#either way! funney

[dangoulains-devotion]

my final results on this accursed banner,,

1 mizuki (pot)... 1 reed alter (new!)... 0 virtuosa and... 7 vivianas. LMAO

i'd saved this much to spark specter and figured i'd probably be able to complete the banner along the way... those 30 extra pulls were full of desperation. this is what i get for taking a break during hortus event i think LOL

[cryptvokeeper]

I like to think In the last arc of Mononoke the medicine vendor wasn’t even there for the evil cat ghost he was just like “ooh I won a ticket yippee :)” and then the sword started rattling and he was like “oh come ON I just wanted to ride a train :(“

[junkartie]

Guys ok so ive done research and the etsy thing may be happening (no promises) HOWEVER. I am not american and therefore dont know what you guys consider ok prices for a shirt. For example a simple black shirt with text on the front/back and a silly doodle, what would yall think is a fair price

[meowthiroth]

tangentially related to that one reblog earlier, goddd now I'm just thinking back about that time doug's weird nft business partner kept trying to follow me on twitter for some reason

he hadn't liked any of my posts or interacted with me otherwise beforehand, so I had NO idea how he even found me at first. but his bio said he was doug's business manager & they were mutuals, so I guess he was legit?? which honestly made me uneasy because 1) im a heavily left-leaning trans dude, a type of person doug REALLY doesn't seem to like considering how openly he shittalks them on his own twitter, and 2) I was NOT SHY about how much I HATED nfts and would retweet posts making fun of nft bros all the time. so I was like, absolutely sure that me being present on this guy's timeline was a disaster waiting to happen.

tbh the first time he followed me I kinda thought it was a fluke. like maybe he saw something I posted and hit follow on accident. he had followed like a few hundred people already so it was possible he just didn't notice. So I figured he probably wouldn't notice if I just hit "remove follower" on him either. Didn't seem like it at first.

But then a couple days later, he REfollowed me. didn't say anything to me about it, but the fact he apparently NOTICED and refollowed meant it WASN'T a mistake & that kinda shook me a little. I almost immediately removed him again, still hesitant to outright block because I knew twitter actually shows people if you block them & I didn't wanna risk him siccing doug on me or something. hoped since he was following so many people he wouldn't notice I went missing again.

His second refollow didn't even take a full day. And at that point I was getting kinda freaked out. Like, what the fuck? why does this guy wanna follow me so bad?? does he want something from me??

But this time, he had tipped his hand a little, because on top of refollowing he also liked an old piece of neverhood art I'd posted. And I realized THAT was how he kept finding me— he must've been searching keywords related to Doug's creations (stuff like earthworm jim, neverhood, and armikrog) and following people who had posted about them. And since I had posted a few pieces of neverhood/armikrog related art before, he must have been finding me again & again through those. So this time, not only did I remove him, I also searched back through my own account and basically nuked EVERY POST I'd ever made mentioning Doug or any of his IPs. and the guy didn't refollow anymore, so I guess that must've done the trick! :)

but yeah anyways that was partially why I took down all of my old NH/Armikrog art on twitter 😅

[sockempossum]

Childhood OCs time! Hitting you like a freight train on this friday night. Not my first OCs by a long shot, but definitely the ones I remember most fondly and definitely the ones I actually had interact and be friends with each other. For some reason as a kid I really only made one OC at a time and just focus on them until I was done, but my only geek friend was super into anime fanfiction RP over the telephone, so I mashed up a bunch of recent character designs and hurriedly cobbled together a vague enough plotline for them together because I didn’t know any anime, but I didn’t want to be myself the entire time. Because of that! We now have!! Them! They’re gonna want to play Rock Band in your basement if that’s okay.

[kalashnikovlobotomy]

here. my deranged work in progress 90-something song rusame playlist🤦‍♂️ there's no order. you can shuffle it. some are meaningless/funney and the rest are meaningful but either lyrics/vibe wise or in a way that requires a multi phrase explanation which i actually would be over the moon to give you

edit: somehow it's shown with the wrong name... well disregard that. ill probably keep changing it anyways

[godslush]

TokeiWoman.EXE

A central NetNavi for a large corporation, who oversees all scheduling and finances across multiple subsidiary companies. Very little is known about her other than she is not owned by an individual Operator, instead being owned by her 'company', and seems to have very little autonomy… but with nobody issuing orders, who knows what transpires when no eyes are on the code…

Tokei has two forms. Most will first encounter her ‘Combat Projection’, an aggressive, dual-blade wielding monstrosity upholding security in her region.

