#I need this dev to make more horrific games

[ovium-sheep]

Dying Star.

I forgot to name it properly oops!

Also I did indeed cook with this one.

[hellsite-yano]

STEAM NEXT FEST DEMOS I PLAYED:

>500 CALIBER CONTRACTZ Highlight of this list. Literally Super Mario 64 x Cruelty Squad with a Suda51 coat of paint. Highly recommend.

>Antishoot / Morn FPS games that feel terrible to play. Avoid.

>SAEKO: Giantess Dating Sim Title says it all. Pretty solid and unnerving writing.

>Mother Hub Like if the abandoned vaults in Fallout 3/NV were the whole game. Your enjoyment of this depends entirely on your tolerance for slavjank. I liked it tho.

>Year Unknown Good so far - if you've played games like Manifold Garden and NaissanceE you know what you're getting here. Combine that with the terminals from The Talos Principle and you get this game.

>Elation For The WonderBox 6000™ This is SHORT (less than 5mins) but I've had my eye on this for ages. The writing is very online but in a good way.

>Skyward Dream Kinda boring first-person platformer.

>THRESHOLD Another short one. Kinda reminds me of Pathologic but on the PS1. The grimy aesthetic is nailed down perfectly. If you liked Paratopic check this one out.

>Galaia Dev describes it as TUNIC x Enter the Gungeon but it's not really. Gameplay reminded more of Geometry Wars if anything. Was kinda fun but don't think I'll get this.

>BRUTAL JOHN Been seeing this around on twitter and avoided it due to it seeming bland. And I was right!

>Kitsune Tails SMB3 with a traditional japanese aesthetic. Solid and the characters are cute.

>Sparedevil A 'shooter' where you're in a bowling arena and need to knock down as many pins as possible. Couldn't really get the hang of this.

>I Am Your Beast SUPERHOT / Hotline Miami fans will want to check this one. I liked it but the story is presented pretty obnoxiously.

>Bloodless Beat 'em up where you play as an old samurai who doesn't use a sword (anymore). Gameplay takes a bit of getting used to but it's fun and the story's intriguing.

>Poke ALL Toads Puzzle game structured like Baba is You with really good and expressive art. Liked this one a lot.

>Caravan SandWitch One of those slow exploration-focused games like Sable. Liked the aesthetic and music but dialogue was a bit long-winded.

>ODDADA You play with toys to make music (and you can even save your creations offline). Very nice.

>B.C. Piezophile Control a weighty mech looking for a lost ship or something like that, the encyclopedia (yes, there's an encyclopedia) is written pretty esoterically so it's hard to figure some things out. Requires patience but got my eyes on the full release.

>Old School Rally PS1 styled racing game, takes a bit of getting used to the feel of the car, PROTIP: it's better to pump the brakes instead of holding them.

>Goblin Cleanup Viscera Cleanup Detail except you're a sexy goblin maid cleaning up a dungeon. Was pretty fun, especially online.

>Scarmonde Final Fantasy 1 but it's a dungeon crawler. Not my sort of game but if you're into this genre you'd probably like this.

>Bedrotting You're stuck in bed and got to keep yourself sane by eating, smoking, and not looking at the horrific abominations. Good stuff.

>Blue Prince You inherit a mansion and need to find the secret 46th room. Won't say too much about this because it's best discovered by yourself. Was very good though.

>Stardust Demon Didn't like the physics on this. Pass.

[neonfretra]

just read your nhl teams opinion post and I'm laughing my head off. sharkies clean sweep <3 <3 <3

COMPLETELY valid reason to dislike the devils, dw 'bout that (though if you ever need an infodump about them I come armed and ready!), but I will just say... macblack my beloved demon shark needle dodger... you are FAR from the only devil who's been stiffed by the terrible medical staff. imagine being sponsored by a hospital and having the worst concussion spotters in the league. radio-for-a-head is sputtering static right now I HATE THE DEVILS MEDSTAFF SO FUCKING MUCH THEY KEEP OBVIOUSLY INJURED PLAYERS IN GAMES AND IN THE LINEUP FOR NO FUCKING REASON AUGHHHHH

but I like how you looked at the entire east and went "who cares, experience shork". I aspire to be like this.

I also wish I could forget the Leafs. I also aspire to be like this.

um. in lieu of any like. actual content have pictures :]

timo mimo......... grabby hands............... it is possible that I named my blåhaj after him..................... they're the same picture your honor!!!

but I like how you looked at the entire east and went "who cares, experience shork". I aspire to be like this.

i need you to know this line has put me in honest to god, genuine tears from laughing. oh my god i didnt even realize. like i have the standings pulled up and goin down the list i literally only care for THREE teams (the bolts, the sens, and the pens) for their proximity to the sharks. INCREDIBLY humbling. read me like an open book. im returning to this ask when im not lightheaded oh my god

ok multiple parts to this response because im goin point by point. i yap a LOT. not sorry, hello <3

the art!

OH... those wings are DELIGHTFUL!!! i love how nicely you simplified them, especially with a pen hell?? very very elegant, i hope you get a major minor obsession with angels ^_^

the devs & injuries in the nhl

how they handle injuries drive me UP THE WALL. like i personally assume teams start actin like this when theyre in hopes of playoffs when in reality its like . BABY. WE ARENT GOIN TO BOSTON. PUT THE STICK DOWN.

to make this about the sharks (you read my rankings, you know im like this) i constantly joke about the sharks being the healthiest team in the league cause all our players are out. like christ we have second most missed games on a per player basis at 459 man games lost to injury, second to vegas!

but i think its straight up because playoffs are SUCH a pipe dream for 19-wins-total san jose sharks that we dont HAVE the same pressure to play with torn muscles or broken bones. there is a reason why mackblack CAN have his 72 hours of purgatory (3 day long fever) out compared to teams who are noted to have locker room wide sickness and still getting in board battles. i think we should expose mackblack to them kinda players before the preseason so he builds an immunity to whatever they got. yeah im basically trying to vaccinate him SORRY i am getting distracted

YES, i will disappointed beyond words when the sharks start gettin better at hockey

and its like that that i cant really say its a DEVS thing now, its tradition to see what horrific injury a player played through in their locker cleanout like a more morbid new years countdown. do not want to imagine the consequences of the culture as perpetuated by both staff and players on long term health. lord. and people get mad about mark stone takin time off.

in the same ravine, different vein, hohhh boy they were NOT joking we have gotta separate leagues and medical care. nothin good has come of a doctor workin in the best interest of your team that wants you on ice ASAP and not in the interest of keeping you healthy and able to play and to live a decent life after playin. league worst concussion spotters is a HIGH bar. lird.

