In Dragon Age Inquisition, there are horses you can ride, and theres a button that makes them sprint, speeding then up. Except, no it doesn't. A few years ago, the Creative Director, John Epler, made a post explaining that the game engine couldn't actually handle the speed of the horse sprinting. So hitting the sprint button doesn't make you go any faster, it just increases the field of view and adds some motion blur to make it feel like you're going faster

13:43 Sorry Andy, Jane was actually nodding at the lamp; that's the monster's attack cue.

Portal cheats in another way. The portals have a funneling effect where if the player is a little off they still get sucked into the portal and come out the center of the other portal. No hitting the edge of the portal and spinning off in a strange direction out the other side. This is really helpful considering some of the long distances you need to fall to build momentum for some puzzles.

Just for everyone interested, the reason why the portals are blue and orange, is that people with colourblindness can still distinguish both from each other without having a dedicated colorblind mode... u can see this colorscheme alot throug different games like rocket league (which have a colorblind dev or leaddesigner cant remember), Batllefield, the new legend of zelda games and so on ...

It's been in past videos, but I appreciate Bioshock's trick of making all splicers miss with their first shot. This makes ambushes feel startling and immediately dangerous, but without the sense of frustrating unfairness that would come from getting deadeyed out of nowhere every time. Speaking of missed shots, Half-Life 2 has a neat mechanic that "steers" stray bullets. If a shot goes wide of its target, the game will try to veer it toward something interesting or destructible instead, like a nearby explosive barrel. Gotta keep those firefights cinematic, especially if there's a chance to show off the physics engine.

I worked as a game designer on Oddworld New n Tasty. One of the tricks we did was that if you were getting shot at, as long as you were a reasonable distance from the shooter and running away, you'd never get killed.

You've got the Alien Isolation one the wrong way around by the way - the behaviour tree is the one that handles physical senses like sight, hearing etc. It's the director that knows where you are at all times and governs the game's tension.

Satisfactory capping fall damage combines with it NOT capping the boost in speed you get when entering a transit tube to make the tube cannon a viable form of travel from one side of the map to the other. Just chain a bunch of really short tubes together and launch yourself into the sky, it will hurt coming down but you'll live.

Can confirm about the players scaring themselves thing. Many times when I am sailing across the Horrors-infested sea in Dredge, the wind will howl spookily and my Joy-Cons will rumble ominously, but when I stop to see what horrors are approaching so i can dodge, nothing happens. I have over 55 hours logged in this game. I should be used to this by now. But it still gets me. Every single time.

My Portal headcanon: the reason it's always a blue portal is because, like everything made in Aperture, it actually has an artificial intelligence and, after so long, has developed an attachment to Chell and would overwrite her input and always fire a blue portal at the moon to save her.

I was expecting the lamp monster to cut off Andy's world class performance at the end. Perhaps the soothing music calmed the beast?

A lot of games like Assassin's Creed make it so the last part of your health bar is significantly "bigger" or more valuable than the others.

I like that when you made the joke about Ubisoft and activating towers you used Far Cry 5 as an example where that’s the only tower you climb and activate in the entire game. They literally just added that as a joking nod to the previous games and then revealed that actually you clear the fog by exploring the map manually.

I still remember in Senua's sacrifice. During a difficult fight, I suddenly hear one of her inner voices go "look out!" overlayed by two others going "Behind you!" and instinct took over. I dodged, and perfectly avoided an attack coming from an enemy offscreen. That was downright amazing. I felt SUPER immersed in that very moment.

As someone old enough to have had dental work before the days we got anaesthetic injected into our gums, that bit is now my favourite. It means I won't feel what comes next.

Did Andy suggest making this video to justify the expense of purchasing an otamatone?

I remember a spiritual predecessor video you mentioned for example of how game developers trick you by making a 4 hit kill attack take away 33/100 health instead of 25/100 health to leave you with that "by the skin of your teeth moment". I cant unsee that development trick anymore.

Thematically, the Hellblade "cheat" makes sense. Senua has psychosis. As you play, her reality is often called into question, what is real, what isn't. So they attempted to make sure you felt just a little bit of the same thing, by "lying" to you.

11:20 Great bit of acting by Jane, that one really got me for some reason

Another notable example of this is Kirby and the Forgotten Land. Developers use multiple tricks to give you the “close enough” effect. For instance, if you’re about to land and press the jump button slightly too early, while Kirby is still off the ground, Kirby will still jump. Also, iirc if your attack misses an enemy in 3D space, but the camera angle makes it look like it might have connected, the enemy still takes the hit