#unfeatured

[figchn]

I don't think I ever posted this here.... and sorry for yapping;;

If you want to read the rest of it, posting the link again---> Karaoke comic

[the-fandom-phantom]

vld as quotes from The Hivemind™ discord (part 1/?) featured: @robylovi @tamaytsuki @catsushinyakajima @bluemanticism @/myself

[f3ralchild]

The hyperfixation is taking over 😢(I'll post finished products soon)

[thatonebipotato]

was just supposed to be some pose practice but im incapable of being Normal so it became red robin instead

[mitsutsuki]

Editing progress? Editing progress!

[samueldays]

Sam Reviews: Factorio

Factorio is a good game.

Factorio is well advertised. When I look at Factorio in the Steam Store with example screenshots, I think: Mm, yeah, it's pretty much like that. There's several screenshots of varying organization and complexity and scale.

Factorio is a logistics, automation and construction simulator game for people who like those things. It delivers what it promises. It's Factorio. If you are even vaguely in the Factorio demographic, you have probably heard about it already, it's hard for me to say anything new about its features.

So I'm going to talk about what I call "unfeatures" instead, the absence of specific failure modes that I've seen many times elsewhere.

1: Factorio does not routinely lie to the player.

There's a lot of video games where the game shows e.g. [80% chance to hit] but the actual chance is closer to 90%. Sometimes because it rolls twice and takes the better result, sometimes because it secretly adds a flat 10% player favoritism bonus against the AI. In the short run, I suppose this keeps players happy by feeling lucky and not frustrated by miss streaks. In the long run, I find it offensive because not only did the game lie to me, the game polluted a playerbase by spreading a false understanding of how much "80%" is, and this will make a lot of people unhappy later when they run into real 80% and it feels too low.

There's a few games which can pull off a clever Interface Screw, where the game temporarily lies a little or hides information for diegetic reasons (visor damage, invisibility spells) where someone is lying to the character, but games that lie to the player are almost always bad. This should be a very low bar to clear, and yet, game devs keep thinking they're clever and transgressive for deliberately crashing into it.

Moving from lying to merely non-informing:

2: Factorio does not expect me to keep my own database.

Again, this is not an absolute rule. There's a few games which can pull off out-of-game note-taking well, such as detective games where working out contradictions and inferences is part of the fun. But even those are usually friendly enough to keep an in-game list of clues found for the player to re-examine at leisure.

For most games, once you've discovered e.g. a potion recipe, then the potion recipe should stay discovered and be listed in-game, in a character knowledge section. Quest Logs should be a standard feature of RPGs, so the player can step away for a week and the character has the information freshly available, avoiding "WTF was I doing" problems.

Factorio is very forthcoming about providing information to the player, both general function and specific numbers. Some games might say Assembler 2 is "slightly faster" or "much faster" than Assembler 1, but Factorio tells me that the the Assembler 2 has a speed of 0.75 while Assembler 1 runs at speed 0.5 (the baseline of 1 is the player character's own production speed).

With quality of life improvements, Factorio will even auto-calculate and display how relative speed interacts with processes having different base times, so a smelting furnace might say something like [Takes input of 1.2 copper ore per second, outputs 1.2 copper plate per second] in the mouseover tooltip. Except with icons rather than text, so it's shorter.

Plus, there's good "Ctrl-F" functionality to help me find where something is.

Some enemies in Factorio are immune to fire. These enemies will immediately be listed as having 100% fire resistance when you mouse over them. You don't need to catalogue enemy resistances by exhaustively shooting each enemy with each weapon. You don't need to remember the resistances, the game will track and display those for you.

3: Factorio lets me play the game, not play the wiki.

When I say "play the wiki", I don't simply mean looking things up, I look things up in Factorio too. I am gesturing at a game design failure pattern where the game expects a player to know/learn something and is very bad at providing ways for the player to learn it.

e.g. if I loot [Silver Key] from some house, I can reasonably expect it'll be useful, and I'll discover it in the natural course of play when I find a door with a silver lock. Maybe I even found it earlier and can backtrack now that I've found the key.

but, if I loot [Silver Crystal] [Red Crystal] [Pale Crystal] [Purple Crystal] from some house, but only one of them opens a door, and the other three are worthless filler, this is the "playing the wiki" failure mode. There's no good way of learning that 3 of 4 crystals do nothing, so I end up going to the wiki if I don't want to be carrying around worthless trash in my inventory - especially if I have a limited inventory and/or there's more red herring objects elsewhere.

Many games are self-sabotaging this way! Players checking the wiki are players browsing the internet, not playing the game!

As mentioned above, Factorio provides a lot of information up front, in game, so I never need to look up on the wiki how fast the new assembler is, or what the plastic crafting recipe is, or how much health an enemy has.