but in the same breath what can you do about a mess of on ice spotters? unless you plan on bringin your family doctor as a plus one. which is an absolute wild thought actually. wag jacket for my medical practitioner <3 rhinestone directly INto my open injury <3

sponsored by a hospital too... irony is rollin in its grave hello a whole rotisserie chicken of it

the devs, but more normal

wait oh god i gotta be SO honest with you when i was raggin on the devs i had you in mind as like. THEE friend of mine that roots for em and debating on how impolite itd be to drag your team. and then i remembered we both root for vgk <3

would you believe me when i say i followed them a bit? yeah i was mostly lookin for kahkonen, i do miss him though id call it a bit bad mannered of me to clearly only root for a team for one player LOL

do NOT look at vgk. or tbl. or dal. dont even look at ME.

does it actually count if im also lookin at timo meier? two players thats gotta count for umm something. two things even? because hes an exshark. yeah. oh god it really is a sharkies clean sweep. beloved stereax you have unwound me like the noble helicase. you got me checked out and in like a library book. you broke me down to my barest components. what do i even do with myself right now???

i will NOT say more lest i embarrass myself more than i have already

LOVE that you named your blahaj after him, thats very cute <3 i am endlessly enamored by the photo you chose of timo mimo, why are you so hat boy!!!

hey isnt a blahaj also a shark

PLEASE feel free to tell me bout the devs, im sure knowin more about the team will not make me itching to throw down with their managements poor decisions any more ^_^

getting a little less normal, a little more embarrassing now

okay i need to be so honest with you. and myself. mostly myself. i was SO surprised to learn media has an eastern conference bias. what the hell is a traditional hockey market.

bringing shame to my family name by discussing the leafs

should i not be tryin to remember them if youre tryin to forget LMAO

you wanna know something more humiliating than regularly forgetting the leafs. i confuse them with MULTIPLE teams when i do remember them. NEAR EVERY BLUE TEAM. the bolts. the nucks. the sabres, when i do remember them. the blues.

I FOLLOW SOMEONE WITH A MITCH MARNER PFP. HOW DO I MANAGE TO FORGET THIS TEAM SO OFTEN???

visibly sweating and shaking as i stare at a wall and try to recall every bit of trivia i know about the leafs RN. if you root for the leafs i probably owe you financial compensation

[thefirstknife]

The higher ups at Bungie are 3 for 3 in terms of bad deals? You would've thought they would've learnt a lesson or two from leaving Microsoft and Activision.

I highly doubt Sony will ever be willing to let them go.

I feel like them getting into these deals is a sign that there's people at the top at Bungie themselves who are ultimately responsible. Like, these big corpos can be as shitty as possible and we can blame them for how they treat employees, but at the end of the day, management at Bungie is the one that decides to get into these situations.

I'm not even sure if there would be any point in Sony letting them go, even if they wanted to. Like, at this point with all the layoffs, it doesn't change anything anymore. They could go back to being independent and they wouldn't have enough resources to re-hire everyone laid off anyway. And it's questionable if anyone would even want to be re-hired.

Two more asks under:

I'm not sure either. I don't think we have any fully official numbers of how many were laid off. The 40% number is the most commonly reported right now. This includes all of Bungie, not just Destiny btw.

The theory would make sense, although as of now we really don't have enough information. But it makes sense with the general vibe of what's happening and with the claims that Sony wants to move away from live services and the fact that Bungie did not announce any new expansions.

Additionally, it would make the most sense that a lot of these veterans have wrapped up their contributions to TFS (a lot of concept art for example gets done really early, and even with music, it could've been written by now and just waiting recording) and since no new expansions are planned (presumably due to the incoming change in how Destiny will function after), Sony/Bungie did not want to keep these people on the payroll. They essentially won't need them if expansions aren't happening anymore.

This doesn't make it any less tragic or awful, of course. It's super extra disappointing, first and foremost to everyone who got laid off, because they were promised that the deal with Sony will not result in layoffs:

Though Bungie employees said leadership has assured them there will be “absolutely no layoffs” and nothing “major” in terms of restructuring once the Sony deal closes, the acquisition represents a notable shift for the Washington-based game developers.

Ofc, this was over a year ago. Things change. But it's still horrific because it means that the deal absolutely accounted for potential layoffs at some point in time and the employees were essentially lied to. Especially since this seems to be coming from the idea that they want to restructure how Destiny will work after. And for a lot of devs, that's something they wanted too, but this isn't being done in a way that benefits them at all. So many of those people were laid off in the first place.

In a way, there wouldn't be anything bad with cycling people through the industry. Sometimes veterans (in any industry or job or field) can preclude new people from ever getting a chance. It's overall a good idea to refresh the workforce every so often and get new people with new ideas a chance. Who knows how many, for example, absolutely stunning composers there are out there who can't get a chance because the veterans are employed for life. Like, these things are generally not supposed to be this devastating.

But like this? Absolutely not. Mass layoffs with basically no notice? People not given a choice? Ripping people out of on-going projects? Leaving remaining workers understaffed and demoralised? Treating employees essentially like expendable cattle that can be fired over night without any real explanation? Changing projects and goals mid-way through development? Leaving devs to scramble to salvage what can be salvaged while they're fearing for their employement?

This also probably involves hiring new talent just so you can excuse lower salaries. Because they HAVE been hiring recently. Now a lot of the job listings are gone, but there's been newly hired people coming in. And like I'm all in favour of new people getting a chance, but I've seen how this works and hiring new people just so you can pay them less is beyond shitty; it's essentially expecting entry level workers on entry level salaries to do jobs that used to be done by people with 15+ years of experience. And then when they finally get experience, they will be fired too. Even worse, this can sometimes make absolutely desperate workers with a lot of experience getting entry level jobs with entry level salaries because there's nothing else they can do. With the state of the industry right now (over 6000 layoffs this year), you can see why workers would be desperate to apply for anything.

I wouldn't go that far yet. Obviously we don't know anything for sure, but I don't believe TFS will be cancelled. Or that it can be. Again, Destiny is the only thing making money for Bungie. Studios can be shut down any time for sure, but even the most insane out-of-touch CEO would not shut down a video game at this stage in its life that is actively earning money. Like, that would be extraordinarily unprecedented.

But even in the showcase for TFS we've seen signs that they are looking to change how Destiny will work after. If anything, it's the stuff after that might be on the chopping block, but not TFS itself. Either way, we've seen that they did not announce any new expansions and that the original plan was to change seasons into episodes as, presumably, the full scope of content for the game going forward.

Without having to work on expansions, they don't need as many people to work on the game after. One of the main stresses for the dev cycle is having to churn an expansion each year on top of making content all year long for seasons. With expansions gone, that's a significant reduction in workload. And apparently in employees too. Obviously I think that's a bad choice. Even with expansions not happening, any content coming after would benefit from employees who have been working on the game for years. Except you know, someone up on top clearly doesn't think that content needs that many people who are on the highest salaries.

