#anyways all the more reason for me to get into gamedev so i can make my OWN indie fire emblem. with gay nonbinary space furries or whatever

[taffywabbit]

me: i wish someone other than intsys would make a good tactical RPG with Fire Emblem-style gameplay for me to enjoy

studio: look we made a cool new tactical RPG that fans of strategy games like Fire Emblem will enjoy

me: is the gameplay Final Fantasy Tactics or Advance Wars

studio: it's a good tactical RPG ma'am. fans of strategy games like Fire Emblem will enjoy it :)

me: *plays 20 minutes of it*

(it's FF Tactics or Advance Wars)

[fioras-resolve]

i'm an hour away from San Francisco, and less than a day away from gdc. the stuff is terrifying to me, and i'm almost scared to go. like, i'll be on my own in a massive conference center, potentially interacting with people a lot better than me at this whole gamedev shtick. it's strange, you know? to a lot of people i've met i *am* the intimidating gamedev, but when i'm in the presence of other devs i'm reminded that i'm a socially awkward loser who probably wouldn't fit in with this whole thing anyway. i mean fuck, i'm going to wear the cat ears, in large part because i'm hoping that gives people an easy in for talking with me. but it can just as easily make me look like a weirdo who's not taking this seriously. and i do take it seriously! i take it very seriously. i take it more seriously than anyone else i know, because goddammit games are my life. my truest love. the constant in my life that makes it all worth it.

and i'm scared, you know? i'm scared that despite how mature i feel of late, i'm still a fuckin kid. and like, i know, okay? i know that "realizing you're still a kid is the mature thing," but it's different, okay? this isn't "humbling." for years, since i was in high school, i've been insecure about fitting in with people older than me. with rare exception, i'm the youngest one in any group, because i've always been doing shit that few others can. and like, look, i know it's not the Correct thing to say, i know that saying that i, angie nyx, have special talents that others don't is entering some real shit territory. i am well aware that despite my obstacles i am still in an immense position of privilege for even being able to make games in the first place. but i haven't come this far, in creating, analyzing, and learning about games to be told that i'm just like anyone else. 

*sigh* i want to have self-respect and self-confidence without being vain, but really sometimes i just wanna tell someone "i know more than you, why are you questioning me?" i'm in a position where i get to talk about games with people in a way where they listen, and i have an obligation to listen to them. and i hate the feeling i get when someone tells me they see me as a standard they need to live up to, because it shows the contradiction of my whole approach to my work. i take this stuff really seriously, i pursue it as a passion like no other, and i hold myself to a high standard, but i also recognize that holding literally anyone else to that standard would be harmful. i've lost friends over this, and only one has come back.

man, i just... i'm pushed all sorts of ways by this. i'm worried that my going to gdc makes me a sellout or an uberdweeb or an ivory tower elitist. but at the same time i'm worried that i'm NOT good enough to even be in this space. i'm choosing to go to this conference because i believe in my craft, because i want to get better, and because gdc talks have been my comfort media for years. there's some part of me, at the core of my being, that thinks this will be a nice and enriching conference where i'll learn a lot and maybe get to network. this is the place i'll go to meet My People. but i'm terrified, you know? i'm scared that all that i've built up is just pretend. i'm even MORE scared that i'll fuck it up somehow by being so autistic. scared that the mask will slip and i'll reveal myself to be a scared cat in a human body. scared that i'll embarrass myself, or make someone uncomfortable. i'm scared that maybe i'm not a real game developer, but someone just cosplaying as one.

man, i just... i wish i could cuddle with someone right now. it's been months since i've seen a partner or even a friend in person. it's been so long since i've had any kind of contact, any kind of warmth or closeness. i wish i was doing that instead of going by myself to a convention full of people i don't know. i'm lonely. i'm scared. the real reason why i wanted a friend to go with me is because that way i wouldn't feel so alone. i'd have someone i could talk to who was right here with me. if things went badly, i'd get support. instead i'm going with my mom, who very openly treats this as a vacation opportunity like any other. she wants to see the sights of san francisco. what i need is someone who i can share a room with and know it's all gonna be okay. god dammit.

[canmom]

I'm doing a gamedev course, paid for by Her Majesty's Government, because I guess they think more game developers is more taxes or something. I'll take it lol. Am I going to be come a game developer? Unclear as yet! I'll be as surprised as you. But I need 'money' to 'eat food', I understand, and this is looking like the best bet.

A lot of it is about one big project that I'll be working on over the next ~14 weeks, so I thought maybe people would be interested in what I'm trying to make. Which is THRUST//DOLL, a game about darting and grappling your posthuman shell through hundreds of missiles. You can see some visual inspirations here...

For reasons best known to Past Bryn (ok, it's to learn the tech), I'm trying to do this entire project within Unity's new(ish) Data Oriented Technology Stack (DOTS), which gives you the magic of an Entity Component System, meaning you can shove data in and out of the CPU cache at speeds previously unknown to humanity. DOTS is a paradigm that's supposed to replace the old object-oriented world of GameObjects with something sleek and modern and compiled (using 'Burst', we're still in C# sadly).

So the core idea of ECS is that, instead of storing data on class instances, you put that data in tightly packed arrays of component strcts indexed by the same 'entities', and you iterate over these rapidly with 'systems'. If you've heard of e.g. the Rust game engine Bevy, it's the same idea, just... awkwardly jammed into Unity. (Many other engines are following the same sort of idea).

But... it's had a really rocky history, the API has only just stablised after most of a decade, and half the DOTS-related information you'll find on the internet is plain out of date, and the rest is either a little inscrutable or long video tutorials.

The first task I've been set by the powers that be at "Mastered" is to make a 'configurator'. The assessment task they had me do to get into the course was also a configurator, I guess someone there really likes configuring things. Anyway, for me that's going to be the character creation screen of THRUST//DOLL, where you swap out bits of your body to get new abilities.

So, have the first of some devlogs where I describe the design decisions I've been making so far. At first all I wanted to do was create a system where there are UI elements that you can click on with a little toggleable circle in the UI that is attached to them. Unity has like three ways of doing everything you can think of, so that involved a lot of digging. Eventually I settled on doing it a fourth way using none of Unity's built-in UI systems, using shader magic.

So I made a noodly looking thing for drawing circles:

Why shadergraph and not the cool hardcore HLSL text editor way? Because sigh DOTS has a bunch of weird boilerplate I didn't have the energy to figure out. 'Because DOTS has a bunch of weird boilerplate' is gonna be the recurring thing in this story I suspect. Anyway Unity ShaderGraph is almost the same as Blender Material Nodes, except you need to know a little bit about rasterisation. Luckily I made a rasteriser in 2017, so I have a decent understanding of this stuff.

A billboard shader it turns out is hilariously simple. What you basically want to do is have a polygon that matches the rotation of the camera. However, in a shadergraph, Unity will apply the full MVP matrix no matter what. So the solution is that you do is you take the View matrix, which is the camera's transformation, and invert it, and apply that before the MVP matrix with 0 in the w component to make sure any translation still gets applied. As long as the model isn't rotated at all, it all cancels out.

Anyway I figured out how to do overrides with DOTS components, which is neat, so I can feed in numbers into my shader per entity. The next step was to figure out how to create entities and components to display these little circles... which is the subject of devlog #2.

This one's basically a DOTS cheat sheet where I boil down the main things you'd want to know how to do. If you ever felt like trying out Unity DOTS, I really, really hope it will save you some of the misery I've had. There are so many weird gotchas (you fool, you saved a temporary negative entity index!) but the good part is that it really forces you to learn what's going on in this thing.

That is a good part, right?

Anyway here's the milestone I reached today: cubes you can click on at like 200FPS. It will revolutionise gaming, I think.

Yeah so that looks like shit, but the code is cool, and now the code's there I can make something that looks cool instead of bad!

More updates soon, I have to work pretty hard at this thing. Have another concept sketch!

[rawliverandgoronspice]

god i felt like i was losing it seeing everyone praise totk's story as better than botw! mostly i'm just frustrated that botw gets so much shit for its story when imo it's one of the most compelling stories in the franchise! just because a story isn't ~epic~ with bombastic music 24/7 doesn't make it bad :/ anyways thanks for your post about totk's story its nice to know i'm not alone :')

Haha no problem! I relate to the frustration so I'm glad to help in that regard!

