At least, once you get past the overly long tutorial part.

Sure, it's pretty typical Assassin's Creed fare by this point. But it has some nice new moves: like being able to go prone! I dunno why this is cool, but it's kinda rare for a game to have three stances (standing, crouching, and prone). It was cool in Last of Us 2, it's cool here.

The game is also pretty stunning, with beautiful vistas dotted with cherry blossom trees. It gives Ghost of Tsushima a run for its money. 

I'll need to play more to give any proper impressions, but critic reviews have been very positive. Eurogamer says "Majestic in scope, impressive in detail, Assassin's Creed Shadows honours the beauty of feudal Japan".

Split Fiction

It Takes Two was one of the best games of the last few years: a wildly imaginative and inventive co-op game that never let an idea wear out its welcome. This is Hazelight's follow-up.

IGN says "An expertly crafted and absorbing co-op adventure that pinballs from one genre extreme to another, Split Fiction is a rollercoaster of gameplay ideas and styles that are usually discarded as quickly as they’re introduced."

I have yet to play it - hoping to try it soon! 

Also this month:

• Fights in Tight Spaces gets the perfectly-named fantasy spin-off Knights in Tight Spaces

• Main Frames feels like it was made for the Built to Scale game jam theme

• The Darkest Files is a historical investigation into Nazi crimes. Cheerful!

• The latest plinko-style numbers-go-up roguelike is Nubby's Number Factory

• Inkle's new game is Overboard in a school: it's Expelled!

• Pathologic 3: Quarantine is a free prologue to the upcoming horror game

• Atomfall is described as British fallout... but the reviews are very mixed

Headlines

Fans Port Sonic Unleashed to PC, Potentially Opening the Floodgates to Xbox 360 Recompilation - Sonic Unleashed has been trapped on old consoles for ages. Now you can play it on PC - at 4K, if you fancy it - thanks to a clever bod who has managed to translate its source code into a PC-friendly language (or something like that). With this, practically any 360 game could be ported to PC. 

Aloy actor reacts to AI-powered leak: ‘I am worried for this art form’ - "Aloy actor Ashly Burch has said that she is worried about the future of video game performance as an art form, following the release of a video that appeared to be an AI-generated version of Burch’s character."

Game Informer Is Back And The Entire Team Has Returned - US retailer GameStop shelved the 30-year-old magazine back in 2024. Now it's back, after having been acquired by the wonderfully named Gunzilla Games.

Nintendo Direct March 2025: everything announced - Nintendo's real Switch 2 showcase is next week. But we got some last-minute Switch 1 news this week, including Metroid Prime 4 footage, a new Rhythm Heaven game, and a weird and slightly confusing look at "virtual game cards".

Reading List

Design

Read - The Half-Life Delusion - "Valve had “cracked the code”, had finally shown that a game could tell a story without a single cutscene, without ever “taking control away from the player".

Watch (22 mins) - Black Monolith: An Unfinished Mystery - An exploration of Fez's final unsolved mystery.

Watch (40 mins) - How The Blue Shell WARPED Mario Kart - "We take on almost the entirety of Mario Kart, looking at its most infamous item: the Blue Shell, and see how both it, and Mario Kart as a whole, evolved in item play and priorities".

Watch (27 mins) - When Games Check Your Sanity - "We’ll dive into what makes a GOOD nightmare sequence. What film, animation, and games all do best when it comes to crafting a good hallucination".

Development

Watch (1 hour, 40 mins) - Some Things That I've Learned About Game Development While Making ULTRAKILL So Far - A recorded talk about making, marketing, and releasing Ultrakill.

Watch (28 mins) - The Origins of Dwarf Fortress - "In the first episode of this four-part series we explore the  decisions that led a pair of brothers to embark on the development journey of a lifetime".

Read - The Balatro Timeline — LocalThunk - "It’s been approximately 3 years since I began work on Balatro - and in that time I have personally documented almost nothing about the journey".

Watch (34 mins) - You don't actually want to make games - "People who've never made games have a very unrealistic view of what this industry is like to work in".

Watch (12 mins) - Game Dev Advice I Changed My Mind On - Jonas Tyroller: "I started giving game dev advice on YouTube over 7 years ago and have learned a lot since. Here are some beliefs about game development, that I changed my mind on!".

Business

Read - Capcom Was on Its Knees After Resident Evil 6, Now Monster Hunter Wilds Cements Its Golden Era - "A change in the way Capcom made its games, supported by a powerful new game engine, gave these much-loved series a new lease of life...".

Watch (1 hour, 15 mins) - For-Profit (Creative) Software - A look at how most software has shifted to a subscription model.

Read - What Can AAA Games Marketers Learn From Indies? - "So many AAA games’ Steam pages are full of common mistakes that would bury indie games".

Watch (27 mins) - These Indie Games Will Give You Hope for Gaming’s Future - "The games industry feels broken at the moment, especially if all you're looking at is the AAA side of things. Indie showcases like Steam Next Fest, however, give me hope for the future of the medium".

Culture

Read - Video games can’t escape their role in the radicalisation of young men - "Those of us who spend our lives gaming can no longer deny knowledge that our online communities are awash with disturbing hate speech and violent rhetoric".

Watch (40 mins) - This Game is Perfection, Please Don't Buy It - "It's Rollerdrome, and because Take-Two laid off everybody that made it".

Watch (17 mins) - An Archaeologist Overanalyzes God of War - "When did the character of Kratos live? What time period are the God of War games set in?".

Read - Surviving a Disco Elysium LARP - "Have you ever had to admit to your boss that your gun got stolen because you were distracted writing poetry with your former childhood friends at the local discotheque?"

Critique

Read - Expedition 1 - "We wanted to make a video game newsletter that isn’t in fact about news at all. It’s about games we’ve played or games we’re looking forward to". From Eurogamer and Guardian writers.

Artistry

Watch (41 mins) - The Best Game Animation of 2024 - "2024 brought an abundance of fantastic game animation, and I'm going to see to it that you are aware of ALL OF IT".

Read - The Empty Promise of AI-Generated Creativity - "What strikes me about AI-generated stories, dialogue, and characters is their inherent mimicry".

Watch (26 mins) - Humans are Bags of Meat (in Games) - "Perhaps the heap of bodies clangs a bell, reminds me of love; a closeness gone missing".

History

Watch (13 mins) - How Tony Hawk hacked 3 Generations of Video Game Consoles - "It turns out that some of the games were riddled with code that can be exploited for unauthorized code execution".

Beyond Games

Watch (40 mins) - I put 27 habits to the ultimate test - Matt D'Avella looks back on several years of challenges and lifestyle changes. Interesting to look at which ones worked and which ones fell flat.

Watch (9 mins) - How Filmmakers Shrink Entire Cities - How to use tiltshift to shrink stuff.