We'll see where this goes. As I said before, emotions are high right now and it hasn't even been 24 hours yet. Stay cautious and lower expectations, primarily to give remaining employees a break. No need to go full into the worst case scenario yet, mostly because we simply don't have enough information and I don't want to give the impression that we don't care anymore or it will be a self-fulfilling prophecy. There's also going to be a lot of rumours and unverified information going on for a while. I'd wait for things to settle and get confirmed before any further drama.

[sailorsharky]

On Hogwarts Legacy and allyship.

TW/CW: J.K Rowling, Hogwarts Legacy, Transphobia, Antisemitism mentioned. Right. CW out of the way, let me preface this by saying that this may turn out to be a long ramble, but I feel the need to voice my grievances in some way as a non-binary person. First of all, let's set some boundaries. Arguments in bad faith and trolling shall be ignored and/or reported/blocked. Lately, with all this hassle going on about Hogwarts Legacy, I felt the need to air my frustrations. We have all seen many different arguments from across both sides, but I will try to keep this as short as I can.

This game has been talked about well before launch, and many trans and enby folks, as well as Jewish people have asked for people to show solidarity by not buying the game. As an ally, it's important to note that it's not a lifetime pass. Many think that being an ally just means saying you support something or be generally neutral and not saying slurs. That is not the case. To be an ally you have to listen to what marginalized groups are saying. The release of this game and the widescale purchase of it by people only talking the talk and not walking the walk has shown many of us under the Trans umbrella (as well as our Jewish comrades) that we cannot trust those we called allies.

I am not saying that playing this game automatically makes you a bigoted person. Some folks I know got it and one admitted that the last JKR controversy he recalled was the whole "Dumbledore is now gay" debacle. (Pretty solid rock you've been under. Room for one more? /j) My ire is not pointed towards people that were genuinely ignorant of the situation, though my disappointment still stands and my trust in them as allies is gone. What mostly draws my ire is the knee-jerk reaction of supposed "allies" when pointing out that they have crossed the picket line and attempt to rationalize their purchase with arguments such as "I'm only supporting the devs", "I'm seperating the art from the artist", "What will 60-70 bucks change?" and "It's okay though because I donated as much/more to a Trans charity!" and so on. Let's go through them one by one. I'd like to keep this as short as possible however as many others have pointed out why these fall flat. 1. "I'm only supporting the devs". If you ONLY support the devs (of which the lead dev and a voice actor share JKR's horrific viewpoints), why aren't you buying EVERY single game on every storefront you make use of? This is a non-argument. If you buy games ONLY to support the devs, then by all means, bankrupt yourself to do just that. But you don't. You wanted to buy this game for nostalgia's sake. 2. "I'm separating the art from the artist" As a fan of HP Lovecraft's work, I understand the want to separate the art from the artist. But 1) Lovecraft is rotting in the ground as we speak. JKR is very much alive. 2) It's hard to seperate the art from the artist when said art is used as a cudgel to infringe upon human rights and dignity. Every act of consumption of her IP she sees as a vote of confidence in her brand of hatred. You may not personally see it that way, but she does, and she relishes in it. "But you just said you like Lovecraft's work! He was VERY racist and xenophobic!" Yes, absolutely! Let's HAVE that conversation, but not on this post. I agree that Lovecraft's art needs to be talked about in a critical light and the setting needs to be reclaimed and distanced from his fear and hatred of all things Not-From-New-England.

For now, moving on to... 3. "What will 60-70 bucks change?" In the grand scheme of things? Nothing. But this was never about trying to ruin JKR's pocket book. This was a litmus test for allies. Stand side by side or cross the picket line and play a mid-tier magic game filled with propaganda and caricatures of Jewish people (among other things). No, I will not entertain statements such as "But I don't see that! If anything, you seeing Jewish caricatures means you are the antisemite!" No buddy, no no no, that's not how propaganda works. There are other posts that delve into this. But in short; recognizing when something is a racist caricature does not make you a racist. Nor does not recognizing it immediately make you a racist, it simply means that you do not recognize propagandic imagery and it's important to listen to people who do know about it, specifically people that have been so unfavourably depicted in the past and present. Moving on. 4. "It's okay though because I donated as much/more to a Trans charity!" Martin Luther would like to have a strong conversation with you. Specifically 95 Theses long. Karma is not a linear scale. Buying something that ends up directly harming people and then turning around to pledge the same amount of money (or more) to a charity is not going to fix the broken trust, nor will it actually help at that point. What might help mend the fence is recognizing what the issue is and listening to the voices of those affected. Granted, many of us feel that they can no longer trust former allies because of this. Once broken, trust is hard to repair. It's important to keep that in mind and not get upset when we point it out. Personally, I like to give people the benefit of the doubt, but with that said, I won't be so trusting of people calling themselves allies when they choose to spend 60-70 bucks on a game that directly benefits Queen TERF (Royalty cheques are a thing, remember? You ARE directly financing her hate) rather than saving the money or putting it to a different game or charity. In short, my advice for folks that call themselves allies is this; If you want to call yourself an ally, actually listen to what is being said and learn from it. We all make mistakes, but launching into a kneejerk reaction is simply degrading what little trust remained. Don't just virtue signal, but stand beside the voices of the marginalized in solidarity.

That is all I can spare at the moment. Please keep the responses civil among one another. Asking for clarification is a-okay. Repeating above mentioned "arguments" and more like them is not. P.S: Do forgive me if I forgot some key points, I've been running on very little sleep at the moment and I needed to air my frustrations in a constructive way.

[cetra]

This has been said before but i'm so serious what's happening in the film & TV industry needs to happen to the gaming industry. mass unionization efforts and strikes NOW. an overwhelming majority of the most profitable games and game franchises are made by people in unimaginable financial, emotional, and physical pain as a result of the horrific conditions they're forced to work under. the GHOULS they work for force them to crunch so they can ship out a game on an impossible date to rake in their earnings ASAP and make shareholders happy. and then when that game is inevitably broken at launch who suffers the most. The poor devs who carved out years of their lives to try and make it work against all odds.

And then the failures and crimes of the people at the top are essentially forgiven when the game gets fixed by those same poor devs a couple years later. and if they try to unionize or just ASK for a better more liveable wage so this can't happen anymore they get laughed at or just fired bc corporate views them as disposable. it's all just so rancid and it makes me so angry I cant breathe. the gaming industry is a neverending nightmare and every big CEO in the industry should be beaten with a stick

[icebrooding]

Honestly even though I didn’t have the same negative reaction that much of the online gw2 community did, I do kinda appreciate some of the learnings for story they outlined in the retrospective 😅

I agree completely. I personally loved Secrets of the Obscure, I rate it very highly while acknowledging that it definitely had flaws. Handling as many new characters and lore topics was going to be difficult, and I understand the frustration of people who felt that things felt a bit underwhelming or glossed over, I really do. I feel it myself.