Instead of being a time stopper, her Combat Projection enforces a metronome on her board; combat with her and any minions/viruses occurs "on the beat" (akin to Crypt of the Necrodancer), with the background and floor pulsing to indicate the timing.

Instead of a catchy dance beat, the music would be... much more foreboding.

Her own attacks are strong but telegraphed with zones, and she's invulnerable except on beat-based intervals (and the window of opportunity changes every round, indicated by her markings’ color shifting). However, her gimmick is balanced by her Projection having low HP (akin to a slightly stronger Virus), though it can be resummoned when destroyed after taking some time to recharge.

The nature of her primary attacks involve throwing her clock-hand blades out, which linger on her opponents’ side of the board as a damaging tile. They can then either be dropped to create ‘ice’ tile zones, or recalled to do returning trajectory damage on the way back.

Tokei’s ‘true’ NetNavi form is much more subdued, quietly toiling away at a computer, chained to a desk in the center of her drive. She clearly doesn’t want to be there, but as far as she knows, she has no other choice.

Tokei is not housed in a PET, but instead runs from within a gargantuan supercomputer array at the heart of her owner corporation. It’s necessary for not only analyzing and crunching massive amounts of data, but also to make moral and ethics calls when it comes to managing things like sick leave, time off, and other intra-company HR decisions for thousands of employees per day.

Tokei’s ‘zone’ exists in an Overclocked state, where everything appears to move normally but is in fact moving at hyper-speed, causing the outside world to appear to move very slowly. This is what allows her to do so much work in a seemingly short amount of time. However, it has two downsides; it disables Operator-to-Navi communications, alongside causing other NetNavis to run out of energy and burn out very quickly while anywhere near her online presence when she’s working; she can avert this by ‘freezing’ them in a sort of stasis, to preserve them until they can be appropriately retrieved. The only reason she is able to function at those speeds without running out of energy or otherwise overheating is due to her ‘core’ body being plugged into the system for power and coolant.

This comes with the caveat that she is almost if not completely powerless outside of her domain.

Though stuck in a draconian job, especially when it comes to things like time-off requests and raises and employee welfare, Tokei will always put employees first over management and bottom-line, and the reason she gets away with it is that she insisted and eventually proved that having happier employees is better for the companies than keeping them unmotivated and wanting to quit. Despite her cold exterior, she's very much "The people who do the most work deserve to be happy." Wishful thinking on her part, but it keeps her going.

=================================

A funney idea along the lines of SlashGirl.EXE. I changed it from Tokay to Tokei and removed the more obvious gecko parallels because Tokay herself has significant narrative importance outside of MM, so I wanted to make it more concrete that the Navi is separate (just inspired).

I'd started thumbnailing designs a while back on my Twitter priv, but decided to give it a big overhaul, especially after seeing ClockMan.EXE and noting the similarities to my older passes.

Her 'tick tock' rhythm mechanic and broken clock/hourglass details (plus the 'noose' clock hand necktie) are all very evocative of a "your time is running out" death motif, but her also working in finances just makes her a big "death and taxes" joke at the end of the day.

[trisockatops]

Okay I lied, one more post about the blatant antisemitism that isn't getting as much as attention as the creator's cissexism.

Thread from Unsidhe, Artist&Vtuber|Illust/Live2D OPEN on Twitter:

cw: antisemitism 1 of the 'goblin artifacts' you can find in That Wizard Game is literally just a shofar, a Jewish musical instrument, described as being 'used to annoy witches and wizards'. In it's description is the year 1612, which was when the Fettmilch uprising took place.

This uprising was followed by an outright massacre of Jewish people. If you STILL think it's just "a coincidence based on unfortunate folklore about goblins" and not literally an antisemitism propaganda simulator, fucking BLOCK ME. I want nothing to do with you.