"Where do I go to get more iron ore?" Wiki can't tell me that, Factorio has random map generation, I have to explore. Strong randomization is another method of avoiding the wiki problem.

"How do I fight this enemy?" Wiki can't tell me that either, Factorio gives me a toolbox of guns and grenades and mines and poison and tanks and artillery, but there's never any kind of necessary special secret that's troublesome to discover. Big enemies can be killed with tactical nuclear strikes, or with weight of fire from lots of small guns. Wiki might have advice, but not a walkthrough to the 'correct' way of doing it.

4: Factorio does not steal control with frequent, repeated, unskippable animations.

Some games insist on making you watch the Movement Animation every time you give a unit order, some games insist on making you watch the Transition Cinematic each time you move to a different area, some games have text that gradually loads into a dialog box and won't even present your dialog options until the Text Scroll has finished unrolling. Et cetera.

Factorio respects that I'm here for a game, not a movie, and definitely not a movie that I've seen a dozen times before. This is partly about respect for the player's time, and it's also about flow and interruption. Even a sub-second animation can be very jarring when it blocks interaction. A sub-second animation can be especially annoying if it's in a frequently-accessed part of the interface that could itself be sub-second to use, and the animation makes it take 2-3x longer to use every time.

By contrast, a dishonorable mention goes to Citizen Sleeper, which a friend recommended to me recently. You can watch a speedrun of the game here. It's ten minutes and a lot of that is spent on enforced waiting for animations to play: zoom into location, zoom out of location, fade to black, unfade from black, and even a loading bar animation for buying an item. Very artistic, I'm sure. Infuriating when I am accustomed to Factorio's responsiveness.

[aalinaaaaaa]

WIP Folder Tag

Thanks to @ruvastuon for the tag!

The premise is to post all the headings under the folder/section for your WIP, and people can send asks for the titles that interest them!

For this, I'm going to go a little left field. In the past, I've presented my Scrivener files for this game.

But for today's edition, you're getting the headings from my notebooks! Two of them, in fact 👀

One of them is for any time that I know I won't have my laptop with me/otherwise in easy reach, such as the train or on holidays.

The other is my notebook. Story ideas go into this one, including ones that are dripping in spoilers for a book that doesn't truly exist yet!

—

The Fancy Paperblanks Notebook (The Prose and Pieces notebook)

General

A Deal With the Ancients

Limbo

A few scribbled lines

Writemas — Day 22

Another errant quote

No Good Choices

The Crow's Gift

This Blood-Stained Charcuterie

The Forest's Disgrace

The Swans' Departure

The Markings of the Raven

Obsidian Sapphires

The Temple of Verelise*

Alycja's ceremony*

The walk home*

A Deal and A Proposal*

Dinner that night*

A Conversation on the windowsill*

Ard na Preaghaun*

If You Must*

*These relate to the first redraft of Obsidian Sapphires; A Healing for the Birds is redraft #2

Flamebearer

A Brush with Fate

Stir into life

Before the Blue Embers

Upon the Precipice

The Royal Council meeting

The Highest Bidder

A Promise to Keep

Soulswapped

The New Status Quo

A Question for a Question

A Healing for the Birds

Star-Crossed (including a deleted starting paragraph!)

A Broken Seal

The Next Stage of Pilgrimage

The Chase for the Chalice

A Wish in Exchange

(Cerigo's perspective of the above scene)

A note

An unfeatured paragraph

A Conversation in the Aftermath

The first of the interrogations

Interrogation #2

A Prelude to the Questioning

The Third Interrogation

An Important Visitor

The Lady's Lament

The Fool's Deal

A tidbit about Ruadhán's house

The Notebook I bought in Lidl (The Notes and Ideas notebook)

Little to no major spoilers :D

The meshaika

Background events of the Temple Chaos

The aftermath

The moment the friends vanished

A note on the High Councillors' strategy

The purpose of Morilast's Mark

What's the story's core?

Aileste

Eshani's manor

Claudia's manor

The central ballroom

Naimorste

Seldaikan mages and how they define magic

Alycja's career desires

Cerigo's stance on the aftermath of Chapter Two

Spoilers!