Personally, however, I think those things affected me less because I've always been rather focused towards story, and digging as much out of it as I can in a rather aggressive way, in almost everything I enjoy, and that allows me a different (not necessarily deeper) level of enjoyment. Sometimes I may come to conclusions or thoughts that may not be there actually, or may not have been the intent, but the enjoyable thing is that art is subjective, and if nothing comes out to specifically say 'this reading is wrong', I can satisfy myself with those interpretations.

Why else do you think I can sit here and write essays on 'here's why X character makes me think they're like Y based on one throwaway line or an implication in a piece of lore in a book I found on the overworld' :P

This is definitely how SotO appealed to me, because there was a lot there that I could dig into personally and get my mental cogs ticking. But on the same note, I get why people want more concrete answers, more time spent on developing new threads. I would have loved SotO to be longer, myself, because I truly enjoyed the world and characters it brought to the table. That's what Wildflowers will be for--

Gameplay, I think could have definitely been improved. While I wasn't particularly fussed with the first or last Nayos release, the middle one is where I felt the impact hardest. But I do enjoy things like Rift Hunting, Convergences, etc, I just pace my time. I know that's easier for me though since I only started playing in '22.

I appreciate the transparency on this front, in all honesty. I've only dabbled into game dev myself in times long past (I feel old, but I'm really not), and can understand the need to push out an excuse for why x or y didn't turn out as expected, but I can respect flat-out saying 'we tried to do too much, and we failed to achieve what we set out to'.

And with the certain extreme-level volatile reactions in other sections of this player base, I think recognising that treating the places where SotO tripped over itself as something not done maliciously is important. Not saying that criticism isn't deserved, but I have seen some genuinely horrific things said that make me feel ashamed to be part of this community.

All in all, I'm going to hold my faith in the next expansion and am greatly looking forward to it, and seeing how these lessons take. I've stuck through way worse in other MMOs, so one expac that struggled to handle everything it set out to do is barely a blip on my radar.

And I feel this is the best moment to bring up my general blog's attitude: it's no secret how horribly negative this playerbase can be, to the point I've had to turn off map chat a number of times because the negativity is so constant it is genuinely bad for my mental health. I have fairly severe depression, I do not need to sit here and wallow in even more negativity. I think too much of the world as it is right now thrives off of negativity and hating things and not being happy, so when I talk about story beats or characters, etc, I always try to do so in a positive way. I'm just here to enjoy something that's come to mean a lot to me, not to sit here and hear for the eightieth time about why X is a shit character or Y is the worst thing that ever happened or Z blah blah blah.

[gallus-rising]

if anyone here is a fan of artsy TTRPGs and/or Odd trans books a fav dev of mine is doing a big sale to fund her laser hair removal (link is to full bundle but you can get anything individually)

i can personally vouch for multiple of these and am going to now

Songbirds 3e: is, has, and always will be free so why haven't you checked it out yet bc omg????

.dungeon//remastered: a lot of TTRPGs have tried to replicate the experience of playing an mmo-type video game and maybe someone of them are more mechanically closer to that, but .dungeon gets the vibes. it gets what it feels like to play an online game w friends. reading it makes me nostalgic for an alt-reality internet that feels real. this game has received accolades for a reason ok

My Body is a Cage: haven't gone thru this one as much as the others but i wanna say holy shit that layout. game premise tho is you're normal ppl trying to survive your normal lives and one day you start dreaming of a dungeon. all the loot you get dungeon crawling? you wake up w irl. you also wake up (or don't) w all the horrific injuries and traumas inflicted by dungeon crawling

Lilancholy: god damn i need to get a physical copy. is a collection of rules for playing school yard games but also a warning/survival guide to any children who might be reading on how to ""safely"" deal w fairies, which are real and do want to eat you, and no, the adults don't care. massively blurs the lines between "work of fantasy/horror fiction", "game you can play", and "semi-bibliographical" idk man it's a trip. being a child is scary and horrifying actually, and i'm glad Snow is one of the ppl working to get that message out there

Endsville: An Unorthodox Setting Guide: vibes are off the charts, man. a game setting(??) written in the style of a found artifact. everyone goes to Endsville when they dream. i hope our houses are close to each other :]

[asimplevampire]

I'm a game developer. I'm one of those ~indies~ you laud as being The Good Guys because ~games cheap~. And as one of those indies, I can tell you, uh. If you care about workers getting paid fairly? Games absolutely should cost $70+, especially if we're talking big franchise-tentpole Nintendo games.

Most indie games are horrifically underpriced for the amount of work you put into them. Like. I don't think I can overstate how big the gulf is between "the amount of work and love and time that goes into making an indie game" and "how little people are willing to pay for an indie game". People continue to make indie games because they love the craft. But most indie devs are operating at a loss, because people do not value the craft or the effort that goes into making a game.

A big company like Nintendo is not going to operate at a loss; they can afford to charge something vaguely approaching what their games are actually worth. And herein lies the problem:

If you want the art, the writing, the music, the coding, and the game design to be the quality you expect from a Nintendo game, you need the developers to not have to worry about money and to get to rest during production. Paying your workers fairly is expensive. Giving your workers time to rest is expensive.

The more people squawk about how GAMES SHOULDN'T BE THIS EXPENSIVE, THINK OF THE CHILDREN, the less likely devs are to get paid fairly or to rest. When people don't want to pay for games- or pay what games are worth- you get shit like Pokemon ScarVio getting rushed out the door to cover the costs of whatever Game Freak is developing next.

Like, I hear what you're saying, but devs gotta eat too.

ok I got into an argument with someone in my media class yesterday so I’m just gonna say it:

No video game should cost $70.

I’m sure the new Zelda game will be great, but no video game should cost $70. “But if you adjust for inflation, this is actually less than what the Wii games were,” cool. No video game should cost $70.

We no longer live in a world where a kid could save up their allowance for a couple months and then be able to buy a video game. Just buying one has somehow turned into such a grandiose adventure it takes all of the fun out of getting a new game.

The only possible benefit might be that, with games being so expensive, people might be more likely to pick up an indie game because those companies can’t afford to sell those games for a lot.

This is becoming normal. I used to be able to buy four ds games for $70. What the hell.

And you know damn well that Nintendo can afford it.

[rachelsnotebook]

See ya, 2023. You were... a lot.

I'm equal parts delighted and horrified that this year is coming to a close. To be honest, I'm still mentally trapped in late August-September...

2023 was a huge year of change:

The Baxter dlc wrapped and launched early in the year.

People assumed I was under 18 the entire day I was celebrating my 30th birthday. It was insane. Culminated with the friendly's waitress asking if I wanted the children's menu and my friend nearly hit the floor laughing.

My scared of heights ass got on an airplane for the first time! I only had a mild wave of panic once.

I went on an incredible trip with two of my most dear and important friends and we all experienced Chicago for the first time together.

And we saw Fall Out Boy kick off their tour at Wrigley Field. It was an extra special show too:

I was in the audience for episode 1 of AEW Collison.