I think BotW's strength is how coherent its proposition is overall: it makes sense in this story that everything would be open, the world is fractured and faded and it's up to you to pull the pieces back together, or to ignore this and focus on your task. It's a game about reclaiming the land from a disaster and injecting meaning back into it, and I think it does wonders in that aspect. I have some issues with some of the game writing at a craft level (and I've never been sold on the idea that Zelda needed voice acting also, I think it shows the writing's limitations and always feels somewhat awkward and low-grade anime to me but that's another subject and my own opinion), but Zelda's character works really well, and the story is tragic and hopeful at once, which makes the world more believable and engaging in my opinion.

I'm warming up to the sidequests in TotK, I think some of them are pretty good! But it bugs me that you have to get out of your way to get any sort of emotional investment from the game, and I'm bothered that I feel more emotions for a random 20 minutes series of tasks than for the main quest where all the budget has been sunk (also a lot of it is poorly designed; that's a LOT of back-and-forth you're asking me to do for no good reason, game). I think this gripe is my own experience speaking, but I seriously wish companies in the modern age would stop being so precious and cagey about their main quests and dare show heart and take emotional risks --even though I know how difficult that can be in practice given how many eyes and hands are on the damn thing at any given time. Gamedevs call working on a main quest "being caught in the eye of Sauron", because it's exactly how it feels like and it's an almost universally awful experience --and maybe it's just projection on my part, but TotK's main quest really gives off that exhausted, sanitized vibe and this is partially why I have trouble enjoying it overall.

[hummingbird-games]

Dev Diaries

October 1, 2023

My goodness, it's the first devlog post-Crushed release!! How did that happen???

And where the heck has 2023 gone?!?! 🙃

Okay, pausing--for like four seconds--on the sillies, I've got some updates for y'all, so have a seat and get comfy.

Crushed updated build is out!!!

Now with the rest of the partial voice acting!!!

It was a super fun experience with the VA and I giggled a lot to hear the words I wrote spoken into existence. I think the next project I work on with voice work will also be partial. However, I can't imagine doing a whole game with full voice work. I can feel the mental break down from that possibility making its descent....

The postmortem was longer than I anticipated it to be, so it shall be posted separately (and with a read more for your scrolling needs) sometime! I go into (more) details on my inspiration and the process from hesitant idea, to jam entry, to a full-blown game, and all the heartbreak and burnout and catharsis in between!

You can also search 'gamedev rambles' or 'crushed vn' where I've already blabbed about Development Tingz LOL.

2. The HBG Twitter account has been nuked.

Yeah. Apologies if this is how you're finding out about it. I honestly have no idea where my audience is located as y'all are a quiet (but supportive) bunch. But for me as a player, it hurts because many of my peers are only on or are most active on Twitter.

However, me and the bird app have been at odds for a while so I guess it was just a matter of time... 🥲

3. Game Jam Gemini Mode

Alright, time to get serious-serious. (HA!)

While I was Fighting The Good Fight concerning getting Crushed up before the summer ended, I started dropping hints about the next project I wanted to work on with Yuri Jam (and Once Upon A Time jam) coming up.

Well. After giving it some thought, forcing myself to pause long enough to breathe, catching up on personal reading and other things, and again, giving it more thought: nope.

I could ignore this decision which I hate and push on anyway, but the consequences are not ones I want to deal with, nor will I be physically able to handle. (Yes, this is a direct reference to my health lol).

My plan about this time was to start reaching out to people and create a team--given that I banged out a script at lighting speed just so I knew what roles I needed and was prepared. I'm still not sure where that burst of frenzied energy came from, but it's gone now.

And then in between making Crushed live and getting the first voiced update done, I started to feel really weird. Like "Hello, Anxiety My Old Friend" weird. And I kept berating myself for dragging my feet, especially as Yuri Jam (and OUAT) are so 'chill' and 'easy-going' and why was I still freaking out? What was wrong with me???

Anyway, once the last voiced update went live, it hit me how utterly exhausted I was. Still am(?) So it's insane to think I was somehow going to have enough energy to lead a whole ass team to create one more project before the year ends. Even if said project was under 5k words.

Even as I write this saying I'm done, a part of me keeping scheming up ways to make it work.

But I wouldn't be doing it for the right reasons anyway (i.e. feeling like I should participate in more jams because every other developer is and I'm a bad indie dev if I don't, and feeling this desperation to prove I can tell other kinds of stories. ahahahaha)

A L S O I am broke 😂 And money talks louder than anything else!! This was the year--and continues to be the year-- of medical expenses and emergencies so like...gotta recover from that too.

The Knight Dance (my short Yuri idea) shall return, but next year at the earliest. And who knows? It might benefit from me not working on it now. Or that's what I'm telling myself so my brain will chill.

4. Tackling Ko-fi

I keep saying I'm going to start putting content on ko-fi, or posts, or something, and I keep proving to be a liar. That ends soon!

I've been playing around with the idea of adding both content for subs and one-time donators as well as free content, these things all exclusive to ko-fi. So there's an incentive to you guys to visit and an incentive for me to keep up with it.

There's a lot to the world of HSD/Crushed that just didn't make it into the games, and probably won't for a while, and then there are drabbles and longer stories that would be fun to write and share for anyone who's curious.

Okay!!!

In conclusion!!!

Go play Crushed!! Go support some game Kickstarters!! Go support a Pateron/Ko-fi of your fave creator!! Go replay some games!!

And watch this space for the Crushed postmortem and my yearly games & demos wrap up!!

And maaaaaaaybe catch me on the sideblog where I embody the cringe gamer girl I truly am???

~ Gemini

[waywardsalt]

putting this under the cut immediately because i KNOW this is going to be extremely long

general disclaimer, its not my kind of game im not blaming the actual devs for most of this shit i understand gamedev and writing and animating and all of that shit is hard yadda yadda anyways i fucking despise totk with an acidic rage and im trying to swear off of bitching about it any further but tbh i gotta get my actual thoughts out of my system somehow.

i guess my biggest issue with totk at the moment now is just that... it feels like it's the gaming equivalent of dangling keys in from of some kids face to get their attention; it's shiny, it's got fun gmod-ass glue mechanics, you get three whole maps and... it feels very hollow and like they just wanted to make a fun game and let everything else rot while the gameplay was polished to an insane degree- and i see why it's likely getting good scores despite the story and worldbuilding and theming and literally everything but the gameplay being rough as hell, its a fucking open world game with stupid glue mechanics where you can built the shit you want and go anywhere and like.

i didn't even like ultrahand very much, so there was no chance of this game actually winning me over. more often than not ultrahand was a hassle for me to use outside of solving puzzles with it. the gameplay isn't even particularly fantastic when you take away ultrahand bullshit or the admittedly impressive recall and ascend, it's just there to prop up the stock-standard open world game exploration and combat, which is effectively the exact same with the additions of every weapon being shit and funneling you into using ultrahand-mini (fuse) and giving you the chance to create insane destructing machines, which- where does that fit in? where does the zonai garbage being crazy weapons fit in with like... the zelda feel? idk the gameplay did literally feel like botw but with different abilities. ultrahand and fuse were effectively the same thing and the abilities just had. no decent story integration you just get these weird ass abilities because the devs wanted to let the player so whatever the fuck.

i mean, just... i know there's this general idea with loz games where they come up with the gameplay gimmick first and then build everything else around it, and totk is where it's the most painfully obvious. it is extremely easy to tell that the gameplay was the first priority in creation. with the other games, the gameplay gimmicks and story mesh pretty well, and everything is about equal- but the gameplay in totk sticks out like a sore thumb in comparison to the story and... everything. the story does just feel like an excuse for the different gameplay mechanics they decided to cook up.

