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nemirambles · 10 months ago

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Fraymakers: Nearly a Year Later

Hello everyone, I just wanna lay some groundwork. I’m an ex-SSF2 modder, SSF2 being Super Smash Flash 2. I used to go under the handle “Foxx”. That’s with two x’s by the way. A lot of my mods are more or less kinda just lost media now. I used to work on SSF2 Delta but left on my own volition due to disagreements with some of the leads. I'm most notably known for making cosmetic related mods for the competitive community. I started messing around with the game when I was maybe 12 or so? I’ve made a lot and I’ve seen a lot in that time and if there are any SSF2 devs or old acquaintances that knew me that’re reading this now, sorry. I was a shitter then but I'm better now and will promise to continue to keep improving myself. When I write this essay, I’m saying this as someone who’s loved modding the game, playing with others and looking back at old community drama somewhat fondly.

When I saw Fraymakers be initially revealed, I was really excited to see a new project from McCleod and for it to be one that seemed to be fully embracing the modding scene that they’ve cultivated over the years. It was finally gonna be this huge breakthrough for this team that had basically been going under appreciated and recognized for all the work they put into SSF2. The Kickstarter showed off 6 characters, assists, training mode hitboxes, stage hazards, some single player content, rollback netcode and a bit more. With the way the trailer was edited, it appeared that most things shown off were either done or close to being completed. There was sparse content sure, but nothing that looked unfinished. No sketched animations, hazards seemed to be working, the UI was functional, the game seemed like it was on a good path.

Two years later, it was released on Steam in early access and I don’t think I’ve ever been any more disappointed playing a game. I know that it’s an early access but when the game can’t even run at 60FPS for some mysterious reason, something is probably wrong. Rollback was shitty, meaning that most people had to just play on delay netcode. Which is kinda shitty in of itself, but the quickplay function just automatically turned rollback on, meaning that you’d be forced to play with it. This basically ensured that quickmatch was more or less dead on arrival. There was a built in online stress test to see if you’d be good for online play and I just wanna say that my relatively new Steam Deck struggled to get a good online stress test score on max quality. For a 2D sprite based game. Training mode was pretty much nothing. There was no hitbox viewer. Several characters had unfinished animations. You couldn’t play time matches. You couldn’t really change any significant match settings. Only one stage had hazards, the hazards in question being two extra platforms under the stage and the UI was abysmal. That last part isn’t like a *real* huge issue I just felt like pointing out how utterly terrible the UI design is here.

This left everyone with 4 characters that’re at varying levels of unfinished or unpolished, 5 stages and a good chunk of assists that sorta feel more like cute gimmicks than anything else. The only other thing was the workshop content but we’ll talk about that later. But that was at launch, of course it was going to be messy. But it’s been 10 months since then! Almost an entire year! Surely it’s gotten better, right?

It Did Not Get Better

Well since then we’ve gotten several quality of life updates, fixes to the input system, some optimization improvements, several finished animations, some online improvements, a new assist and a new character. I might’ve missed a bit here and there but that’s about the sum of it. How did these changes fare? Well they undoubtedly improve the game, for sure. But it’s kinda not enough? I know it’s crazy to say that when we got a new assist and a new character but respectfully, the issue wasn’t the lack of characters as much as it was just the lack of quality surrounding the characters, at least for me. Sure they added like two extra guys but the training mode is still awful, online is still bad (if you can even get a match), some characters are STILL unfinished sprite wise and the game STILL doesn’t have things like time matches. There simply isn't anything to do.

Anything greyed out cannot be selected or toggled.

How about those stage hazards? Well some were shown off in the trailer, seemingly being functional and or finished. Now that the game is out in EA, there's only one stage with hazards. Wanna know what the hazard is? Two extra platforms at the bottom of the stage.

I guess it's now also a good a time as any to mention the absolutely abysmal Kickstarter rewards. Wanna know how much you get for two thousand dollars? You get the game, ONE golden costume, a test build, a DIGITAL artbook, a discord channel, your name in the credits will show that you're angel tier and you'll get some online tags. You also get to play with the devs on their terrible netcode! That might seem like a lot but in reality that's kind of only really three things, the game, a costume and an artbook. Sure you get some fancy stuff by your name in the credits but… y'know I decided to go check this myself to be super sure. Your name doesn't like glow or anything in the credits it just sits in a tier above everything else, which alright, fair enough, but who's gonna be checking that really? Is that really what you want for two thousand?

You could add 5 more characters and people still would pass this by because the general quality of life is still genuinely super shit. Hell, when you change your controller profile in the settings, the controls in the menu don’t even update until after you restart the game. This isn’t even an issue SSF2 had. It doesn’t have controller profiles but it did at least recognize what button did what after having it be set. This might seem harsh but this game is 20 whole ass dollars. You might be ready to say “oh but they’re packaging a game creation tool with this, that’s where part of the money is going as well”. We will get to that just give me a moment. First I wanna ask the question of who this game is even for.

Audience?

Really, I’m genuinely asking. Why would you play Fraymakers? For the gameplay? I mean it’s more or less just SSF2 with assists and those assists aren’t really that fun to play with. They just kinda feel like ways to cheese out stocks. There’s utility ones but… you know nobody’s using those when they can combo into an assist that does damage and kill at like 80 in a game where it’s very easy to rack up damage. The music? It’s amazing but nobody’s playing a game purely for that unless it’s some sort of rhythm game. Quality of life? This is some of the worst quality of life in a modern fighter. It’s not easy to get matches, it’s already a Discord fighter, and when you DO get matches it’s gonna be a lot of the same. It’s fun but it’s not really fun enough to wanna keep playing it over all the other fighting games or even platform fighters out at the moment. So that leaves the workshop which is cool and all but there’s that Rivals of Aether sized elephant in the room. Sure, Rivals is 10 dollars more than Fraymakers but,

It has players

The modding support for that game is huge

The game is much more complete than Fraymakers

The online is actually good

Rivals workshop completely and utterly decimates this game. Considering Rivals is an actual finished and polished product, it’s just not that fair of a fight. But that’s just how these things go, sometimes you just can’t compete and I don’t think Fraymakers will be able to. The worst part about this is that Fraymakers COULD’VE had a strong audience for it’s modding scenes but do to choices made on McCleod’s end, that potential community was basically kneecapped before this game even existed. That last bit is really important. I’m about to get into some deeper stuff regarding the SSF2 modding scene and how McLeod’s choices with it undoubtedly led to the poor modding scene for Fraymakers.

This Was A Long Time Coming

The SSF2 community and Fraymakers community might as well be 1-1. Well not 1-1 in the sense that SSF2 players play Fray, they don’t, but most Fraymakers players tend to play SSF2. One thing you ought to know about the SSF2 community is that it’s sort of splintered. Not as much as it used to be, but it used to be broken up quite often. This game more or less was the next thing for a lot of us, SSF2 is a flash game that’s limited by it’s engine, even despite the absolute magic these developers have put into it to push it far beyond any other Flash project. Fraymakers was or will hopefully eventually be the next step for the scene and for a lot of us to move forward. While the competitive community may, the modding community definitely will not.

This is some old stuff but a good few years back, McLeodGaming was quite antagonistic towards the SSF2 modding scene. You’d be banned from the Discord if you posted mods there or showed off hitboxes. If you were shown to have leaked content from the unreleased beta build at the time, you’d be banned from online for months, even if you weren’t distributing it. I don’t have the proof of these things anymore but if you ask certain people who were around in 2017/2018, they could likely corroborate, but being a modder would actually decrease your chances of being hired as a developer if you were.