I went back to my seasonal job from before the pandemic and helped my boss with projects she couldn't juggle on her own.

My mum's car officially broke for good. The body was so rusted and fragile that the steering was severed. And since I don't know how to drive and rely on that car... we were fucked. For months. And by that, I mean that we had to still use that car to get groceries, medicine, appointments. Not fun...

Our cat, Petey, just made it to his 21st birthday at the end of September. He began to decline at the end of August and his heart simply gave out. He was loved dearly, and treated like a king. He was happy and full of personality up until the very end.

I'm yet again reminded of these silly drawings of him <3

I bought my mum a car! It's a clunker that was new in 2005, but it runs and passed inspection! So we are back and legal on the road again.

Though, it took the majority of my bank account... so after taxes I'm expecting to be rebuilding my savings from scratch in the New Year.

There's a family member that caused a lot grief this year and I'm coming to terms with the fact that I'm done with them. There are actions I refuse to let pass by. I'm deeply hurt and I will not forget this feeling.

I finally pushed through my doubts and fears, and opened up more in game dev spaces online. Imposter syndrome was horrifically strong, but I love all the new people I've been able to connect with. I'm growing more confident (some days), and I can't wait to see how these friendships grow.

There are exciting projects in the works that I can't wait to not shut up about!!!

I gave editing scripts a shot this year, and I love it a lot!

I participated in two game jams and I'm so proud of both teams.

My website went through several updates. I finally decided to move the blog aspect to tumblr. It feels so much better than what I was fighting with before! I ended up removing this part of my About Me page... shortly after Petey passed. It's still saved on a hidden page. I just needed to move it while I process life without him.

If the clock was turned back to this time last year, I can tell you for a fact that I couldn't have predicted any of this. This year has been a mixed bag.

I wish I was stronger. There are too many instances where I dropped the ball, and I still am. All I can do is try. And I do. Every day.

And I'm so proud of every good moment and success. I hope 2024 is a kinder year. For me, and my loved ones.

My Current 2024 Goals:

Read more books.

Laugh harder.

Turn any of my rough ideas/concepts into something.

Join more game jams!

Build back some of my move out money.

Keep working on my website: I want to try out a testimonial page. Maybe? I'm still somewhat embarrassed by that thought, but it could be beneficial for applying to jobs. If... when that comes up. I also just want a reason to slip in this comment from one of my friends:

I want to make a better writing portfolio and craft an editing one too!

I might look into if there's any interest in doing more editing & proofreading work for smaller game projects in exchange for a few dollars. And figure out real rates for projects with actual budgets. (For game jams, please just ask if I have time because more than likely I'll be thrilled to volunteer some hours!)

Learn to drive a car. Maybe this year I won't feel terribly paranoid behind the wheel...

I can't thank the incredible people in my life enough for their kindness, wisdom, strength, and support over the course of 2023. I wouldn't be here without any of you.

And a huge thank you to all the new people 2023 brought into my life. I hope our friendships grow, or at the very least pass with only good memories attached. I hope many of us are able to make many wonderful games in the future!

So goodbye, goodnight, and have a Happy New Year!!!

[mercuriale]

Horrible little gaming annoyances

So insufferable is the way that certain terms have entered the space that discusses games. In my honest opinion they have been co-opted by hopeful, discussion-happy types from the press releases and statements from industry types, or perpetuated on forums by users trying to fit in with other users, all never questioning how utterly asinine they are.

"Selling like hotcakes" has become a common term for good sales in gaming. Like a grating little noise it squeaks into existence more often than it should.

Many posts use "dev" to refer to any place that makes a game as a lazy catch-all, glossing over the individual efforts of artists, writers, producers, publishers, programmers, QA, and anyone else I've regretfully missed. This lack or granularity is damaging to games discussion at large and fosters continued ignorance of the multitude of roles there are in game development.

The horrific employment of the word "we". "We" want X game remake; this is the content "we"'re getting, "we" waited X years for this. Who is we? its YOU. You're already writing a crappy comment on the internet. At least have the bravery to speak for yourself and not on behalf of a hypothetical group that includes you.

Devil's advocate types who try to appear more enlightened by saying they understand that a game needs to "make money" or otherwise say that a games at its core needs to be financially viable. Closely related to the kinds of posters who say microtransactions are "just cosmetic". Pathetic litle white-anters undermining it all under the guise of being pragmatic and intelligent. We all know games need to sell well. we all live here under capitalism, and we all know how it works whether or not we agree with it. I hope every game gets the success it deserves but only so those that work hard get paid and those with artistic visions get to bring them to life and nothing more.

[scvnthorpe]

No seriously, Focus on Testability

How preparing to test leads into everything else

(No but seriously, I can't find any currently existing tags for test driven development. Testing yes. TDD no!, apparently not!)

So, why isn't TDD the norm?

Now, this is important. TDD gets a lot of praise in theory, but does that mean it's the actual norm for what people do? Consider the following:

It’s embraced as a way to maintain high code coverage and write better code, and 41% of the developers who responded to the survey said their organizations have fully adopted TDD. However, when asked the same question in a slightly different way (“How often do you write tests before writing the code under test?” — the definition of TDD) only 8% of developers said they do this at least 80% of the time.

Something's kinda sus: why, if TDD is so highly regarded as a standard, aren't more people actually doing it?

People often say it slows them down in terms of productivity, but research indicates that this simply isn't the case! My guess is, it feels like a lot of upfront thinking for a lot of people to do. You have to know, somewhat, what it is you want to do and what the broad structure of messages within your program is going to look like (and believe me, that can change suddenly and dramatically especially if you're working with shit you've never really used before). Cue flashbacks to horrific UML sketching exercises and Waterfall esque development lifecycles.

Seriously, fuck that shit.

But it's also true, particularly in fields where automated testing period just isn't as universally accepted (yes, AAA games. It's AAA games), that many environments see Dev and QA/testing as separate software design concerns to be handled by separate teams a bit like how many people see Dev and Ops as separate concerns in software delivery. So, why make development do the testing in the first place? Where does QA fit into this? Apart from the fact that we've already established that leading with automated tests can increase the speed and quality of your work, the fact is that QA are some of the most overworked and under-loved parts of the industry. Leaving at least the unit and feature tests to the devs (because trust me, there are several levels of testing you can do) leaves more than enough higher-level testing and well, quality assurance, for QA to do.

Of course, these are just two major detractions to TDD proper that I wanted to clear up, but once one has decided on TDD there's also a litany of places where I've personally experienced friction. But, not only can these problems be overcome, but implementing all of the workarounds involved creates a battery of happy little accidents for your architecture.

So now, I'm going to cover some of the discoveries I've made while working through various issues in code testability.

