#plus this npc is like....complicated

[killshotspectre]

sigh i love just feeling so so stupid and like i've done something wrong after every dnd game no matter what

[perenlop]

me: i should give more ocs good parents bc i have too many that are just kinda bad. especially for my partners, i should give one of them at least two good parents.

also me:.... ok but what if nimbus had an absent dad and kind of a subpar mom-

[restrictedreadingtwst]

Playing video games with friends is always an experience, funny or aggravating. But when sharing a game with a special someone you can bond over all the little details and share the memories of learning and playing together. So what's it like playing a special game with your special someone like Idia, a mad gamer who has almost every game figured out, and Malleus, a fae who has no interest in learning about the technical side of modern society?

tw: none?

Gn!Reader at best, please excuse any mistakes.

Groups: Idia + Malleus

Since Idia is always cooped up in his room, when you come over to spend time with him you always end up watching him play his games but it gets boring being an observer. You can ask to try out whatever game he’s playing but sometimes they are a little complicated and leave you upset that you don’t get it. So when Idia mentions an old game that was getting an update, you have a look at it and something just clicked in you. I guess he took notice cuz next thing you know he gifted you a brand new laptop with Stardew Valley newly updated. 

✦ Idia is a try hard, he’s grinding and calculating every day with precision in order to get the most out of the early game. He’s pretty informative on the do's and don’ts; and with this new update he's looking into newly awaken forums on brand new intel to better get a good grasp on the game. And then there is you, the new farmer who likes to talk to the townspeople and take your time to fish and farm, discovering things as you go. So when Idia is off unlocking things, you are looking into the farm and making it pretty with what little guidance Idia gave you. 

✦ Half the time, Idia is spending his times in the mines or skull cavern to get you gems and materials for all the cute furniture you wanna make to decorate your home. The money he earns ends up spent on more seeds, more recipes, upgrading the farm and house, a brand new fishing rod to catch better fish and you always thank him with a kisses irl. And he doesn’t complain, cuz sometimes you do things absolutely hilarious that he can’t be mad at you since you’re a newbie at the game. Plus, you have an eye for design so he can come home to a cute house where you cooked some more food for him to take when he leaves for the caves again, he’s dying on the inside from just how cute you are. 

✦ Idia had his favorites in the past, he no longer considers romancing the npcs anymore since he has you and practically unlocked every achievement known in the past. But when he realizes that you’re talking with Alex or hanging out with Sam while on a walk to the beach, he gets paranoid and begins to pursue you in game. Gifting you diamonds, tulips and sunflowers, a whole ass prismatic shard. It isn't until you are given the bouquet that you laugh at how he’s trying to settle down in the game faster than he would in real life. He’s a mess but he won’t mention it. Plus when you return the favor with a mermaid’s pendant, he’s gushing and flustered in real life. He almost forgets to accept it. 

✦ When you come over for another gaming session, Idia whines that he missed you while you smother his head with kisses and a hug. Booting up your laptop and logging in, you find the farm decorated beautifully with flowers and enchanting sets. Idia had set up the whole wedding venue as a surprise before you got on. Come the next day you guys would be married in game, and you're gushing at how well he cleaned up the farm for you. He says it’s nothing but the sly smirk and the tint of pink brushing his features tells you that he’s more then happy to do anything for you!

When Malleus was introduced to his new console, it was a birthday gift given to him from both you and Lilia. Seeing as you enjoy your little video games and liked showing him the little things you’ve created on your switch, you had the bright idea to share this experience with him with his own green nintendo switch! With the help of Lilia, you showed him how to use the controls and how to take good care of it, seeing as it was different from his tomodachi. Once he gets a grasp on it, you then share with him a game you’ve been meaning to play with him, Animal Crossing. 

✦ Since the game is very slow pace and you guys can do whatever you want, He spends a lot of this time following in your footstep. You show him how to gather items, dig up fossils and the bell system. If you’re fishing, he’s busy trying to catch a bug nearby so he has an excuse to stay near your character. His least favorite thing is when he shakes a tree and he misses the wasps. If he could burn down the console he would, but you hurry over in game to cure him of his ugly bug bites. It leaves him all giddy to think that you would nurture him back to health so the upcoming thunderstorm outside subsides. 

✦ With decorating, he does his best to fit your vision for the island while also adding his own opinions. Sure you can place your favorite villages nearby as long as you guys can put your castle-like house at the very top of the island. Do you want beautiful waterways with a forest vibe? Of course you can, but as long as you have an enchanting rose garden that you both can sit in. And while you two share a house, he loves to decorate his room with historical art and the few gargoyles you’ve made for him in game. His eyes sparkle when he looks at your shared ‘Nest'. He loves when you make things for the two of you to spend time in, but if a villager gets in his way he will pout and plot against them.

✦ Speaking of the villagers, he adores them so much. For one, he loves how they are all so friendly and have the strangest of humor. Of course, they are characters in a game so none of them would be scared of him, but he loves how they all wave and smile at each other. His favorites are the deer and alligator villagers. He finds them oddly familiar as his starters are a sleepy deer and a loud, proud alligator. But other then that, he makes an effort to greet every villager they pass around the island and help them with their little task as a great king would. 

✦ When you both play together, you find yourself sitting in his lap and leaning back on his chest with your switch lite in hand. Malleus has a larger screen per request so that you can help him better, so he is able to hold you and play along. While fishing, he leans over and leaves kisses in your hair, smiling as you pout and complain about him distracting you as you watch the fish escape your grasp.

[factual-fantasy]

21 asks! Thank you! :}} 😶‍🌫️

I mean this in the nicest way possible.. but crossing my boundaries/going against my wishes is still bad even if its in private/in secret. Please just don't make any kind of fanart based on my stuff. I just want interactions. 😔

@neo-metalscottic

Hello! My days been a little rough, but at least I haven't seemed to catch that cold yet! <:D

As for the Sun and Moon.. I'm kind'a on the fence about my AU ngl. I don't want a repeat of Octonauts where people just yoink all my ideas and copy all my designs. So atm I'm not open to sharing anything I've made for them.. sorry <:/

As for your Mario ask, the clown cars are a thing! :0 They just are shaped a bit differently and Bowsers doesn't have a goofy face in his XD its the koopalings that painted faces on their mini ones.

@aamin-original

Google translation: "I love your character! It is very original and looks very charismatic! I hope you see this message, I really want you to continue drawing, you draw very beautifully."

:DD Thank you!! Though I don't know when I'll post next.. getting my Octonauts art and my original characters traced has been pretty frustrating.

@obtainedtinyteeth

Uhg, such a shame that you found me through stolen artwork. But hey there's a master post here for all my FNAF stuff so.. there's that.

Also thank you <:))

I have not, so I have no opinion on the story or characters <:/

Sorry, but atm I'm not really open to talking about the plans for my AU. I'm keeping it all private until further notice..

@beryl-shade

I'm not really open to talking about my AU right now.. But I can talk about the NPCs :0

When it comes to the background/crowd NPCs like the candy land citizens, as seen here-

They are not as sentient or as advanced as Gummigoo and his buddies. They don't have unique bodies, personalities or names, they are just bare bones NPC coded to just stand in the crowd and follow a script.

Same as he does in canon. He's just Caines goofy A.I. assistant :0

@glitchhayden418

I have no idea what you're referring to <XD

@paulacooks

I'm not open to sharing much, but I will say I have plans to make Jax more likable. He's so rotten in canon <XD

@jdsstudio

Now why they'd have to go and bring Mike back 💀

Hate to say it but the decision is final, I've had enough of tracers and thieves. I plan to only draw Octonauts in private.

Thank you though <:) I'm doing my best to take it easy.

@rockyztownesys

SCREAMS AAA THANK YOU SO MUCH!!! :DDD This was the major mood lifter I'd been needing <:)) Thank you so much

@rainwwatermelon7

Ah sorry, but I wouldn't be okay with that.. but I mean props to you. Just taking it, coloring it and sending it back without asking would be much worse.

And thank you! :D I'm glad to hear that you like my artwork! :DD

@milk-powrit

Not really sure how those episodes would play out..

@chromchill

Even then, just use free bases or show/movie screenshots. That's how I learned.. but yeah I get what you're saying. That's not nearly as bad as tracing and posting it as your own.