While the SSF2 dev team was hostile as shit to modding, it was at least somewhat justified. I won’t pretend that I wasn’t pretentious when it came to editing the game and I had a good amount of “it’s just that easy” moments and while I was being snobbish and many competitive players and modders alike were also being snobbish, they weren’t totally unfounded. Like sure we made fun of the balance but that wasn’t entirely unfounded. Let’s not forget 9b Zelda, 3.2 Samus, memory leak Lloyd, reworked Sora, Krystal, the terror that used to be Tails and so much more. There was also the matter of people sharing around leaks of the beta build of the game. But this was a very small minority in actuality.

There was still a very large community for this kind of content that was pretty much rejected rather than embraced. So modders went and made their own community. There began this sort of disconnect between the developers and the modbase. Sort of. Some developers were still very receptive and interested in the modding scene, shoutouts to TSON, but it was still largely rejected when it came to official spaces. Some of the higher ups in the modding community started to almost resent the people in charge of SSF2. Creating rifts that might still be there to this day.

I mention all this not to point fingers at anyone in particular or to say that one side was shitty. I think that both kind of were, but that whatever chance Fraymakers had to gain a large modding scene basically went out the goddamn window when just a few years previously they had done everything in their power to keep modded content away from their game. Because there was this anti-mod authority, all the people creating content in SSF2 just… went away from official avenues. FrayTools might as well just be a shitty version of Adobe Flash/Animate. If anyone was going to know how to use it, it would be the people who had spent years putting Vegeta into SSF2. But literally all those people are gone, off in their own spaces. But even beyond that, there’s another thing to keep in mind which is that Fraymakers is directly competing with SSF2.

Sibling Rivalry

Fraymakers is very similar to Flash 2. I’d even go out and say that Fraymakers probably runs on some refurbished SSF2 engine or at least borrows elements from it. But Fraymakers lacks a lot of the sauce that SSF2 has while also lacking a ton of content. When you make games that are so similar but one has so much more going on compared to the other, it’ll be hard to make people want to throw 20 bucks into a game like Fraymakers. This is ignoring one huge thing though which is that I wouldn’t call Fraymakers a game based around modding. You cannot change anything about the base game itself. You can only add content. You are not modifying anything, you are tacking on free DLC. As far as I can tell, the files for Fraymakers are impossible to get into and any of the talented people from the old days who could’ve figured out ways to break into it are long gone.

On the flip side, SSF2 is a game that is cracked wide open with tons of resources and complete and total freedom.

It isn’t hard to get your hands on the engine and to just kinda start doing shit. It’s annoying to get the process started and you’ll either need to pirate or buy Adobe Animate but boy, if you can’t do some great shit with the game once that’s all been done. There’s not really any reason for those SSF2 modders to come over with that being the case.

So Now What?

Well, I dunno really. I want Fray to succeed but with the lackluster post launch support and SSF2 being there, I find it hard to believe it’ll find true success. It’s retained some players but it seems to have gained basically none and it’s failed to get even half the attention it got at its early access launch since. But that’s the early access launch. There’s still some hope for it to regain relevance when it truly launches but that’s something the future can only tell. In the meantime, I can't really recommend Fray in a good conscience. Not when SSF2 is there on the table and doing pretty much everything better. It sucks but them's the breaks. Hopefully McCleod can turn it around.

#fraymakers #ssf2

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televisionenjoyer · 7 days ago

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This was under a read more but the whole collapsible posts feature made that futile so let's see if this fixes it or like. At least you can reblog it without this chunk

SO. When I was getting my references for this i thought, huh, I should probably include some crappy supernatural licensed videogame here. AND THERE ARE NONE. And I couldn't believe it, I mean. Merlin had its crappy DS game, House MD got one, it only seemed logical for a show that RAN FOR 15 SEASONS to have some kind of videogame themed after it. But no. Although I did find some footage from a russian demo of a supernatural indie videogame??? that you can only download from russia?? insane. I watched some gameplay and my craving to play it was insaaane.

Realistically I don't think the whole gameplay of such a game would revolve around dialogue, but it's the most convincing part to mock-up to get the concept across. If it were up to me, the game would be a balance between dialogue, combat against monsters, and gathering evidence/collecting objects that directly affect the storyline.

So anyways.It was clear to me that I wanted to give it an early gen console vibe (was thinking ps2, xbox 360 at most), at least to the main menu. And for that I'd have to bite the bullet and 3D model for the first time in 2.5 years. I actually wanted the name carvings to be on shot but I was too stupid to add that to the model and by the time i figured it out i was well into editing. I briefly thought of scrapping the 3D model altogether but i had already gone through agonies unimaginable just to make it.

I had been thinking a lot about dynamic menus like that of half life 2, menus that change depending on the current stage or location that the player left off at. I thought that was really cool, so that's why when the player hovers over the 4x02 save slot the background changes to bobby's house. I thought something similar could be fitting for the pause menu as well, even though I originally wanted it to be a retro phone, before realizing that they had iphones by this point. and those are boring!

Oh, and by the way, there's this weird bug in which if you play the game in english you can't get the reciprocated confession event to work?? Which, it's weird that they haven't patched it in four years, but the whole game is filled with bugs and by this point the devs have pretty much moved on from the game, rogue recurrent rumors of a comeback aside.

And, of course there's a dedicated modding community making whats basically destiel fanfiction as mods for the game, did you even have to ask?? It's what keeps the whole fanase still loyal to the game, bugs and all.

Your plan? Getting everybody safe? That's good, okay, but it won't last forever.

Supernatural as a visual novel — 15x18 "Despair"

Based on my merlin as a visual novel gifsets.

ok so like. i have a lot of thoughts about all this. about what spn would look like as a game, about my creative process and whatnot so I'll put that on a reblog.

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nealcassatiel · 3 years ago

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Why was the Prequel announced sooo early? Why is Jared being super dumb? Why might his tweets cause SERIOUS issues for the future of the prequel? Why should Jensen and Dannel be livid and actually quite worried as CEOs?

I see lots of people, Jared being the main one, super confused as to why the Prequel was announced in Deadline when apparently its still just an idea? Surely its further down the road, development-wise, than Deadline and Jensen and Daneel are saying? Surely Jared has been left out of months and months of development of this show??? Well, no. Not really. This is what i think, as someone who works in TV development...

A lot of questions have occurred as to why Jared may not have known about the Ackles’ prequel, and yes it might be because they haven’t talked, but let’s look at this from an industry perspective…

Of course the project may already have NDAs attached to it, and as it seems to be in the incredibly early stages, there may not even be anything to the project right now. Working in TV development, you can have big announcements in the Trade publications (such as Deadline) with just an idea for a project with maybe one high profile talent attached. When the company’s ive worked for announce a project in it’s really early stages, without even a script and just an idea but also with IMPORTANT TALENT ATTACHED, it is for one reason: finance. The prod company and the Trade magazine work together to announce the project and it’s all planed.

So I would guess that maybe Jensen and Daneel’s prod company are looking for extra financing? That is always why the companies ive worked for have made super early announcements like this, without even a script or an entire treatment written. If you announce a project super early but there is big talent attached, then big industry financiers may read, see the project has legs and has buzz around it already, and plonk in their money early on.

