#honestly sims can be one of the most horrific games if you play it right lol

[comradecowplant]

100 baby challenge is all fun and games until the feminism kicks in and you immediately feel bad for turning your sim into breeding stock 😔

[wirewitchviolet]

We really need 1:1 time passage in games.

I play a lot of games. I particularly play a whole lot of RPGs, strategy things, survival games, and these all tend to be games that try to create an extra sense of immersion with hunger, thirst, and a day night cycle. And WOW do they ever end up doing the exact opposite with the implementation!

Like, let’s just start with food. If I am playing a survival game, and I choose not to eat for a while, my little hunger meter will bottom out, and I will start taking damage then eventually die. This tends to take like, one real life hour/in-game day, give or take to kick in, and then death comes within like, maybe 5 minutes if they’re generous? And I stave this off by... usually finding, killing, cooking, and eating, 2 entire turkeys per real hour/in-game day.

So... what the hell is any of that!?

So we have hunger, and we’re representing it as this slowly draining meter you have to keep an eye on. Already, that’s just weird. In my experience, you can go an entire day, not eating a damn thing, and not feel a thing out of the ordinary. But when you do actually get hungry, it can be overwhelming and impossible to ignore (have you eaten yet today by the way? My meal schedule’s gotten totally weird). Nothing about that makes sense to simulate as a slowly lowering bar. If you want realism, you have absolutely no onscreen hunger meter, and then like every 4-24 hours or so you have some incredibly distracting hunger indicator kick in and stay kicked in. Like, activate rumble packs and leave’em going at a steady pulse sort of annoying. And it gets worse when you’re actually preparing food.

Also feeling hungry is not an early indicator that you are going to suddenly die of starvation, or even that you’re anywhere near that point. I had dinner 6 hours ago, I’m a little hungry now. It varies a lot, but actually starving to death can take upwards of going TWO WHOLE MONTHS without any food at all. Like if we’re representing that as a meter, “hungry” kicks in when it drops to 99% full. Starvation is not a particularly common cause of death. If you’re dying of starvation, either someone is intentionally starving you to death, or some horrific catastrophe has just wiped out completely absolutely every potential food source in an area you somehow cannot wander your way out of even if you have months to do so. Relevant real world fact- Any time you see stuff about people dying of starvation, that’s never “farming just is not a thing that works in this area,” it’s “some malicious tyrant is actively preventing these people from accessing food in a deliberate effort to cause them to starve.” It’s really not actually a concern in any sort of survival story, unless we’re going real long term.

Meanwhile, have game designers ever actually, like, eaten food? Like I said, 2 whole turkeys per real hour/game day seems to be the going standard and like... have you had a turkey? I live in America, there is this tradition on Thanksgiving to go get a turkey, spend a day cooking it, and serving it as part of a meal served to one’s whole extended family. You’ve got that one turkey (granted, generally with a lot of side dishes) feeding like... a dozen people, easily. And at the end of the day, you’ve only MAYBE collectively made your way through like half a breast. You carve up a bunch more and send everyone home with a ton of leftovers. Then you’ve still got this giant mountain of turkey left, and you’re eating it for like the next week until you’re completely sick of turkey and throw the rest out, with plenty of meat entirely uneaten on the bird. Or hey, do you eat hamburgers? You know how the standard for a really kinda too big to responsibly be ordering it hamburger is “a quarter-pounder?” Which refers to the 0.25 lbs. of meat on the bun? Just quickly googling “beef weight” and copying the preview text from the oddly named first hit, on beef2live.com... “An average beef animal weighs about 1200 pounds and has a hanging hot carcass weight (HCW) of about 750 pounds.“ I can’t honestly say I know what “hanging hot carcass weight” is and I kinda doing want to, but I’m assuming that’s how much you have to work with after stripping out all the bones and organs and such. Multiply that by 4 to get how many oversized burgers you get out of one “beef animal” (why does it not say cow? I’m growing increasingly unsettled)- 3000 burgers. Give or take. You go smack that one Mnecraft cow with your sword, you should be fine for like 5 years. At least assuming we’re not simulating food spoilage. And if we are, HEY THAT TAKES SIGNIFICANTLY LONGER THAN ONE DAY, 2 IF YOU SALT IT!