@somcdonaldsamirite

That would definitely be something :0

@kind-of-human1

I wont share much. But I can say that Caine was always like that/was capable of being like that. As time went on in the circus he kept leaning further and further away from "haha I'm a wacky A.I. ringmaster! :))" and more towards "these people really need my help to escape this place- and I gotta do what ever I can to comfort them in the meantime"

@carsaadi

Hello! :D So far I've drawn Caine without canines because its already hard enough to draw his "face"/expressions as he is. Adding sharp teeth would just complicate his face and make it even harder to draw expressions..

Plus so far I'm liking the vibe all flat teeth gives him. He still feels like a goofy cartoon character. Meanwhile adding sharp teeth makes it look like he's trying to be realistic... if that makes sense..? 'm more for cartoony <XD

@caronaro-flipaclip

1: I cant think of anyone who'd say that <XD

2: He might tease Ragatha, but he doesn't bully her and he doesn't bother Gangle at all.

3: I imagine is sound about the same as it does in canon! :0

@asperanna

Other than knowing its gonna have the light and dark looking sky kids from Eden, I cant actually grasp what this season could possibly be about...

I'm excited for it none the less! :)

Also as for the two sky kids themselves- the scene with them in Eden always makes me feel something 🥲

[beneathsilverstars]

@horatiocomehome replied

ooo how about jewelry taste. dangly earrings vs studs, do they wear bracelets, rings, flashy vs elegant, etc

mirabelle has so many cute trinkets! we know she loves accessories that go ding ding, and she'll layer a ton of necklaces so they knock against each other. sometimes they all match nicely, sometimes it's eclectic chic! she adores metal charms and carved beads, especially charmingly unusual shapes like an itty bitty fork, ducky, book, etc. as well as classics like lockets and bells! she tends to fidget with rings and lose track of them, so she avoids those. post-canon she decides to stop wearing earrings, so she turns her novelty earrings into bracelet/necklace charms! and gives her more basic studs to isabeau so he'll actually own some basics.

isabeau is all about shapes and contrast, so he likes chunky beads in materials like turquoise or jasper that have different shades marbled together, metal geometric shapes, wire-wrapped stone, and unique arrangements of elements. he likes funny noises too, but will go for one complicated necklace instead of multiple single strands. he definitely tends towards statement necklaces and earrings — he used to run into trouble because he only had statement pieces, so they would clash terribly, but then he started buying more matching sets. he loves bonding earrings as a romantic, but is a little torn because there's no way any two earrings could match all of his fits...

odile is the kind of person to pick a nice look and stick to it, so there's not much variety in her accessories. she has her glasses gems, a pair of pearl studs, a pair of silver studs, and a couple sentimental rings that she keeps somewhere safe instead of wearing. we know bonding earrings are popular in ka bue but not as universal as in vaugarde; i think it would be cute if ka bue had a whole language of earrings and rings, with different gem types/cuts/colors denoting different sorts of relationships and emotions. so she's got, like, a [daughter, you are the most important thing in my life] ring from her dad, and a [lover, we change each other] ring from an ex.

siffrin is all about sentimental pieces!! it doesn't really occur to him to buy himself jewelry, but isa or mira will see him looking at something in the market and buy it for him and suddenly the aesthetic appeal that sif had mildly enjoyed doesn't matter at all compared to They Gave This To Me. siffrin tends to be drawn towards solid shades or starry dots, and smooth, swirling shapes. isa also gets them stimmy pieces like a bumpy bangle or spinny ring, and mira gets them cute things that remind her of them like star pins or kitty charms. he's just so fun to give trinkets to, even bonnie and odile have gotten him some, so he's working up quite a collection! he carefully rotates through everything, and keeps some pieces in his pockets when he can't fit everything he wants onto his body or doesn't want to wear any jewelry that day.

bonnie's bracelet is smooth wood, and they're going to be very upset the day it no longer fits over their hand. they prefer non-rock materials like wood, shells, bones, and sea glass, because that's just way more fun! they made shell necklaces with nille all the time, so many that it doesn't matter how often they lose them.

loop goes full magpie! since they don't have to buy necessities like food, they're less careful about spending money than siffrin, plus they're more desperate to capture any scrap of joy. they also have a bit of "everyone else is an npc" brain and "i am both above and beneath normal rules", so they're more comfortable with stealing than siffrin is. they like drapey chains, black and white beads, and unusual pieces. they like the pressure stim of very heavy necklaces and the clack of many bracelets. once when one of their favorites broke they procured the tools to fix it, and started modifying the stuff they own and stringing trinkets onto chains!

[cantheykillmacbeth]

Skeletron from Terraria could kill Macbeth.

Yes, Skeletron from Terraria could kill Macbeth!

Though the lore of Terraria is a bit scarce, there are many heavy implications that connect almost every major boss of the game to the eldritch deity Cthulhu, who is referred to with either masculine or neutral pronouns. Skeletron in particular is said to be part of Cthulhu's skeleton that was ripped out of his body during a war, which then became animate through sheer force of rage. Skeletron (as well as the other bosses ripped from Cthulhu) is referred to as a separate entity from Cthulhu entirely, with it/its pronouns being used exclusively.

This definitely applies Skeletron for the Gender Clause and Birth Parent Clause at the very least, and while its initial inception would certainly count for the Unconventional Birth Clause (being a piece of a skeleton getting ripped out of your father's body and then becoming independently animate only after your father retreated to the moon sounds like a pretty esoteric birth to me), it gets a bit more... complicated with what we see within the actual game.

You see, in Terraria, when you want to fight Skeletron, you have to interact with an NPC who is simply known as the Old Man at the entrance to the world's dungeon. He explains that he is under a curse from Skeletron, and asks you to break said curse by defeating it. Agreeing (under the right conditions) will cause Skeletron to violently erupt out of the Old Man's body in a giant blood splatter, ripping him apart from the inside. ((The Old Man comes back from this somehow. It's never explained. Don't worry about it.)) Now, one could potentially make the argument that this... eruption would count as a "birth" under Shakespeare's definition of the term. And, unfortunately, if we deny this, then we're going to need to make a much more specific way to define "birth" for our purposes that excludes Skeletron and C-section babies while simultaneously including births that result in the death of the birthing parent.

Looking to previous posts I've made, a somewhat similar situation is the Xenomorph, with the whole chest-burster situation. At the time, I had quite confidently said that they apply for the UBC, and nobody seemed to really bat an eye at that; plus, I would probably still stand by that decision. So, while it's ultimately debatable, I'm going to say that Skeletron erupting out of the Old Man does not count as a "birth" for our purposes, and therefore Skeletron's initial inception will be counted for the UBC instead.

Sorry for that overly-long explanation that ultimately just led back to the same conclusion.

Thank you for your submission!

[minecraftbookshelf]

Evo SMP/Life Series Relationship Web

This does dip a bit into Empires and Hermitcraft but I tried to not focus on that.

The types of relationship portrayed, color coded for my sanity

Parent & Sibling are pretty self explanatory

Soulmate - Double Life Soulmate. Allows for both Assigned Soulmates and Chosen Soulmates and does not indicate the exact flavor of the soulmate relationship at all.

Partner - Primarily indicates some level of romantic relationship but also allows for Canon Typical Ambiguity

Platonic Partners - Partnerships that are enough aligned as platonic that I felt comfortable assigning them here. There’s only like. Two of these.

It’s Complicated - Aka “fuck if I know” aka “???” Boils down to “there is Something Wrong with these people and I don’t know that it can be labeled with any fewer than three categories, some of which are mutually exclusive” Covers a wide range of actual relationship flavors but I ran out of colors and so couldn't get any more specific than this.

Haphazard Breakdown of Some of the Actual Relationships Below the Cut

Grian and Solidarity and Pearlescentmoon are all half-siblings (and that is the age order)

Solidarity & LDShadowlady are step-siblings

Can Flower Husbands Please Chill Out With the Relationships Please

A couple relationships got more than one line color:

Desert Duo are both Assigned Soulmates and also What The Fuck??? Because look at them.

Smajor and ZombieCleo are both Chosen Soulmates and also Platonic Partners on account of having what I'm pretty sure is the only positive relationship to survive all four Life Games without a single backstabbing or betrayal and all the murder being 100% consensual.

