#sorry that I reused this screenshot but it is a busy week and I have this one handy

[elderscrollsconfessions]

Confession: When I returned from the final dark brotherhood quest, my wife Mjoll was glitching from being kidnapped by bandits. Google said the only way to fix it was to reload the save, and I lost that progress. I never started it again because I wanted my dark brotherhood family to stay together and alive.

[olderthannetfic]

Ok, wow, this is NOT the type of ask you seem to get usually, but this appears to be my best option...

I'm seeking out a post that is not particularly fandom-y in nature, but I was reminded of it after reading the earlier anon who was burned out from AI discourse - I totally feel the same way, and there was a really great lengthy textpost I reblogged a few months ago (read: "I read it any time from, like, April 2024 to almost a year ago......sorry") that I cannot find on my blog nor on tumblr in general - either because the post has been completely nuked from the internet OR because I'm just bad at SEO searches and remembering the keywords that were actually IN the post. I'm hoping it's a me issue or, if the post IS nuked, at the very least someone here remembers it and has an internet archive link or screenshot or something????

to get to the point, there was a post that was like (paraphrased, quote marks are not literal quotes):

"When it comes to the anti-AI crowd on tumblr, there's basically two schools of thought: people who completely hate AI and everything about it and are opposed to all forms of AI without even learning what AI really is. These people are stuck in their ways and generally can't be reasoned with.

Then there's a second group who are against AI for pretty good reasons - they really are worried that AI is gonna completely take over and steal artists' livelihoods, those who criticize it for environmental activist reasons, etc. These people generally can be reasoned with as they're truly misinformed, and in fact they would be - or already are - receptive to a less harmful AI."

The post then went on to compare AI to other forms of automation and made some really great parallels; such as bringing up the fact that stores that have both self checkout AND cashiers tend to be the best business models, because people who have their preferences can choose how they want to shop, AND we can utilize automated checkouts without completely getting rid of cashiers, which is obviously good for a lot of reasons.

It also debunked a lot of common fearmonger-y arguments against AI, i.e. explaining what "training AI" really entails, with some general copyright-critical philosophy in general. (I don't know the actual, like, political term, if one even exists, but basically they were talking about flaws with "intellectual property" as a concept - or at least how IP works today and why it works the way it does.)

There was also a really good addition to the OP's thoughts that I liked, with another user talking about: Essentially people who are gonna use AI would likely have done something else sketchy anyway, even if AI as it stands today didn't exist. For example, chatGPT isn't to blame for plagiarism. The people who use chatGPT to do their homework would, in an earlier time, likely go on Chegg / pay someone to write an essay / reuse their old work / etc. Likewise, the people who tell open AI to make artwork for them likely wouldn't make (or try to make) their own artwork anyway, nor would they even commission someone. They talked about how since fandom is so damn divided on the topic of AI, that the artists who DO feel as if their commissions are being taken away from them, or the writers who DO fear AI taking over fanfic.......well, to put it nicely, those people likely wouldn't really be losing many fans in the first place. You didn't lose a commission to AI - that person never would've commissioned you in the first place, and the people that do commission you hate AI as much as you do. You're not losing readers to AI - people who choose AI fics over yours are likely already the impatient type who can't handle waiting more than a week for an update, so they just make AI feed them 10k in one sitting! And the people who DO comment and read on your stuff, also hate AI!

I definitely did not agree with every single point made on the post (ie i dont think the self checkout metaphor was a great direct parallel logistically, but I def picked up what they were trying to put out and overall agreed with the general sentiment), overall it made a lot of really, really, really good points about the AI debate that I'd truly never considered before.

I know I've damn near rewritten the whole post myself now at this point but I also know there's a lot of stuff that I'm missing or that I just can't word and I'd love to know if anyone else has seen this post or has it on their blog in some capacity.

--

[violetganache42]

College Graduation Update

This has been a long time coming ever since I started attending college 5 years ago, but as of the 13th, I have officially graduated! And I even fully recovered from the cold I caught last weekend in time for this big accomplishment. I would have gone to the graduation ceremony, but me and several other students chose not to because it took place at the college's outdoor football stadium. Since it has a large campus, it meant a shit ton of other seniors were graduating, making the ceremony a chaotic experience. Not to mention long because for some reason, instead of doing individual ceremonies for the graduates and undergraduates, they combined it into one and last from 11 AM to 8 PM. Yesterday's weather didn't help either because it felt warm and humid, so no doubt it would've felt almost oppressive to sit out in the heat for a while.

