"Lets dig/dive into this. Welcome to Design Delve."
Design Delve is a Web Video series, narrated by JM8 (with help from his Canine Companion Ludo), in which he looks at different aspects of video game design, and educates the viewers about how those aspects work, and why they work so well. Or, in some cases, why they don't work as well as they should.
Design Delve started off at The Escapist, but JM8 jumped ship alongside other video creators and now his show is aired under the Second Wind banner.
Design Delve Provides and Discusses Examples of:
- Accessory-Wearing Cartoon Animal: Ludo typically only wears a miner's helmet with a headlamp.
- The Cameo: Frost makes a brief appearance in "The Scarily Good Design of Alien Isolation" after JM8 gets jumped by an ice cube with a Xenomorph's face.
- Intelligible Unintelligible: Ludo frequently provides commentary on the videos' subject matter, but it's up to JM8 to interpret her barking for the viewers' benefit.
- Master of None: JM8 accuses Starfield of this in "Can a Badly Designed Game Still Be Good?", stating that it's better to make a good game for a select audience than a bland game for everyone else.
- Only Sane Man: JM8, in the "Asset Flip" episode. He barely has time to react to one horrible idea or game-breaking cut corner, before Ludo rushes ahead to the next one—and they have widely differing reactions to the end result.JM8: (after posting a "Ludo Woz Ere" sign on a wall in-game) Is this because you want people to know you made this? Ludo, I don't think you want that. There are still so many issues. The doors don't work, you can't walk up the stairs, you can't vault, you can't hip-fire—you can't even look up! How have we overlooked the Z-axis?!
Ludo: (barks)
JM8: Wh—"ship it"?! Ludo, have you been taking producer pills or something? - Punny Name: JM8's dog is named Ludo. As in, "ludology", the study of games, which suits the series for being about studying games.
- Saying Sound Effects Out Loud: "Asset Flip" features a foley pack for the game's weapons that consist entirely of someone just boredly muttering "Bang!" into their crappy microphone (if not entirely AI generated). These overlap into something like "Boo-ang! Boo-ang!" for rapid-fire weaponry.
- Signing-Off Catchphrase: Each video ends with JM8 asking the audience: "But what... do you think?".
- Stylistic Suck: In the "Asset Flip" episode. The game is explicitly cobbled together from free asset packs and UnrealEngine 5 as a way of analyzing the motivations of such things.
- Suspiciously Specific Denial: In the "Was Blighttown a Mistake?" video, JM8 doesn't resent the bonfire that traps you in that level, because "I love being trapped!"Ludo: (suspicious bark)
JM8: No, it's not a sex thing! - They Copied It, So It Sucks!: Discussed in "What Developers Misunderstand About Dark Souls Level Design", where JM8 goes into a lot of detail about why Lords of the Fallen (2023) fails to emulate Dark Souls' level design properly. For example, where Dark Souls uses vistas to prepare the player for the level ahead, Lords uses vistas after where they would have been useful, giving the player a view of the level that they had to wade through without preparation.
- Worst. Whatever. Ever!: "The Worst Puzzle of All Time," which gives the titular crown to the sphere-rotation puzzle from Obduction. JM8 justifies this choice—particularly over the more obvious Moon Logic candidates from earlier point-and-click games—based on how tedious it is to implement the puzzle's solution, even long after the player has arrived at that solution. (Oh, and they recycle the puzzle two more times.)
- Your Mom: Usually a Gender-Inverted Trope, as JM8 is fond of making "Your dad" jokes. His response to the in-game explanation for the aforementioned Obduction puzzle, however, is an incredulous "...Your mum, yeah?!"
But what... do you think?