Smajor and InTheLittleWood get both Partners and What the Fuck??? because i stared at them for a solid five minutes trying to decide.

BigBSt4tz2 & Pearlescentmoon ended up on opposite sides of the web somehow but pls know that they have a What the Fuck??? line connecting them, I just really didn't want to draw that over the whole thing.

Similarly, Impulse and Bdubs are on different sides (Impulse as part of "Tango's Polycule") pls imagine their soulmate line as well.

"Smajor's Harem of Husbands" consists of (as of Smajor's list after MCC30) HBomb, Whisp, FireBreathMan, and Milo (NPC from Witchcraft SMP) Solidarity gets to be individually listed because he’s one of the integral parts of the web at large

I am absolutely open to conversation on any and all of these points and any others.

EDIT 5/9/23: I made a streamlined version that is also more thorough.

I started with the Evo Squad as a group for this one. Instead of the Evo Sibling Squad. All Evo SMP members are also now underlined in Orange

I removed some extraneous characters, down to one Empire Character, and Three Hermitcraft (plus the Harem Unit)

This took about six attempts so I apologize for the handwriting decline.

[newbiespud]

Griftlands: Three For All - Announcement

Over the past few months, maybe even the past year, I've occasionally mentioned an idea for a second big Griftlands mod, one last hurrah to cap off my time with the game after Arint's Last Day and Grift the Spire. But I haven't gone into great detail about what this mod idea actually is, have I? I've been doing so much pre-production planning that I haven't really had the time to go into the basics. Let's fix that!

The Grifters Join Forces!

Anyone remember the cinematic early access trailer for Griftlands? How it greatly implies there's a story where the three grifters are brought together by chance and team up? And that didn't really end up anywhere in the game because it was just to show off how the main characters operate?

Let's make this tantalizing concept a reality!

The story of Three For All picks up where the trailer leaves off. All three grifters - Sal, Rook, and Smith, some time after the events of their main stories - are in Pearl-on-the-Foam, figuring out what these strange devices they've all collected are and why every faction in Havaria seems to be after them. In order to survive, collect the rest of the devices, and get paid, they'll have to team up, utilize their connections and skills, and watch each other's backs. If they can trust each other.

Choose Your Character and Party Up!

Three For All is a story about all three grifters working together. But, you get to decide who's taking the lead. You can start the campaign as any of the three grifters and the other two will be your NPC party members. Instead of being three separate campaigns, it's one campaign that can handle multiple playable characters, plus different routes when the grifters must sometimes split up, and even altered dialogue in many conversations!

This extends to battle and negotiation as well! You can play through many of the same conflicts as any of the grifters and the other two will back you up! You're a proper party now!

Of course, this means that battles and negotiations will be a bit harder on balance. Many factions are after the same things you are!

("But what if the other two grifters die in battle?" You might ask. You're right, that would get very complicated very fast, and be anxiety-inducing to manage. So instead, they are what certain games would call "Essential" - they won't die, but reducing them to 1 HP will make them Panic indefinitely until healed. So if you want to make the most of their help, keep them defended and alive! But if they get knocked down, it won't be the end of the world.)

While not much has been implemented or locked down yet, there will most likely be special cards or mechanics for controlling your fellow grifters in battle and receiving help from them in negotiation!

As a bonus, there will also be a special "All For One" solo route with its own dialogue that any modded character can add to their list of campaigns! (Or you could even use the Cross Character Campaign mod to replace one of the grifters in the trio routes, who knows?)

What's Done and The Road Ahead

The reason I'm making this big announcement post now is that a lot of the quest planning work is finally done. The structure of the main quest is locked in, and I've got enough concepts for new side quests and random events to justify making a campaign where you're expected to play through it a minimum of three times, once for each character, while maintaining a high level of variety.

(That means something like 25 side quests so far, 20 opportunity events, and 50 random travel events! I've been trying to frontload as much brainstorming as I can, and I'm still not done!)

Now I can really start getting into code and scripts and start making the content that goes into the mod.

The plan is to create a Day One Demo, with all the content that could appear on the first day of the five-day campaign, and push that onto the Steam Workshop for testing and tantalization. Then it'll be on to finalizing the rest of the days and their special quests and routes.

Oh, did I mention that this mod will be adding 10 new bosses to the game? Yep. And the Day One Demo will also include a special Brawl mode for previewing and testing all of those bosses!

That's a Whole Lotta Content!

Welp, my big mouth has written a whole lotta checks that I'm gonna have to start cashing. But Griftlands is a very special and important game to me. Working on Arint's Last Day, my first mod ever, really kind of saved me and restored a lot of my working confidence, and I want to give back to the game with one last hurrah, one last injection of raw content.

The goal is to make this an intricate, extremely replayable campaign where there's always something new you haven't seen, while enjoying the indulgence of the gimmicks of partying up and swappable main characters.

I roughly expect the Day One Demo to drop sometime in 2025, and the full mod will come later, either very late 2025 or more likely sometime in 2026. I may also run a private playtest group as the mod approaches completion, no solid plans there yet.

If this sounds great and you want to support my work - none of which will be paywalled in any way - consider donating to my Patreon. It keeps me alive, and you get access to my quiet little Discord server, which is probably the best way to find out what I'm working on day-to-day. Otherwise, follow me here or on Mastodon and I'll post infrequently about my progress, though most days it'll probably just be "yep, wrote a lot until my brain fried today."

So that's Three For All, an ambitious plan to create what's essentially another free DLC pack for Griftlands and write some gloriously indulgent fanfic at the same time. Wish me luck!

[klabauters]

This might be like a weird ask, but like can you explain how larp works? I play ttrpgs so I know like the basics of roleplaying but like is it the same group everytime? But there seem to be so many people involved? Do you get assigned your character or do you create them? Is there some kind of a gm? I imagine the logistics are super complicated but maybe you could explain it a little? Also followed for db content, stayed for larp sideblog!

Not a weird ask at all! But oh boy, where do you begin?

Every larp is organized differently, and the things I'm about to say are by no means universal. I'll just explain this using the Mythodea campaign as an example.

Just like in ttrpgs, you've got one-off games, and long running campaigns. Mythodea is one of the largest german campaigns. There are several Mythodea events happening each year, the biggest one being Conquest with just under 10000 players. Then there's the Chroniken and the JdS, which usually have around 1500 players attending. There's a few more smaller events throughout the year, too.

These all happen in the same universe, with the same plotlines. Like sessions in the same game of DnD. Some players only attend the Conquest, others show up at several or most of the smaller events as well. All depending on how involved you want to get

Do they assign you a character?

No! There are larps that'll hand you a pre-made character, many don't. However, individual groups within the Mythodea campaign (say: certain nations, orders or camps) might have a certain design concept that they'd want your character to fit into if you want to join them. A knightly order wouldn't exactly want a random pirate joining their ranks. In the overall campaign, you can pretty much show up with any vaguely medieval (ish) fantasy (ish) character that you came up with.

Is there some kind of GM?

Kinda, yeah! The overarching plot is written by a team of organizers, who then brief the NPCs on what's supposed to happen next. The players, like in ttrpgs, then react to whatever gets thrown at them. Occasionally they'll brief "important" individual players, too, for logistical reasons. But as a player you ideally get minimal direct info from the game runners.

Since this is a giant campaign with all sorts of factions and groups, there is a fuckton of plot that isn't dictated by the game runners. A lot of conflict and storylines just evolve naturally, and you can attend most of the bigger events without necessarily having to interact with the given plot.

How are the players in such a big game organized?

The players are, in this case, split into groups. There's different kingdoms (in Mythodea you have four main kingdoms: southern, western, northern and the realm of roses. We don't talk about the east for, uh, a bunch of reasons. Plus a big number of independant kingdoms and groups). That's how the camps are divided. Within those big kingdom/group camps, you have smaller factions within said kingdoms. Like specific guilds, families or organizations. You'll usually have one or two people per small camp, and then again a few people for the umbrella groups organizing the logistics of who goes where, who's showing up, etc etc. If this sounds horribly complicated and like one mess of a snowball system, that's because it is. You just hope that whoever's directly above you in the chain of People Who Organize Things knows what they're doing.

