Mark Brown, if you don’t know him already, is probably the biggest name in game design videos.
He’s decided to make a big push to see a proper game to market.
And he has announced that he’ll be using Unity (smart).
I’m sure he’s here under a pseudonym, so “Hi mark.”
I didn’t wanna speak for the community, but if you want to wish him luck I just wanted a place for it.
Best of luck Mark! Thanks for all that you’ve done!
I have no idea who Mark Brown is other than from that one video, but that may indeed be the most valuable beginner-oriented “how to get started making games” video that I’ve ever seen.
No joke. It’s the only one I’ve ever seen which is “how to approach solving problems” as opposed to “click in these places to make this happen”.
I do have a question, though. If he’s “probably the biggest name in game design videos” how is he just picking up these basics now…?
I do find it ironic that he’s spent so long talking about video game design without actually taking part in the industry itself for so long. If anything it just says he’s good at editing/writing videos, and on a number of occasions he’s taken down/altered videos for being more opinion than objective.
I do respect him highly for pushing matters such as accessibility in games, and I imagine he’s had a bit of influence on the industry in that regard. But other than that, he’s mostly a launching point for game design discussion in an amateur and non-professional format.
To answer this question, most videos he’s done has direct input from big industry names, often including interviews with developers. For example, on a video about designing good platformers, he has an interview with the developers of Celeste. Not to mention he does put in tons of man hours into research.
His videos aren’t without merit. Hell I’d say they’re quite valuable. But you do have to bear in mind he’s not an industry professional.
No idea who he is, but based on wiki, he was a video game journalist, and his youtube channel is a video game analysis channel rather then game design per se. While important, critiquing/analyzing/exploring video game design and designing video games are 2 different things because as they say, hindsight is 20/20 (at least in my opinion). It would be interesting to see how his game does given his longish history in this area (about 10 years since his video game journalist/game review days), and his 1m subscribers.
that explanation on how to learn unity was probably one of the best…(IMO)
I hope UnityHub is fixed and ready for all the new users:
I know Game makers toolkit but had no idea who mark brown was 
But I do agree that their videos are very good and full of actual applied knowledge rather than just “follow along” or pure theory style videos.
Never heard of any of this, but I gather Mark is a critic who now is learning to make games?
Will be interesting to see if he starts to understand that as a critic he probably spent more time thinking about game design than actual game designers did, and now that he is making games there is more decisions to juggle than just “is game design good.”
So the art critic is going to paint a Mona Lisa in sfumato. Talking about execution and executing are two different domains. The amusement here is when he begins executing and finds he can’t chat up VS code into yielding that perfect rotation.
For the most part, at the beginning, it feels like more of a case of “Can I or do I know how to do this?”
Followed by “WHY THE [DOLPHIN NOISES] IS THIS NOT WORKING?!”
lol yeah i hope he is a very honest fellow and is candid about his journey, that could be very valuable.
I never seen him so maybe he is perfectly cool but I think it would be valuable if he shows that much of game design is a series of compromises and emergent situations that make the final “design” more of a frankensteins monster that sort of takes off on it’s own.
I mean probably ubisoft has pretty clear designs because they make same thing over and over for so many years and have the money to blast through any problem, but for tiny studio or soloist… you make what you can make, and if you are clever you find ways to meld can with want.
anyway not trying to be a naysayer, all the best to our friend, will be interesting journey i’m sure.
He hasn’t even started and has already made a mistake.
Let me know when he gives up.
I hope he is exactly as successful as he was in keeping embargos from small indies when he reviewed games.
If the one video so far is anything to go by then I’d say that he is being fairly candid. The two games he showed making there, which sound like they happened over a period of weeks, were quite trivial, and even with that he points out that he still had trouble along the way (with rotations, no surprise).
I suspect that the videos are still designed around entertainment value, though. No point making them unless he can get people to watch them.
He’s already got further than most.
Everyone struggles with rotations at first.
Everyone.
And making mistakes is exactly how you get good at something.
And by the way, also about this guy, he also broke the record for most participants in a game jam on itch.io multiple times.
Doesn’t every one of his videos start with “Hi, I’m Mark Brown” ? 
Holy shit, who hurt you?
Imho that is a bit of a bad example because painting is so hard and the carryover from being an art critic to being a painter is worse than that from being a games journalist to being a gamedev. The indie scene is full of people that have professional programming backgrounds but are just as naively incompetent when it comes to gamedesign and art as you imply games journalists to be when it comes to code. The whole thing makes me think of Tom Francis who made this exact transition from journalist to gamedev and his first game “Gunpoint” was a big success that demonstrates very well how much of his first job carries over to being a gamedev.
I think Mark Brown has a real shot at this, and I wish him great success.
Damn, I would have bet on your answer being “Unity”.
I like @AcidArrow ’s sarcasm.
I don’t think they ever mean to be mean.
Using the Mona Lisa and sfumato was appropriate considering he is some creme de la creme of critics. The leap from critic to painter is one brush smear away. The culmination of those brush strokes is what determines a level of technical skill and creative acumen. He may be a virtuoso or another youtube jive talker. He does have a built in audience so he does have that advantage. I wish him neither success nor failure as I am indifferent to such but will find it intellectually interesting to see what results came out of the effort.
With 1.6m followers he’s gonna be completely successful. The game itself doesn’t even matter, he has such a huge built in audience, and the audience will be super invested because hundreds of thousands of people will have followed his entire video journey. He will obviously end up hiring people or get volunteers to help, I have no idea who he is so I don’t know if he’ll be honest or not about the actual process but it will definitely require outside help to complete unless its flappy bird level gameplay.
But considering he’s getting 200k views per video, he is completely funding the development effort with the advertising which is a kind of an amazing situation to be in.
…
Mark, if you’re reading this, DM me! Let’s collab! I’ll be your ghost coder if you help me promo stuff!
(Can’t blame a guy for shooting his shot)
Did you watch the video…?