I know it seems like if Deadline announce a project then that infers that lots has been done to develop the show already, but especially with the pandemic and the industry not doing well from a dev and prod point of view, and especially because Jensen and Daneel’s prod company hasn’t made anything yet (even if it does have a co-production deal with Warner Bros television), they still might need to get financing during the early stages of the project. Anyway, it makes sense that very little has been done on the prequel show, and they just want early buzz for financiers. So they got their PR team to talk to Deadline and Deadline and Warner Bros TV and J&D’s prod company’s PR team set up a date for the article to go out to get optimal buzz in line with when financing needs to get off the ground.

I don’t know, but I’m sure J&D’s prod company paid a lot for the spin-off rights / general supernatural IP. So that’s a lot of sunken costs already. Also, even with The CW on board, the industry is pretty shaky right now and they still might need early financing from international distributers.

Anyway, all I’m saying is that lots of times, when a project so early in development gets a Trade publication announcement, it’s to secure financing for the project, or to raise the awareness of a new production company, like J&A’s company. Maybe they have a whole slate of projects and are looking for co-producers, and need some legit PR to play with the other big lads in the industry (however, Chaos Machine could do with like… i mean the bare minimum of a website,, unless anyone can see their website? i cant find one?) Maybe they just want to focus on the SPN prequel. But even so, why do they need money, you ask?

If the CW is involved, and if Warner Bros television is co-producing, then why do the Ackles’s prod company need money? Surely the CW can support them and make the show?! Well… i mean, yes they could. But the Ackles wouldn’t necessarily WANT that. You see, whichever company funds the show, gets most of the creative rights to the show. The big issue with SPN was always that the CW/Warner Bros TV probably had things like ‘the final cut privalege’, and could ALWAYS have the final say on scripts. Having been through that on SPN, Jensen needs his production company to retain creative control over the IP and the rights, and for that to happen is prod co NEEDS to fund a majority of the costs. So the Ackles’ need to secure a heck of a lot of financing as a separate entity to the CW. This will mean they might get financiers, other prod cos, distribution companies, and such on board, just by an early announcement of a big project that already has legs and a buzz around it and YOU CAN HELP GET IT MADE AND GET A SLICE OF THE PROFITS ONCE IT’S MADE. See how great this project is ALREADY? Give us some money to help us retain the creative rights and get it made, then you get whatever percentage of the show’s profits. A great investment right? Look at our willing and lovely fanbase! We’re like a big family! A big, happy, fa — *enter Jared with a bulldozer*

SO. With this PR disaster from Jared’s stupid rage tweets like he’s a child, what’s the situation now? I mean, all press is good press… kind of?

I expect the announcement has something to do with money. Either the project needs money or J&D’s production company needs money. I expect the Ackles are looking for financing, but now is their lovely PR stunt to try to get the project financially off the ground, or at least the PR stunt to try to make sure THE ACKLES retain creative rights by majorly funding the project in jeopardy?

It depends. Certainly Jared storming in and destroying the idea of a solid and family-like fanbase is going to hamper things. Jared destroying the brotherly vibe, a central theme of the IP, is going to be an issue, but the statements J&J put out to end the drama, and Deadline’s unbelievably obvious ‘solve the drama PR’ where they wrote about the drama ‘All’s well that ends well. After some Supernatural drama that mobilized the series’ legions of fans Thursday night and Friday morning, showcasing the series’ massive social media reach, the #spnfamily is happily back together after a heart-to-heart between Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki.’ (https://deadline.com/2021/06/jared-padalecki-supernatural-prequel-reaction-bummed-gutted-the-winchesters-jensen-ackles-the-cw-1234781475/) will help. Side note, Deadline writing the announcement article with the Ackles to help them get good PR for a project, then having to write an article to solve the bad PR that was caused by their original ‘this’ll be great PR’ article is pretty hilarious.

Basically, I don’t know if this’ll really affect the reason for the article: getting the Ackle’s money for the project. Whether it will affect the project or how much creative control the Ackles can keep if the CW does have to step in and fund it, I don’t know. But Jared obviously has no idea about how television development works, and certainly has no idea that shows so early in development have these trade publication announcements for financing (a pretty obvious and known-about thing to anyone who works at a film or tv company). Jared also seemed to think that BECAUSE it was announced in Deadline, THAT MUST MEAN that the project was more than an idea with some creatives attached, which again shows that he doesn’t understand how projects in development work and why they’re so often announced when there isn’t even a proper treatment let alone script. The dude is obviously clueless, and there is J&D trying to run a production company which pulls PR moves like this regularly, as an industry standard.

So, even if this doesn’t jeopardise the projects financing, and therefore the control the Ackle’s prod company has over the project, the personal effect this will have on Jensen could be huge. Jared, with his stupid uninformed idea that he’s been left out of loads of development of a project just because it was announced in a magazine, could be read by Jensen as really putting his baby of a project in danger. The article was about money, and what if Jared’s tweets mean that they won’t be able to fund it? What if the CW does have to majority fund it and therefore keep creative control like they did with SPN? Like, this is Jensen and his wife’s COMPANY. Which they’ve already sunken costs into? Like… this is their FINANCIAL FUTURE Jared has stuck his foot into? That article WAS ABOUT MONEY FOR THEIR COMPANY. OF COURSE IT WAS. And now Jared has put their company, and financial future into question potentially? DUMB IDIOT.

Anyway, that’s how announcements like this work, this is why they normally happen when a project is so early in its development it seems silly to even ‘announce’ anything. Someone forward this to Jared plz and thanks. xxx

#supernatural season 16 finale episode #wow the drama #tv industry #supernatural #sorry i couldn't be bothered to check my post so its such a ramble

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fionacreates · 2 years ago

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La Sal (le Sal?) is so cool!!! I love the colors and their design, and the premise is FANTASTIC. Will you be making more art about them, or is this just a dabble cartoon?

(Also, will we be seeing more of the king and the bodyguard????)

Sal, and the magic plant shop La Sal de Plante, will probably appear more in future yes :D I'm glad you like her I too am quite fond.

I've intentionally structured the comic as more "slice of life" style which gives me room to just do a strip whenever I fancy, as opposed to being tied into a long form story and update structure (as I only have room for one of those right now!)

It also means I get to experiment with page layout, colour usage, and speed at which I can make pages too as it's not tied to anything specific. If they style changes dramatically it doesn't look odd 2 years down the line like it would in a longer narrative piece!

(early dev of Sal included more lockdown humour but I've decided life is bad enough I don't need it in my plant magic comic)

As I am currently working hard on Ladies of the Knight there won't be any other longform comics until that is done. (I'm stretched thin enough as is!) HOWEVER I was writing Ladies for at least 2 years before I published the first pages, so there are definately things in the development stages right now so I can hopefully jump from Ladies right into a new project, The King and Bodyguard being one of them.

And sometimes you have an accident and Sal slipped out of the development pile into the wild. So who REALLY knows.

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douchebagbrainwaves · 3 years ago

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YOUR EMPLOYEES AND INVESTORS WILL CONSTANTLY BE ASKING ARE WE THERE YET

I think I've figured out what's going on. After the first 10 or so we learned to treat deals as background processes that we should ignore till they terminated.1 Don't Get Your Hopes Up. Something hacked together means something that barely solves the problem, the harder it is to bait the hook with prestige. And that is almost certainly mistaken. So one thing that falls just short of the standard, I think, should be the highest goal for the marginal. Big companies think the function of office space is to express rank. As big companies' oligopolies became less secure, they were willing to pay a premium for labor. You can see it in old photos. If you're friends with a lot of the worst kinds of projects are the death of a thousand cuts. And what's especially dangerous is that many happen at your computer.