[stemmmm]

Stem's Thoughts on Harvest Moon GBC3

Harvest Moon GB1 has a mechanic called “Harvest Sprite Help” which lets NPCs take over the work on your farm for you. I criticized it heavily for the way that it took control away from the player by encouraging a style of gameplay where you turn the help setting on and then leave your game for real life hours at a time to effectively play itself. What if there was a way you could have someone else work your farm while you can still have fun playing the game though? How could you make this mechanic work?

Generally my rule when I play a new one of these games is that I have to go in without knowing anything about it, or at least as little as possible, since I've absorbed some knowledge for the older games via cultural osmosis. I don't fully know why I broke that rule for this game, but I'm grateful that I did because everything you do here hinges off of one choice you make the instant you start your new file: will you play as a boy or a girl?

Gender selection in this game is not just an aesthetic or story choice, but a mechanical one, too. Each character is given access to different tools and is expected to do a different type of work on the farm– the boy has all the basic crop-farming implements, and the girl has all the tools for animal care, plus a few farming tools that lack the ability to be upgraded. This makes it pretty hard to do the work of the other gender from what you selected, but that’s not an issue because you aren’t meant to be doing that work anyways, they are. Whichever character you don’t choose will live on the farm to work with you.

Before you start your day, you’ll need to talk to your partner and tell them what you would like them to focus on. It’s not too complicated with the girl because you can just ask her to do general things like get milk and eggs from the animals or pet all of them, but when delegating work for the boy, it’s as complex as telling him what to do on every 9x9 section of the crop field. This isn't the first game to have work delegation, you could argue Harvest Sprite Help was the same thing, and Back to Nature had you asking Sprites to assist you as well, but this is definitely the most thought out version.

The story

The premise of the story is that the boy character and the girl character are coming together to save an old farm like usual. The difference here is each character's relationship to the farm. 

While HM64 was a sequel to SNES in that all the characters were the descendants of the original cast, this game is a sequel to GBC2 in a more literal sense. The boy character is literally the farmer who saved the farm in GBC2, called over to do the job again. He even makes references to characters from that game as if they're his old friends. It feels a little awkward narratively, since he saved that old farm from becoming new development just to abandon it again, like what benefit does that bring to anyone? Who knows. It doesn't matter here.

The girl on the other hand actually has a relationship to this farm. When you choose to play as her, the game opens with cutscenes showing her as a small child watching her father work the fields. In the current day of the game, her father has died and we enter on a scene of her arguing with the mayor that she can take the farm over, but to no avail. What wins him over is that someone else brings in the boy and proclaims he can save it instead. This is accepted without question, but at least he’ll let you live with him in your own house and pick up some of the slack. This game has somehow figured out how to turn sexism into a mechanic as well.

The girl is only expected to care for the animals, a very simple task compared to the hard labor of working in the fields. There is also only one way to get married in this game, and that is to marry your partner on the farm. If you’re playing as the girl and decide to get married, your game ends. Playing as the boy, you can keep going and even have children, but marriage for a woman is game over.

All that said, my choice was actually to play as the girl, and I think it was the superior option, at least in terms of having a good gameplay flow. You may only be supposed to care for the animals, but you still have all the tools you need to grow crops, they just aren’t the best. At the beginning of the game, your partner usually isn’t very good at their job. For me, this manifested in the boy doing effectively nothing. The game started with me doing every last bit of work on the farm– planning the field, buying seeds, weeding and clearing the field, plowing, planting, watering, caring for the one cow you start with… It was basically just the same as every other farming sim. The difference is that by the time I was sick of that grind, the boy was competent enough with his work that I could just tell him what to do and go about my business. 

A management sim

It took a minute for the management part of the game to kick in, but once it did, it ran like butter. Sure, I would have had better tools to work with had I picked the boy, so it wouldn’t be so labor intensive once I got to that point in the game playing as him either, but I still much preferred assigning him the work rather than actually going and picking every single crop. It feels a lot nicer to go out and buy the seeds while I know he’s harvesting the grown crops so I can tell him to plant them himself the next day. It also meant that for the first time, I was giving almost my full attention to the animals. They don’t have any more nuance to them compared to the usual, but I did feel inclined to keep more of them and actually try to care for them the way you’re told to. On top of all that, the boy has nothing to do in winter because there aren’t any crops that season, so at least the girl has year-round work.

I really think that to play as the boy and have to take care of all the crops actually would make the management part of the game a little overwhelming, because there’s a lot more to it than just delegating work. Your farm is located on a small island off the coast of a city, and because of that, the only way to get to any shops to buy things for work is by taking a boat to the mainland. This wouldn’t be so much of an issue if it weren’t for the boat only running two days of the week, assuming good weather. This means if you’ve got five days left in the season and you want to buy a crop that’ll grow up in four, if it’s raining on the last day you can go to the island, you’re straight out of luck. If you make good enough friends with some people in the island village, one of them can let you use his old fishing boat which lets you access the mainland whenever you want, but you’re unlikely to get that until you’re a year or so into the game. This limit makes the start of the game really complicated– in a fun way.

Shipping your produce isn’t limited by boat availability, thankfully, since your produce can rot in the storage shed. The shed is where you can hold up to 99 of every type of produce for about a week until it starts to go bad. No one automatically comes to pick up your goods like in other games. Instead, there’s a phone in your house that you can only use to call into the farmer’s union and tell them that you want to ship something. This works for one item type at a time though, so you’ll have to make a whole lot of calls if you have a lot of different things to sell. I tended to try and leave things to sit as long as I could just to make fewer phone calls. It also only works while the union is in business hours, but this is a problem I ran into more often very late in the game when I ran out of work to do early in the mornings before the union even opened.

The goal

Speaking of work, the goal you’re aiming towards isn’t something that you know straight from the beginning. In fact, for a short while playing the game, I was under the impression that there was no “goal” or real endpoint at all, because it seemed to be the case that the farm wasn’t in jeopardy at all with the two of us in charge of it. It turns out my feeling was true, because this is one of the few early games where there is no failure state. There is a winning state which is presented to you once you’ve gotten a little bit better of a relationship with your partner. You need to have three of each of the four types of animals (you have room to keep eight of each type), and you need to ship 300 crops. By the time this was brought up to me in the first summer of the game, I’d already shipped well over that many crops and had the requisite number of chickens. 

The more challenging part of the goal is definitely the animals, as they all cost money which can be a pretty limiting factor, especially early-game, but I should also note that when I’d already destroyed the crop goal, that was without any help from my partner, because he still completely sucked at gardening at that point. The game is made pretty easy to play though the task management system, but it’s also made a lot easier thanks to the way its menu works. It’s the first time I’ve seen a Harvest Moon game use a Pokemon-style menu with a dozen different options that let you check everything from your tools, to your inventory, to the individual statuses of all of your animals. Actually, this might be the first Harvest Moon to actually let you know how well your animals are doing in detail, which is really handy. The menu also lets you choose between tools on the fly without having to go back to your house for a toolbox, which makes working the field way faster than other games, at the cost of having to constantly go in and out of menus because there’s no quick-swapping function. The inventory is also the biggest it's ever been from the beginning at nine slots, including whatever you’re holding in your hands, so you’re able to carry a full seed bag’s worth of harvest back to storage at once. All of this mixed with the fact that you aren’t time-limited to make sure everything is shipped before 5PM means you’re free to work both more efficiently and more calmly to get way more work done than in previous games. The only risk is that the storage shed only holds 99 of each item, so you can lose a lot of harvest if you don’t pay attention.

The rest of the game

Other than that, there really isn’t that much else in the game. This is the first entry to have no character portraits for anyone, so even if there are other NPCs that you can build some small relationships with, it’s very hard to connect. The game exists on a tiny island with a small village of about six people you’re able to talk to every day, and you’re able to boat over to the mainland where you can talk to people and shopkeepers in the mall, but the relationships are pretty limited to only a few events for people in the village and a quest each that can be given to you by the shopkeepers. Don’t get me wrong, there is some story you can run into with a couple ongoing narrative threads, the biggest being something to do with a mysterious mermaid who you correspond with through messages in bottles found on the beach, but for how big the world is, I personally expected a fair amount more than there was.