People are trying to tell me "but it's not a shofar because it's painted" like, you're grasping at straws for excuses at this point.

Learning that they wrote 'stuffed with gorgonzola to silence it' about the horn, and finding out that gorgonzola specifically is not a kosher cheese... when they could have just written 'stuffed with cheese' for the Haha Funney Points really says a lot someone had to think.

/end thread

Thread from Yonah Gerber on twitter:

For those saying Hogwarts Legacy isn’t antisemitic, the game devs made it canon that goblins use shofar

“Generally annoy witches & wizards” literally the text in the game is that Jewish practices are just an annoyance like what the fuck

To address the dumbassery in my responses: assume good intentions must be earned. If this was the first time a Rowling property has been antisemitic, that's a woopsie. But it's not.

Here's the facts as they exist: - The object is a war horn - The artifact in the game is located at a place named after a pig & stuffed with dairy products to stop its music - The year of its most famous use is also the year major antisemitic pogroms happened in Germany

If ONE of these things were true, but Rowling & the franchise otherwise hadn't made any major missteps, that's when we give the benefit of the doubt. But I'm not willing to give said benefit when considering all the in-game context AND ALSO prior antisemitism in the franchise.

At a certain point, "benefit of the doubt" becomes "any plausible deniability is sufficient to ignore all context to the contrary" & to me, & to many Jewish folks, we are way past that point.

Hogwarts Legacy is not the first time the Harry Potter franchise has been accused of antisemitism. If the franchise & its creators wanted to avoid further accusations, they could've done some basic historical research to make sure these alleged coincidences were not included.

Once you have harmed a marginalized demographic, it's on your as a creator to prevent *further harm*. If you're using an IP that another creator once used to harm others, then I'm sorry, you do have the responsibility to undue that harm where you can in your own work.

EVEN IF these are coincidences, had the development team made a point to avoid antisemitic caricatures & educated themselves on that history, this wouldn't have happened. They chose not to care. And that's not much better, really.

Obviously I don't know what the team at Avalanche thinks or believes & frankly that's not my business. What matters to me is the end product & that end product either is purposefully antisemitic or was made by folks who don't care if they're accidentally antisemitic.

However you twist this, there's a tremendous lack of care going on here, & a choice to perpetuate cruelty that didn't need to happen.

Don't yell at folks in my mentions who genuinely don't understand the layers of context here. This is a great education opportunity. Block the obvious trolls, I sure am, but some folks have only seen a piece of the whole, & education is the best solution to ignorance.

Deleting my last tweet because I saw the point on Mastodon, but I can no longer find the post. I don't want to share what I can't currently verify.

To add, though: - The shofar is located at the Hog's Head (aka pig) Inn - The music of the shofar is prevented because a wedge of gorgonzola was used to stop the music, & while many cheeses are kosher, that one is not Take from that what you will.

/end thread

Thread from moby dickgirl on Twitter:

// CW: antisemitism; discussion of Islamophobia Concerning Gorgonzola (expanding on a comment in Yonah's thread) N.B. Once again, I am speaking as a gentile

It's a really common trope in right-wing propagandistic fiction for the "heroes" to desecrate the graves of religious enemies by putting profane items in them. The example I'm most familiar with is endless post-9/11 masturbation about putting pig products in Muslims' graves

I understand that there's a prohibition, deriving from a law given by Moses at Sinai, on seething a kid in its mother's milk, and that this is generally interpreted pretty broadly as meaning having meat and dairy in the same meal, or otherwise combining them, is unkosher

Some cheeses are kosher. Traditionally, Gorgonzola is not. This is because the production of Gorgonzola requires the use of a complex of enzymes called rennet. Using animal-derived rennet to make cheese is unkosher because of the prohibition mentioned above.

Now, this doesn't always apply to Gorgonzola today; you can get Gorgonzola made with non-animal-derived rennet which I understand may be kosher. However, this was unequivocally not the case in 1612. Gorgonzola made then would have been made with animal-derived rennet.

It's also been noted that the year of that goblin rebellion is 1612, the first year of the antisemitic purge called the Fettmilch Rising in Frankfurt. Both the real Fettmilch Rising and the fictional rebellions may have been based partly on allegations of financial misconduct.

