#animal crossing improvements

[chodzacaparodia]

When the truck hit Kisaki I burst out laughing and you can't blame me

It was just like the bus scene from "Mean Girls"

[stanley-rocket]

Common Side Effects is getting me, like, excited about the passage of time and looking forward to the day when a new episode comes out.

[skyarly]

this animal crossing game is really speaking to me

[riiviir]

fanart is so hard to draw. stupid characters having stupid details that are out of my stupid comfort zone AAAAAGH

[glngrbred]

Hot take, Elden ring is a really good souls like, but that doesn't mean its actually a good game.

within the subgenre, souls-likes have always had really huge issues with accessibility, and i don't mean for disability alone. Elden ring especially had extremely horrible performance issues at launch, which they did eventually fix. Even then you still have to get a 400 dollar PC. Aside from that there are some strange decisions made with teaching the player, like the tutorial is just a hole that players had to point out to each other, and On my barely stable first 20 minutes, i couldn't even find (my b i guess). Obviously alot of extremely experienced gamers would be able to handle themselves super well in Elden ring even without a tutorial. But there's another issue there with accessibility.

2 last things on accessibility. The game's audio is mixed like a movie, (so barely audible or ripping out your eardrums ;-;) witch is another accessibility issue, that you have to put a lot of work in to fix. And the graphics range from maxing out the brightness, to being completely black on bad screens. obviously an issue. I'm not going to go into the issues with explanations and the general tell don't show nature of alot of souls likes, because people have already complained about the text tunnels enough

I do really appreciate the artistry and just beautiful atmosphere Elden ring has, my only issue with the graphics is the performance requirements for them. Also if you never turned the graphics all the way down, it used to cause bit lag spikes just because it wanted to i guess :")

So, my argument is that a game can be a good version of the predecessors it bases itself off of, but if it doesn't actually deliver on playability and accessibility, I really don't think its deserving of the praise it gets. here are examples of games I think are flawless Unraveled/Unraveled 2 Hades Minecraft (Java edition only [cuz bedrock is completely broken somehow???) Never alone (a cool 2 player co op platformer that me and my brother played through when we were 6 and 8 or smthn, it was incredible, and i still think its worth playing as an adult) Spelunky 2 ***Monster Hunter (except for the extremely slow RPG elements) [takes 3 months to get 1 armor set built fully :)]

So i actually have some great news for the difficulty purists, You can actually do a hardcore game well, So long as you make failure quick and readable, Make trying immediate, and Make learning a part of the design. Spelunky is not my cup of tea, i have a bad time with reaction time, but spelunky is really great, in that your goal every attempt is simply to get as far as possible. In elden ring, you have the opposite problem, where instead of completing the objective being extraordinarily hard, getting from point a to point b is tediouse, saving the game takes time, occasionally you can be attacked without knowing why, and you dont get a clear read on what went wrong, ETC. If Elden ring was only the boss fights, I would say its almost a great game. Which is why I included Monster hunter on that list, despite its insufferable grind. Also BTW spelunky 2 has four fun minigames. a requirement for any game to be truly perfect is for there to be appeal for casual gamers, and i don't think adding casual elements makes a game worse, like, ever.

Anyways, last little thing, I really dislike it when People praise games for not catering to the needs of some players. Like everyone has heard dudebros or their friends be like "It doesn't have any difficulty settings! that's so sick!" But, like, Have you ever met someone with a motor function disability, or like, just someone who doesn't play games for 30000 hours every year? Difficulty settings and the ability to control your experience are important. and this isn't about Elden ring, But if you care about being an ally you should want your games to have accessibility features, they only benefit people. and if you're so worked up about about an extra tab being in the settings window, maybe you should like, go to therapy or something.

Also Elden ring's UI is so ass it gave my design teacher a heart attack and they hired a Pe*o as our sub.

[isame-allen]

Learning a new artstyle + more redesigns

[mrcowboyreturns]

Ok. So you know that funny Egyptian cat from Animal Crossing “Ankha”? You know those weird yellow rectangle thingy she has on her hair?

I like those, so I wanted to see what they were look like on someone with longer hair.

Anyway above WIP pic is a remake of some older pic I years ago (pics below)

[seventh-district]

.