1 - Smaller components are easier to simulate

Now, here's the kicker. The bigger a unit of code and the more complex the logic is, the harder it is going to be to change or to apply to novel problems within your project. Back in my bootcamp days I can remember working on a toy project to simulate a bank account - bank statements and all - and feeling like I was struggling to really grasp how to mock out the printing of a bank statement! As it so happened there were a bunch of dependencies on the internal state of the bank account object itself, such that in order to verify the correctness of the bank statement you'd need to know the internal state of the bank account itself. At the time I found the testing framework's tools for mocking/stubbing way too limited in the complexity of their behaviour, but you also shouldn't be reaching into internals to test shit to begin with! That's a recipe for brittle tests that don't permit radical change.

However, things really clicked into place when a colleague suggested I make the bank statement into a new object.

This not only gave me the opportunity to test bank statement functionality as an isolated unit, but also meant I could just stub out the bank statement functionality when testing the main bank account object!

But of course, stubbing out different parts of your program and doing injection to achieve isolation in this manner can be a real damn pain in the ass if operating under the classic OOP style. So if you ever find yourself blaming TDD (or even just testability) to be the problem, sometimes you should consider a solution...

1.5 - An aside on testing with time

But first, I'd like to mention that a tricky dependency with code testing is time. Now, there are a number of libraries for pausing or otherwise modifying time in a test environment - timecop for Ruby, freezegun for Python - and I've reached for these whenever I've needed to test some time gap, as far as feature testing goes at least. However, maybe there's a better way? Instead of reaching in and pausing time itself in the program's environment, perhaps we could have an object passed in from which to get the time - with the standard time object as the default - and inject a stub of this object when testing? In fact, in many cases maybe we'd rather inject a function to be called to get the current time rather than a whole ass object? Speaking of which...

2 - Consider mixing up your paradigm

As we've seen hitherto, the smaller and more straightforward you make individual components of your system the easier it is to swap them out with inert copies when it comes to testing: this allows you to test certain classes in isolation even if they usually require members of some other class in order to function in the wild as previously seen, but can also work with other dependencies such as RNG or time.

However, there comes a point where fucking around with injecting dependencies, class instances and object state simply doesn't yield enough benefit for the additional overhead.

From my own experience building a rather simple income tax calculator, I used a singleton instance to take the tax bracket configurations and then calculate the resulting tax given the income provided. Said singleton was also storing the result in an instance variable which was causing problems for subsequent tests with this same instance, which is where I realised I'd be better off incorporating a more functional approach in this case.

In functional programming, the focus is on producing units of code that always yield the same output given the same inputs and as such one doesn't deal in mutable state at all. This makes such code a natural candidate for terse tests that get right to the point without as much (or any) auxiliary setup.

Moreover, it's possible to pass dependencies at the point of call as you would any other argument in order to modify the behaviour: in fact, when the dependency in question is a function, the function being called is known in the functional programming world as a higher-order function. Likewise, in a test environment you can simply pass a 'stub' version of the function depended on at the time of calling. Thus, dependency injection, and thus stubbing/mocking, becomes a little easier too for the absence of instantiating other classes within a class and other such clusterfucks.

Besides, often the best OO programming begins to look a lot like functional. Seriously, google that shit.

3 - A little abstraction loosens a lot of coupling

I must admit, this next solution isn't something I've actually implemented but it is one that lives with me to this day.

For this one, I'm reminiscing on my days working with SQLAlchemy. What would tend to happen is that I would get the database session object directly, pass it into another object with data relating to the incoming HTTP request, and then call the method on that object which related to the SQLAlchemy query that was needed to perform the appropriate database operation. Now, I'd say this is a decent amount of abstraction; I and the others I was building this thing with could keep all those queries somewhere other than the main file defining the API endpoints.

But testing was a whole different beast: here, we essentially needed to prepare a test database (which is common practice) and because we were using something quite lightweight in development it actually wasn't unfeasible to just generate a .db file with each test run and then nuke the thing once finished. But, well, this was also a pain in the ass to do...

For data insertions, updates or deletions it made legitimate sense to at least somehow simulate the db and check for some change in its contents (but my thoughts on this continue). But a lot of requests were simply for data fetching, and yet still I found myself generating, pre-populating and then querying a whole ass database for the data - which again, is a lot when you are concerned first and foremost with testing your endpoints, not your database specifically.

The best solution I can think of currently is to have the SQLAlchemy session remain internal to another object/module entirely, and then only concern the API code with grabbing the result of a method on such an object/module given the relevant incoming data. This way, I can simply have the method required for the test be injected as a default parameter value into the endpoint function and stub it with a different callback when testing. I'd argue it's stuff like this that allows me to consider SQLAlchemy as a library rather than strictly a framework, but that's a post I've already made...

But that being said this is far from my final thought on the matter and following the rabbit hole of testability through to better modularity etc. is a continuous process.

In turn, I tend to like to think in extremely abstract terms and to draw things out on paper before I set to work on things a lot of the time, but a lot of people seem to prefer designing primarily by writing out a So, how can you balance doing your tests before your implementation with getting from idea to keystroke right away?

4 - Types, and other code signature tips for typists

I have to say right off the bat, I'm not that deeply enthusiastic about type declarations and declarations for their own sake - that is to say, I'm not yet convinced that I can use types themselves to define every aspect of the behaviour of my code.

Perhaps, judging from the words of some of my peers, there are some dazzling developments in type theory that are yet to come to my attention and a fortiori are yet to really become all the rage in the software world, but for the time being if I really want to know that I get a given, specific outcome for some given, specific input given particular conditions are met... I'll write a test. But that's me.

But again, how do we get a broad design into our editor without implementing before we even test?

A trick that I sometimes like to do when setting up to do something - bear in mind, I like to sketch things out on paper first - is to define a set of class or functions which just return a placeholder value but take the arguments I want to pass.

So if I can feel I need a function to doSomething, but I don't want to code blind, but I also feel like typing it out to get an idea of what it is, the best place to start is with what arguments it takes and what kind of data it returns. But again, we need a little more to go off of for inputs and outputs than just the names, especially if we have all sorts of potential data types we could use to represent these.

And this, in my view, is where type signatures really help to clarify roughly how a piece of code should be used in, and what it does for, a system, before you define the actual behaviour at all. From there you can write a failing test, and it's red, green, refactor from there!

Once those rough details are in place, we then have a basis for which we can start writing our tests! One must consider that this certainly isn't the procedure I always reach for, but it might tickle your fancy a little if you're considering TDD but feel weird writing your tests before you even really know what the interface for your code looks like!

It's also worth mentioning where type signatures can support smarter and more extensive tooling - such being the reason that Typescript exists (apparently) - and this will often catch silly little errors that would have stopped your code even attempting to behave properly. Testability is about speed of feedback, and hey, that spills over beyond TDD.