For these reasons, I've decided to keep it lowkey and celebrate it at home; we did a cookout for dinner. My sisters, brother-in-law, and one of said sister's boyfriend also flew in to celebrate, so there was a lot of socializing throughout the weekend. My diploma will be mailed to me, but I am glad I managed to get through these past 5 years. Despite the roadblocks I faced, it was a lot more tolerable than my high school experience. That's for sure.

Not me reusing this DSoD screenshot from my high school graduation post. XD

On that note, most of next week is going to be quite busy for me because Mom and I have a lot planned to celebrate my graduation. We will be leaving on the 17th to spend a few days in New York City. We're going to be seeing a few shows, including the revival of The Music Man starring Hugh Jackman! We had gotten tickets for it back in 2019, but the pandemic kept delaying it, so I'm glad we are finally going to see it. I'll be back on the morning of the 20th, but later that day, we are going to be seeing Garth Brooks. And again on the 21st. lmao Mom did think about selling the tickets for next Saturday's show after she saw he added another show the day before, but she never got around to doing it. Wouldn't be the first time we have seen someone in concert twice in a row. lmao

Sorry for not telling you this sooner; it was a busy and rather draining graduation weekend. The fact my graduation also took place the day after the last day of finals (the 12th) didn't help either, so between that and all the studying I had to do, it was rather hectic overall. Fortunately, all this fun stuff throughout the week will give me a much needed breather now that I am officially done with college.

See you later this weekend!

[spacesave-game]

Version 1.4 News & other boring stuff

Good whichever-time-of-a-day-it-is! Here’s some irregularly scheduled piece of SpaceSave-related news and some things around it, which affect the development of a new version. It’s been nearly 7 months since the upload of the latest version and around 4 months since last post, so I guess it’s a good time to drop some info. Before we go into specifics, let’s delve into the state of my development process this year.  It’s been a long time, so the post is going to be long as well! I’m sorry...

TL DR(I don’t blame you...): SpaceSave version 1.4 is in development and will release later this year. Also – I’m making a new game.

AlSO, A WARNING – TODAY’S SCREENSHOTS CONTAIN DEPICTIONS OF BLOOD. SO, IF YOU DON’T LIKE THICK TOMATO JUICE – BE WARNED.(I made tags, but I’m writing it here, just to be sure)

These last months has been pretty busy for me, in both personal life and game development. I haven’t been working on SpaceSave’s new version at all, right until three weeks ago or so. As I’ve noted in my last post – version 1.3 turned up to be very time consuming for me, so much so that I had to put my new, main project on hold(I still worked on it from time to time, but the progress was minimal) , just so I could finish the update in a timely manner. I eventually did release version 1.3 on time for my self-imposed deadline and the game was upgraded quite considerably, but it left me burned out in the process and with a small feeling of guilt, caused by ignoring my new project. Thus, after uploading the current version, in December, I’ve decided to take a break from SpaceSave and focus on that new project instead(development of which had a pretty major problem of its own, but we’ll talk about it later ). And this is basically what I was doing since last version’s release. Thankfully, that break was pretty rejuvenating – I’ve came back to SpaceSave, ended up enjoying working on it again and are making progress at a nice pace.

Okay, the boring stuff’s over. Below will be an actual info about new version of SpaceSave and... a new project? Well, that turned out unexpected.

SpaceSave v.1.4

As explained in my latest post about the same issue – this update will be much more humble than the last one, focused mostly on bug fixes, since I want to thoroughly test the whole game again. That being said – there will be some snippets of new content. To not reveal too much right now – one new, shorter questline is planned and I’ve already mapped it out, although I still have to create new(well, mostly recycled, but you get the point) assets for that and actually implement it in the game. As for the new stuff that’s already been added(may contain spoilers):

-          New... character?:

-          Also, now there are two types of soldiers, instead of one(there are also more sprite variations for them as well) on Day 4:

  Now, the urban(that’s grey, for normal people) camo is the same type of soldiers that were in the base game with the same skills. The green(I call it “forest”) variant however uses incendiary grenades, which can put your entire party on fire. It’s a small change but should add some variety.

-          New Items:

First, there is a new special item that you can get from hidden vendors(what, you didn’t know there were hidden vendors in the game? Well, now you know)

Heretical Book – (Description from the game)

Written in fake blood for better effect!

Use these dark secrets to fully revive an ally!

Since there is a new type of soldier, there is also a new type of grenade:

Incendiary Grenade– (Description from the game)

A real thing. Less damaging than a normal one,

but can put all enemies on fire.