And I mean, on top of that, we’ve got this whole standard I keep citing of 1 real world hour/1 in-game day. That kinda seems to be one of the more common standards for the passage of time video games use. That or 1 minute=1 hour. And I... really don’t understand why we have these scales?

Like, the earliest example of a day/night cycle in a game is Dragon Quest 3, where 1 steps on the over world map=12 minutes passing, or 120 steps=1 day. That’s a weird scale I’m having to use, but that’s because as the most traditional of JRPGs, DQ3′s sense of both time AND space are super abstracted and walking a short distance across the world map is this super compressed and simplified conveyance of a big long epic journey through the untamed wilderness. The first games I can think of offhand to really do it as a real time elapsed ratio thing are like... The Sims and GTA 3? Let me look at each of those in turn in a bit here.

So, The Sims has to pass days pretty quick, because that’s like, the whole idea. We’re watching this little household drama unfold in a compressed time scale... but the scale is really messed up? Like, we start off pretty simple. Sims work their shifts of like 9-5 on the in-game clock, need an appropriate amount of sleep... but then MOST things have timing based off having animations play at a reasonable pace, which is to say, 1 to 1 time, not 1 to 60. It takes like 3 in-game minutes for a Sim to get up out of a chair, several more minutes to walk to the kitchen and even start cooking, altogether just getting up, making a meal, cleaning up, and sitting back down is going to end up being this hours long affair, most of that being travel time from one room to another. It’s weird, and practically speaking you end up having them eat one meal, use the toilet once, and take a shower once per in game day, because less than that problems occur, and more than that, it’s a huge pain. And forget conversations. Those are like 12 hour commitments.

And then we have GTA3, where 1 real minute=1 in game hour... and this isn’t tied to anything in-game at all really. You don’t eat, you don’t sleep, nothing really has business hours to deal with, the whole day/night cycle is just there to give you a nice cycling change of scenery... and also again, breaks immersion, because the animation speed is 1:1. According to a video I just watched, walking end to end across the map of GTA3 takes a full 48 in-game hours (121 in GTA5). And I mean... there’s races, and high speed chases, and all this other stuff that according to the in-game clock are at such slow speeds you can barely tell anything’s moving. It’s weird and arbitrary! And also unnecessary! Like, I’m pretty sure I sank at least 80 hours into my first playthrough of GTA3. I definitely spent enough time cruising around any given island that if time passed in a 1:1 ratio, I’d still see what everything looked like at every time of day. And hell if you rigged it up to a real world clock I could plan around that, do all the cool missions right at sundown.

But I mean, also, there’s these things called movies and TV shows? You may have heard of them, because it’s where games get a whole bunch of terms they use all the time. Like camera, and scene. So the thing there is, when, say, a movie switches to a new scene, they’ll often arbitrarily jump the day/night cycle ahead by several in-movie hours, or even days, so the lighting is appropriate to what’s going to happen in that scene. You can actually just... do that in games, too. It’s OK. Nobody’s going to stop you or say it’s breaking immersion. I talk to this guy to start this mission at what’s clearly noon, then we fade to back, and I come back out onto the street late at night so I can do this daring nighttime raid. That’s.. OK. You can do that. Honest. No need to have the sun doing crazy fast laps in the background.

Anyway, other games since have all copied that time scale, because blindly copying things from GTA3 was kinda... how people made games for a good stretch of time (and yeah yeah yeah, Elder Scrolls was probably already doing it, whatever... hell so was Robinson’s Requiem I’m pretty sure, and Drakken I know was paced something like that). But anyway, we mixed that sort of time scale with Survival Gameplay and we’re just kinda mashing these problems together. We’re doing everything in this one to one time scale, but the in-game clock is running at like 60 times that, and our already ridiculous food intake needs are downright absurd, and suddenly we’re destroying absolutely all life on sight to sate our ever-present ravenous hunger (and possibly never sleeping).

And like... survival games don’t actually need that? Like the interesting bits of the angle are finding sources of things like clean water and shelter so you don’t die of exposure once the sun’s down and stuff. And these are things you really just need to do once and you’re set. You could... basically set up a whole game, running in real time, where these are early potential fail states. Get some kind of shelter set up within the first 5 hours or so, sleep to advance straight to the next day after pulling that off, then you have like 3 days total to find drinkable water, and... honestly at that point we’re talking like a good 45 minutes of gameplay and you could really end it there, or start your last goal. But instead, no, we’re making some kinda crude axe/bow and killing everything to eat.