And the microcomputer business ended up being Apple vs Microsoft. In 1450 it was filled with the kind of turbulent and ambitious people you find now in America. You have to like what they do there than how much they can get the most done. That's not what makes startups worth the trouble. Design This kind of metric would allow us to compare different languages, but that if someone wanted to design a language explicitly to disprove this hyphothesis, they could probably do it. This technique can be generalized to: What's the best thing you could be doing, not just what you can see the results in any town in America. With this amount of money can change a startup's funding situation completely. There I found a copy of The Atlantic. Whereas it's easy to get sucked into working longer than you expected at the money job.2 That's ok. I think you have to do all three. But more importantly, you'll get into the habit of doing things well.

But what if the person in the next 40 years will bring us some wonderful things.3 They all know about the VCs who rejected Google. The writing of essays used to be.4 You may have read on Slashdot how he made his own Segway.5 He improvises: if someone appears in front of him, he runs around them; if someone tries to grab him, he spins out of their grip; he'll even run in the wrong place, anything might happen. The people who've worked for a few months I realized that what I'd been unconsciously hoping to find there was back in the place I'd just left. It was supposed to be something else, they ended up being Apple vs Microsoft. By 2012 that number was 18 years. The first thing you need is to be willing to look like a fool.6 Google they have a fair amount of data to go on. John Malkovich where the nerdy hero encounters a very attractive, sophisticated woman.

Many of the big companies were roll-ups that didn't have clear founders.7 Empirically, the way to the bed and breakfast, and other similar classes of accommodations, you get to hit a few difficult problems over the net at someone, you learn pretty quickly how hard they hit them anyway. Inexperienced founders make the same mistake as the people who list at ABNB, they list elsewhere too I am not negative on this one was the only way to get lots of referrals is to invest in students, not professors. It will actually become a reasonable strategy or a more reasonable strategy to suspect everything new.8 Never say we're passionate or our product is great. Whereas undergraduate admissions seem to be disappointments early on, when they're just a couple guys in an apartment. Programmers at Yahoo wouldn't have asked that.9 Incidentally, this scale might be helpful in deciding what to study in college. VCs think they're playing a zero sum game.

I spend most of my time writing essays lately. Almost everyone's initial plan is broken. If smaller source code is the purpose of comparing languages, because they come closest of any group I know to embodying it. Distracting is, similarly, desirable at the wrong time. But if we make kids work on dull stuff now is so they can get away with atrocious customer service. In fact, here there was a kid playing basketball? Of course, figuring out what you like.

Go out of your way to bring it up e. The industry term here is conversion. Try to keep the sense of wonder you had about programming at age 14. At least if you start a startup, people treat you as if you're unemployed.10 But hacking is like writing. Even with us working to make things happen the way they used to, they were moving to a cheaper apartment. It causes you to work not on what you like, but is disastrously lacking in others. I do in the rest of the world. Their defining quality is probably that they really love to program.

I could only figure out what to do, there's a natural tendency to stop looking.11 Economies of scale ruled the day.12 One is that this is simply the founders' living expenses.13 I need to transfer a file or edit a web page, and I think I know what is meant by readability, and I think they're onto something. Multiply this times several hundred, and I get an uneasy feeling when I look at my bookshelves. You may have read on Slashdot how he made his own Segway.14 Everyday life gives you no practice in this. Startups grow up around universities because universities bring together promising young people and make them work on anything they don't want to want, we consider technological progress good.

Notes

Samuel Johnson said no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money. Which is precisely my point. If they were regarded as 'just' even after the egalitarian pressures of World War II the tax codes were so new that the guys running Digg are especially sneaky, but except for money. They don't know enough about the new top story.

The image shows us, they tended to make money. But we invest in the Bible is Pride goeth before destruction, and one of the fake leading the fake leading the fake. In No Logo, Naomi Klein says that 15-20% of the aircraft is.

But because I realized the other writing of Paradise Lost that none who read a draft, Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson. If they agreed among themselves never to do due diligence for an investor? The best technique I've found for dealing with the other.

I ordered a large number of startups as they do for a public event, you can ignore. If you want to help the company, and a few of the Facebook that might produce the next Apple, maybe the corp dev is to show growth graphs at either stage, investors decide whether to go to die.

If you walk into a big company CEOs in 2002 was 3.

Or rather, where w is will and d discipline. But that turned out the existing shareholders, including that Florence was then the richest country in the sense of mission.

In Shakespeare's own time, because they can't afford to. The company may not be able to raise their kids in a company in Germany. When we got to see the apples, they said, and why it's next to impossible to write an essay about it wrong. That will in many cases be an open booth.

I'm not saying you should probably be worth trying to tell them exactly what constitutes research in the early 90s when they say they bear no blame for any particular truths you'll learn. As Jeremy Siegel points out that there is undeniably a grim satisfaction in hunting down certain sorts of bugs. Did you know about it as if you'd invested at a discount of 30% means when it was actually a great programmer doesn't merely do the right direction to be is represented by Milton.

But a lot of the next round. It's hard to say exactly what your body is telling you. In Russia they just kill you, they tend to be very unhealthy. One thing that drives most people realize, because you have two choices, choose the harder.

Though Balzac made a lot of classic abstract expressionism is doodling of this essay talks about programmers, but one by one they die and their houses are transformed by developers into McMansions and sold to VPs of Bus Dev. Or rather, where it sometimes causes investors to act. Eric Raymond says the best hackers want to trick admissions officers. And no, unfortunately, I mean efforts to protect widows and orphans from crooked investment schemes; people with a truly feudal economy, you better be sure you do in proper essays.

The top VCs thus have a better education. Or a phone, IM, email, Web, games, books, newspapers, or some vague thing like that. You need to fix. But the question is not much to maintain their percentage.

Kant. Loosely speaking. The real decline seems to them to lose elections. Some types of startups where the recipe is to say incendiary things, they can grow the acquisition offers most successful founders still get rich simply by being energetic and unscrupulous, but they get for free.

World War II to the frightening lies told by older siblings. That's one of the most general truths. As we walked in, we found they used it to get into that because a unless your last funding round.

But this seems an odd idea.

Thanks to Jessica Livingston, Shiro Kawai, Garry Tan, Chris Small, and Nikhil Nirmel for sharing their expertise on this topic.

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goombasinastack · 10 months ago

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an addendum:

i made some more mockups of what the previous post's filter could look like. one has stages, the other has random game screenshots in my library. i think the ink colors pop just that extra bit more! have a look:

i think these help the colors pop more--let me know what you'd change!

in other news:

responding to comments and other insights, though, i think a main problem with the polish of splatoon 3 lies in the atmospheric details. has anyone else noticed that almost every single stage takes place at high noon? flounder heights used to be near sunset!

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a sparse few of the new maps (brinewater and shipshape being most notable, um'ami to an extent) play with lighting and atmospherics at all--i suppose you could make a case for mincemeat being covered halfway in shadow, but it's just not as notable as splatoon 1's variety!

this part of the addendum applies mostly to the undertow spillway section of the essay:

i think part of it is just that the contrast between light and shadow just isn't as great in 2 and 3 as it was in 1: look at Ancho-V Games in 1 vs 2, especially indoors:

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splatoon 1's rendition is gorgeous, with light streaming in through the large overhead windows, the shadows of windowpane obvious on the walls and floors. the natural lighting is obvious--while 2's version looks like it's lit by yellow lamps instead of the sun. i suspect because there's no color contrast between light and dark, instead purely lightness-based. in direct sunlight, shadows seem blue:

and both stages have plenty of natural lighting (even though in canon, 2's version is in a different building just across the street from ancho v games 1), so this change is very odd to me. as for undertow spillway.... it's probably the most indoors map in splatoon history! the map should be a cool grey, not warm grey. the filter i proposed is kind of silly looking back at it a sleep later. here's an updated version according to this color theory:

honestly i still think it's too well-lit for the splatoon lighting style, i think there should have been a skylight right over one side of the stage that casts shadows, and also more dramatic light shafts. then you could REALLY make the background darker.

in addition, there are literally no clouds in splatoon 3? splatoon 1 and 2 have beautiful immersive cloud shadows that roll over stages--a small but important bit of polish that's not present in splatoon 3 for some reason. 3's stages feel a bit weird without them!