The regular grenade also received a small boost in damage, since it was a little too weak in the base game, especially when you remember that it was supposed to be... well... a grenade.

There is a number of other things that I’ve already added, fixes and tweaks, but I’m going to skip them for this post and leave ‘em for an actual announcement, which is still quite a way ahead. I’m going to do a proper post about it, with a release date, as always – at least two weeks before uploading a new version. For now, the progress is going pretty alright, but I still focus more attention on my new project. The plan is, that I’m going to work on SpaceSave as much as I can, but when I’ll notice that version 1.4 will start to eat up into my main project - I’ll wrap the update up, finish things that I’ve already started to work on and release it. Another alternative is that I’ll manage to do all the work I’ve planned to do for this update(I keep a handy list for stuff like that) and if I keep my current pace – it’s pretty likely going to happen.

To summarize – I guess you can expect a new version, at best, in the early autumn. At worst – somewhere later, but it will certainly be this year.

New Project(!):

Yeah, I’ve been talking about it for quite a while, even in this post. I’m making a new game! It’s been in development since late December 2017, two weeks or so after the release of the first version of SpaceSave, although I’d say that I seriously started working on it after version 1.3, since I’ve finally got time to do so. Before that, I was mostly making assets for it.

In the February of this year, I’ve finally got enough assets to start working on a prototype, since this is a quite a different game from SpaceSave, more complex gameplay-wise. Naturally, I’ve wanted to test out how these mechanics work and how the whole game feels to play. Good ideas on paper don’t always result in an enjoyable game. There was also another thing I’ve wanted to check – the engine. For this project, I’ve decided to use the latest RPG Maker MV and there were two reasons for that:

-          Bigger sprite sizes and with these – more detailed sprites – which was the main reason

And obviously...

-          I owned it for some time already and wanted to justify the purchase

However, you’re probably pretty well aware about MV’s reputation as an engine that is pretty unstable. By creating a prototype I wanted to see if that’s true, before I started working on it proper.  And, oh boy, MV didn’t waste any time proving all the bad rumours about it right, for me. I may have sucked at working with it, but when I did – the engine was slow, menus were janky, graphical glitches were everywhere, more complicated events broke almost every time(sometimes they actually worked, but broke later after no changes whatsoever) – hell, sometimes, after the software update, the entire game could break and I had to update project’s files manually.

In short, it was a mess.  It was already March at that point in time and while the progress on the prototype itself was going swell, constant problems in the events for crucial parts of the game were infuriating. Finally, I’ve decided that if I want this project to survive – I need to start over and make it again in VX Ace. I have already made a lot of assets at this point(we’re talking around 86 spritesheets here and that’s only for characters and overworld animations, not counting stuff like tilesets here) and while battlers and animations could be reused no problem – all the sprites made by MV’s standards and most pictures made for MV resolution had to be redrawn. It was a hard decision to make, since it would take a very long time, but I’ve decided to go for it. The only possible alternatives were either keep making it on MV and risk creating an inferior game(at best) or to scrap it altogether. I really like this project and want to see it to the very end, like SpaceSave, so I didn’t want it to just die in such an anticlimactic way. So, for the rest of the March and the entirety of April – I’ve managed to painstakingly remake every single graphical asset that needed it, to fit VX Ace’s standards. T he operation was a success and I’ve finally been able to continue my work! But before that, there was still one thing to do.

When I was busy remaking assets, the prototype for MV was obviously put on hold. However, after I’ve finished working on the asset problem, I’ve decided to complete that version. It was already half-done anyway, so sure, why not - I could still use it to test out the game mechanics, even if some of them will probably be borderline broken. I’ve spent the entire May working on it and finally – on the very first day of June – it was sent to a few carefully selected victims individuals.

The prototype in its barely working state, to my relief, turned out pretty fine. All the mechanics are there, giving me a good blueprint to use in an actual version and its fairly enjoyable. The people I’ve sent it to were pretty positive about it as well. So, everything turned out fine in the end! Now... I just need to actually make the darn game, oh boy...

Anyway, as a reward for you for reading this boring wall of text – here are some screenshots from the described prototype! Please keep in mind, that the screenshots you’ll see below are from a version that will, well, never be released and the actual game will look different, although it will be similar in style and gameplay. That being said – it should give you a general idea about what I’m going for with this game, but remember that it’s VERY WiP. It is also not an announcement(we’re, at the very least, one year before that), that’s why I’m not going to give you any dates, descriptions or concrete information. Sorry, you’ll need to wait some more for that!