The island that you live on has five different zones that you can visit via map selection: your farm, the village, a cliff where you can see the mainland from, a mountain path, and a labyrinthine forest. The cliff really only comes into play for a fireworks-watching event with one of the villagers, the mountain exists mostly as the only place where you can find forage to sell or gift, and the forest hides a good lake for fishing but also comes into play for one late-game event, if you manage to run into it (I couldn’t get it to trigger). The mainland works the same with its five shopping areas: the port with a weekly farmer’s market, the Farmer’s Union, the shopping mall, the movie theater, and the aquarium. Each of these areas has a good deal more going on than the island, though.

The port is obviously where you go to take the boat back to the island, but off to the right there’s an entrance to a farmer’s market area that’s only available to enter on specific days– notably, days when the ferry doesn’t run, so this isn’t something you can experience until you’ve gotten your own boat. It doesn’t work how you’d expect. The idea is that you’ll be standing at a stall with everything in your inventory on offer and people will come up looking for something very specific. If they don’t find that one thing, they’ll be disappointed and leave. Their requests aren’t locked to any season either, so someone can ask for corn in the winter, and you’ll just be out of luck.

The Farmer’s Union sells and buys animals, sells farming tools and specific seeds, and can give you part-time work which usually is a specific request to ship a certain number of a given item. It also has a bank to store excess money, which is easy to have in this game. Anything that you can’t find at the Union you can find at the mall, which sells seeds for vegetables and flowers, food, special tools, and books which teach you special tricks. The books are mostly there to teach your partner new ways to do things. For instance, I could buy a book that taught my boy to plow in a U-shape, but by the time I had the kind of money I could throw around at things as frivolous as books, he was already competent enough to handle a field full of 3x3 squares without issue.

The theater is just a place where you can watch short movies, but the aquarium actually gives you something else to do. It’s empty, much like the aquariums of the Animal Crossing series, so the owner requests that you go to all the different areas you can find and catch a variety of fish that he can populate his tanks with. This quest was a life saver to me when I completed all the goals given to me well before it was time for the game to end. There’s the river on your farm, the lake in the woods, the beaches, and the open ocean to fish in with a decent variety of fish to catch. It’s tedious and random, but the fishing mechanic is the usual timed-press type, so it wasn’t too hard, and once you’ve filled up the tanks, you can see whatever fish you caught swimming around in them which felt very rewarding!

Criticisms

If I had to criticize this game, I would say that it’s a little bit too easy and it doesn’t have enough going on narrative-wise. This is a pretty light criticism though, because at the very least, because of how easy it is, it never overstayed its welcome. This is probably the fastest I’ve ever managed to beat a Harvest Moon game and that’s definitely because it does half the work for you through the management aspects. Given my complaints about GB1’s help mechanic, it’s easy to assume that this would be a massive downside to this game, but I think the reason why it works here is because it never takes the control away from the player. It never encourages you to put the game down and let it play itself. Instead, I’m still an active participant who’s in control of everything going on on my farm. That feels good to me!

Between the management aspects and all the new things the game is playing with like the irrigation and scarecrows and new crops, I feel like this game was actually interested in doing something new and different with what farming mechanics are and always has been.

For lack of better way to get to everything in a succinct manner, here’s a list of things that show up which, as far as I'm currently aware, never return in mainline Harvest Moon: 

Pet selection that includes falcons and pigs (or either being things you can have on your farm at all)

Digging out irrigation

Sprinklers (that use this irrigation)

Scarecrows

Produce rot

Fertilizer (that’s made from the rotted produce)

Boating

A bank to store excess funds

Buying books to teach you new skills

Snowboarding minigame

Male animals and animal breeding that requires having one of each gender

Fish collection on the level of the Animal Crossing museum

Multi-seasonal crops (wheat, rice)

Things that are new here that I know come back: 

Horse breeding

Farmers market

No shipping bin (manual selling)

Part-time work

Saving the game anywhere you want

With all these crazy mechanics, this is the type of game where you need a manual that comes with it to tell you what to do. Fortunately for me since there was no chance I'd get one, this is the first game I've seen with a dedicated fansite detailed enough that I think it actually covers every single aspect of the game accurately, and that's obviously because the mechanics actually have something going on for once. If you’re curious about what all of this is, I highly recommend either playing the game or at least checking out the site to see what’s up with them.

I am infinitely charmed by the sheer quantity of weird stuff this game tries out. Truthfully, it makes me a little sad that none of it seems like it ever went anywhere based on the state of modern farming sims, not just because I wish more games would reconsider what farming mechanics could be, but also because some of this stuff is really cool and fun to consider!

I think the path of progression through this game is fascinating, and could work magnificently if it was just tuned a little bit better. The beginning of the game is incredibly hard between the lack of energy, incompetent partner, mess of a field, and hard time limit on when you’re able to get seeds to earn some money with, and I think that early game struggle is truly the most fun part of farming sims. The number of barriers keeps you in that state of constant fighting a little bit longer, but I do feel like as soon as you get a little bit of leeway, everything cascades into becoming infinitely easier. The point where you finally have a perfectly clear field, a partner who can actually do some work, and a boat to get to the mainland on your own can hit all at once, and once you’re there, the challenge is all gone. I don’t think that this point shouldn’t exist, because it’s part of what makes this kind of game satisfying in the end, but I think it could have been reworked to keep some of the challenge a little longer. At the bare minimum, they could have added some expensive items to buy at the end of the game that aren’t just stuff that generates more money like cheese makers and such, because I have no reason to try making more money when I already hardly have anything to spend it on.

Conclusion

In the end, I just think this game is neat. I don’t think it’s the best game out there, it’s certainly lacking most things I look for in farming sims (narrative), but it’s still a lot of fun to play, and even if you don’t like it very much, it’s over in a flash. If you’re the type of person who wants to make a farming sim of your own or someone who’s just interested in weird farming mechanics, I seriously insist that you should check this game out because it tries so many different things. It’s a fantastic thing to study if nothing else.

[nickiemoot]

ok dark souls characters i can't even pretend to be normal about:

solaire of astora

no listen to me i know he's the funny praise the sun meme guy. but listen. hes possibly the strongest non-hostile npc in the game. he can go through the entire game and fight the final boss with you. but if you get his gear, it's not that good. both his armor and his sword are just ok, and has no special blessings or enchantments or properties. which means he is going through the entire game (and he does, you meet him early on and then several times in various areas) on pure strength and skill. hes just that good. plus hes a literal ray of sunshine ass golden retriever of a guy, he's so sweet and jovial <333

rosalia, mother of rebirth

honestly i don't know how to explain myself here. you fight these horrible flesh slugs called "man grubs" in the area she's in, but when you actually enter the room she's in... it's a nursery. full of empty cradles. and a big bed in the back, where you see this woman lovingly cradling a man grub. if you speak to her, she turns her head toward you but the dialogue box just says that she cannot speak because she has no tongue. her covenant is a pvp covenant, where her followers (called "rosalia's fingers") cut out the tongues of their fallen opponents to gift to her. for some reason i was instantly captivated by her and wanted to gather tongues for her despite not even being into pvp. i can't explain ok. let's not psychoanalyze me and move on instead.

malenia, blade of miquella, goddess of rot

malenia seems to be a living avatar or vessel of the outer god of rot, and i think that's fascinating. because as devastating as the scarlet rot is, there's beauty and even life and growth in it. caelid, the area infested with scarlet rot, is full of flowering mushroom-like things and insectoid creatures. its strange and alien life but it is life. when malenia transforms into her goddess of rot form, its with an explosion of butterflies. its complicated, though, because we know the rot took her eyes and three of her limbs, and causes constant pain and restless nightmare-filled sleep. and yet she is one of the strongest empyreans, the only time she didn't succeed in battle was against radahn, the guy powerful enough to halt the movement of the very stars, and that was a stalemate not a loss. shes strong, shes tragic, shes beautiful, shes literally falling apart. i love her so much.

and last, no image because i can't look shit up without tripping over dlc spoilers:

kindly miquella the unalloyed

twin brother of malenia, also cursed from birth but in a way almost opposite of his sister: he is in a permanently youthful body. he is considered the most fearsome empyrean, because he is so kind and loving that he has no enemies. hes described as being able to "compel affection". some people are put off by this but i see his deeds and i think, is it so strange? the lands between are a harsh place and he is the only one being kind and fair to everyone. when his mother's religion fails to alleviate malenia's suffering, he rejects it and finds a solution himself. when the golden order outcasts and subjugates people, he welcomes them with open arms and promises a future where they will all be equals. i don't think there's anything manipulative about how he compels affection, i think he's just so genuinely good and kind that people follow him willingly. i would. (i haven't finished the dlc so i can't remark any further, but this is my impression just from the base game)

anyway. if theres a pattern here of the types of characters i am extremely un-normal about,

i don't have a conclusion. i don't know

[moonpool-system]

How's system travel work? Like, what's your& process for performing it, or for performing astral travel? How might one learn to do something like that themselves?