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also, in looking at the lighting in recon mode, i noticed that there's literally no sun on Hagglefish Market??? if it's hidden behind these clouds, it's not obvious, and the shadows should be severely dulled because of it:

it’s just odd such an important detail was missed!

okay, no more lighting talk.

and as for the essay/rant part of the first post:

i got some interesting conversation out of sharing that post! i wanna address a couple of points:

1. fuck capitalism? what do you mean by that? why do you mean by that?

what i meant when i said "fuck capitalism, i guess!" was that i don't like how rushed splatoon games have been--every single splatoon game has been rushed out and published before it was ready. this lead to lots of problems! 2 didn't launch with all main weapons (and only had 2 years of dev time!), 3 had those issues i mentioned in the prev. post, 1 was launched so early before its intended release that the first major content update, six months after release, added private battles and league battles.

point is, these games have been kicked out the door way too early in the hopes for profit. this leads to very dangerous crunch and stress, which is already much too common in the video game industry! so that's why i say fuck capitalism :P

(also there's probably something more to say about how capitalism is present in splatoon as a whole--i find myself playing splatoon as a squid-themed shopping game sometimes. i have way too many clothes and things that my octoling doesn't wear, and only has them just to have them.)

2. so, you don't like splatoon 3? did the developers fail?

i love splatoon 3!!!! i love splatoon. i'm on a competitive team and i have 340 hours in the game. splatoon 3 is a good game. i don't think the devs failed, either--they added so much new stuff on launch in the 2-3 years they had between splatoon 2 and 3 that it's impressive. new hair physics? brand new spawn system? the entire-ass story mode? all very good and cool! what i was trying to get at but never said in the essay was that i felt the devs were stretched thin. they had to prioritize the things they needed to get done (story mode, weapon design, new content in general) and just... missed a couple things. i don't think splatoon 3 is an ugly game by any means, either! it's one of the smoothest experiences i've seen on the switch--it's almost up at the level of mk8dx imo.

3. nuance

in writing that essay, i tried to be pretty nuanced, but i think i missed some stuff. to be fair, it was 1-2 in the morning! this is an opinion piece and not fact. i just want that to be clear for the reading comprehension lol

splatoon 3 hot take turned impromptu essay

was stuck offline in splatoon 3 because internet was actin up and i realized how pretty the photomode splatoon 3 filters are compared to the actual game

i was taking photos on brinewater and thought. damn. this game looks fine but i miss how VIBRANT splatoon 1 was! i wish i could play sploon 3 with this photomode filter on all the time. and brinewater is the best map for this because of the sunset lighting! so i went to one of the worst offenders mapwise for general color—undertow spillway. it is a warm gray mess:

for someplace underground, it’s WAY too warm of a tone—even if there are skylights, they aren’t very well defined, as they’re off in the background—they’d be better with some light shafts to pop out more, imo.

so here’s undertow with photomode filter #6 (this would’ve been a video but tumblr limits to 1 video per post):

and i think this looks a lot nicer, colorwise! the icky warm gray is shifted to a soft pink—and while that’s still not in keeping with the lack of obvious skylights, it works better than warm gray.

so then i opened ibis x paint and got to work on a filter that would hopefully help elevate the entire game’s look:

on top is photomode filter #6, in the middle is the original screenshot, and on the bottom is my proposed filter.

i upped the contrast, brightness, and saturation a bit, then added a 5% pure magenta (#FF00FF) overlay layer on top of that. then i added a slight gaussian blur to emulate antialiasing, which nintendo refuses to do for some reason!

and i wanna play splatoon like that! i miss the vibrancy and intricacy of splatoon 1…

incoming splatoon 1 essay‼️

not only were the colors eye-bleachingly bright, but the overall game feel was much more immersive—especially in ink physics. you could paint trees, and the ink would drip down through leaves as if it were rain… ink splatter would respond to the movements of platforms, keeping its intertia as it dripped! you could see the textures of surfaces through the ink, as if it were an actual liquid instead of a layer of thick oil. 3 doesn’t have any of those special touches.

there’s also the music… 1’s ost feels so much more WEIRD and experimental than the later games, and that really helps cement that this is not human society—this is a new thing—which tracks for splatoon 1, as it was so zany nobody had ever seen anything quite like it before! splatoon 2 follows this sheer melting-pot of brashness and creativity with evolving and varied styles—where once was punk and weird samples in Squid Squad is now groovy rock in Wet Floor, jazz in Ink Theory, and also whatever Sashi-Mori was. also i <3 chirpy chips. splatoon 3’s music goes back to that punk, but i feel that it loses some of the charm and creativity of the first two games. C-side is pure metal, and hardly uses any weird instruments. there have sparsely been other splatbands involved with regular battle music—Yoko&tgb call back to the jazz of Ink Theory which i love! Off the Hook’s new tracks delve into a new style in piano rock. but the main band kind of falls flat to me. :(

let’s talk stages. in splatoon 1, stages were wildly different from each other, including skateparks, construction sites, underpasses, malls, sewage plants, and other locals that are culturally underground. the rest of the trilogy moves away from this in a story standpoint, as ink battles evolve from punky, diy competitions into full-fledged championships in 2 and 3, with advancing battle infrastructure as time progresses. that’s fine, and honestly it’s cool to see that kind of worldbuilding! but in 1, each stage was designed about and influenced by the area it represented. Arowana Mall is a straight line with high vantage points on the second/third story because it’s a mall. Pirahna Pit features convenyor belts that shuffle refuse around because it’s a trash plant. Blackbelly Skatepark has so many hills and valleys because it’s a skatepark, for goodness sake. splatoon 3’s original stages have some of this charm, but it feels lost in ambiguity. why doesn’t Mincemeat Metalworks have small moving platforms on cranes or other heavy machinery? Idk, have some grates and one-way drops, and a car on a post. why isn’t there any water incorporated into the stage design of Brinewater Springs? Idk, have 2 paintable walls and a tetris piece. 3’s original stages have little to no connection between their locals and the geometry, which make it feel same-y compared to previous games.

maybe this is because of the inflexible philosophy of the designers—or their corporate oversight, maybe. for stages, you need to make a straight line or tetris piece with few routes to push, in an effort to promote the game’s main premise of Chaos. for music, you need to make punk songs that aren’t too weird so they don’t drive away the parents. maybe the little ink touches could have been missing because development was rushed?

i honestly dont know why it happened out this way—perhaps the splatoon team just needed more time to cook, in order to squeeze out that extra 20% of game feel? or maybe it was that speculated corporate oversight, i dunno. things WERE missing on launch—notable exceptions being X rank, online tableturf lobbies, and no more than three salmon run maps. i know we’ve yet to even get the DLC but for being about 75% of the way through the game’s content lifespan, but splatoon 3 feels incomplete. there have been improvements, yeah! i just wish there could’ve been more. i would rather have waited another year for splatoon 3 if it were polished that much better, y’know?

i honestly feel like splatoon 1 captured that creative, no-holds-barred mantle of Chaos better than 3 does. 3 feels… flanderized, in a way. the curse of trilogies, perhaps? writing about it more, it feels like not only have the in-game sports of turf war been ripped out of its seedy home and thrust into the spotlight, and gone “mainstream” (see: massive squidsport companies investing in multimillion battle lobbies with holograms and lockers [sunken scroll about that!], flying coffee machines that grant you brief invincibility, new rules and techniques that allow squid surges and rolls, etc.), but also the Real Life Physical Video Game Cartridge of Splatoon has been popularized massively with the sequels on the Switch. maybe i’m not missing the “vibrancy” of splatoon 1 when i look at the colors and photomode filters of splatoon 3, but instead the inherent punkiness and counterculture inspiration that i see in the original.

fuck capitalism, i guess!