Not only is it not realistic, not only does it take me out of the experience by checking the math, the whole affair feels kinda like I’m being put through someone’s weird hyper-masculine cargo cult fantasy of what it would have been like if they grew up Hunting With Dad and like.... OK people who actually do that still kill like one animal, then drag it home, throw it in a big fridge, and eat it for quite a long time, or sell it, or leave it to rot because they’re just really into ending the lives of innocent creatures and don’t want weird gamey meat at all.

So yeah, just let time be time, and don’t ever actually make me eat if we’re trying for some kind of gritty realism thing. I really don’t get hungry nearly that often and fill up quick.

[notmrfeelgood-blog]

If y’all don’t mind, I’d like to take a second and talk about what is, in my opinion, one of the best scenes in Summer Rose Court and why it works so effectively in and out of context.

Spoilers below

Going into my first playthrough of this game, I thought I had a pretty good idea of what it was going to be like.  I had played through the demo about four times and had seen enough early-build screenshots to feel confident in my expectations of what I would be getting into.

To put it plainly I was expecting a dating sim visual novel that leaned pretty strongly into the dating sim aspects that would be backed up with a conventional, if unobtrusive plot.  And if that’s all that SRC turned out to be then I would be totally satisfied with it, I mean, I definitely got my money’s worth out of it; you can’t exactly beat free.

But about an hour or so into my first playthrough I came upon this scene, and all of my expectations about the overall story and tone were tossed out the window like so much dead weight.

Just look at those screenshots, Ozpin, shriveled and wizened, clutching to a throne that is literally draining the life from him with sentient thorns.  Fuck man, how much farther could you get from a fluffy, low-impact dating sim?

Now there are a handful of reasons why I think this scene works so well at subverting expectations, so let’s get right to it.

One: Ozpin

This point only works because SRC is a fan-game and really doesn’t make much sense if the audience hasn’t already watched at least a little bit of the original source material.  As a fan of RWBY for a few years now, I’ve seen Ozpin, kicked around, betrayed, surprised, literally killed (its fine though don’t worry about it), and generally just had a real rough time of it, but I’ve never seen him as far out of his depth as he is here.

Ozpin has, to a certain extent, been a bit of a reassuring figure throughout the show.  Sure, we can argue about just how moral his actions are, but you can’t deny that at the very least, he knows what’s going on.  He’s been overpowered by Cinder and others, but trying to use Crescent Rose is just a completely different caliber.

We’ve always known that Ozpin could swim in deep waters, but during this scene, he might as well be in outer space.

The fact that its Ozpin on the throne throws all the reassurance that normally comes with him off kilter.  His answers may not have always been the ones that we’ve liked, but at least he had answers.  This however, is something totally beyond him, giving us a pretty solid idea of just how powerful Crescent Rose is going to be.

Two: Crescent Rose

Let’s take a second and step away from the minutiae and describe the scene.  We have a young protagonist, newly forced into a demanding journey, who upon the completion of the first leg of their journey, meets a kindly older mentor who shares a connection with the mystical power that is integral to the hero’s story.  But before the mentor can really aid the hero on their journey, they lash out, face distorting into a reflection of the grotesquerie manifested by the magical force.

You know what that sounds an awful lot like?

Its not a perfect metaphor, Bilbo reaching for the ring out of the primal need for it is a lot different than Ozpin’s taking of the throne out of a sense of duty, but let’s play this out for a second.

Turning a beloved/relatable character into something so viscerally horrific and then saying, ‘oh its all because of this power that the hero must now handle is a pretty intense way of building the overall tension surrounding that power.  I mean, I still have a hard time watching that bit in Fellowship and I’m a grown-ass man.  

Crescent is a force to be reckoned with throughout the entire story, but introducing her like this is an extremely forceful way of showing the audience exactly what she’s made of, a tactic used again to similar effect the first time she takes over Ruby’s body.

Three: Recognition

“It isn’t fear or confusion that strikes me at the look in his eyes, but a deep jolt of recognition.”

This point goes hand in hand with the previous one.

As the Lord of the Rings trilogy ramps up, one of the ways Tolkien builds tension is through the gradual corruption taking hold in Frodo.  In effect, Bilbo’s little jump scare in Rivendell is a reverse time capsule, showing what the end effect of Frodo’s journey could be.  Recognizing the same lust for the ring in Frodo is genuinely one of the most terrifying things about the final trek towards Mt. Doom.