There is, however, a shorter path. A distinctive quality of Gorgonzola — unique to it as far as I can tell — is that it's made with unskimmed milk, that is, milk with the milkfat still in it. The German word for "milkfat" is "Milchfett" — "Fettmilch" with the syllables reversed.

(I've heard that "Fettmilch" is literally a dialect German word for "unskimmed milk," which would make the link even more direct, but I don't have a sufficiently comprehensive German–English dictionary on hand to confirm this. German speakers are welcome to chime in.)

/end thread

Not to mention that the basic plot of the game is suppressing the rebellion of a canonically oppressed race that has always been an antisemitic caricature (hooked nose, beady eyes, hoard money, apparently control the wealth, manipulative, sneaky, greedy). We didn't need to look far to find the antisemitism, and yet here it is, ratcheted up times ten.

[vigilskeep]

so interested to hear your thoughts bc i love your supreme ability to take a haphazardly-written bioware arc and turn it into a thematically-coherent masterpiece. how does one do this with sera??

i could never get into her personally (found the way they wrote her voice a little contrived/“haha funney swearing and crude jokes”) and i struggled to figure out her core motivations somehow simultaneously being the red jenny “sticking up for little guy” stuff but also a complete alienation from elves and the actual people she wants to protect?

also found it weird how you can just 😭 kick her out any time when you can’t do that with anyone else afaik. i mean i didnt like her but ?? that was a Choice bioware

ah the big sera question

first of all, upfront, i adore sera. this is just a matter of personal taste that people are going to have or not have, and that’s completely fine! (although people have said before that my talking about certain characters has made them give those characters a second glance, and i hope i can do the same for sera for people who maybe haven’t given her a full shot !!) i am just personally delighted by her. i love the fun of her design and i love her combat style and i love the way she talks, how you have to think through what she’s saying to follow where exactly the line of thought went, and you don’t always get everything but that’s okay bc hurry up we’re already onto the next thing! as someone who uh doesn’t always find it the easiest to communicate verbally, i find it very relatable and freeing and charming that she talks as she pleases and dares anyone to challenge it and expects them to catch up. i love the side she brings out in people in banter and i’ve never regretted bringing her along in the party. i think she’s very pretty. i’m getting distracted we could be here a long time

one thing that really helped me figure out how i could play a seramance was bouncing between potential inquisitors until i got one that could use the way the inquisitor and sera’s interactions are written. a big flaw of the writing is that it pushes your character into a box. partly because of the style of comic relief it’s attempting, it forces you to play the “normal” one who can only be fondly bemused by sera at best and can never be unconditionally supportive, even the nicest options available sometimes coming across critical or condescending. the way i’m personally making that make sense to me is playing an inquisitor who has lived a fairly secluded life and is bewildered and stilted and awkward as she tries to navigate a kind of relationship she’s not accustomed to with a kind of person she’s not accustomed to. but she really is earnestly trying. and sera seems not to always get her either, so there’s this process of trying to figure each other’s language out that i’m personally finding very endearing!

obviously that isn’t for everybody. your inquisitor is whoever you want them to be! that’s just one way i’ve personally responded to the question of how you can take the admittedly flawed writing and work with it, and i’ll have to adapt something different with another inquisitor with a different background.

there’s a lot of specifics i don’t know about her backstory and where her story is going—as i say, i know a majority of spoilers, but i don’t have all the details—so i can’t completely elaborate on my thoughts on how she was written until i have all the information. i’ll have some more coherent comments on my actual opinion of sera’s writing as a whole then! but i will say as a final note i honestly find it a little startling how saying completely insensitive things abt elves rarely stops human characters from being continual fandom favourites—and that isn’t, like, a condemnation, i’m thinking of major characters like leliana and morrigan and anders and dorian who i love as well, that’s the nature of the setting and genre of dragon age and the questions it explores—but meanwhile sera, who is an elf and suffers from internalised prejudice that’s against herself as well, seems to be the one who gets so much of the heat? i’m just putting that out there as food for thought.

wait one more thing sorry. when she talks about the little people and the friends of red jenny and it’s confusing who she’s standing up for, i have to say in her defence i think it’s more than a little unfair to expect her to be remotely comparable in clarity of direction/ideology/purpose as the other inquisition companions and advisors, a sweeping majority of whom are major political figures or otherwise trained professionals in their 30s and 40s, when sera is literally just a random person in her very early 20s with a hell of a lot of initiative and talent. of course she hasn’t figured things out she’s too busy cutting her own bangs. you know?

