So today is the day that university starts back up for me, but I hope to still keep this blog updated with games I’m playing and design stuff that I’m liking somewhat frequently (hopefully at least once a day). But as a quick post, I’d like to share some people that I’m watching and learning from. Almost all of these people will be based on YouTube, both to keep them accessible to you but also because that’s just where I get a lot of my entertainment from.

RedLetterMedia - film discussion/comedy

Known primarily for their “Mr Plinkett” critiques of the Star Wars prequel trilogy (which are longer than the films themselves), RedLetterMedia consists of Mike Stoklasa, Jay Bauman, and the one and only Rich Evans (some of their friends occasionally make appearances too). They have a few regular shows which are normally a long-form discussion of film, “re:View” is where two of the group will sit down and talk about a movie from the past that they love, “Half in the Bag” is the show where Mike and Jay talk about whatever films they’ve seen in the last week or two, and “Best of the Worst” is where they pick random bottom-of-the-barrel VHS tapes and drink themselves to death. Unlike a lot of other film YouTube creators, RedLetterMedia actually has pretty good production value too, they hand-build all their sets, they have multiple cameras to cut between during conversations, they don’t scrimp on time or effort when producing content, since each video is normally at least 30 minutes long and are edited as if it were a professional production. They’ve also produced and distributed a few films themselves (on their own), none of them is particularly great, but it gives their more technical critiques more validity in my opinion.

They’re also just fun to watch on screen, you can tell that they’re all really good friends.

Watch at: https://youtube.com/user/redlettermedia

Noclip - videogame documentaries

I do not know how these guys do it. Noclip makes flawless documentaries about the “behind the scenes” of the games that we all know and love. Much like movies and music, we tend to pin the success (or failure in some cases) of a piece of a game on its director/studio/whatever single and the easily digestible name appears on the front of the box, but that’s not really the reality of how these things are made. There are (normally but not always) teams of people working on these projects, and Noclip is one of the only places that I’ve seen who regularly interview everyone involved in the project’s creation, rather than just the project’s director/studio’s CEO. Noclip’s documentaries are about how games are made, but I feel like it’s more about the people who make them.

https://noclip.video/

https://youtube.com/c/noclipvideo

Game Maker’s Toolkit - game development docs & essays

I won’t linger on GMTK for very long because I personally don’t watch many of their videos/essays unless a topic really interests me, but they are very diligent producing at least a few well written and edited videos a month and they’ve cultivated a great “hobbyist game dev” community with regular game jams. So, if you’re interested in what it takes to make a game or you’re thinking of making a game/interactive project, Game Maker’s Toolkit has you covered for 90% of game-dev related topics. They also make pretty good video essays every now and then too.

https://youtube.com/c/MarkBrownGMT

That’s all for today folks. Hope these were remotely useful for someone, I may update this in the future if I start to feel passionately about other creators. Bye!