#splatoon 3 #splatoon 2 #splatoon #color theory #long post #i hope this clears up some of the confusion! i got some spicy comments in the discord... not that i mind too much.#internet words be internet words.#anyways. splatoon 3 is fun and pretty #splatoon 1 was dearfully earnest in everything it tried and did though #like octoballs. i miss octoballers #do you remember those guys #the bowling ball octo guys in octo valley. the ones that would roll at you #they would keep bouncing like pinball.. balls. until they hit your ink #then bababooey you shoot them and they splode #favorite interaction tbh

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mybg3notebook · 3 years ago

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Does Gale love Mystra?

So far in EA, we have been shown that this is complicated to answer: human love is complex as well as the delirious lore of Forgotten Realms.

Disclaimer Game Version: All these analyses were written up to the game version v4.1.104.3536 (Early access). As long as new content is added, and as long as I have free time for that, I will try to keep updating this information. Written in June 2021.

The number between brackets [] represents the topic-block related to (this post), which gathers as much evidence as I could get.

The narrative is clear until the party scene which, as I stated many times across these posts, it's a scene that feels a bit inconsistent for me (reasonable since it's EA). But if we follow what the game explicitly shows us, we know that if we send Gale to sleep at the beginning of the Weave scene in which he is watching the incantation with the shape of Mystra, he will say:

Gale: Long days, yes. And long, lonesome nights.

If Tav knows that the incantation on his palm is Mystra, Gale will explain:

Tav: [insight] You don't have that look on your face when you're looking at “no one” / There's more to it than that. The figure I saw: she means something to you. Gale: [...] I can’t quite describe it, the need I sometimes feel to see her – to draw the filaments of fantasy into existence. [...]

Dev's notes: Passionate. [...] He was recalling Mystra as a lover, but doesn’t say that out loud. [...] Narrator: The Weave evaporates, and as it does so, you realise the night feels suddenly cold and lonesome.

This allows us to infer that, at this moment, Gale is feeling alone and probably very anxious with the oppressing feeling of the "orb" in his chest. The tadpole only increased the number of problems he has, so he resorts to seeing Mystra melancholically. We notice later in the Weave Scene that not having Mystra around increases this feeling of loneliness. The whole scene seems to give us the idea that he still loves her. There is yearning and loneliness in his current situation.

After a moment of passionate description of magic, Gale invites Tav to experience the Weave. The Weave has a particular effect on Gale: "The moment feels intimate. You realise the Weave is making you one." Considering how Gale was feeling while conjuring the incantation, this moment touched him deeply (the narrator implies that this feeling is mutual).

If Tav expresses their romantic interests, Gale will be surprised:

Gale: I.. I didn’t think.. Narrator: You perceive quick-fire gusts of embarrassment, trepidation, and finally.. elation Gale: Sorry, I wasn’t expecting… But it is a pleasant image to be sure! Most pleasant, in fact. Most welcome. Dev's notes: Warm, with real affection.

The narrator is giving us meta-knowledge, we can trust in what she says, and we can see that the situation was truly shocking for Gale. These emotional stages described here made me suspect that Gale is a character who has focused for too long on healing his condition, ignoring any chance for romance. His surprise here may confirm that, in my opinion. He feels embarrassment, a feeling that one can interpret as a sign of the surprise of being thrown into a situation he had not seen beforehand (the death protocol and Gale’s conversations show us that he is a character that thinks ahead). It follows trepidation: fear or anxiety about something that he is going to do or experience. Gale is scared of the possibility. Maybe because he is thinking in the danger he is, maybe because he was already burnt by Mystra's attention and having someone else's attention now makes him feel a bit anxious. And then, the final resolution of the process: elation, which is a feeling of great happiness and excitement about something that has happened. Gale is suddenly excited by the possibility. Something he will be thinking about, many times, for the rest of the EA.

Tav: So what did you think about what I pictured when we were connected by the Weave? Gale: Oh, I was surprised. But pleasantly so, just like I said. Amid the madness that has befallen us, it seems almost out of place to think of a kiss/ of a romantic walk. And yet... now more than ever, it's important to recall what makes us human. [if Tav is not human] Well- you know what I mean. A stolen glance- that sudden heartbeat... Sometimes the little things are worth more than kingdoms. They promise things to come.

So romance was not something he had even considered until the opportunity arose (this is why he won't pursue a Tav who didn't show romantic interest towards him). I think that, since he is a character always living on the edge of death, he will take this opportunity to feel “human again”: after all, he follows the concept of "living life to the fullest".

During the Loss (see the post of the "Loss Scene"), we know that losing Mystra was a big blow for him. He regrets his decisions of the past in this scene, and it reinforced the idea that he is the only one to blame for Mystra's loss. There is a yearning for the lost Chosen powers, but Gale's context in the majority of his scenes seem to reinforce the idea that he sought power not as a means, but as a goal itself to be closer to Mystra and Magic. Since we are talking about a wizard, his passion lies in magic itself, in being one with the Weave/Magic/Mystra. A Chosen of Mystra is so entangled with the Weave and magic that when they die, they are part of the Weave itself. This is the level of passion that Gale has for Magic, and since Magic can only be performed by most mortals via Weave, and the Weave is Mystra, the whole three concepts are, in fact, one; and it makes it very difficult from a lore point of view to separate them.

Tav: There's something I don't understand. If Mystra abandoned you, how can you still cast magic? Gale: The Weave is still here, all around us – inside of us too. As long as the goddess lives, magic is a tangible thing for those who know how to touch. I've studied magic for many years, and in as many ways I am still a more than capable wizard. It's just that I'm no longer able to perform those feats even arch wizards would marvel at. To have one hand on the pulse of divinity. You have to remember that the Weave is a living thing, both the embodiment and the extension of Mystra herself.She can give and she can take away. I'm afraid I'm still very much on her naughty list. Consider yourself lucky you're not.

I personally think Gale will never stop being devoted to Mystra (and won't stop loving her in many ways), because his passion for magic and knowledge is his own life, and Mystra IS those things. He loves magic for the sake of it. So losing this unique contact with magic itself that only Chosen of Mystra have was a terrible punishment for him. His abandonment issues are not just the result of a “guy being left by a girl”. They have an extra complexity because of the nature of Magic in this world and how its deity behaves with her chosen. Gale was not only abandoned by Mystra, but was also removed of a good amount of his capacity to perform magic. If magic “is his life”, the abandonment removed a part of his life away. I think some people miss this point, because, once more, it's related to Forgotten Realm lore and not Dragon Age. Many of these people keep constantly comparing this situation with Dragon Age, which has nothing to do with it. Dragon Age has no wizards, their relationship with Magic is natural, it’s sorcerer-like if we want to compare it, and the relationship with their deities (mostly absent, silent ones) are nothing alike the ones in Forgotten Realm. The context is key, as I repeated several times in these posts and in the one about "Context, persuasion, and manipulation".