[marzipanandminutiae]

*I* want to hear everything you know about the Chocolate Cream Killer!

Many many people asked, so here we go!

Q: How do you get a man to leave his wife for you?

A: Mass poisoning, apparently.

At least, that's the answer if you're Christiana Edmunds.

Born in 1828 in Kent, England, she was highly educated and had apparently been diagnosed with "hysteria" in her early 20s. Given that this diagnosis was frequently a catchall term for "Woman Behaving In Unexpected Way," it's uncertain whether she suffered from an actual mental illness. But her behavior in her 40s, when she was living with her widowed mother in Brighton, would suggest that she may have been.

Around this time she became close to a married doctor, Charles Beard. Their exact relationship has never been worked out, but she tried to kill his wife in 1870 by giving her a poisoned chocolate truffle.

You know.

As one does.

It didn't work and, incredibly, despite strong suspicions that she was the culprit behind his wife's illness, Dr. Beard did absolutely nothing about this.

So she decided to poison. Um. Everybody.

Essentially, she bought boxes of fancy chocolates from some poor local confectioner, injected strychnine into them at home, and then returned them. Apparently returning fully opened packages of food was just Okay in 1871- one really begins to see how modern regulations on these things came about. The chocolates would then be put out for sale again, because I guess nobody saw anything wrong with that either as long as there were no visible bite marks. #capitalism or something

she hired local boys to buy the poison for her after the first few times, in an attempt to allay the suspicion that would doubtless arise if she were seen buying vast quantities of strychnine

(apparently the possibility that they would compare notes and be like "that Miss Edmunds keeps asking me to buy her poison for stray cats 'round her house [yes that was her actual excuse]. she asked you, too? seems a mite rum to me!" did not occur to her. I never said this was a smart Take Out Lover's Wife scheme)

meanwhile, large numbers of randos were getting sick all over Brighton, mostly visitors as it's a seaside resort town. nobody connected these illnesses to the chocolates until- and this part is not funny -4-year-old Sidney Barker, vacationing there with his parents, died from the poison.

that was the only death, and again, it's. not funny. a little boy died because this woman (maybe not fully rational, probably not intending anyone but her target to die, but still) wanted her crush/possible lover's wife out of the way and didn't care about the collateral damage. I will go back to the Ha Ha Funney Weird Inept Mass Poisoning tone in a moment, but...I don't know. take a moment of seriousness for this poor child

everyone good? okay. let's move on.

realizing that putting out poisoned chocolates into the world willy-nilly and hoping Mrs. Beard would buy some wasn't working, Edmunds escalated to just sending boxes of strychnine sweets directly to people- including her intended victim. I assume the rest were mere decoys to throw investigators off the scent, since she sent some to herself to allay suspicion. and pin the crime on the poor confectioner, to boot

but this time, Dr. Beard decided to get off his ass and actually Tell Someone that his possible ex-mistress had a murderous streak. thanks, Charlie. thanks for divulging that little fact

Edmunds was arrested, tried, and convicted of murder and attempted murder. though initially sentenced to hang, she was granted a reprieve due to apparent mental instability and lived out her days in the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum [their wording, not mine]. she died in 1907

so that concludes our brief foray into True Crime, folks. remember, inspect your kids' Halloween chocolates! Someone might have [checks notes]:

bought a bag of Fun-Sized Snickers

opened the packaging

injected poison into the candy

returned them fully opened

counted upon them being placed back out for sale on the off chance that this person's crush's spouse might eat some

(dear sensational news outlets- THAT IS SARCASM)

[cryptidclaw]

Yeahhhhh I always tend to… disregard the parents/family not outright mentioned in material.

Cause in the desperation to give the cats parents it often times just muddled the gene pool 8n8

which Y’know the canonical Clans who value blood purity to the point that after book 1 if the sire is unknown you’re a traitor- makes sense I guess. But god the Clans would’ve died out so long ago if this had been a thing for generations.

