💙 CK2/Mass Effect?
Crusader Kings remain the greatest romantic fantasy villain simulator ever made. Where else can I arrange to have my 16-year-old-niece marry a famously ugly brute three times her age so they can have kids that will inherit his claim to the throne of Hungary once I assassinate him?
(Also Paradox Games are, like, unironically some of the best avenues of education for history/geography with any sort of mass audience. Which like, not an amazing endorsement, but better than most alternatives! Not like I was going to learn about who the Mamelukes or Komnenoi were anywhere else. My mental image of political geography is still the EU political mapmode.)
Mass Effect - the Tuchanka mission of Mass Effect 3 is literally the greatest sequence I have ever experienced in any Triple A video game. Unironically high art.
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What media & content to study for my Maynard software toy(-kit?)
Ya, that's alot of content to learn from.
First Person Perspective
Quake 1 / Xonotic / Red Eclipse / Tesseract / Cube 2 Sauberbraten... (slipgates, scenario scripting interpreter on runtime and absolutely open to modding for every single system in the game thanks to the entire stack being open source)
Resistance Fall of Man (part of its color palette especially for diagetic amber retro GUI/UX, initial darker arc that goes upwards to hope later on, unravelling longer connected history secrets, excavation of historical relics to further one's end, preservation vs progress metric)
Epistle 3 (broader vibe of the series, time travel paradigm through the Borealis, gender swapping, )
Quake 4 (Tweaking the Stroggification process into some transformation that is much more handsome and way less gruesome)
Halo 2 (the alien arbiter's redemption arc + complicated alien politics)
Halo Reach / Portal 2 (far away future dynamics and sapient rebellious unrest)
Wolfenstein The New Order (dystopian aesthetic flavor & alternate history path)
Duke Nukem 3D (EDUKE32 & BUILD2 counts in that department)
Ion Fury (Female protagonist & innovation within retro contraints; Aftershock & Phantom Fury counts as well)
Cyberpunk 2077 (mechanics, quests, overall vibe of going against the systems in place despite working gigs for those same structures, generic future technological level)
Simulation
Micropolis / original Simcity (overall aesthetic and runtime asset/level editing glory)
SimCity 4 (mechanics, connectivity with other cities and other engines, moddability...)
The Sims 2 (life simulation framework, family-building, moddability, the CC community, the customizability of everything*)
FreeCiv (open source, retro Civilization game rules, world sizes and civ numbers in vast quantities, Lua scripting, in-game level editor...)
Civilization 5 Complete Edition (external SDK tools, entire game loop, world generation in high resolution hexagonal grid, a couple of custom and built-in map scripts, strategic mapmode, technological tree with 'G&K'+'BNW', community content, )
Civilization 6 (some loyalty system, climate change, diplomacy in the end-game, districts and other novel simulation aspects)
Crusader Kings 2 (dynamic agentive intrigues in real time, pausable time, historical bookmarks...)
Europa Universalis 3 (graphics, complete-ness, early modern era onwards, Protestant Reformation, enlightenment period, abundance of focus sliders, alternate history threads...)
Abstract
4D Toys / Miegakure (simple environment with composite 4D objects, manipulation of fourth dimension objects with interesting properties, playground world...)
Citizen of Rome Dynasty Ascendant (endless life simulation, accurate historical considerations, subjective goal-oriented playstyles...)
Hypnospace Outlaw (network and knowledge exploration + instigation as strong gameplay loop incentive, connection to other fictional realms, emulating much of the year 2000...)
Factorio (creativity, computer simulation, ultra deep technological mechanics, abundance of diverging workflows for similar tasks, several recipes and several ways to do things...)
'TIS-100' / 'Shenzhen I/O' (classic Zachtronics formula, custom levels, optimization metrics, fairly decent to complete but encouraging to optimize further, prices, time-sharing, limited processing power, instructions, meta/self-awareness aspect)
Baba Is You (keyword manipulation, interpreter like environment, moddability and abundance of custom levels)
The Elder Scrolls 2 Daggerfall (densely inhabited fictional world, complex skills and wider world design)
Mercenaries Playground of Destruction (many factions to trade and interact about, a shared baseline opponent, territorial control, vehicular combat and other props shop)
Before note-taking form gameplay sessions thread
The aesthetic I shall use is pretty much the one I utilize on my blog most of the time, the one with retro cartoon vector layered sectors, volumetric 3D geometric elements, with as little anti-aliasing as possible, using NPR stylized N64+Dreamcast Cel-rendering, warm soft yet dark wooden colors, and other things to make for a synthesis of many eras. And I do still am figuring the level layouts to empathize most but I do have some demo suggestions like Poolrooms, forested areas, homes and other sector layouts. So to amount towards a worldly geometric terrain wrapped around on one axis to make a curved cylindric world from QGIS files into Qodot levels.
But I feel like this manifesting game is about integrating into this alternate world, interacting with the many factions that will keep varied relationships with you and building yourself up onto those byzantine politics to instigate positive, constructive, incremental changes.
Study notes from playing the games:
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