Tav: I don't know what to make of what you've told me, but I sympathise. Gale: Thank you. [no romantic weave] I want you to know that you’re a good friend. [romantic weave] I often think of that moment we shared together – one under the Weave. I hope you think about it too. /I'm glad to know you think about it too.

Narrator: You sense a moment of unspoken affection. You want to know where it may lead. Gale: I consider myself very lucky to have found you Tav: I think perhaps we could be more than friends Gale: Perhaps.

Tav: You said you think about the moment we shared under the weave. Do you think about it often? Gale: Do you? 1-2-Tav: Yes / From time to time. Gale: So do I. 3- Tav: Not really. Gale: And yet you ask. I do, as a matter of fact.

Gale: You see. I'm not a big believer in fate, but I do believe in serendipity. Life is a tempest of events that sometimes we brace against and sometimes embrace. You're one such event that one day soon perhaps I'd like to embrace.

So after sharing this regret during the Loss scene, Gale will show affection if Tav remains friendly during the Weave (but Gale will never directly engage it, he is waiting for Tav to give the first step; understandable if we consider he also has a dangerous bomb in his chest, so he may be torn between wanting to, but knowing he should not to). If there is no interest in pursuing romance, he will show a gesture of gratitude for being a good friend during that night of regrets.

If pursuing the romance, we can interpret that Gale, at this point, even though he is still struggling with all the emotions that Mystra inspires, wants to experience something more “human”, a romance with a mortal. We know for sure that Gale is getting interested, slowly, while thinking about it, since in each of the following scenes he will ask (or Tav will ask) about that “moment in the Weave”. He has been thinking about it for many nights, and he is “embracing” the idea.

If Gale is treated with judgement (despite not knowing his whole story) or allowing him to keep the secret of what or who he lost, we will obtain lines likes:

Gale: Good. Goodnight. And thank you for your patient understanding. // And try not to think too poorly of me. A cat can look at a king. A wizard can look at a goddess.

Tav: Another fool pays for his arrogance. A tale as old as time. Gale: Arrogance? Ambition, rather. And ambition is a fine thing – until suddenly it no longer is. Then again, if that is how you judge me, there’s little I can do to change your mind. But know that I have this ambition still. First to save myself, and after that, the licence to dream. (Gale Disapproval)

We could interpret these lines as the only ones so far that may suggest that Gale is still wanting something from the goddess. We know due to the tadpole dreams that Gale’s desire is Mystra. On the comments of the second tadpole dream we know more details about his major desire: it is not just Mystra, but her forgiveness.

Tav: Gale, who is the apparition in your dreams? Gale: She's... It doesn't matter. I just know her to be unreal. Tav: What's impossible about what you're been shown? Gale: Forgiveness Tav: Gale, who is the apparition in your dreams? Gale: It's indeed Mystra I see. And yet it cannot be her. There was a time when I would have believed - but no longer. I told you that I lost her. Lost her favour and lost so many of the powers I took for granted. What magic I can still weave is met only with undercurrents of disappointing silence. Mystra has not changed her mind about me. That's how I know our dreams are delusions.

I think this scene shows the difference between a standard desire for power as a means, and power for the sake of power itself (since this power allows Gale to be one with the Weave). The scene is ambiguous enough to see it as Gale wanting to return to Mystra’s side as well as remaining as an ardent devotee of her (because she is magic herself). I keep repeating that these scenes show that Gale’s most important thing in his life is Magic, which is Mystra: the extension and the embodiment of magic. So his desire for her seems impossible to be extinguished completely. In previous scenes we saw that he certainly had thought through the idea of loving her more like a devotee than a lover, but certainly the weight of being his first love will remain, especially since she is deeply related to magic itself.

During the Party Scene we find some information about his feelings for Mystra.

I personally ponder the book of Amn’s description as very important because, from a narrative point of view, it's a lot of lines/content that, if they were not important, tend to be removed from the script. If they are there, they are meant to be interpreted. For this reason those lines mean to me that Gale has finally embraced the idea of having something important with a mortal. In my post of the "Party Scene" I go into details, but here I will stick to the interpretation related to Mystra: all what Gale numerates in that book are things that he could not access to with a Goddess. Curiously, part of those descriptions are things that make humans human, so I personally think it reinforces Gale's intention in heading into this romance with the eagerness of finding some shelter (never forget the “orb” has a constant oppressing effect in him, increasing his anxiety and fears) and to experience (maybe for the first time) the love of a mortal.

So, for some assumptions made in the post of the "Party Scene", we suspect that Gale needs to share a night to feel confident enough to speak the details of his “orb” condition. Since he wants this relationship to be strong (after all, he implied commitment during the description of the book) he speaks about the true origin of the “orb” immediately after that night, starting with Mystra (which is, after all, the true origin of his folly). Depending on the version that Tav picks, we have extra information provided by Gale about his emotions for the Goddess:

Tav: What did Mystra’s attention feel like? Gale: Love. Perhaps it was not quite love, but you see, the wizard was but a very young man. It was most certainly love to him. [...] One day all too soon, the whispers stopped. The goddess spurned the mortal. [...] and the wizard was left behind heartbroken. Tav: I hate to say it, but he really could have seen this coming Gale: He was blinded by love. Good stories are rife with lovers’ follies after all.

[Short Version] Gale: Before long Mystra tired of me. What was I after all but a mortal plaything in sacred hands? You have to realise I was heartbroken. I was a young man, she was my first love. I thought it would last forever. I vowed to win her back.

[after explaining the mistake of the “orb”] Gale: It is this folly that led Mystra to abandon me completely. I can only hope you won’t abandon me as well. After all we’ve been through.. After the night we spent together. Surely we can brave even this side by side

Gale is giving a very detailed context about his love for Mystra: she was his first love, and the first love tends to have a special weight in a person's life and their memories. That doesn't mean the person has become unable to build more relationships for the rest of their life. If we add the fact that he was very young when all this happened (more details in the Post "Gale Hypotheses- Part 1") we find him under two effects: the impression of the first love and the naivety of the youth. Both elements made him believe it was a love that was going to last forever. With a Goddess, no less.

Besides, Gale expresses this, highlighting his naivety and foolishness: he is aware of how silly he was back then, and how impossible it could be for a mortal to keep the love of a goddess. He is a pragmatic and realistic character, after all. He recognizes in the end that he was just a mortal plaything for her.

I think these pieces of information give us a very clear context of his emotional state: he is still nostalgic for Mystra because of all the reasons I enumerated above; she is also more than just a woman, she is Magic itself. But he is aware that those emotions were the consequence of a very naïve and young self that has awakened by the burden of his own mistakes. There is also a reinforcement of “forever”, which recalls the concept of commitment that Gale pursues so much in his romance: he is not there just for the sex “intimacy”, he is there for serious commitment, maybe because he doesn't want to experience another abandonment. After all, we are talking about a character with a profile that shows abandonment issues (see the post of "Gale Hypotheses- Part 1", section: "Abandonment Issues")

[If rejected] Tav: No. This is too large a betrayal. GALE: I see. I am sorry. I am sorry that it had to come to this. All that’s left to say is farewell. Dev’s notes: hurt but understanding Gale: Farewell. (Leaves) Dev’s notes: A slight hesitation, hurt but understanding. He makes a polite little bow, then we see him walk away.