Also a contender to the Squirrelflight and Ashfur being niece and Uncle- at one time Greystripe’s parents were Patchpelt and Willowpelt. Who are full blooded siblings. I don’t remember when this was eventually swapped out to just Willowpelt being his mom, but it was there for a hot minute.

OUGH the Willow and Patch thing is so funney though,,, like why did they DO that????

also fun fact I constantly forget who Willow, Red and Spotted are related to in canon bec I only think of them as Rosetail's kits now LOL. like Patchpelt is Willow's brother???? untrue. Either way he's not her baby daddy!!!

[yuridovewing]

honestly this readthrough has legit gotten really difficult to get through because these books are honestly kind of a bummer to read and they’re bringing my whole mood down. part of why darkest night took me so long was because i would be either in a really good or a really bad mood and i didnt want the book to make me feel worse. that sounds kinda extreme for Ha Ha Funney Cat Book, but really, most of this book was just meanspirited conversation. the same crass attitudes, the same vitriol, the same bigotry, and even from the authors, i feel they just make certain decisions specifically to stir up the fans in a bad way. it’s a deeply spiteful read as all the writers pets get pat on the head and their hated characters get brutalized. the characters will never learn. they are just as, if not more spiteful towards one another and especially outsiders in the present than they were in “into the wild”, and they never will truly learn, will they?

at least in wings of fire the characters actually seem to like each other.

[fluentisonus]

not to be a catullus 16 apologist because it is a horrible poem to read in many ways but it's a bit sad it has the reputation is does (either haha funney poem or Bad Poem We Don't Talk About) because it actually has SO many interesting things to say about roman and catullan views of masculinity & social behavior & self presentation. like there's a lot of nuance & self awareness going on there that gets overlooked

[beatcroc]

@clownpepperoni hi hello and hrrmmmm. in terms of How It Would Develop i'm torn between "noise eventually realizes fake pep isn't going to hurt him and they become playmates" and "peppino drags this out as long as he possibly can"

i do genuinely love them as friends because it can sate noise's desire to be a little terror while fake pep also gets to play rough with someone who isn't going to freak out whenever he so much as touches them; they probably team up sometimes to Bother peppino, much to his chagrin, but it's much more harmless than what either of them would get up to solo.

on the other hand, fake pep really is just kind of unnerving to encounter if you don't know anything about him. the post was intended to be a 'first meeting' type thing, so either way noise knows there's two of them now; but that certainly isn't telling him anything about what the hell this thing is or where it came from or why it seems to listen to peppino, or why peppino would even have it around in the first place. and peppino sure as fuck isn't going to tell him. peppino very much encourages fake pep to go after noise because he loves not having to personally deal with that little shit every time noise decides to be a problem, and fp is totally convinced they're just playing because peppino is otherwise pretty strict about keeping him from, uh, unintentionally menacing other people like that. [customers are a rarity out there, can't let him scare off the few you do get!] [fake pep is learning but it is hard. ZERO concept of personal space. he means well but unfortunately he can't help being a scary gunk beast 😔]. but yeah noise does not love it whenever to he goes to terrorize peppino and sees this thing excitedly charging at him instead since he has no idea what the hell it wants. i feel like they can get away with this for a pretty long time since fake pep isn't Always around and noise never knows whether or not to expect him. keeps him on edge.

anyway i probably won't get to any other noise stuff in proper comics but i left it open-ended intentionally for if other people wanna splash around with it, haha. we'll see if i have any ideas or motivation for funney noise dialogue after the uhhhhh Five other ones for the rest of the cast i have planned currently :x