i mean there's no real reason for why link getting rauru's arm allows him to access those powers, especially since we never see rauru or mineru use those kinds of powers, the depths and sky don't really matter outside of the dungeons in them, and the zonai tech is messily integrated just to be toys, and zelda turning into a dragon just... gives you another dragon for resources, and along with ganondorf jsut lets you have this cinematic final boss- ganondorf turns into a dragon for the sake of that cinematic boss battle, there's literally no way for him to have known what would have happened if he ate the stone. ganondorf being in the game alone is just... they added him because it's ganondorf, they don't actually go forward with making it matter that it's ganondorf, just that they had calamity ganon in botw and decided hey why not people like ganondorf let bring him back. it practically doesn't matter that he's gerudo or even a human character. he's just treated like another flatly evil monster. he's evil for the sake of it, and any other possible backstory for him is either ignored by the story or stamped out by the way the narrative wants you to view him.

i dont know exactly what happened during development but i hope to hell the final story and worldbuilding isnt what they intended to do by the end. it all feels so hollow, echoing what past zelda games have done and reusing old tropes, either not improving on any of them or not understanding why those things worked the first time. totk's story is just so flat, hardly any new characters get time to breathe and make any real impression, the ancient sages are nameless and faceless and are barely more than symbols, sonia was quite literally fridged, mineru and rauru get their moments but they don't do anything beyond what is needed to advance the immediate plot, and any new characters in the present aren't that deep either, even ganondorf is just more flat than ever even if he had the most character to his animations.

they backtracked on zelda's character growth and character in general to just shove her into that same old dedicated princess mold and the game at large is so desperate to have you groveling at her feet like the rest of hyrule with the overbearing repetition of 'look how great and nice and smart and thoughtful she is :))))' and it's so bizarre how they shove her influence into every corner of the world, including those she really shouldn't be that involved in, and it just wraps around to being like... don't think about it just listen to us. that's what the whole game feels like, don't think too hard about it and just follow what the game wants you to do and think about all of this. the stable quests all boiling down to just finding a bunch of stupid quirky little misunderstandings of things zelda had benevolently done was one of the most frustrating experiences: why even fucking BOTHER with fake zelda even being a thing in the present if nothing outside the plot is done with it, and the stable quests would have been a great opportunity.

i didn't even bother with most of the side quests after i beat the main story; i did a smattering of bigger side quests, got the memories and all of the shrines and cleared the depths and finished the story and i havent touched it since. and then i played persona 5 royal and had the best time of my life. that game was a fantastic palate cleanser after totk.

i mean.... my favorite part of totk (asides from the music) was the depths, clearing that out and spending hours getting every lightroot, and as much as a i loved the depths, in hindsight it is BULLSHIT that you get what amounts to a worthless token for getting every single lightroot. same as the reward for every korok seed- that open world bullshit of there being no real payoff to these massive collectible undertakings buts a little 'you did it :)' token. SO much of the chests and rewards in totk were absolute dogshit, it was CONSIDERABLY worse than the rewards in botw especially since the weapons are worse across the board. i played totk around the same time as a friend of mine, and even they were starting to get irritated with the shitty rewards.

similarly, it was also a pain in the ass to see how they used the amiibo armor and other references to past games- it was so shallow and hardly every worth the effort and just... why even reference the old games anyways? totk has jack shit to do with any of them, much less the game it's supposed to be a goddamn sequel to, and it was just a worthless attempt at using nostalgia and references. you can utilize past game references and nostalgia well (imo fire emblem engage did a really good job with that) and totk just tossed that shit in there bc it could and then moved on. don't even bother.

tbh totk really did stampede over everything in botw, from basically ignoring most of zelda's characterization, to scrubbing away most of the stuff about the champions or sheikah... anything (i'm so pissed by that one interview thing. 'it all disappeared bc calamity ganon disappeared' ILL BITE YOU. NOT ALL OF IT IS GONE. THEY LITERALLY DISCUSS IT IN BOTWS EPILOGUE. they built that shit in preparation for clam ganon its not like clam ganon caused it to pop up it was like a massive contingency plan for ganon why would it all disappear anyways what the hell. what the fuck. considering the sheikah's history w/ the hylian royals its so doubly fucked), and just... oh my GOD what totk does with link is so. you cannot be doing this rn.

link being a non speaking character is totally fine and has been handled great in the past and tbh botw handled him being non-speaking with limited emoting in the memories bc it gave a valid reason and suggested that lack of pressure and memories is what allows him to be more visibly emotional in the present!!! and totk is like. ah. nope. hes stone faced again. even in front of his friends and the people he cares about. even though this was explained as being basically a defense mechanism for hyrule's safety being put on his shoulders in the past and he loosens up in present botw. oh you want to see him smile? at his friend? who he's fought tooth and nail to see again? too bad its out of bounds. poor boy looks like he could be a customizable character in most cutscenes. you could swap him out with any other character in those scenes and it would not matter. the common defense abt link feeling like he doesnt matter to the story is usually like 'oh but he's doing that stuff of course it matters' you are missing the point the problem is that it feels like link. link specifically. link the character from botw. it feels like he does not matter to the story. feels like he could be swapped out with any random character so long as they have the master sword in hand.

look the music was the best part of the game but like. the usage of motifs from botw that don't actually relate to anything in totk (such as bringing back the champion's motifs when. they have LITERALLY nothing to do with almost anything in totk). the music does a good job at pulling on your heartstrings but it feels like it's doing a LOT of that specific heavy lifting in the story. very little of the actual game content backs up the soundtrack. totk does not deserve its soundtrack imo.

tbh the new sages were kinda weak, too. yunobo is infuriatingly fooled by fake zelda at every turn, tulin (best boy) has the most lazy blink-and-you'll-miss-it character 'arc' abt him learning to work with others or whatever the hell that dialogue was trying to impress upon me, sidon... look i did the water temple first (hated it) and then moved on i barely remember much about sidon, and riju is unfortunately in the blast range of what was done to the gerudo as a whole. they're fine, don't really get much time to breathe, their powers range from decently useful to just straight up a pain in the ass, (mineru is the worst sage. her mech... using that thing is one of the most unpleasant gameplay experiences ive had in what might be years) and oh god the dungeons... those fuckers are not a 'return to form' they're cheap imitations of zelda dungeons of the past.

say what you will about the divine beasts but at least i didn't feel like i was being treated like a fucking moron while going through them. totk's dungeons were insultingly easy, robbing any puzzle completing satisfaction by either just handing you the solution on a shiny silver plate or having the puzzle just be some flavor of 'go hit that switch' totk's water temple is the WORST zelda dungeon i have ever played through good god. it feels like the inverse of what majora's mask had going on; while majora's mask was on a smaller scale, the dungeons are huge undertakings of interwoven puzzles that are just... mwah i need to replay majora's mask soon. despite the game's massive scale totk's dungeons didn't take half as long as some fucking shrines. idk. every other zelda game ive played from phantom hourglass to skyward sword had considerably better dungeons than totk. fuckin- ph is easily a zelda game aimed more for younger audiences and they have more complicated dungeons than totk. fuck the story felt darker than totk. FUCK, LINEBECK ALONE WAS A MORE WELL WRITTEN AND DEVELOPED CHARACTER THAN THE WHOLE CAST OF TOTK PUT TOGETHER- my copy of phantom hourglass cost me $70 to obtain. phantom hourglass is worth that $70 to me. totk is not.