I'd also like to know more about the experiences you've had that corroborate your belief in system travel. For full transparency: The concept of systemhopping does sound very unbelievable to me, but I'm always curious to learn more and be proven wrong.

Excited to learn more ^_^/) !

Hi, thank you so much for the ask! (re: this post) Infodumping ahead!

Disclaimer: This is our belief and our method! This doesn't reflect the view of all astral travelers

Our process for performing system travel ties deeply into both our belief in chaos magick via the collective subconscious and our own hyperphantasia & synesthesia. Chaos magick generally hypothesizes that the living subconscious as a plane of existence is a well of energy, from which manifestations spring forth upon intense belief in or focus on them. For example, a single person hypothesizes a deity; this person believes in the deity deeply and spreads the concept to other people, whom then begin to believe in the deity deeply as well. The devotion of time and energy allows the deity to manifest within the collective subconscious, gain a sort of consciousness if this is how they're believed in, and communicate with/enact on the physical realm around them. This is how both a lot of "collective thoughtforms" work, and how most pop culture paganism works, plus some string theory a la fictionsourced past lives or soulbonding. It's also the basis for both spiritual and psychological(check out Jungian theory) shadow work. (yes this is where Persona™ came from) (this is also why we consider our tulpamancy metaphysical but thats a WHOLE nother post)

So stemming off of this concept of manifestation based on intense thought & belief, we personally work with those in our headspaces that used to have outerworld powers in their past life memories. Many of them can still use these powers to an extent within headspace, and luckily for us, our partner system has many members that utilize a magic realm known as the "Warp", a perfectly useful representation of a physical manifestation of the collective subconscious. This is ideal because it means my dearest friend Magnus is used to working with a tangible representation of metaphysical sub/conscious energy- exactly what we'd need. To locate us, he hones in on the bonds we share, similarly to how a soulbonder connects with their soulbond. (This is made easier due to the fact a few of us across the system are canonmates, not just sourcemates) Once he's got the connection established, he opens up a shortcut for other members to travel through. This takes a lot of the work of learning astral travel off of every individual member, instead letting someone skilled act as a sort of manager and "flight" attendant. We know someone has either left or arrived due to our synesthesia, since the colors and other sensations we experience when the member leaves/arrives will disappear/reappear. Since then though, we've also transferred back and forth metaphysical artifacts that perform the complicated part for us so we can initiate travel as well. We have a couple members that perform astral travel outside the system often for other reasons also, so it's not like we're relying completely on our partner system's skills or anything. The connection goes both ways.

Since I know I'm gonna get a follow-up ask about this from someone: yes we have tried to communicate with people that've left, halfway just for shits and giggles and half because we have a bunch of scientists in this system. What happens is essentially an "impression" is left behind- it's kinda like an NPC, where you can sorta communicate with them on a set list of dialogue but there's no real conscious will behind it. It kind of feels like communicating with an old, broken record player or tape deck. It keeps skipping back, moving tracks, repeating the same things over and over again, warped and out of tune. It's pretty unsettling and creepy so we don't usually do it, especially because if we were to accidentally form someone new and then the original person came back, that'd be uh. A Unique Problem™

We're run by a logically minded system manager, so of course we're always looking for things to support and substantiate our spiritual beliefs. Our goal is not necessarily to have a proveable theory for how metaphysics works, but at least something that doesn't starkly contrast reality and science as we know it. (That's why we often cite string theory, the theory of ten dimensions, and Jungian psychological concepts in our spirituality) As such, we look for evidence to believe our travel has actually occurred, and the brain is not just creating long lasting phantoms while the original member goes uncontactable. What we've seen here are throughlines and consistencies lining up with how members' memories seem to grow muddled when they've either been in back for too long or when recalling exomemories. If something doesn't happen in front, we often have trouble telling the details of exactly what happened- it takes focusing pretty hard and going through to piece things back together to get a solid picture. However, we know that things Do Actually Happen in headspace out of front, because we've had members corroborate each other separately on manners such as the layout of headspace, personal relationships, etc. Similarly, we've seen the same thing happen with system travel, including: two members getting into a relationship while they traveled and then acting romantically with each other upon returning without needed to affirm to each other what had happened, members recalling the product of physical training with their mindforms taught by another outside the system, one member pranking us by dumping a bunch of stuff through without telling us first and us receiving them before we were informed in the outerworld, and more.

There does tend to be one problem though, and it's something we've dubbed "the Missing Word problem". It's something that happens with our past life memories too. (This is presumably partly because our memory retention and processing problems affect names and other proper nouns extremely intensely, but it affects our partner system too in reference to system hopping.) Essentially, the Missing Word problem arises when a member goes to say a word they're aware they know, are certain they know - however since the brain doesn't, they can't speak it clearly, and all that comes out is the vague shape of a word. This is the biggest problem when it comes to information transfer- most memory is stored in, y'know, the Brain, and spiritual memories can be hard to hold onto. (If they weren't, knowing about your past lives might be commonplace!) Along the same vein, we've had members with fictionsourced past lives predict canon in uncanny and obscure ways with their memories, but they're always more broken and fragmented unless they have canon to gague themselves off of.

- in conclusion/TLDR: We rely heavily on visualization and shared mental costructs in order to establish connection and send people through. We base our metaphysics on Chaos Magick as a base metaphysical system. We've seen our headmates corroborate emotions and concepts separately as well as experience travel effects without front being notified first, and while it's not perfect, it's okay for us. System travel is no more shocking or different than a long-distance or visiting soulbond, it's just that people become way more aware of the unproven nature of spirituality once you involve multiple bodies on this Earth engaging in the practice.

[pommunist]

I do wonder a little if the very different reactions to Pomme and Dapper's beds being included in the stream might in part be like... a difference in people used to seeing a new admin play an egg? The situations are very different and that should be acknowledged and looked at and even if as is likely the case QStudios owns all rights to the NPCs created for QSMP it would feel extremely icky to me to give Pomme especially a new admin. But at the same time... I do wonder if people more used to say, Chayanne, who has had 2 different main admins and been played by 4 or 5 different admins regularly enough the different forms have nicknames are more... accepting of the idea? Because the idea of an egg belonging only to the one actor is less comprehensible to them, as it's not what they're used to? Ramón's situation might be closer, but again 2 admins at least. Im almost certain I've seen Tallulah played by someone else when her admin was sick, and I've no doubt some of the other eggs have occassionally been played by others due to admin illness even if not long term.

(This is not to say it's main the issue (even without eggs being acted Sunny's admin should have known what was happening just for bigger issues with the stream alone - admin health and treatment is far more important than what they provide) I'm just. Trying to think of reasons why reactions I saw were as polarised as they were, with half my dash treating it like parading a corpse in the street and the other half like this was entirely expected and normal.)

Oh that’s a good question anon !!

First, the ownership of the characters is a tricky point that I don’t have an answer to as intellectual property laws are extremely complicated and not something I know much about tbh.