[bagelsandlocks]

You don't have to be doing the same thing as me. Your presence is enough ✨️💕

[citrlet]

brownies for dinner because i'm mentally unwell

[thisearthycat]

i’ve seen a lot of art summaries and wanted to do one c:

i started drawing digitally only about two or three years ago :,) so my summary doesn’t look extravagant or anything 😭 but maybe one day i’ll get there

i mostly chose pieces with backgrounds even though i feel like some without them are better😭😭 i didnt want to have too many characters floating in the void™️

neways i think i did pretty good this year considering ^^

[moongothic]

Oh wow, did you see new anime eps? Young Dragon voice is different and kinda 😳👌

Did not watch the episode but I checked and

Young Dragon is literally voiced by

(Kazuhiko Inoue is a great VA, it's just that based on the emojis I did not expect him at all lmao)

[wheatwhip]

[rottencandyco]

This is the oldest art I have on my phones. I’m glad I’ve improved so much, but like, all of this is so cringe ewww. I also used to draw a lot of Pokémon, I don’t do that much anymore.

[dew-droppies]

now that online services are gone for 3ds animal crossing new horizons NEEDS a big update that brings back the tortimer islands along with all the minigames. playing with other people in new horizons just feels so lackluster compared to new leaf. this is a great opportunity to bring it back.

[abandonedpie]

Little bit of a vent, not that serious but slightly heavier than you'd expect from the subject.

TL;DR designing an ACNH island is suffering and I took that personally

So my island has been in a WIP state since its creation. Got fairly far with implementing my plans, and I've worked on pieces of it here and there, but recently, I was inspired to redesign the whole thing (again). No longer liked all the ideas I had liked before, and overall felt it was lacking. With some struggle, I started coming up with new ideas that I felt good about.

But the thing that has slowed me down the most? That has me already doubting or even hating my brand new ideas?

Paths. It always comes down to the paths.

Custom paths? Default paths? Both have pros and cons to consider. Fellow ACNH players are likely familiar with these issues: loss of footstep sounds, limited design slots to work with (is it worth using 12+ slots for a single path border?), having to make every design from scratch (no Online for me), lines of grass left between paths/inclines/buildings...

And I can't decide. I can't find an answer. Whatever I try, whatever I imagine, I don't like the result. I've hit a wall, and that wall is my own perfectionism. Clearly there is no perfect solution, and I have to compromise to progress—"finished, not perfect" and all that—but I don't want to compromise the vision I have for my island, even though I know that vision is unattainable.

I just want to have an island I'm happy with. And it feels like no matter what I do with it, I'll never be satisfied. I've seen such beautiful pictures and videos of other people's islands, and while they inspire me and fuel my creativity, they also raise my standards for my own island because I know it could be so much better.

I want to be able to settle for "good enough." But it feels like trying to paint a rainbow with one or two colors missing or not quite the right shade. Maybe I can make something pretty, but it's not what I envisioned or want.

So I think, let's just come up with something different. There are plenty of designs I would like just as much or more, right? I'm already struggling because I like multiple exclusive aesthetics/layouts/etc. and I can't fit them all on one island. But...paths are kinda omnipresent, and that means I have to accept them being substandard. Unless? I've considered using minimal to no paths, but I can't imagine that working for me. I'm not going for full-on natural forestcore or whatever (and even that wouldn't look its best without dirt paths, right?).

I guess I might've made this into a bigger deal than it needs to be. At this point, I feel tired and stuck and hopeless, and part of me wants to let it go. It's just a game. But I don't want to give up and leave my island a mess again. For a short while, I was excited to create, thinking I could shape my little land into something great, something I could walk through with a smile and maybe feel proud of. And now I wonder if that's really possible. There must be something I can do, something I'd like, but I don't know how to find it. I'm honestly having trouble focusing on it right now.

Seeking inspiration is a double-edged sword. As nice as other people's islands look, I know a lot of pictures are shared with filters, and even those that aren't...well, seeing images and videos is different than walking through your own island day after day.

I could go into the game's flaws and limitations, but this is what we've got. And it's not all bad. There's potential. The problem is my own inner critic, and I don't know how to get past it.

The best part is that I've been trying to fight this perfectionism with the game from the beginning, when I last restarted my island and named it Wabisabia after the term wabi-sabi, the Japanese ideal/aesthetic centered on transience and imperfection. You can see how well that's going for me ha ha ha! Even if I want to embrace it in theory, it's not so easy to break through the perfectionism cemented inside me.

Anyway, yeah. Back to agonizing over my island I guess. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