But enough with the Lord of the Rings references, I promise I’m getting to my point.  The fact that Ruby recognizes the power sucking Ozpin dry as the same one her parents used and the one that is inextricably linked to her and her bloodline is more haunting the more you think about it.  It also definitely gives her some hero points when she chooses to use the throne anyways.

Now this isn’t totally substantiated by the game, but I also like to believe that not only is Ruby recognizing Crescent, but the reverse is happening as well.  Even though she’s asleep, I think Crescent could definitely sense the presence of the next Rose heir and a new chapter in her story, a thought which doesn’t exactly engender a sense of safety.

Conclusion: Setting the Stakes

Okay, so we’ve talked about some of the components of this scene, but what’s the overall effect they have when you put it all together?

Early on in the game, you watch an attack on the Xiao-Long tribe by a pack of Grimm, and while that’s a fairly brutal inciting action, its far more important to Ruby than it is to the audience.  For us, this scene with Ozpin, is the moment when we become just as invested as Ruby.

Honestly, the first time I played through this, I literally had to set my laptop down and pace around my apartment for a few minutes before I could go back to the game.  Every expectation I had about the game had been proven wrong in the space of a few seconds, and I had to mentally reorient myself as to how I was going to experience this story.

Gone were my ideas about a fluffy dating sim with light coming-of-age themes.  This was going to be a story that I had to engage with on a completely different level and this was exactly the moment that proved it to me.

By setting the stakes miles higher than I had expected in a single scene is something you can only really pull off once in a story, and this particular moment does it more than brilliantly.

[rebdot]

Doki Doki Literature Club

I just finished playing Doki Doki Literature Club....

idk what to say other than what a wild ride without spoiling everything so spoilers under the cut?

Okay so first of all I had a friend who was texting me while I was playing, and because he’d already went through the whole shebang I was sending him screenshots with my reactions of text. Every time he told me to record something I immediately got suspicious.

First of all Sayori jumpscared me to hell, but the reversed music was really cool! My friend told me it was reversed apart from the whistling, which added a really creepy effect. Sayori herself was a really good character, and her dialogue really shows the thought process those with depression can go through - wanting to make everyone happy despite her being the opposite, lack of ability or reason to even get out of bed sometimes. The fact that her death is inevitable makes the situation all the more dark...and realistic.

After the whole jumpscare thing, when the game literally descends into chaos, I was lucky enough to get the absolutely terrifying “realistic mouth” easter egg with Natsuki. If you haven’t seen it, it’d be best to just look it up. It’s like the thing with Yuri’s eyes except it apparently only shows up occasionally. Also I felt really bad for Natsuki in general, especially as she’s kind of ignored by the third act (After Sayori kills herself and Yuri turns into an obsessive maniac and Monika just exists really, she’s only really used for jumpscares).

That said, Natsuki’s ending was honestly the scariest for me. I don’t know if it was just me, but after the depression conversation with Sayori the fact that she killed herself was less surprising? It was still horrifying of course, but it made it very clear that that was what was going to happen. Plus, Yuri’s sanity was deteriorating from the start of Act 3, so it really wasn’t a stretch to say she’d do something awful. Natsuki’s glitching out and body horror was really unexpected compared to everything else, and that right angle neck crack gives me shivers just thinking about it...

Yuri’s ending, well, was obviously messed up. What she did with the pen was...ew... I think the fact that even though her death animation was literally 2 sprites the blood was animated normally was a really nice touch, and was one of the most unsettling things about the game. The fact her body rots and the blood dries also makes the whole scene all the more horrific.

Finally, Monika. A lot of people hate her, but I actually understood her character a lot? I don’t see her as inherently evil, but she was definitely completely insane. I did like her “space house” as I called it when I saw it, the animation outside the windows was really cool. But Monika’s character as a sentient being in the midst of all the programmed entities was actually really well executed, as well as her supposed control over the game. The deletion and addition of files over the course of the playthrough was actually a really nice touch.

Another really nice thing about the game was the music and atmosphere. Whenever the music stopped I was on edge, waiting for some sort of creepy tune or messed up visual to appear. The glitching at the beginning of Act 2 did a really good job of easing the player into a slightly messed up atmosphere before just unleashing hell.