For A Healing for the Birds unless otherwise stated

A comparison of the two balcony scenes

Throwaway ideas

The plot (Chapters One to Three)

Shifting of the Guard (happens towards the end/after Soulswapped)

Some major questions to be answered

Eshani and Claudia's response to the events of Chapters Two/Three and a bit beyond

Alycja's dilemma over the Chalice

—

There's a few more entries after this, but they relate to Chapter Four/onwards-ish of A Healing for the Birds, some notes on a potential sequel (they're on the aftermath of the end of the first one!) and what Cerigo told Cheyoria after she came home the night of the ruined ceremony. Extremely spoilery stuff (ask if you want, but maybe do it off-anon or in a private message 👀😅)

—

Anyway, I'm going to put an open tag to see everyone's wip folders, and also send tags to @nightmaricwriter @seastarblue @willtheweaver @bardic-tales @finickyfelix @yaboiii-azzy @thatndginger @winterandwords @wintherlywords @jev-urisk @writingamongther0ses @avrablake @ark-inkweaving @oros-ash3s @bloodlessheirbyjacques @space-writes @thebookishkiwi @vesanal

[stonecrusherdrawsthearts]

WORLD OF HEROES R - The Bat Pack

A small collective of vigilantes who patrol the streets of Gotham and minimize the impact of criminal empires and metahuman happenstances. Originally just a single individual, they've since expanded into a small-scale league of crazies that, despite everything, might be what the city needs.

FEATURED MEMBERS

Batman - the original knight of Gotham and still the most well-known. His expertise and cunning has made him the most feared individual in Gotham, though only by the cruel and distasteful.

Robin - A long-time associate of the Batman, known for being flashy and witty but still not to be underestimated.

Batgirl - Nobody's quite sure if the Batgirl has merely changed costumes and strategies or has been taken up by new individuals in the time since she first appeared, but most people still know when you cross the Batgirl's path, you'd better make sure you're not up to anything.

Signal - The only known Metahuman in the Bat Pack, gifted with heightened supersenses, and usually acts as the group's sole day-walking member. Some could argue that he's just another one of Batman's sidekicks, but it seems the other members of the Bat Pack are accepting of him.

Red Hood - Who the Red Hood was before he showed up in Gotham is... honestly still a mystery. Of the Bat Pack, he's certainly the most brutal force to go up against, though it seems that he's been toning it down a bit since the early days.

UNFEATURED MEMBERS

Oracle - A mysterious individual who oversees the entire city, watching for any sign of trouble and alerting the Bat Pack to its troubles. If some rumors are to be believed, this Oracle has ties to the Batgirl identity.

NOT MEMBERS

Catwoman - a cat burglar who, due to a variety of circumstances, happens to be the closest thing in Gotham that Batman has to a true rival.

[newx-menfan]

Kind of disappointed they’re related.

It kind of just hammers in how there’s too many unfeatured X-Men…

Like when was the last time Roberto got a larger roll??

[figchn]

[princesslftsz]

srry for the crap picture 😭👍

earring are literally the hardest to position

diff stores same chain, too lazy to type it out lol

can you guys believe i found this lipgloss!!! its from 2006 >_<!!! ooh, unfeatured cuz i forgot about it, but i also took this máybé||ínė great lash mascara, i've been wanting a mascara for so long but they're CRAZY expensive 😡 at least for me lol

i basically did the sleeve method for all of these, since it was so small i literally could just go behind someone or between clothes racks and slip it in. sleeve method FTW 🙌 the mascara was honestly so frickin hard just bcs my stupid sleeve was getting caught and blocked it 😭😭 i thought the gloss would be hardest but NOPE

[michaelmac6072]

Mystia's Izakaya, using a gaggle of notoriously unpopular and unfeatured Touhou characters stuffed into the plot of a cooking game DLC, was able to handle a story with Mizuchi Miyadeguchi more successfully than the official manga starring her and featuring all the most popular characters from all the most popular games...

[ashleybenlove]

"But in this matter of the whale, be the front of thy face to me as the palm of this hand—a lipless, unfeatured blank."

Ahab says "Talk to the hand."

[amngtheflowers]

Recent Grabble wip stack........ plus more unfeatured

[picochu007]

I made myself a phone wallpaper featuring the cast of my death game crossover longfic "Your Turn to Crossover". Decided to share a version that has the so far unfeatured characters as just silhouettes.

Link to the series: https://archiveofourown.org/series/3142680

[sasori-rp]

A humanoid puppet, half-finished and unfeatured beyond the short black hair settled on its scalp, a cinnamon-toned ribbon tied around its neck, and golden, fuinjutsu-etched rings set on its right hand, is left upon the step of Sasori's workshop. A gift? Its eyes are lidded in perpetual sleep.

*The second strange gift today...how come people thought of him all of a sudden. He had been under the impression that he'd gone unnoticed. At least...for such a trivial thing as birthdays. After all, what point was there in celebrating. He didn't age...ha hadn't aged in over 20 years. So why care now?*

*But still...he admired the construction from all angles with a scrutinizing gaze*

*Interesting it was...not the finest craftsmanship he had ever witnessed - that being his own naturally - but it had a certain allure*

*Perhaps he could make something of it. Something special. Something...awe inspiring*

*He smirked, picking the delicate doll up and carrying it into his workshop*

*Whoever may have gifted him this, may have known him better than many*