Welcome to Dev Game Club, where this week we continue our series on Majora's Mask. We talk a bit about getting stuck, the structure, and do some extended catch-up on email. Dev Game Club looks at classic video games and plays through them over several episodes, providing commentary.

Sections played: Up to Swamp Dungeon

Issues covered: making it feel different, long-winded save mechanics, interrupting your play, expecting it to be okay to let the world end, the threatening moon, how games hold up, the usual strategy for reuse: more of the same, making the main mechanic out of a minor Ocarina mechanic, recontextualizing models and similar locations, the groom mask and the new interactions, constraining locations you can reach, the audio mix, being able to control for when certain events happen or not, being unclear on whether the water is poison, searching high and low for a bottle, a non-Nintendo moment, implying that the player could have been prepared, looking forward to more masks, reusing your engine, platform architecture converging, changing goals requiring changing programs, a podcast guidebook, Tim's annotated notes, finally having a list, recency bias, convergence of mechanics in AAA games, a story of a dev inspired by events and the podcast, asset flips, Majora's Mask inspiration.

Games, people, and influences mentioned or discussed: CalamityNolan, Outer Wilds, Melancholia, Stranger Things, Wind Waker, Ultima, Hitman, GameCube, Oddberry Games, Vitor, Eye of the Beholder (series), Doom (series), Fallout (series), Monkey Island (series), Warren Spector, Origin Systems, Apple ][, PlayStation, Xbox, Unreal, Republic Commando, Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, Mystery Dip, Carlos, Dark Souls, Deadly Premonition, Hollow Knight, Ubisoft, Anthony Vaccaro, Synersteel Studios, Eric Heimberg, Sandra Powers, Nicholas Vaccaro, Maria Vaccaro, Valley of Shadow, What Remains of Edith Finch, The Witness, The Talos Principle, Raymond, Drew, David Lynch, Takashi Tezuka, Twin Peaks, Link's Awakening, Dwarf Fortress, Mors, Kirk Hamilton, Aaron Evers, Mark Garcia.

Next time: More Majora's Mask

Links: Valley of Shadow via Steam

Twitch: timlongojr and twinsunscorp YouTube Discord [email protected] mailto://[email protected]