(speaking of shrines, totk's shrines were fine, it was disappointing how many of them were just. empty with just the prize. i will say, however, I fucking LOVED the shrines where you were stripped of all of your items and dropped into a unique combat situation. a perfect blend of puzzle and combat that utilized the new abilities much better than literally any other part of the game i WISH they actually used the ideas present in those shrines throughout the whole game they were so so good)

of course, theres the uncomfortable implications in the plot of hyrule in the past, the zonai being heralded as gods and then just peacefully placing themselves as higher and in authority over the other races, and then the suggestion that again in the present the other races (in some form) return to being vassals of hyrule, pretty much everything with the gerudo and the way ganondorf is treated and some aspects of his design, how the female characters are treated and viewed across the board, the messy theming, hyrules seemingly complete infatuation with zelda… a lot of this game just made me feel icky, and not in an intentional way.

it almost feels like theres a sense of disdain aimed at storytelling and worldbuilding in general, hardly anything feels new and what is new just is awkwardly superimposed on existing concepts, those existing concepts being carelessly brushed aside, the world bending- sometimes nonsensically- to fit the new ideas totk introduces. all of the disparate parts do not fit together very well and every cool new idea either falls flat after any scrutiny or stands as an unsatisfactory answer to an interesting question. its messy and i get the vibe that they (whoever has the final say on this stuff) don’t care so long as it sells. it doesnt particularly inspire hope or interest in the future of the series if the attitude towards final-draft storytelling and worldbuilding is the same as we got in that interview snippet about the sheikah technology. it feels insulting after everything we’ve seen in this series.

totk arguably is dragged down the most by its story, and i think is has the worst story of the series on account of how hollow and blatently gameplay-enabling it feels. at least in past zelda games if things went unexplained, there was enough room and evidence to speculate. the sheikah tech situation has been explained with ‘it just vanished and no one cared’ and that just feels insulting, not only to the people who wanted a real answer, but also to the game itself.

idk what else to add this game is covered in the ooze for me and i hate it and wouldnt mind never playing it again. theres so much that just doesnt make sense, straight up sucks, goes nowhere, means nothing, is shallow and pointless, is uncritical of itself and what it says, and is just… im not surprised about the lack of dlc on the basis that they dont have any more gameplay to add. the story and world is the very least important thing to totk and it fucking sucks. the gameplay doesnt even do anything for me i just fucking hate this game and its elementary school recess level complexity world and story

To my fellow totk haters (people who started off mildly annoyed with the game's flaws, who then progressed into full on rage as almost everybody else seemed to love it): What did you most dislike about the game? If you can't decide, what were the biggest problems you had? What changes would you like to make?

This can be anything from gentle constructive criticism to a full on rage induced rant; I want to hear your thoughts, whichever form they may take!

[machinesbleedtoo]

Capstone project over! Here is what I have planned for Hyaline

My major university assessment - a group software project that was developed over 8 months - is over and done with! Woo! It was a game, I chose to jump in with the gamedev students so I could learn more about the technical side of development to aid me in making Hyaline. We were a group of 8 and had supervisors and everything, so it was an incredibly insightful ordeal when it comes to project management and completion. So, Hyaline’s game - here are 2 things from the start of the year, and 2 things from the distant past.

And a bad quality 2018 photo of a draft print of Hyaline’s world guide book just as a reminder that progress had actually been made on it before life kicked my ass (this photo is my tether when I feel like I’ve achieved nothing in my projects, really.)

I’d like to continue on with my now ancient plans for opening a Hyaline themed shop but finances and time are not on my side for that right now.

Read below for information regarding my plans / my degree and how it all fits together.

The largest change is my focus shift from the world guide to the videogame.

The world guide writing is more or less in a second draft state and has been for eons. All that is left is some worldbuilding details about climate and then I need to work on the illustrations. I burn myself out every time when I try to paint complex scenes because I cannot visualize depth (stereoblindness.) I can’t imagine where to place things inside of a perspective grid.

The world guide primarily focuses on the section of rainforest Hyaline’s game is set in. So I’ve decided to build that first because I’ll need to do it anyway, and it means I have references for the illustrations I need to do - that are canon down to every detail!

The game relies on the environment for mechanics - the wildlife and placement of edible plants, of water, etc, is the driving force behind the survival gameplay. I also plan to include story-driven exploration elements which requires the map be finalized too.

I’ll be making the prototype for the mechanics as well to ensure my design decisions aren’t a total disaster so it’s going to be a big undertaking so I’m equal parts nervous and hype. The graphic novel remains the last on the list to complete, which pains me, because it’s my favourite story arc! But it requires the most worldbuilding work and chronologically makes the most sense to release last. Though I do want to make some standalone comics of the characters since discovering sketching scenes with 3D art first. I have been slowly working on redesigning the characters and species to make them fit the world more, too.

I don’t have any deadlines or estimates on when things will be done, life circumstances remain fucky and will probably remain that way until I get any semblance of life and financial stability, after I graduate. Hyaline is a living world, anyway - I’m trying to just enjoy the worldbulding process.

As for my degree -

I’m scheduled to graduate at the end of 2022. Due to a prerequisite and unit availability, I have to do 2 semesters part time. I should still be able to access financial support because this is for a reason outside of my control. If so, thank fuck, because the lower end of the full time study load was really harsh on my disabilities and university has been torture for that.

2 of my 4 units left are 3D modelling electives, because I am so antsy to have time to dedicate to projects again after almost five years of utter hell, and I’d rather have a chill time in my final year. Also I’m not very good at 3D art for games and it’s yet another sneaky way to use my unrelated degree to help me make progress with my projects. Thank you so much to my patrons for the support - the extra money has been a godsend - and to the people who have been patiently following me all these years. I have learned so much, and changed so much, and I can finally see a future that isn’t full of misery and art burnout!

I’ll have a cybersecurity and neuroscience degree by the end of next year, in absence of any more setbacks, and can maybe finally afford to exist as a Sick Person. Here’s hoping.

[hopecountyisforlovers]

rant under the cut dont read this if you like pokemon swsh or dont want spoilers. or do if you like to start fights i guess fsjdlfjsdkl

saw a few people say it wasnt so bad and this isnt like. coming after them or anything but sword and shield are just so so rushed that its like. more thought was put into the aftergame i.e raising a real competitive team to battle online than like the. real experience of it. the story is SO so linear that it leaves little room for exploration and theres not much to explore anyway. the gen3 games had more content than sword and shield. i played pokemon sapphire for YEARS after i finished it and never picked up swsh ONCE. and dont even get me started on the fucking mess that is the STORY like. oh my god. its so bad. its literally just the story of su/mo but with absolutely everything done completely wrong. leon and the few hot gym leaders are its absolute only saving grace. the game is PUSHOVER easy and thats coming from someone who cheats at hard pokemon games because i LOVE to be overleveled and feel overpowered and sexy and never lose. not once in swsh did i feel like i earned anything it more felt like it was all just being handed to me. the storyline with hop is depressing and honestly ? that problem pervades what little story there is. its depressing. i do not want to think about the ENERGY CRISIS in the middle of my POKEMON GAME i do not want to see a SAD DEAD CORSOLA what is WRONG with you gamefreak. and its depressing on a meta level because its the beginnings of something awful for a franchise ive loved my entire life, that has helped me get through some of the worst times ive ever lived through. it signifies Making Money becoming more important to them than making something thats actually Fun or Better than what theyve Already Made

and i know. i know its not the gamedevs fault they were put under massive strain and forced to work a ridiculous amount. dont come after me with “they did the best they could with the time they had” or some old bullshit like i KNOW that. but the problems with this game are SYSTEMIC

like i always think of that one scene. im pretty sure it was near the end of the game when theyre setting up rose as a villain where youre waiting for leon, a guy known for getting lost and being late, but because he doesnt show up on time hop gets worried for some reason?? and you find out from oleana or w/e that leon is talking to the chairman and its framed like hes ?? in danger ?? and you have to rescue him?? despite him being the undefeated champion of this region for at least ten years and you being Two Children?? so oleana tells you how to get to the place she clearly doesnt want you to be and you have to battle through all the guys and her to get to leon but once youre there he just. LEAVES WITH YOU of his own volition ?? he was literally never in any danger at all ?? so the only reason we did that was to set rose up for his villain reveal quite literally the VERY NEXT DAY ?? if this was a cartoon or a movie or anything else it would be ripped apart for being stupid and contrived and badly written because quite frankly it Is so why are so many people just OKAY with it it drives me absolutely insane. the game holds your hand to a quite frankly ridiculous degree. at no point can you walk more than about two steps without someone showing up to dump exposition on you and give you free revives you dont need because the game is Piss Easy and tell you EXACTLY where to go like these games that have been out since 1999 still thinks youre too stupid to already know how to play them which granted has kind of always been a thing but NEVER to this extent. a catching tutorial is one thing but this is completely and totally Another 

i just. man sword and shield bums me out. the first mainline pokemon games on what some would call a real console since the n64 and all they amount to is boring predictable garbage with half the content cut out and sold to you for 30 extra dollars after the fact. everything in swsh probably could have been done 15 years ago on the Original DS and i really hope they dont continue with this trend. i really want to be excited for a pokemon game again. i dont want to think that like. theyve already made the last good ones theyre ever gonna make.

in the meantime im gonna play fangames and hacks by people who have actually put love and care into what theyre doing

[inflammatoryfandomblog]

anyways let’s hard pivot into VIDEOGAMES, a subject for which approximately 0% of you followed me for.

anyways one thing i always hate hearing is that “oh a challenge for video games is how to integrate story with gameplay,” which is honestly really baffling for me. that’s like saying “a challenge for novels is how to integrate story with prose” or “a challenge for film is how to integrate story with cinematography.” like... you either write/film/design to your story, or you come up with a story that matches your writing/filmstyle/design!

i’m so tired of hearing about games with a “great story” and how it “succeeded despite the INHERENT CONTRADICTION BETWEEN GAMEPLAY AND TELLING A STORY.” i truly think that if you say something like that you have no place in games commentary or indeed gamedev, but that’s neither here nor there.