I know a lot of people dislike the game because of the way mental illness and suicide is portrayed, but it’s not the first game to fail to portray it well, and it won’t be the last. Still, I don’t usually tag triggers because i never post things that would require it, but for this game it really feels necessary.

Overall, the game was not what I expected. On one hand, I thought it would be scarier and that the ending would be completely messed up and awful, however on the other hand for something which set itself up as a cute visual novel dating sim, it was extremely unnerving and caused me to be completely on guard for parts of it, which most indie horrors don’t manage to do.

[brightsimmer]

Ziam update: Azan ages up!

Breakfast and getting ready for school time for the kiddos, and Zayn was actually awake too.

Akasha still had blonde hair because of the glitch(??)

Liam got sick :( and he looked so miserable!

Liam helping Akasha with her homework.

So I built them a brand new house (surprise surprise) because I just felt like the one they were living in was too small and also the lot was pretty small. I built a house based on the house that I, personally, grew up and lived in for about 16 years. Alright so I’m very emotionally attached to that house and the property, and in September (about 5 months ago) my family had to move from that house and well... I’m still not over it. So this house that I built has basically the same floorplan as my childhood home with a few adjustments. 

So to explain this random screenshot, I took it accidentally (as I do all the time) while trying to bring up the cheat window (Cntrl + C) and I sometimes end up just pressing C by mistake and end up taking a screenshot. I was decorating the master bathroom and was trying to use the cheat where you can raise objects up because I wanted to put those candles on one of those shelves and it wasn’t working... turns out I forgot to turn move objects on! whoops. But it wouldn’t let me put those candles there anyway. 

The kiddos having breakfast in their new house, obviously after I finished (or mostly finished) the house and moved them into it.

The girls playing on the monkeybars and Azan practicing dribbling because I put a basketball hoop outside at the new house. Ignore the um... landscaping? or lack there of... I’m not finished with this house yet. The interior is mostly decorated all the way but I still have a lot of work to on the outside which is going to take a longggg time for me to finish. 

I also was able to change Akasha’s hair back to black and so far all the kids’ hairs have stayed the correct color. 

The girls playing Don’t Wake the Llama

Liam “dreaming big”... while this dunk looks impressive, he actually fell on his butt right after and the ball bounced off of his head!

Spending some time together after the kids have gone to bed. Liam’s eating a chicken burrito and it looks weird lol

It was finally Azan’s birthday!!

And he made the huge transformation into being a teenager!

Here he is before his makeover! Honestly, this kid is the most attractive Sim I think I’ve had born in my game! He looks a lot like Liam but I see Zayn in his features too! His eyes are grey, and I figured out why none of the kids have brown eyes like their dads: Zayn and Liam have CC eyes, so the game just gives their children random colored eyes. I thought about changing Azan’s eyes to brown, but I like the grey too much!

The aspiration I gave him was “Party Animal” and his new trait is Goofball, like Liam, and he’s also Cheerful. I picture him as the one kid everyone knew in school that was the class clown, but was also super nice and funny and had a ton of friends! He also has a geeky side, so I’m planning on giving him the Geek trait when he becomes a young adult.

And just for shits and giggles, I changed him into a girl, and slapped some hair and makeup on him, just to see what he would look like!

Here is Azan after his makeover! I usually would never think to use this hair, but I think this swoop suits him! I wanted him to look like a fun guy!

And he was already wearing glasses for his sleepwear which made me realize he looks really really good with glasses, so I gave him glasses for his second everyday outfit, so I’m imagining that most days he wears contacts, but some days he’s feeling lazy and wears his glasses. 

The only adjustment I made to him was to broaden his shoulders a teeny tiny bit just so he looked more in proportion with the rest of his body. This is his first everyday outfit...

And his second everyday outfit. I’m so bad at dressing guys but I think he looks alright! This look would be on his lazier days where he overslept and threw on some random clean clothes... so basically a typical teenage boy!

Azan with his dad! (again please ignore the horrific landscaping!!!) I also ended up giving Azan braces but you can’t even tell!

And with his Baba!

And then I decided to get some Ziam selfies while I was at it!

Aww, I love this one!

Azan chatting with Maia and you can kind of see what the new house looks like. I’ll get proper pictures of it when I’m happy with it lol