And on the topic of admin change, I think public reception depends a lot of the cause of said change : For example, when Ramon switched admins, huevitos were perfectly fine with it as it was assumed that the OG had taken a break for studying purposes so it was not a problem (turns out they were fired 🥲). It’s the same whenever an admin steps up to punctually or long term play another character because their admin is too busy with irl stuff, other work within Qstudios, is sick…. (like what I assume happened for Chayanne)

Pomme’s situation is different because of Lumi’s circumstances and the fact that she asked for her character to end with her leaving. Plus the fact that CCs have said before that they didnt want her to be replaced, even before that whole situation, I remember at least Antoine saying he would rather have Pomme dead than be played by someone else. I’d say the french speaking side got quite attached to her as, with all the sidelining we went through, both her character and admin were our only beacon of representation within Qstudios/QSMP 🥹

Also something that makes me kinda ehhhh about saying that there are people who are completely fine with admins changes because their fav character went through at least one is remembering the whole Pepito/otipep mess that had people go mad because Pepito had an admin change for a few days and they didn’t like the "new personnality" or whatever ? (Couldn’t tell the details of it as my spanish suck and Roier often streams in the middle of the night for me, but I remember the twitter shit storm)

Finally about the eggs being like kidnapped and in a coma (I think ? didn’t watch the stream) I guess it’s an okay way to put them on hold while sorting things out + an opportunity to explain in lore if you have to kill some because no more admins ? Or at least it would have been okay if all the eggs admins still working would have been made aware that their characters was being put on hold 😀

[obsessedwithkirby]

Continued thoughts on ex astris:

[initial thoughts here]

-fought the first boss to really use complex attack patterns and it is really fun to counter/dodge those kinds of attacks

-the enemy designs continue to be really really good, said boss is my favorite so far

-the combat system keeps getting more complicated (this is a very good thing)

-the game is surprisingly lowkey about there being side quests, and about informing you about the rewards for doing side quests. I found this a little confusing. The quests themselves have been strong so far though, with them fitting in naturally with the context of the world and providing some extra background to the world

-localization may apparently be getting a fix-up which is very good news

-the story has started to complicate a bit and I’m interested in where it’s going

-the journal is great, especially for someone like me who loves logbooks and bestiaries in games, but I have noticed that it occasionally gives information slightly ahead of what the player has actually experienced in-game. It’s not super egregious though

-starting to think about how I might want to replay this game in the future like I do with a lot of other rpgs I like, which is certainly a testament to how much I like the game so far. Specifically, I think the amount of tutorials could be a bit of a pace-breaker for the earlier game if you already know what to do, and it seems like most of the customization options appear gradually as you progress through the game, meaning the first hour or so on a replay might be a bit repetitive. Then again, the first hour also has some unique locations, events, and enemies that you wouldn’t have seen for a while, plus a lot of unexplained terms and concepts that you would now have context for, so that might be enough to keep it interesting (this is so long-term that I’m not even sure why I’m thinking about this, I’ve basically barely started the game)

-the story has a very different approach to that used in arknights and I find that very interesting. Arknights has a deeply personal story that treats each character as a realistic person and uses these nuanced, complex characters to tackle tough societal issues. Ex astris feels very detached in comparison, most of the side characters feel more like representations of what the people in its world would be like rather than complex individuals, and it feels like the player is then left to imagine for themself what a real person in this world would be like. The npcs feel like how they would be in older rpgs where they act mostly just to serve a purpose for providing a specific bit of extra worldbuilding, facilitating a side quest, or hinting to gameplay mechanics. I think this works just fine for the tone of the game, I think I like it even, I just thought it was interesting

[queenburd]

okay okay here’s a rough outline for the hypothetical fic, like 3/4 developed, in an order that makes sense narratively. it’s kind of a mess, because it’s bits and pieces of what I’ve talked about on my blog, but in a Narrative structure.

-

If I had the mental capacity I would write a whole TSP fic that gets severely meta and Stanley and the Curator are the only ones in on just how meta it is

I definitely wanna preface that this thing isnt a completely 100 percent developed story, its like. 70 percent? idk. but my thinking, or hunch, is that this whole thing started because the Player came back and did a Real Person run. it’s been a long, LONG time since they showed up, so when Suddenly Stanley isnt responding the the Narrator, the fellow cant inhabit his model and is forced to be a voice that run (after a long time of the pair of them by themselves, doing what they like), it shakes them both up pretty badly.

so the Narrator decides that since he can inhabit a model, he’s getting Stanley to that escape pod to get the hell out of dodge.

alone.

the narrator is not planning on coming with him.

and this…. doesnt go over well.

So a big theme about this whole story is the fear of abandonment. The Narrator is terrified of it, 432 has experienced it, Stanley feels like that’s what the Narrator is doing to him with the whole Escape Pod thing. (Stanley may also have some. unprocessed feelings abt the collectibles ending and epilogue.)

and this is all the Narrator’s fault btw. he made a bad decision early in the fic out of fear so he and Stanley have been dealing with that the ENTIRE TIME.

When the Narrator makes the decision to “let Stanley go”, Stanley doesn’t take it well, and 432 projects onto him pretty strongly–it’s hard not to! There’s a lot of overlap. That, plus the fact that the wheel has to keep turning, spurs 432 into action. He acts out in what he thinks is mutual anger both he and Stanley feel towards the Narrator.

They’re doing it because he’s projecting onto Stanley big time, under the assumption the Narrator made this protagonist and is now going to throw him aside and make a new one. This falls in line too closely with their memories.

Memories including a Narrator who wanted to make a big story about mind control and choice and freedom. Who jumped headfirst into a project that he only half-completed, because he got lazy and didn’t want to put all the work in, so he dumbed his story down.

Memories of half-finished NPCs disappearing and changing halls and a protagonist, designed to solve a mystery, instead becoming paranoid and disappearing.

432 is a sympathetic….. antagonist. not a villain lmao but an opposing force to the narrator in the sense they find the narrator to be lazy and probably stupid.

The narrator even describes himself pre-Parable as a person who got lazy, and made a character to make decisions for him, because decisions are complicated and difficult. He made the bucket instead of rewriting the game. he made a bunch of gags in the hope it would be a story.

As for 432… well. I think the narrator had initially planned a more complicated true ending. NPCs, a more complex storyline to figure out the mystery of mind control, and an inquisitive protagonist designed in game to be allowed the mental freedom to question. Documents and lore abt 432 show he was an exception for the mind control experiment.

But the narrator was finding this story and the choices too unwieldy. Making all these 2dimensional npcs, outlining this complicated storyline, he found it was not what he wanted. It was hard. So he cut it down a lot.

But 432 was not designed for this much simpler environment. The inquisitiveness turned to paranoia. The self awareness turned to game awareness. He knew what his role was but he didn’t fit it anymore, not the way the narrator needed him to.

And then he disappeared.

Did the narrator erase him? Did he find his own way to slip into the code? Who can say? But the narrator’s memory of 432 is fuzzy at best, and he made a new protagonist, one much simpler. One who wouldn’t ask hard questions unless prompted. One who simply desired happiness.

And then, of course, like any good protagonist, Stanley changed.

432 is, sadly, a lil bit of a hypocrite, because they too don’t want to go through making an entirely new video game. that’s hard. but, it also has to be said that it was not their job to make a video game, it was their job to be the protagonist. It was their job to play the game, again, and again. Keep the wheel turning.

they make the door to the skip button disappear. they make the door to the steam reviews, that they know will drive the narrator mad. they are the time keeper, and time between skip presses increases and increases.

but they bring the parable back, as well as push it “forward”.

the narrator is prone to fixate, get stuck, and not progress, without a protagonist. 432 knows this. when Stanley is frozen in the Skip, the narrator keeps playing and playing and playing it all over in his head until he decides to try to make decisions for himself again. even then, he cannot do it. he wants to play one more time.

the wheel must keep turning.

In truth, Stanley wants freedom. The narrator want Stanley to be free, but he also wants to tell his story, and I don’t think he INTENDED Stanley to become self aware and aware of the multiple endings and restarts, etc etc. I think he expected Stanley to be like a normal game protagonist, wiped clean, and it should be easy because Stanley is supposed to be a simple character.

432 on their part wants to keep the game functioning. He, like Stanley, became aware of his role of protagonist, but unlike Stanley, 432 doesn’t want freedom. 432 wants the loops. Wants the eternity. They’re right, the game is not a sacred thing that needs to be frozen in time. They want to play AND change.

They honestly would be the ideal protagonist for the narrator if he hadn’t goofed it so bad. or if they didn’t want to antagonize him so bad.

432 at one point becomes the storyteller, forcing Stanley and the Narrator to do the story, only “new and improved” (and the worst part is the story 432 makes IS more compelling than the narrator’s and it’s upsetting!!!)