(to be clear i have nothing against narrative-less games, just as i have nothing against narrative-less poetry or narrative-less video. story isn’t the end-all be-all of art (TM))

now i do know why people say stuff like this: when people talk about “gameplay” they mean “combat mechanics,” and i think that if you think “gameplay” means “the different ways you can simulate beating the shit out of people” then maybe saying that there will always be a tension between gameplay and story is accurate.

the fundamental problem with combat mechanics is that there is usually no going after a fail state--you can’t lose an encounter and keep going, because usually that means your character dies, which means you get a game over screen. this is immensely problematic if you want to communicate any sort of narrative, because narratives usually involve agents who fail sometimes--and in a combat system where the only way to fail gameplay-wise is to die, that means your struggles in the game to beat a boss amount to nothing for a character.

the souls’ series (at least in dark souls and demons’s souls) ability to contextualize player death in its narrative is one of the reasons it was so immersive to its players. you dying over and over again to that boss, scouring the world for advantages? that’s exactly what your character is doing in the story--you can’t help but feel a connection there, and people are really driven to know more about the world of these games because of it.

if you can’t do something like that (some other games, like undertale, integrate the ability to reload saves into a superpower the main character has, others, like hades, make you a literal god trying to escape the underworld), this means that gameplay will runs in parallel to the story (and there are other problems with the saturation of violence in video games, such that you have to bend stories around them, hence why so many protagonists are DEEP HARDENED KILLERS WITH PSYCHOLOGICAL ISSUES--the other avenue is to make an unserious game with more cartoon violence, and those games usually have a better pick of main characters.)

one of my favorite games of all time is pyre (best supergiant game by far), largely because it tolerates fail states and the story keeps on going even if you lose a match. if you play it on a challenging difficulty and don’t reload, you do feel some dips and dives of the story independent of “scripted” plot events. the gameplay also isn’t combat-oriented: it’s more of a sports thing instead.

it’s not hard to fix this problem. it’s not even especially hard to reframe combat mechanics so that the system represents something that isn’t combat (see griftlands and the negotiation decks), reframe them so you don’t have to completely lose and die every time you fail (lots of games do this). and--if you’re feeling really adventurous--it’s not even hard to make a game that doesn’t have combat as its only meaningful mechanic in the first place! it just takes, you know, creativity and effort.

[yellow-rising]

i have no highground here in fact actively holding myself back from being a villain. i do not care to be a better person than someone who is convinced shipping two fictional characters who are equally racist towards eachother is the equivalent of a real life hate crime. i guarantee you if you so much as attempted to convey this point to a real person face to face youd shit your pants and cry before even thinking to utter the word “racist”. do u think poc see ur nonsense and think “oh my god my hero” because sweetheart i promise you are making yourself look like a joke. i still cant tell if this is serious and entertaining you is an embarrassment but here i am at 3 am

you are getting cooked rn and it is funny as fuck. youre right, i dont give a shit if you enjoy hp or jerk off to deku or whatever and you dont have to defend yourself for that, but lets not pretend youre not the lamest person on this website rn. bffr youre pushing 30 and calling an asian person a white racist because they drew fictional characters hatesnogging.

u are nothing. u are no one. because of this, people are  going to draw them making out more. look what youve done. take a good, long look in the mirror and ask yourself “why does laezel sticking her tongue in shadowhearts mouth compel me to be an insufferable human being on the internet”

and yes, all timelines in the game are technically canonical given the fact they can happen within the original piece of media. shadowheart and laezel have been animated by gamedevs doing disgusting things to eachother. it is canon. that is the definition of canon. just because it is a choice does not mean it is not canon. i can choose to kill gale at the beginning of the game but that does not make him not canon to the rest of the story.

anyways youre probably gonna ignore most of the reasonable points people are making towards you because losers like you cannot for the life of you take accountability for your behavior while holding others accountable for your brain delusions but idk youve done more to boost ops art and make ppl draw this shit out of spite so keep at it i guess im here for it

[myfriendpokey]

Innocence Reserve

I don't know when I noticed that the culture had been filled with veterans - not necessarily of the military kind, although the word always carries something of that connotation. News stories might mention veteran bankers, veteran lobbyists, there are veteran reporters and veteran bloggers, you can go listen to talks by a veteran game designer. The word "veteran" in this context seems to imply not just experience, or longevity, but a certain kind of experience, a world-weariness. The veteran tag carries the suggestion of having dealt with the uglier parts of an industry, the backroom politicking and desperate fixes that might not ever be officially acknowledged. It made me think of the line used by the film critic Vern as shorthand for all those melodramatic revelations in recent action films, that mutants are real, or vampires are real, or transformers are real and they secretly fight the vampires at night - "your world is just a sugar-coated topping...."

The funny thing about these movies is that the protagonists nearly always end up fighting to leave the topping intact: to make sure the general public remains blissfully ignorant of the real world beneath the surface of the everyday. The protagonist encounters the secret knowledge and then fights to prevent the burden of this knowledge being passed on to others. If the classical action narrative is that of public violence in the service of maintaining private innocence, the postmodern action narrative is that of private violence in the service of maintaining public innocence. As a recent american political candidate (and, yes, veteran) has remarked, he personally carried an assault rifle "over there" so he would not have to carry one "over here".

The anti-veteran is not the rookie, but the civilian - the person who isn't even aware of the continuum of knowledge of which the veteran stands at the top. If the veteran is defined by knowledge and expertise, the civilian must be correspondingly defined by ignorance and ineptitude. They are figures of contempt, pity. But as the veteran is now also defined as an ambivalent attitude to that knowledge and expertise, the civilian becomes an object of yearning, a state of innocence. Old man action movies and dadified videogames tend to involve reluctant but extremely capable professionals who put their skills to use for the purpose of keeping some innocent other out of the cycle of violence that they themselves are trapped in. The value of non-expertise can be accepted and celebrated, but only after the value of expertise can be demonstrated yet again. The civilian here has nothing to do but offer their respect and benediction towards the sacrifice of the veteran: the essential passivity of this role is reflected by the fact it tends to be played by a child.

I think of this, watching gamedev documentaries, reading postmortems, where the emotional payoff comes frequently in the "cut to child" - where all the tribulations of the developer, the second mortgage, the 80 hour weeks, the ergot poisoning from eating nothing but pot noodles for the past four years, are redeemed when we finally see the finished work played by a smiling and appreciative moppet. And, yes, it is heartwarming - but as filmed, or photographed, there's no room for ambivalence in a child's response. We don’t watch for it – the child is not an individual creature, here, but the stand-in for a general condition of childhood, defined socially in part as “an ability to take pleasure in videogames”. When I last wrote about dad action games I felt they reflected a lack of this ability, a deep exhaustion with the format coupled with an inability to break away from it. The characters are tired of doing this shit, the players are tired of doing this shit, the developers are most certainly tired of doing this shit - but here we go again, with the vague hope that this indefinite, looping deferral of meaning or consequence will basically run itself out. And if not, the unblemished victims of one game can be converted into the haunted, compromised veterans of the inevitable sequel.