Moreover, as much as the Rust language currently carries the mark of a fierce dispute over the restrictiveness of trademark policy, it's rich type system allows the compiler to produce machine code that's comparable to C++ without the soul-crushing insanity. Cargo also comes with an in built test runner. Fancy that!

So, in conclusion...

Making your code testable may feel like it's conflicting with your design at first, but more often than not it can serve to push you towards a better way of assembling software. You get code that's more modular, code that can have new features added to it without having to wait and see if something else was broken as a result, code in which you can switch out even potentially rather big dependencies without having to scour the entire codebase, code that draws on tips and insights from a range of paradigms to do the most straightforward implementation possible given the need for testability vs code that's wedded dogmatically to just one paradigm...

And again, there are ways you can dip your toes into TDD or at least focus more on testability, to practice the spirit of the thing if not the exact letter!

In the end, you can get to the point where you're writing tests for your code that don't have to worry about specific internal details at all (well, most of the time).

That's how you get safety nets, not guard rails.

[nocturnaclysm]

I'm going to start off by highly, highly recommending What is Body Horror? by Shannon Lewis if you want to know what body horror entails, because the above definition is far too simplistic. It also fails to take into account why we love body horror so much, and fails to acknowledge how it's being utilized so cleverly in Mouthwashing.

Body horror holds a mirror up to the person, saying “this is you”; the person’s reaction is to reply, “it can’t be.”

Body horror is complex, but at its core are two crucial ideas: 1) loss (loss of autonomy, loss of self, loss of control, etc.), and 2) confronting your own mortality and vulnerability of the flesh. These two things are precisely why the devs chose to use Curly's circumstances as a storytelling device; his disability functions to parallel the loss of autonomy and vulnerability felt by Anya, not as a punishment but as a consequence of his own inaction. The horror is on Curly's end, as he's forced to look in the mirror only to not recognize himself, to realize that he's not the person he thought he was - not because he's disfigured, but because his disfigurement is a physical manifestation of his complacency in a system that functions to strip others (i.e. women) of their own autonomy and safety. Only when he's finally able to acknowledge this does he lose the ability he once had to do something about it, and all he can do is watch his inaction unfold before him, and to him, powerless now to stop it.

"Even the most natural process can feel like a perversion to the person to whom it is occurring."

Attributing ableism to this interpretation of Curly's character shows a lack of understanding for what body horror really represents. Body horror isn't horror because the body in question is disfigured or itself scary. It's horror because it forces you to confront your own vulnerability, because it's in our a nature, a primal instinct, to fear the "unnatural transformation, destruction, or degeneration of the human body or other creatures." It's in our nature to avoid it, to want to prevent it, and fear is a universal, primal emotion that's helped get humanity far enough to contemplate it. One could (and many, including myself, do) argue that having a body at all is inherently grotesque and horrific; our bodies smell, leak, decay, we're crawling with bacteria, we're susceptible to infection and disease, our insides spill out, shed, excrete. Most of all, we feel pain. Pain is a concept crucial to understanding Curly as body horror; the sounds he makes when you're feeding him his pill, the wailing you hear when he needs it, the blood-soaked bandages trying and failing to conceal the raw, exposed flesh underneath. The unbandaged eye following your every move, his only form of communication outside of agonized moans. It's horrific because he can't do anything but endure it, because there's no escaping it, not even in death. Jimmy took that from him, too. (The horror is on Jimmy's end just as well, while we're at it. He has to stare his sins right in the face and reconcile with them, but he fears it. Fears him. Again, not because he's disfigured, but because his disfigurement represents something much larger, much more horrific - the consequences of his own actions and the need to "take responsibility" for them.)

As the article touches on, though, there is a way to paint certain bodies that can be read as ableist (ex. "stories that position becoming disabled as a “fate worse than death”, antagonists with marked visible disabilities when compared with the “heroes.”"). This is an important distinction to make, but interpreting Curly's circumstances as body horror does not align with this (unless they're expressly saying he's horrific himself for being disabled, which I don't think anyone is arguing). Mouthwashing is a horror game after all. The use of Curly's disfigured body to instill fear in the player is deliberate, a perfect representation of what body horror represents. Whether or not you agree with its use is another conversation entirely, but make no mistake - Curly's disfigurement is horrific, in more ways than one.

body horror is defined as a horror subgenre depicting "the unnatural transformation, destruction, or degeneration of the human body or other creatures".

mouthwashing things that are body horror (or adjacent):

giant womb full'a horse fetuses

hallway full of giant curly eyeballs

climbing out of a giant disembodied curly head

polle centipede

jimmy dismembering and eating parts of curly (cannibalism; the dehumanisation and consumption of human meat)

mouthwashing things that are not body horror:

curly being a burn victim & amputee

[a-mole-of-iron]

Now back, with a mini-review of an RTS - The Great War: Western Front

After a month-long interruption (sometimes, life just refuses to get back on track), I am back to posting. Today, what I’ve got is a recommendation for an RTS game, but not for the reasons most people might think... because this RTS is The Great War: Western Front, the first RTS about World War 1 that I can remember seeing, and a very well-made one at that.

Content warning: descriptions of how abysmal the World War 1 tactics were, and how pointlessly these tactics wasted the lives of WW1 soldiers.

On the technical side, the game is made by Petroglyph - the studio built on the remnants of Westwood, the original devs of Command & Conquer - and it’s more similar in quality to Star Wars: Empire at War (one of their best outings) than Grey Goo or Forged Battalion (which are comparatively more meh). The gameplay itself is surprisingly addictive, in that “just one more turn“ manner - the game combines real-time and turn-based modes, like Total War - and because this is WW1, there is an interesting trench-building mechanic and asymmetry between attacker and defender. If that was the biggest noteworthy thing in the game, though, it would be a footnote and that’d be it; the reason to actually make a post about it is that it really gets across the sheer horror of World War 1 trench warfare, much more successfully than even other pop-WW1 games with an infusion of historical authenticity (e.g. Battlefield 1).

Let me give you the most blatant example. For the attacking force, the only way to approach enemy trenches safely is to constantly bombard them with artillery, suppressing machine gunners and riflemen so that they can’t fire back, while also destroying as much of the enemy line as possible and dodging enemy defensive artillery. But the realities of limited supply mean that even if you do that, and even if you flank the enemy trenches in early war (when fortification is not ubiquitous), a lot of soldiers on your side are still going to die. But the real horror begins when the computer player (in my case, on the standard difficulty, which affords advantages to neither the player nor the computer) attacks your side without doing those kinds of preparatory barrages, even when it’s got artillery superiority, and instead just repeats what the biggest names in WW1 failure - like Conrad von Hötzendorf and Luigi Cadorna - did, sending masses of infantry to overwhelm the defense and letting the infantrymen die in droves. Regardless of whether you defend well or not (the AI is actually quite good at probing for weaknesses in your line, which makes its behavior even more damning of real-life WW1 tactics), it’s easy to end up with a ceasefire after the AI side exhausts its resources, then see your losses at 3000 soldiers (which would be horrific enough), and enemy losses at 15000 soldiers with nothing gained (which is just atrocious). And, very conspicuously, the game is rated T for Teen; it doesn’t even need any graphic depictions of deaths or injuries to show how horrific - and wasteful - World War 1 was.