Anyway, here are the screenshots. Enjoy(I hope)!

Picture of a robot in that particular screenshot was made by my friend Pequod, who helps me out in art-related matters

BTW. That name of this project is not real and a joke made just for these screenshots. Please don’t ask about the meaning - it’s really bad. Seriously.

Okay, that’s all from me! This post’s length is nearly criminal... Thank you very much for keeping up with SpaceSave! See you all next time, when I’ll, probably, announce version 1.4 in a proper way!

If you want to download the latest version of SpaceSave(1.3), then use this link:

DOWNLOAD HERE FROM A MIRROR OF YOUR CHOOSING

[dreamharvestgames]

Dev Blog - March 2017

Justin - Creative Director

What a month it's been. It's almost all become a bit of a blur due to the number of different things I've been jumping around doing... I guess that's indie dev for you!

Anyway, my month started off with getting a phone call from a certain someone asking us to pitch our game in front of an investment board with the possibility of securing some of the much-needed funding we've been desperately trying to get for the past 12 months+. With this in mind, we went into "oh shit what are we going to do" mode.

We had to prepare a 20-minute presentation that went into details about the game but more importantly our potential sales figures, monetization model and other business stuff. Luckily, I'm a bit obsessive about all of this so I'd actually already prepared all our numbers months before, though this was a good opportunity to update everything based on how other similar games had been performing over the past 6 months or so.

One of the big issues with the investment board was only two out of ten members were actually from the games industry so we had to work extra hard to explain things that I'm sure most of us understand quite well, such as what a Real-Time Strategy (RTS) game is, or what games as a service is.

It was a grueling 20-minute presentation with another 20 minutes of questions from the board.

To take a bit of weight and embarrassment off my shoulders I roped Milcho into coming with me... and he hates public speaking, which I thought was great. I'd be able to take a breather during the presentation and Milcho could take my place shitting in his pants.

All in all, we think it went well and the feedback has been good, though whether we get the money or not is not 100% confirmed yet, at least not officially.

Since the pitch, it's been all hands back on the demo build for Reboot Develop and it's been another great time getting back to my roots of sound design and writing music. One of the most complex sounds I've had to make for the project has been the Transmission Tower level objective for the Skyline level and it's been quite complex getting each of its sounds integrated and triggering exactly how I wanted, but my god it's sounding and looking awesome; though there's still a few tweaks I'd like to make to the sounds and transitions between elements.

I've also been working on new UI sounds in unison for the work that's currently being done on the player feedback systems. Player feedback is super critical and we'd like to be in a position during Reboot Develop where we don’t need to give any help or instructions to people sitting down to test and play the game. It's an ongoing struggle but we'll get there eventually.

Anyway, I've spoken for too long so will let the others take over from now.

Sven - CTO / Lead Programmer

So what have I've been doing since the last update? A lot of different things, what comes to mind right now is:

backend server systems

the game server

replacing some old effects with Unity's new "Post Processing Stack"

a new menu system

some fixes to some old systems

helping with preparing the presentation

Can't really write about everything here as it would end up in a big wall of text that almost no one is interested in (if you are, sorry for not writing about everything). So, I'll just pick two topics, which have been part of my focus this month.

Menu system

Never really took the time to work on a menu system with the 'new' Unity UI system (it has been out for something like 3 years, so it's hard to still call it new). But, it was interesting to play around with it and figure out how to best make transitions between different menu screens (hint: good starting point is here - https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/HOWTO-UIScreenTransition.html). As we're currently working on the design of some of the screens - what I've did won't be in the game for some time.

One thing that came out of this was a nice system for Options/Settings where we now have a system which is easy to use, so adding a new option to the menu and using it became really easy as:

This also takes care of loading/saving the values. Getting the values and getting notified about changes is also really easy:

Maybe I'll polish the code a bit more and make it open source, could be useful for others. The whole thing is a bit more complicated than it seems as it involves code generation (using CodeDOM) which has the big advantage that I can generate all the methods to get the values etc. this makes it easy to use and makes sure you can't really do anything wrong when using it.

Graphics and Post Processing

A few words on Unity's new "Post Processing Stack". If you're a developer who is thinking about upgrading to the "Cinematic Image Effects", which is now considered to be legacy, be aware that some stuff still isn't in there e.g. the included Fog doesn't support height fog yet, also it completely takes control over the fog settings, so once you add the "Post Processing Stack" to your project you won't be able to use the fog settings in the lighting settings. Bloom is missing the "High Quality" mode too.