What does it mean to reframe public life as a kind of innocence reserve? No longer a place of discussion, argument, violence, history, but a frozen Main Street USA, a vision of the right life accessible to the lucky in brief trips before they go back to the private grind that constitutes their ticket of admission – something that both absolves and basically justifies the horrible conditions around it, and is defended all the more zealously for that reason. Our existing moppet reserves may not be adequate. One of the more jarring political features of recent years is seeing real kids – school shooting survivors, those growing up under climate change – taking up explicitly political positions, as their own experiences diverge ever more wildly from the state of undifferentiated innocence our bold private-industry veterans have supposedly been fighting to protect.  What is the game developer without the player, what is the designer without the end user, what is the policeman without the innocent, what is the soldier without the folks at home?

Well, perhaps automation holds the answer. The task of performing a loveable naivete is increasingly outsourced to artificial intelligence systems anyway, either real or mimed (as with the briefly popular “neural network composes seinfeld script” type comedy format). Robots say the darnedest things, they compose funny pictures, they latch onto words taken out of context and reuse them in humourous ways etcetera. What if a robot learned about Star Wars? What if a robot played Mario 1-1? The possibilities are endless and delightful. The ceremony of innocence can be preserved for another generation – and another generation of “veterans“ will get the satisfaction of simultaneously pitying, celebrating and absolving themselves for the empty work they define themselves around by churning out a public culture of sacrificial kitsch.

(image sources: Breath Of Fire, Captain Commando, Crime City)

[rpgmgames]

August’s Featured Game: Shroom Soup

DEVELOPER(S): Shroomy ENGINE: RPGMaker 2000 GENRE: Adventure, RPG, Psychological Horror WARNINGS: listed here (may contain spoilers) SUMMARY: You play as Arnika, a gloomy teenage girl. Perpetually tired, you live off excessive sleep, lime juice, and instant soup. You look into the vortex forming in your cup of said soup, this time mushroom flavour. Next thing you know, you are in an entirely different world where everything, from buildings to people, is being devoured by fungi. It seems like you have no choice but to walk on... Your journey involves exploration, puzzle-solving and battles.

Download the demo here!

Our Interview With The Dev Team Below The Cut!

Introduce yourself! Hello! I am Shroomy, and I still haven't figured out which one of my nicknames I should go by, but I use "uboaappears" for art and "toxic shroom swamp" for games. I have a bachelor's degree in biology since two weeks ago and like everything surreal, gory and gay. Nice to meet you. I have been in the community since about 2012, and that might be also when I first wanted to make a game - a Yume Nikki fangame, because YN brought me here. I messed around with the engine for a long time, and certain characters and ideas gradually mutated to whatever this is now.

What is your project about? What inspired you to create your game initially? *Shroomy: It's about making a cup of instant soup and accidentally going on a very weird adventure. ...Okay, actually, it's a coming-of-age story with an emphasis on mental health, relationships, and toxic flesh-eating mushrooms. The idea came to me when I made myself an instant soup once. For some reason, I thought it would be cool if there was a portal into another world in the cup. That's how it started. (I was also into drawing mushrooms growing on people at the time, so that naturally made its way into my Awesome Game Idea.)

How long have you been working on your project? *Shroomy: ...A while. It's enough to say that I graduated from both high school and university with it. But to be honest, I didn't really do much with it until about two years ago. Right now I tend to think of the time before that as trial and error, playing around with ideas and learning to use the engine. I feel a little self-conscious about how long it took me to come up with a coherent story, but that might be a good thing. Since this is quite a personal game, it helped to grow as a person. I think it made for a more interesting and mature work than it would be otherwise.

Did any other games or media influence aspects of your project? *Shroomy: I feel like I take little bits of inspirations from everything. But I'd say Yume Nikki and Re:Kinder were the biggest game influences. Maybe Hello Charlotte, too - the minimalistic world gave me some food for thought :> Design-wise, I think my current (character) style is a lovechild of Danganronpa, Killing Stalking and something else I am not sure about. Maybe just me.

Have you come across any challenges during development? How have you overcome or worked around them? *Shroomy: I think the biggest challenges for me have always been centered around the lack of free time, the lack of energy or the lack of motivation. Some people manage to juggle life and gamedev, but I get exhausted really easily, so it's hard. This is an ongoing issue. I tend to try and free up a day just for relaxing and creative stuff. I've also started using the Forest app for focusing on things, and sometimes use it for gamedev as well. At the beginning I found it frustrating that my skills (in pixel art, for example) didn't match what I wanted to create. That one was improved by - you guessed it - making a lot of pixel art. Making and scrapping a bunch of tilesets for the game. It's as simple as practice and learning how to get the most out of your art program. (It also helps me to make a detailed sketch of a map before I start working, or at least brainstorm the main elements of it.) Another challenge was the incoherence of the story. Originally I wanted to make something really vague and open to interpretation, but... that actually didn't give me enough material to work with. In the end, I played around with the characters, tried to write them some backstories that no one was going to see, and somehow ended up with an actual plot..? Shocking, I know! And the final thing is putting gameplay into the game. To be honest, the puzzles in the demo were pretty random on my side, I just thought them up on the spot. In subsequent locations I tried to make them relevant to the game's themes and/or hint towards the story.

Have any aspects of your project changed over time? How does your current project differ from your initial concept? *Shroomy: For one thing, the current project has a story and a plan, even if the story is presented in quite an obfuscated way. The original concept was not much more than an idea of a shroomy world. The characters also have a lot more depth and pain to them than they used to. The locations have changed a lot as well, to the point where most of the original ones don't exist anymore.

What was your team like at the beginning? How did people join the team? If you don’t have a team, do you wish you had one or do you prefer working alone? *Shroomy: My team is mostly just me. At the beginning it was a young and naive me, and now we have a slightly older and better-at-art me. After I started my dev blog, I was contacted by Tommuel, who now helps me with sound design and music. And my old friend Robin has made a few NPC sprites for me, and might give a hand with more pixel art in the future. They're not really involved with other aspects of development, but I really appreciate their help anyway! I prefer to keep most of this game to myself - it feels too personal to share, plus I'm a bit of a perfectionist.

What is the best part of developing the game? *Shroomy: I would say it's putting my work out there and sharing it with the world. I'm also really proud of how much I've grown as an artist and writer through developing this. I got attached to this story and this world, with all of its fun, weird and sad details. It's also been really fun, amazing even, to get to know other devs and make friends through being part of this interesting and creative community. I owe some wonderful friendships to it.

Do you find yourself playing other RPG Maker games to see what you can do with the engine, or do you prefer to do your own thing? *Shroomy: I definitely play other games for inspiration, it helps me a lot. Though I try not to make things "just like" other games, but make it a transformative learning experience instead.

Which character in your game do you relate to the most and why? (Alternatively: Who is your favorite character and why?) *Shroomy: I feel like I have been through stages. At first I was Arnika, then Lina, now I feel like I'm turning into Arthur. I guess I put my traits into all of them. (Does that mean that Bernard is the next stage? I'm /so/ ready to transcend humanity, finally learn how to do maths and become everyone's favourite character.)

Looking back now, is there anything that regret/wish you had done differently? *Shroomy: I think the biggest mistake I made was jumping straight into making a game without thinking it through or considering the scope. In the end, the lack of planning set me back a lot. Admittedly, I was young and excitable, so I guess it was a learning experience? I didn't really know how to write stories or plan long-term projects, but over time, I somehow built up those skills. I think it's good to have a clear-ish idea of what you want to make before you start, and maybe start with something small. (So basically, do the opposite of what I did.)

Once you finish your project, do you plan to explore the game’s universe and characters further in subsequent projects, or leave it as-is? *Shroomy: Aha. Actually, yes. I have accidentally started writing two sequels already. They will be small games focusing on other characters' perspectives (as opposed to Arnika). I'm not actually touching them yet though, only making some notes and writing scripts. Perhaps by the time the first game is released I'll have enough material to comfortably work on them.