[brakingpoint]

yeah i agree i think ppl are a little too much “max doesn’t know anything” whether it’s about politics or the gay thing. he’s 25 and doesn’t live under a rock hahaha. that’s why i think 2/3 seem closer to reality to me. and for 1–he doesn’t ever treat being gay as a joke, he answers all “gay” questions quite earnestly which is really nice and doesn’t no homo like other drivers like pierre for example

yeah definitely - i think max isn't unaware he just chooses not to focus on things because he's more interested in his own shit. which as i said in the other asks is honestly charming in the context of racing and... decidedly less so in the context of social issues. i mainly added option 4 as a Funney Gag about max's very limited interests so it's not to be taken too seriously haha

and yeah i don't think 1 is especially likely either because as you said there's a real earnestness to how he addresses gay topics in media chat. i think if he is just joking around it's in a very well intentioned way tbh. honestly i mostly included it as an option in my post because i could see people reblogging it and saying like "ughh he's just doing gaybait jokes" in earnest so i figured i'd cover all my bases to avoid people being annoying in the notes 🤷🏻‍♀️

[gubbles-owo]

Railgun Reached 100 Downloads!!

Well dang, my funney little game reached 100 downloads, wild! In celebration I thought it'd be a rad opportunity to pull back the curtains and show my approach to creating the bedroom scene, with a few lil hidden things thrown in. So let's go ahead and… listen to me ramble about dev things for a few minutes, I guess, it'll be cool I promise.

Vertex Colors!

When it comes to making N64-esque environments, vertex colors are the hidden secret to make them look lush, colorful, and just plain gorgeous- as well as period-accurate!

Generally there are two ways to light a scene in 3D: you either use dynamic lights, or static lights.

Dynamic just means the scene is lit in realtime. You can manipulate the lighting at runtime to change color or brightness or angle, and use it to create cool effects, like a day/night cycle that slowly changes over time. The main issue is that dynamic lights take up processing power, and that was fairly limited on older hardware.

Static lighting, on the other hand, captures the lighting at a single point in time and bakes it right in. However this has its own downsides. You can't re-light anything, so you have to commit to it. Plus, static lighting in modern day rendering uses separate lightmap textures, which eats up a lot of memory. It's not really something you'd see on the older consoles we're trying to emulate here.

Sooo what are we left with? How do we light our scene without slowly having to calculate dynamic lights for every pixel on screen, and without cranking out a whole second set of textures for the scene?

Well, why not bake the lighting right into the model itself?

3D models are made up of a collection of points, called vertices. Two can be bridged together to form an edge, and a third can connect to both of those to form a triangle-- your basic polygon! While you can take a flat image and stretch it over polygons to give them texture, there's an oft overlooked bit of data you can store in each vertex: color!

The three different point colors of a triangle will interpolate into one another, offering a smooth, if fairly limited, color gradient. Typically this will be multiplied over the base texture, giving you the detail of a texture and the depth of lighting!

It's easiest to demonstrate with a visual example, so here's a shot of the bedroom in Blender:

Let's break this down a bit: what can we see? Well there's a bright window to the left, which seems to be casting light onto the ceiling, fan, closet door, and desk. There's also a bookshelf on the left wall and a mattress below the camera. Given the orange glow of the sun from outside, it's safe to assume this is either early morning or late evening, just before the sun sets. And while the room isn't unkempt per se-- if anything it seems fairly tidy and organized-- the mattress is notably resting on the floor, without sheets or a blanket. There are several monitors on the desk, all blaring light onto the ceiling, and presumably into the face of whoever sits there. Other than that, the room is rather bare. Already we can start to infer a few things about Urchin's character: where their interests or comforts lie, how they take care of themselves and their space, and so on.

Environmental storytelling! Well, a light version of it anyway. But what does this all this have to do with vertex colors?

Let's disable them and see the textures underneath! Get a good look at the texture-work, and…

…oh no.

The detail is there, since we can still tell the brick from the wallpaper, the bookshelf from the mattress. But the mood is seemingly nowhere to be found! The idea of the sun or any sort of local light source has been obliterated, and what we're left with is a fully-lit room that appears flat and lifeless. Dramatic, I know, but this is what we're left with when we're rolling with just textures alone. It's hard to look at, difficult to discern where things are.

What happens if we reverse it, look at the vertex colors without texture?

So the surface detail is gone, we're not entirely sure what these shapes are. But we can infer a fair amount solely by the size, shape, and placement of them, as we have a solid sense of where everything lies in 3D space. While the detail is gone, we still have the depth.