In our case, we had to mix the old effects and the new stack so we don't use some features, like the height fog. Overall it seems nice and should be the way to go forward. For me the most important thing is that everything is now integrated into one 'effect' and it's no longer a collection of separate effects. This alone should make it possible to gain a bit of performance, simply because some steps can be reused for multiple effects. I'm not worried about the missing stuff as I assume all that will be added at some point and if it isn't the whole thing is open source so you can add whatever you want yourself.

Milcho - Lead Designer / Programmer

Salutations, lots has happened since last time so let's quickly go through it.

Reboot Develop

Reboot Develop is happening next month and we have so much to go through to get a stable build ready. We’ve spent the last two-week crushing bugs and making improvements, like adding unit paths on placement for example:

Upgrades

Currently, we don't have many upgrades designed for our abilities. I've designed at least one upgrade for each ability that we're planning to get in for the develop build. One of them will be on our Artillery building, which will let you launch units across the board.

But that's it from me for today. I hope you got your monthly fix of enlightenment.

Until the end of time, Milcho.

Loic - Art Director / Designer

Following last month’s work on the final look of units, we now have all our in-game playable assets that went from mock-up modelling to their final form, with textures and animations.

I polished some concepts for each of them:

I started concept work on a new environment, the Red Lights District, which you can have a glimpse here:

An additional lead on a Zen Garden environment, where I focused on optimising the number of assets to produce to obtain a harmonious moody enviro at reasonable costs.

I then helped to brainstorm on the UI discussion, focusing on our card system to convey clearly all the information about playable elements, while taking as less space as possible and aiming for a slicker sci-fi look than traditional cards.

We are still finding ideas to compress information in a smarter way, and these cards should soon be very comfortable to read, giving precise information so the player can really understand, by themselves, how the game works, but never overwhelmed or distracted by icons or numbers.

Finally, the next goal is to polish our main environment further, the City Scape, so we can have a benchmark of what the game will look like.

Here is a WIP progression screenshot:

Kelvin - VFX Artist

It's been a really busy month! I've only been able to work part-part-time for Failure, because I'm doing another full-time role elsewhere, so I haven't had much time to check everything off my list. But with the little time I did have, I could create the Transmission Tower's capture FX, the Artillery projectile, and some work in progress Nanite elements.

The Transmission Tower's capture FX was a challenge. We already had an existing FX, but with the addition of Loic's tower animations and Justin's sound design, it really pushed the vision even more. After seeing all the pieces together, we knew we wanted to add even more to the FX, it had to be more epic! While playing Justin's sounds in the background, I was pushing forward with the FX until we got something that felt like it was hitting the field very hard. I'm happy to see where it is right now. We have some adjustments to make to sound and code now that I've adjusted the FX, but I can't wait to see it. I'm also really excited to see Artillery's projectiles flying around the map. The battlefield was really missing something like that, and I can't wait to see what it'll add to the game.

Amelie – UX Designer & Writer

Hello, everyone, I'm the team newbie I guess. So my name is Amélie and I do both writing and UX research, I've been doing UX for about 12 years now, only working in games for the last four or so, and that's when I started developing my skills as a creative writer as well.

For the moment, I'm honestly just really trying to catch up with the number of things the team has done so far and familiarising with the gameplay mechanics and the flow, asking many questions and doing my best to see where the player experience can be optimised. I've written some UX reviews which the team has already implemented or planned to include those recommendations for the next build.

This month I've helped reorganize the information on the Script cards and defining when and how does the player need to access each piece on information about his script, I'm currently working on a wireframe for the Deck builder and very soon I will be doing the lobby. (Read More about the UI Stuff here) 

I love how the team is super welcoming to fresh ideas and suggestions and how everybody is so driven to deliver the best possible game experience, we're all looking forward to this next build and I'll be meeting the guys too in Kings Landing as I go with another very small indie team to present another indie game called Fractal Space, (http://store.steampowered.com/app/435410/), how exciting!

There I hope we can meet a lot of potential players and have them test the game. There is no better UX research than field research, guerrilla style: just have a player sit there and look at what he struggles to understand and how fast he alone adjusts to this new environment. Testing the game in Dubrovnik will give us plenty of material to iterate on the next version of the UI and to validate the stuff we worked hard to do well.

There is plenty more UI and UX improvements that we will be doing before travelling there so this and test preparation should keep me fairly busy, but I look forward to quieter times when I'll be able to dive into the NeuroNet universe and start writing missions and dialogues and find a good voice to fit the fascinating narrative that awaits you!