What do you look most forward to upon/after release? *Shroomy: Fan reaction, I think? To be honest, I'm not really sure. I think I'll just be enjoying the incredible dopamine rush after finally setting this child of mine free to explore the world and infect people's brains with all the shroomy memes it contains. (Also will probably get off the internet for about a week from the anxiety.) Then maybe being free to work on other things, indeed. And posting spoilery concept art >:D

Is there something you’re afraid of concerning the development or the release of your game? *Shroomy: I am a little worried about the reception of the game's subject matter. If you looked at the list of warnings, you might have an idea what I mean. Sometimes it feels dangerous to explore certain themes in your stories, because people misinterpret depicting something bad as promoting it, for example. But that's why that list exists. I'm just going to let people know straight away that I explore dark themes in this project and I'm not going to hold back on how I do it. Creativity should flow freely, I think. (I am also a little worried about the ratio of my free time vs. gamedev time and /when/ I will finally be able to release it, but... Thankfully, I'm the one in charge of that.)

Do you have any advice for upcoming devs? *Shroomy: Take some time to make a plan for your project, start small, fail faster, and aim for something finished before you aim for perfect. Make a system for organising your files. Back up often, and on a different drive/cloud than your game is on, preferably several. Most of all, make something you would love to play! And don't be too hard on yourself.

Question from last month's featured dev @blackcrystalsrpg: What are your game dev pet peeves?? *Shroomy: I dislike the fact that sometimes I want to have made a game more than I want to make a game, but to have made a game you need to go and make the game. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ But there's no escape from fate, so... go, go and make that game happen!

We mods would like to thank Shroomy for agreeing to our interview! We believe that featuring the developer and their creative process is just as important as featuring the final product. Hopefully this Q&A segment has been an entertaining and insightful experience for everyone involved!

Remember to check out Shroom Soup if you haven’t already! See you next month! 

- Mods Gold & Platinum

[tinydevblog]

its alive

okay so it’s been almost two years since the last update but bear with me

quick timeline of what’s been going on:

health issues got worse (and are still worse)

had to put project on pause between that and Life Things

started having time again to work on project and realized there were a lot of overhauls i wanted to make and my scope was honestly bigger than i had the means to handle right now (between free time and just. health)

started reworking a new game design document with a smaller scope to work on instead

and now i might as well pick this blog back up and keep doing on it what i was planning on doing on it, which is to keep track of all my gamedev stuff!

it’s going to mostly be planning things for a little bit until i get back into coding but i already have the start of some assets and a reasonable amount of planning drafted out and now i need to fill it with a bit more lore and explicit logic and it’ll be ready to Look Like Something

i’ll make sure to tag different types of devwork (lore vs mechanics planning vs asset work vs coding, etc) so people can blacklist any of the ones they’re not interested in

anyway thanks @ everyone who didnt unfollow somehow despite me never posting, im glad (?) i could reward your apparently aptly placed hope

[freedom2fight]

“This colorful monstrosity will hunt you down in your nightmares.”

Hi. I’m Feedom2Fight and I’m going to write about how a novice artist/gamedev makes animation for games and stuff. 

I absolutely have no idea what am I doing, so take all this with a healthy fistful of salt. Or two fists. Maybe a foot.  

Take a look at this majestic, colorful monstrosity. This is how my sprite animations look like before details are added. 

It doesn’t look good, I know, even for a dummy/canvas. I’m not a skilled artist or animator, didn’t study at some fancy art school, I studied international relations for chrissakes. Am I gonna apply political economics to animation? That wouldn’t help it look better now would it?

Anyways. I used an actual person running as a reference. Kids - using your imagination can only take you so far. 

You can’t replicate the complexity of the world around you relying only on your imagination. It’s alright to look at stuff to get a better grasp of how things are. 

I mean.  Your brain is powerful. Though your brain sucks at reproducing images on its own. 

Right, so.

I picked the frames I will likely use. Reduced it further to the essential 3 frames per side. Contact, Low and High. There are 6 frames in total - 3 Right, 3 Left.

Why are you being economical with your animations frames freedom? I hear you ask. What do I look like? Studio Ghibli? Huh? Gainax? Pixar?   

But there’s a reason for it too. The brain needs at least 3 frames to give an illusion of movement/action. If there are only 2 frames it will look a bit scary. Characters will look jerky and erratic. If you have these 3 frames. You can add passing or recoil frames or both, if you want. 

As for me. I have only completed 3 characters with full running animations. I still have more to do. Still need to fix the existing ones too. I’m just one guy making my game. I’m not doing some RPG Maker thing or some 8bit pixel side-scroller. I’m making a proper game here! Hehehe. 

So I’m sticking with 6 frame totals. It’s faster this way and looks passable. Got any objections? Say it to the marines. If you’re a marine... tell it to yourself. 

What am I talking about again? Man.

Freedom2Fight out.

[leftnipsdoodles]

I would like to hear your reasons for not liking Telltale. I'm not trying to stir the pot, I'm just genuinely curious. (You know, aside from what I've heard they do to their gamedevs)

WELL. if you INSIST

gameplay: none of your choices matter. you usually get 3 choices with either of them making such little difference that you might as well stay silent. the story is set in stone so it doesnt matter how you get there. now, a game like this having a string of events that happen regardless of choice makes sense. but when i treat a character badly and dismissive the entire game and all it does is change our relationship from a romance to star-crossed lovers, or when i do my best to trust and care for a character and they still make my character betray them in the end, or when i go out of my way to pledge allegiance to a cause only for the game to pretend i didn’t bc they didn’t plan for someone to do so, then how fucking dare you advertise this game as being about choices.

i’ve played games like mass effect, that had a core plot that wouldnt change, but every decision you made somehow affected your standing in this plot, your relationship with someone, or just the way your character is portrayed. hell, even in hotel dusk, if you’re mean to ppl, the protag’s personality changes accordingly in scenes where you don’t have control of his reactions. and that game’s a straight up visual novel.

art, design, whatever: ugly as hell. it works for some of their games (wolf among us, borderlands), not for others. but they’re holding onto it as their trademark style and it rly holds them back. however, this one’s subjective, so my other big point about it is:

the animation. absolutely atrocious. every animation is so badly paced and unintentionally awkward that everytime it needs to be purposefully awkward, it just falls flat. not to mention, when a scene is meant to be dramatic, or funny, or heartwarming, or even just fast-paced and action-filled.. it ALL falls flat. there’s not a single scene that feels organic and for a game that’s all about immersion, this is unacceptable. and ofc its not just the character animations alone, its also things like camera work and general pacing. but if they fixed one of these things, it’d already go a long way.

dialogues are just as awkward for the most part, especially because the devs clearly didnt think most of them through when it comes to the choices. they let conversations play out the same, bar one sentence loosely referring to your answer.

also, there is no skip button. you cant skip through the usually long voice lines even tho you can have subtitles on, thus already reading what the person is saying. this sounds minor but it seriously starts to get on your nerves, esp when you’re stuck in a scene that youre not interested in (bc, e.g., you don’t care about the romantic relationship the game has been trying to push you into from the start)

characters: bad. most of them feel the same. again, this is subjective, but i have a huge pet peeve with writers not adjusting their writing style. characters that shouldn’t have witty one-liners bc they’re supposed to be menacing get them anyway bc the writers couldnt help themselves. every character can develop a nervous stutter at any given moment, as if that’s sth that’s universal to people. stuff like that.

i remember in boderlands, when i finally got to meet handsome jack and thought ok, now it’s finally get more energetic and fun, he didn’t feel much different from the characters we had already met. and don’t even ASK me about the characters in batman. they even LOOK interchangeable for the most part bc guess what, telltale character designs are either ridiculously plain or ridiculously over-designed.

and this isn’t mentioning how much the characters miss their mark. you’re supposed to think of x character as a sympathetic freedom fighter who has their heart in the right place and is worth getting to know, but they wrote them as a rude, whiny, borderline sociopathic asshole who makes me wish telltale had the balls to let you make big decisions so i could kill this dick already.again, its subjective. but thats the beauty of a game about CHOICES. if someone feels differently about a character than you intended, you let them choose to act accordingly and experience the game in a different way.likewise, characters that are supposedly horrible and irredeemable but rly only did one messed up thing that you dont care about. but the game forces you to condemn them for it anyway. like alright then, bye.