As a summary, I would recommend this game to any RTS fans who want to challenge themselves with limiting the damages of WW1 and ending it faster than the real-life incompetent commanders and stuck-in-the-past militaries of the time did... or to anyone who has the skills to play RTS games and wants to see for themselves how bad WW1 actually got.

[ziracona]

I have so much respect for every person who played Far Cry 5 and hated every one of the damn Seeds and so grossed out by the fact I know some people played this game and liked them as people—like genuinely found them good or sympathetic.

[fadebolt]

It's a little funny how both Spitter Spiders and Red Centipedes are excluded from this. I wonder if it's because the former dies 1 spear, and the latter dies from 1 Spore Puff. Or maybe they were in another one of these polls, but have received most of the votes, so now, OP is wondering what folks would pick from a poll, where those 2 are absent.

Anyways, creature analysis time! (Though I won't go as in-depth for these creatures, as I did for the Squidcadas, cus you know… there's 4 of them, and we'd be here forever xd)

The least common one here is the Mother Long Legs, which appears only once in two campaigns (even when you count Inv, who gets 0 MLL spawns, surprisingly). And this makes sense, as the creature is essentially designed to be a horrific Air-Leviathan. It'll catch and kill you very easily, and it's not really possible to juke, fight, or outrun, so your only real option is to give it a wide berth. This is why it's so gigantic, and why it only specifically appears in two very sizeable rooms. The creature is also utilized as environmental storytelling, which is why it's specifically in the rot dumping room of Spearmaster's Garbage Wastes, and in the eastern side of The Rot. There's actually a lore reason behind those two being MLLs instead of DLLs, which I find very interesting.

The other more uncommon one is the Elite Scavenger, which only appears in the three campaigns that are the earliest, according to the timeline. They also have a bit of connection to the game's story - as their role is to highlight the impact that Artificer has had. They're decently common in the campaigns of Spearmaster and Artificer, especially during the night time of Metropolis, when they're absolutely everywhere. But on Hunter, they're very rare, so much so that some folks don't even know that they're present in the campaign. And on Gourmand (and the Slugcats that come after)? They're only accessible through lineage, or in some cases, not at all. Outside of the story things, I really don't care about these guys. MLLs, Red Lizards, and King Vultures need to be approached and handled differently than their weaker counterparts, but you treat the Elite Scavengers the same way you treat the regular ones (outside of the fact that sometimes, you have to be a little more careful). The coolest part about them are their items - they can spawn with some pretty fancy stuff, making it worthwhile to kill or trade with them. They also drop masks that function exactly like the ones from Vultures, but you mostly fight these guys in Metropolis, as Artificer, and there, it's generally not worth it to occupy a hand with the mask, so I pretty much never took it.

Going up the commonness list, we have the Red Lizards, the strongest reptiles, present in a few specific rooms, for Slugcats other than Survivor, Monk and Rivulet. They're a bit of a rarity, even in the campaigns where they're present, and for a good reason. They can notice prey from very far, they can move extremely quickly, and their mind is filled with nothing but bloodlust. The creature is essentially a Miros Bird that has an armored head, an immunity to Flashbangs, fits into all the small pipes and tunnels that a Slugcat can use, and can knock creatures down from poles via spitting. It's a stupidly overpowered creature that can only be defeated with the help of special powers, or unique weapons - the only Lizard that straight up can't be beaten by a perk-less Survivor with a rock and a spear. The devs are aware of this, which is why they used the creature in moderation, placing it mostly into a few large rooms where it can be easy to notice, and get away from. I know some people like to meme that the two Red Lizzies in Spearmaster's Outskirts are excessive, but honestly, I think the devs utilized this creature pretty much perfectly. The final thing to note about these guys is their presence in the lineage system. Every single campaign is filled to the brim with Lizard spawns that can be lineaged into Reds. This is not issue, as getting there usually requires many steps, with low chances, but if you're persistent, you can fill up any campaign with these guys. I never done that myself, but I like that it's a possibility, and it can come in handy on an Expedition where you need to kill like, 10 Reds.

And lastly, there are the King Vultures. These guys also don't appear for Survivor, Monk or Rivulet, and they've completely replaced for Miros Vultures on Saint. But on the campaigns where they do appear? Oh boy, they appear a lot! Sure, Hunter and Spearmaster are naturally fast, Artificer has the bomb jumps, and Gourmand has the slides, but avoiding their harpoons is still stupidly hard, and I've died to these guys many times, as all 4 of those Slugcats. It especially doesn't help that unlike Red Lizards, or the Long Legs Family, they aren't placed into the specific dens of specific rooms, but rather onto off screen den, which essentially means that they can show up in literally every room that has an open sky. In some of those rooms, they're quite easy to deal with, whereas in others, it feels nigh impossible, so luck does play an enormous part when it comes to your experience with these guys. So my opinion on them is pretty mixed. I've had some fun fights/encounters with King Vultures, along with some unfun encounters, though I do appreciate that their Mask is actually better than the regular one. The difference in its fear duration is something you can really feel, while Scavengers value it as much as a Pearl - and for a good reason. As such, King Vultures are by far the most rewarding creatures to defeat in the entire game, so they're kind of like a stupidly hard optional Boss in an RPG or MMO, that many people would still attempt, just for the incredible loot that it drops. (The only difference is that those Bosses don't randomly ambush you out of nowhere, so yeah) The Moving Target challenge is the worst though. Thankfully, it's only one minute long, but I'm truly grateful that I never have to do it again.

Okay, so now that I've given my thoughts on each of the contestants, what is my ranking of them, and what is my pick for the favorite? ~ On the very last spot is the Elite Scavenger, a creature that is only interesting thanks to the story that surrounds it, as well as its items. The Chieftain Scavenger reusing their leap and throw angles also makes them feel a lot less special. ~ Next up is the King Vulture, a really cool idea for a creature, that feels incredible to kill. But unfortunately, they can also feel excessively unfair and frustrating, thanks how the game uses them. (I honestly would like it if a bunch of 'em were moved into lineage spots. Sort of like how most Red Lizards are also from a lineage tree) ~ The second best is the Mother Long Legs, a creature that benefits a lot from the restraint that the devs showed, when it came to using it. It rarely shows up, but when it does, it's a big deal - which is why it has become so memorable. Why else would the community have like, 6 different names for it? (Probably the most names that a RW creature has ever gotten) ~ And the number 1 pick is the Red Lizard, a very iconic and memorable creature that the game has utilized perfectly! Despite its rare appearance, it's still an absolute fan favorite, and I think its design has very much earned that!