Thematically, it seems Urchin's room is usually kept fairly dim. The evening sunlight pouring in, while contending with the stark light in the corner and perhaps unwelcome, does cast a rather warm glow into an otherwise cold space. You get the feeling that once the sun sets, the harsh sting of the monitors will be the sole light source illuminating the room.

The mood is still here, despite taking away most of the details!

The mindset behind my own approach to N64-esque environments is this:

Textures carry the detail. Vertex colors carry the vibe.

Of course, there are a number of approaches and methods for using vertex colors, and this is just one of 'em. Ultimately, the two work together to create a rich, detailed environment!

Here's a couple more examples from different angles:

You may've noticed that the sides of the computer case don't actually have textures on them, only the front panel. If they're going to be mostly flat textures anyway, why waste precious (artificially) limited memory? That's one of the fun things about thinking with vertex colors: sometimes textures aren't even necessary! The same goes for the ceiling light as seen below.

While it's possible to generate vertex colors from realtime lights in Blender, personally I hand-paint all of them in myself. Is it slow, time-consuming, and tedious? Why yes it is!! But it's work I very much enjoy, and I love seeing an environment slowly come together, one vertex at a time.

I could babble on all day about how much I love this sort of thing and all the little technicalities involved, but ya get the point. If you want to discover more examples of this, try checking out noclip.website! It lets you view a bunch of environments from a variety of older games, and in some of them you can do fancy things like disable vertex color or textures individually, or reveal developer objects normally hid in game. For some cool low poly lighting shenanigans I personally recommend checking out Diddy Kong Racing, Banjo-Kazooie! And while it's not on noclip, Vagrant Story on PS1 is just… an astounding mastery of old-school rendering infused with bold style, it's WILD.

Fog!

Another relatively simple trick used on older hardware-- oftentimes out of necessity-- was fog. Originally used as a more graceful transition to mask short draw distances, it can also be used to set mood and tone with great effect!

Moving over to the game engine (Godot in this case), this is what the scene looks like imported from Blender after a lot of headache and hassle:

It's alright, but we can do better. We want to go for a hazy summer evening, so let's try a bit of orange fog applied to the whole scene:

It's subtle, but it does a lot! It's most noticeable in the darker corners of the room, lifting several colors and textures into a unified tone the further they are from the camera. Especially when combined with the shaft of light from the window and dust particles swirling along with the fan, it gives the viewer a nice sense of "boy I sure don't want to open up that window, it must be hot and agonizingly humid outside"

Extras!

Let's end it off with a couple random bits to mention! First off is this uh… well admittedly I feel it's one of the most rushed textures in the game:

See, the idea was for Urchin's closet to be missing its door, so they hung up a curtain over it as a soft-doorway. As I am still fairly new to texture painting I have no idea how to render cloth or fabric, and I think it shows here pretty clearly!!

…and yet, I've had several players point this out to me as an example of really good texture-work??

In all honestly I don't understand it myself, but I think it does highlight an important aspect of the N64 aesthetic: when your output resolution is already so low, sometimes you can get away with things you otherwise couldn't. Sure, it looks a bit shit, but mangled through 240p and an NTSC filter you can barely tell! A crummy cloth texture isn't going to ruin your game xD

And lastly, honestly, one of my proudest things on this project… and it is never seen in the final game. I present, the lightswitch:

So yeah, I think 32 x 32px is a bit much for a small lightswitch texture, this could stand to be 16px and probably work fine. But! While most of the textures were painted or filtered noise of some sort, this one damn texture I filled in pixel by pixel. And I adore how it turned out. You've got the interesting colors from all the surrounding ambient light mixed in, the switch for the light is flicked down while the ceiling fan is set on, and the lil shadows formed by the switches. It's good stuff… and because the the script was only finished with 24 hours to the jam deadline, I had to throw together the camera angles rather hastily. Ah well, maybe next time!

Wrap Up

I'll end it there, though there's still a lot I haven't touched on: Urchin's model and animation, the ocs and script, the tangled spaghetti code slapped into place for a 2 week jam, etc. If folk are interested in more of this type of thing I might do another one? I dunno, let's see. Thanks for reading and/or playing!! >w<

And if you haven't played this silly little vn but interested to, you can grab it here! https://gubbles.itch.io/they-built-a-railgun