and ofc, the protagonists are……….. weird. first of all, half of them are voiced by troy baker and as great as i think he is as a voice actor, im sick of him. especially since he delivers all his performances in his normal voice. im starting to feel like im playing troy baker more than rhys wayne or whoever.

and to latch back onto what i said above, what the game does with them is awful: you’re supposed to identify with them bc you get to decide how they act but at the same time they’re more or less established characters and if you don’t relate to them from the start, the game dismisses your choices. so in the end, it’s neither here nor there. i remember i thought rhys was gonna be great bc he was the protag, but one of the bad guys, and he was one voluntarily and with a lot of conviction. thats so fucking interesting! i wonder how this game is gonna play out if i indulge in my love for this concept! i wonder if i can end this game as the new head of hyperion! yes, look at me go!! this is awesome!! this is everything i wanted!! my relationship with jack is the only one that actually feels rewarding and now we’re gonna be the bad guys together!! this makes all the hours i wasted on this so worth it i can’t believ- oh we hate hyperion now for no reason and want to kill jack. ok then.also full offense but as the game went on it kept going out of its way to make rhys look incompetent and humiliate him and is that rly what you want for the character you’ve (allegedly) been making decisions for..? it just felt uncomfortable after a while lmfao

anyway, in general, the idea is nice, the execution is horrible. kinda like how i tried to section these things off into different topics but ended up rambling without structure anyway.

like, look. ive gotten tired of bioware games too. i probably couldnt play mass effect again just bc ALL bioware games feel the same (even tho i like some of them more than others and mass effect is definitely still one of my fav trilogies ever. but if you keep reusing gameplay, voice actors, animations, etc… it just gets tiring).

so i think telltale’s 2 biggest sins are not giving you the control of the story they promise you and desperately clinging to their ways in order to keep their trademark style

[elriedreamer]

Read in 2019 Books Part 1

Suddenly decided I'd like to write a little about my Read in 2019 Books list (and practice my crusty English a little. win-win). Overall I'd read 52 books, including 5 graphic novels and shitton of nonfiction. There will be 4 parts.

Ok, let's start.

January to April

January

1. Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman - Good Omens. This was fun, even though I was reluctant to read it, since I had read 2 books by Pratchett about 10 years ago and didn't like them. Dunno. Maybe not my thing, maybe it was not his best works. Speaking of Gaiman, I love Stardust, Ocean in the End of Lane and especially The View from the Cheap Seats - it was amazing reading - but didn't like American Gods and some of short stories. Well, at least this can be easily explained - I'm not into dark edgy stuff, well mostly. Anyway, Good Omens was surprisingly good reading, and I liked TV series too. Though I liked kids' scenes more in book, than in series, but more Aziraphael&Crowley balances it, so can't say adaptation worse than book - both are fun.

2. Robert Sapolsky - Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers: The Acclaimed Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases, and Coping. Whew. Russian title's WAY shorted than this. I think I already said somewhere here how I love Sapolsky, he's my fav professor and all. Watched his course Human Behaviour Biology on YouTube (thanks to Vert Dider it's translated to Russian), and then I just had to read his books. And if you want deeper understanding how this fucking stress thing works, than you should read this book. It's a little depressing - to know how badly stress affects us, but also has one chapter in the end with advice how to try to reduce it. And. Important thing when it comes to this type if nonfiction. I've only had biology lessons in school, my profession is very far from it, but it wasn't too hard to understrand even more complicated chapters.

3. Tana French - The Secret Place. Yup, why don't we start from the 5th book in series? The order is not so important in here though. I think I've seen @rivervixens rec on this book here on Tumblr. And I'm so glad for that. Tana French's writing is amazing. I've read her other books (about that later), but this one remains my favourite. Also I recommended it to my dad and he liked it very much too.

4. Tana French - In the Woods. This one I liked less - mostly because main character was annoying. I still liked the writing, so didn't stop on this, even if took a pause.

February

5. Emily X.R. Pan - The Astonishing Color of After. This one doesn't have Russian translation, so English it was. Another fav of the year. This story is about dealing with the loss of parent, so it is emotionally heavy. And at first I was sceptical about magical realism here. But in the end it wrapped up nicely. Bonus points: large part of the book takes place in Taipei, and maybe you don't know but there was long period in my life when I was super into everything Taiwanese: music, movies, tv series... So. Good read, can't recommend it enough.

6. Jason Schreier - Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made. Another nonfiction with longass title. Super different theme. I like to play video games. Back in childhood we had Dendy, 3-DO and then PC - with DOS OS, Win 3.1 and forth and forth. I tried almost all genres back then I think, aside from mmo. But in the end I love only very specific one: single player RPG where you can create your own MC and have some kind of band of opinionated misfits. The last one I played was Dragon Age: Inquisition, which had astonishing scenery, some good story ideas (and some halfassed and some really terrible), 50 shades of bald/undercut instead of variety of hairstyles for your character, and fucking male animation for female MC. So, I had questions. And I've got some answers in this book. And better understanding of gamedev industry, since the book tells us about 10 most popular games from the last few years. If you are interested in video games and want some light nonfiction reading - this book is for you.

March

7. Theodora Goss - In the Forest of Forgetting. This is magical realism short stories and also the reason why so few read books in February. The writing is good, so it wasn't a problem. The problem was, probably, that I rarely like short stories (exceptions are Dreams Underfoot by Charles de Lint and In the Field Marshal's Shadow by Brian McClellan). Why do I stubbornly read them, I have no idea. If you know really good fantasy/steam-punk/mythopoetic/magical realism short stories, please recommend them to me.

8. Arsinoe de Blassenville - Victory at Ostagar. Okay this is actually a Dragon Age fic. Extra Super Long fic. Like 6 normal books long. For some reason it was on goodreads, so I added it here. This is not the best DA fanfic I'd read, not in my favs, MC feels like Mary Sue, I find some plot points weird and some characterization not on point, also didn't like the ending (not liking the ending is totally my problem, 'cause I find endings where everyone is paired up and with kids exceptionally annoying)... But it was interesting to read headcanon so vastly different from mine while not totally gruesome, which happens in this fandom frequently from what I've seen. And, you know it's still better than official DA books. Also, it won't be mentioned in this list, but I've read much better DA longfic in summer, and if you want a rec just ask.

9. Madeline Miller - Circe. Full disclosure: I'm not so much into Greek Mythology - I was in school, but not now. But I like when myth or legend or fairytale is told from different perspective, and this book was all over the goodreads recs, so. And it totally delivered. Thank you, goodreads, your recs are much better than livelib's.

April

10. Tana French - The Likeness. Back to Tana French, yay! Just you know, Russian title is changed and not for good. To something like Can the Dead be Back? Yep, in Russian it sounds just as awkward. Why must you do that, publishers? Whyyyy?! Anyway. Liked this one better than In the Woods, and don't find MC annoying, even if I didn't always understand her. Ah! I watched 3 eps (out of 8) of TV adaptation, which is based on the first 2 books. It has some good points, but overall the decision to merge two books in one timeline is making it messy.

11. Tana French - Faithful Place. Was good too.

12. T. Kingfisher - Clockwork Boys. Look at this. This is rare steam-punk jem. My favourite trope - band of misfits goes on quest full of dangers. In this case - unwillingly. They are very different people: a paladin, an assassin, a forger, and a scholar. The writing is brilliant! Dialogues are full of sarcasm and puns! It has some deep emotional stuff, it's full of action, despite it's size. And a pity - it is not translated, and it's a bit difficult to read such an intense writing. But still, I plan to read the second book this year.

13. Megan Miranda - All the Missing Girls. Ugh. Dunno how to tell about this one. The book was interesting to read, but it's full of liars. Seriously. From what I remember now, the only decent person was MC's fiancee, who seems like a good guy and totally didn't deserve how she treated him. And I'm usually on the girl's side. Maybe it's trope subversion. And MC's friends and their so-called friendship? Some unhealthy shit there. My main problem with this was probably the unsatisfactory ending. Can’t say anything more without spoilers, sorry.