I want to emphasize that 432 does not at any point harm a single character and is actually quite chill even as the antagonist. they LIKE stanley, and want to be friends with Stanley, even if there’s a lil bit of envy. it’s not Stanley’s fault they’re in this mess anyway.

they tell a compelling story about mind control, choices, abandonment and power grabbing. the story this parable SHOULD have been from the start.

they spend a lot of the time just telling Stanley a fun story about mind control and stuff (just to rub it in the Narrators face

and all the while they tell Stanley, just make whatever decision feels right. we’ll have fun with it. there’s always something new to learn.

they dont do anything to physically hurt the pair of them, but they consistently question Stanley’s choice to support the narrator after everything, and eventually he and Stanley make a bet that in a moment of high pressure the Narrator will/will not be able to make a decision. and if 432 wins they get to use Stanley’s model for a run.

and then they sabotage the choice to make the narrator so cripplingly scared of his choices that they win.

when 432 snags the model, he doesnt impersonate Stanley–he’s more interested in using Stanley’s face to taunt the narrator.

432 while in Stanley’s body (and Stanley has been made into a consciousness that’s just stuck in the museum for a run) just consistently makes the Narrator doubt that Stanley could ever really properly care about him, because the Narrator is a bad person, who can’t even make a choice when everything depends on it, and gosh, he really thinks Stanley could love him after everything?

the Narrator wont even let him leave the parable, despite having a body and being able to leave now! does he really think Stanley’s going to want to be with him forever?

no. they need to get back to the story. tell the story with me, narrator. this is all you’re good for.

so let’s just generally say that 432 gets to have a run in Stanley’s body more than once, and DOES give it back and only takes it when it’s been discussed beforehand (like the bet)

432 starts breaking Stanleys model pretty entirely unintentionally until the narrator desperately reminds them that they swore they wouldn’t hurt Stanley. They choose to end that run and their round with Stanleys body.

also there might have been a run where 432 puts the narrator through the skip button again. idk

So the Skip button is the most visceral example of this concept. (A theory is that 432 is the one that made the time between skips get longer and took the door away.) They’re doing this for catharsis. They’re doing it to emphasize this is how it feels.

it wouldn’t be a 1:1 experience of how we or Stanley experience the Skip button. The Narrator wouldn’t have the same rants, or the same reactions. his deterioration would be obvious through clothing, physical tics, stuff like that.

432 is immovable. At least until the reset, and Stanley is NOT HAPPY.

anyway when Stanley is booted out of the model entirely he doesn’t take it too well! it’s not a nice time being alone in the settings! but the curator, being able to see the entirety of the story and seeing this has gone WILDLY OFF TRACK, pulls his code out of the void and makes a copy of his model that she drops into the museum. it’s…. like it’s BETTER but it’s not GOOD. he’s pretty panicked about everything tbf.

uncertain as to if the Skip happens while he is in the Museum with the Curator, interacting with the comments, or if those happen the same run. the answer would change the specifics of how the run functions.

if he’s in the museum, than Stanley is aware of it. The Curator tells him it’s happening. for them, time moves the same way it would for the player, not for the Narrator.

If he’s dealing with the comments, then he’s probably on some level aware of it and is trying to prepare for the worst and the resolution. time passes for him equivalent to how it would pass for us the readers (like, update schedule wise. if it take a week for a new chapter, then he’d experience a week in the comments. only he wouldn’t have a full awareness of the time, bc that’s not really a thing in the void he’s working in.)

either way, he doesn’t have the power to stop it.

The Curator’s job is to oversee the Museum, and she knows the truth of the game, and the meta aspects. As the fic nears its climactic point, she’s the one who reveals this all to Stanley-

Diegetically, the narrator “created” the parable, the story, Stanley, 432, the skip button, etc etc. he’s a godlike entity who made a video game for the sake of art. He has full control of the parable, save for certain key moments.

Nondiegetically, a video game company named CrowsCrowsCrows made the video game called the Stanley parable, and hired kevan brighting to voice a character. The video game company developed every aspect and asset. The narrator is nothing more than a character.

And yet, diegetically, this is acknowledged in several places in story. The most obvious aspect is the Museum ending, though the Confusion ending is also a pretty big one. The new “bottom of the mind control facility” ending also acknowledges these developers who had to resolve the bug.

The clash between diegetic and non diegetic, the insertion of non diegetic into the diegetic, is one of the most beloved points of the game, since from its immediate loadin, the narrator (an aspect that is nondiegetic in most other stories that have one) is inserted into his own story. He’s breaking his own “in-story” consistency.

So you have a story within a story within a story. The narrators story/video game he is telling and trying to make, the story of the narrator clashing with Stanley/the player, and then the real world application of CrowsCrowsCrows making this video game abt all of it.

How fucking confusing is that? Me just trying to explain all of this as simply as possible. That’s why it’s been so hard to figure out how to talk about it. But all of this has to be covered for this next part to really make sense.

Because I’ve talked about how I think the implication is the narrator made 432 but then changed his story and 432 didn’t fit anymore, and this led to 432’s disappearance and their own condescension of him.

Memories which are, unfortunately, false. Because in the end, all of them are just a fiction. All of them are simply in a game made by Crows Crows Crows.

But by the time this finally gets out, 432’s sunk way too much anger and hurt into this. Doesn’t really feel like they can go back and still feels secondary. So they don’t intend to stop.

That they’re all just in someone else’s story, and always have been. Even she and the Narrator are not above Stanley, and never have been. She’s always protected that truth, and she only ever makes sure its assets stay safe–which is why when Stanley gets booted out of his model, she intervenes.

she sympathizes with all of them, but she doesn’t (can’t?) intervene, so she just watches and hopes.

and that one of these runs, Stanley would get to have a go at talking to the comments section of the fic. which would be integral to the climax and resolution of the fic.

me thinkin abt fic every night like '432 would be an incredible antagonist to write all they want is to show the narrator that they shouldnt have been left to the wayside so they go out of their way to prove they can make a better story than he can all while being not actually hostile but just an opposing force that makes stanley and the narrator doubt themselves and each other and at the end of the day 432's frustration is that they dont get to be a protagonist people know or care about and then of course the entire fic itself would get super meta because the curator would reveal the full meta narrative to stanley and then any fanfic comments and reactions would be something that he finds a way to share with 432 because 432 IS LOVED BY THE DANG WEBSITE' I am a massive sap every day of my life.

I think my own stubbornness is shouting “there has to be another option. there’s always another way” to the idea that the only way to beat the game is to not play. i think my brain keeps going back to the idea that the game is meant to be loved by its audience, because in its self awareness, if it can know it’s a loved thing, it knows it can be changed.

“to be loved is to be changed” “transformative nature of love” listen. Listen.

432, in the climax of the fic, learns about the audience/comments or the fic and realizes how absolutely adored they are and that they aren’t alone. They’re seen. And that is what they wanted and how they make peace and get closure.

Which would lead to them helping stanley and the narrator in their escape while making sure the parable still runs, because it has to

With the implication that they would do the story with the help of the audience from then on

Stanley and the Narrator escape the Parable after making arrangements with 432, who takes Stanley’s place as protagonist so the wheel can keep turning, and has the narrator tapes, but like I dont know how satisfied i am with that cos 432 by themself makes me sad but the curator does not want to narrate the whole game

but anyway 432 uses a Stanley model but tweaks it only a little

(you made it to the bottom of this post! Good Job, you did it! Good Job, you did it!)

[a-mushroom-dev]

Plans for the restart of development in 2024 and title announcement

Current working title is "Wizdom" because is works on a few levels, wisdom is related to dnd wizards, It's short for Wizard kingdom but also could be for Wizard domination.

Plans for 2024:

-reselect main characters, the main characters were underpaid guard, Leo, shrroms and Ivy, but sadly they are mostly dead accounts, I have half a plan to put more relevant characters as main characters

-scale it back so its less complicated and spread it out over several games as I quit because the thing kept crashing, I am finding workarounds, I'm not a proper coder as of yet so I use Microsoft make code arcade, which is like a pixilated, more complex version of scratch, there might be five levels and 2 shopping breaks and 20 npcs or maybe more than that, it all depends on the amount of blocks it takes to do it, as too much and crashes

When it's done, it'll be available to play for free on tumblr, but yeah, I feel like these changes and having multiple small games instead of one big one would be much better for me and everyone, plus since I haven't learned/it's not possible for me to implement saving yet it would be good. Baisically expect 90's arcade game stuff, not a fancy indie game.

I will update the game a few times, do bug fixes and... who knows.... maybe I'll make a trailer when the time comes!