[If accepted] Gale: I don’t know what I did to deserve the magic that you do.

Despite being terribly cheesy, this last line shows that Gale was more than convinced that Tav would abandon him because he doesn’t deserve Tav. This is why he doesn't put up much fight if Tav chooses to tell him to leave. He will try to make Tav listen to his story, and once it's done, the verdict will fall and he will accept it. He learnt his lesson with Mystra. This line also shows how everything important around Gale is or has to be worded with magic, even a silly metaphor like this is related with the word “magic”: Tav's acceptance is like magic. For him, as important and good as magic itself.

As if that were not enough, after the scene there is a comment in which Gale will reinforce his gratitude for Tav's acceptance:

Tav: If you ever feel the netherese magic overtaking you, what will you do? Gale: If it should ever come to that... if I ever know I am no longer able to stop it... I will do anything I can to ensure no one but me pays for my mistakes. I will find the remotest place on the surface of Faerûn, or perhaps far below in the depths of the Underdark. I will await that death alone. [*] I promise I will not betray your trust... You kept me by your side despite the menace that I am. If worst comes to worst, I will be gone long before the curtain falls. [*] If romanced, Gale will say here "I cherish you."

Which makes me suspect that Gale can disappear at any moment (in full game) if for some game mechanics we are unable to get magical artefacts but the deal with Raphael did not happen (if that’s even possible). But that's just me speculating. Nothing in EA seems to suggest this. What i's clear is that acceptance—that strong concept in the book he put so much emphasis on—is really important to him, so he shows gratitude for that: he promises to protect Tav (and many innocents) from his own mistake. He also says pretty soon an equivalent of “I love you”, in a more formal/meaningful way: “to cherish” is not just to love, but to care/protect as well.

Finally, in case someone lost those hints, or maybe as a consequence of this unpolished scene, we have a direct question with a direct answer:

Tav: Gale, are you still in love with Mystra? Gale: I’ll be honest with you; I don’t know. She is my muse still, the embodiment of magic, but the embodiment of love? Only if we ever meet again will I know

Gale simply says what we have been inferring so far with all the previous information: Gale reinforces the idea that he will remain as a strong, loving devotee of Mystra, because she is magic. I personally don't even consider it possible to remove that love from him. He may not be a cleric, but he loves his deity as one. But he also learnt his lesson that loving gods has its own dire consequences for mortals. He is very aware of it during the discussion about Karsus:

Tav: Nothing good ever comes from mortals wanting to be gods.

Gale: Loving them has its side effects as well. Now, so many centuries later, I tried to follow in the footsteps of Karsus, not to destroy Mystra, but to prove my love for her. It tried to control only a fraction of the magic that was unleashed that fateful day. I merely sought to return one tiny diamond to an imperfect crown. Gale's Folly one might call it. History. Repetition. It's the way things go.

Once more, there is no scene where Gale doesn't reinforce that what he did was a mistake, a foolish action, a Folly.

Finally, if talking about a previous lover immediately after awakening with a new one was of poor taste, Gale acknowledges this, giving an honest apology:

Gale: Before we go on though, do first let me apologise. To share such a night with you only to tell you of a previous lover the next morning... It wasn't the most gentleman-like behaviour. But I had to finally tell you. Silence would have been far worse behaviour still. Nevertheless, I am sorry.

He accepts any rude response or lash-out from Tav without approval penalties. This is an interesting meta-knowledge that speaks about owning up to his mistakes. Unlike the Loss scene, where rude responses made Gale disapprove because Tav was judging him without knowing the whole story [16], in this scene he doesn’t. Now Tav has the whole picture, and he accepts whatever reaction Tav shows. Of course he will approve a forgiving Tav, since Gale is a character very related to forgiveness [12, 12b].

Conclusion:

So, answering the question that gives title to this section: yes. In my opinion, Gale loves Mystra. But it’s not a white-and-black love; it has the complexity of human love mixed with this crazy lore of deities in Forgotten Realms. I believe Mystra will always be part of Gale's life, because the Weave and magic are his life, and she is both. He will always love her as a devotee, even though he now understands the mistakes of his young self and seems more aware of how naive he was when he was a “very young man”. The comments on the second tadpole dreams explicitly show that what Gale wants the most is Mystra’s forgiveness, but at the same time, he knows that he does not deserve it. And this raw realistic view of himself is what makes him understand that those dreams are illusions. During the party scene he is uncertain about his emotions, but still he emphasises that there is a big chance for him to not see Mystra as the embodiment of love any more but reinforces that she will always be the embodiment of magic to him (a very important concept in his character design).

Whether Gale is romanced or not, I don't see a difference in the information he shares on this matter in EA.

This post was written in June 2021. → For more Gale: Analysis Series Index

#bg3 meta #gale #gale of waterdeep #bg3 gale

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villaincock · 2 years ago

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some things to note abt the leaks

just bc its in chinese doesnt automatically mean its a knockoff. it could be in localization stages (or, WAS in localization stages, since those screenshots appear to be old or in early dev stages)

if GUST truly had a hand in making it, it should look marginally better than 3h. have yall seen how the atelier games look (also developed by GUST)? theyre very pretty and i actually quite like the character designs in those games!

the screenshots are still kinda blurry, leaving room for speculation on what the characters could look like

theres a redheaded character named anna, which i think is no coincidence. if its not an official mainline fe game, its definitely a fangame that used annas name/likeness

the leaker (emily rogers) was a credible nintendo switch leaker back when the console wasnt even out yet. i dont think she would just make assumptions or make things up….. however she said on twitter that she hadnt seen the screenshots yet so her knowledge is probably limited

why and how could someone make such an elaborate screenshot(s) in just a couple days after emilys leak? the leak info and screenshots add up

#it all POINTS to the game being real imo #which i dont know how to feel abt but time will tell #we can only wait to hear what good ol nintendo has to say on the matter…..#fe17 leaks #fe18 leaks #fire emblem leaks

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absolutebl · 4 years ago

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This Week In BL

Feb 2021 Part 1

Being a highly subjective assessment of one tiny corner of the interwebs.

Ongoing Series Thai

Manner of Death Ep 11 - a nice beefcake twist, then another twist, plus proud gay dads. We are mighty pleased.

Cupid Coach Ep 4 - Unbearably boring. I’m out. We are not amused.

My Bromance Ep 9 - FINALE I watched it unsubbed (I’ve NOT been following since ep 3) and it looks like it has a nice cute happy ending. I’m now interested in binging it once good subs become available.

1000 Stars Ep 2 - was a lot better than Ep 1, the mains have okay chemistry, the kids are serviceable (child actors, shudder), but I’m really loving all the side characters. We are cautiously optimistic.

Ongoing Series Not Thai

You Are Ma Boy Ep 5 (Vietnam) - pacing still good, cuties are still giving it their all, solid little series with bumpy side couples, confession call & response continues apace.

To My Star Ep 7-9 FINALE (Korea) - quirky as all goddamn getup, but so fucking cinnamon roll tasty. Charming end. Recommended so long as you realize we are in Mr Heart style K-BL. (Also @coldties posted a killer MV for this one.) This one will get a movie rerelease like Wish You, hopefully also on Netflix.

We Best Love: No. 1 For You Ep 6 FINALE (Taiwan) - we got to see boyfriends being domestic af adorable with an ending that was a touch bittersweet but very college appropriate. With season 2 coming March 5 I am disposed to be VERY PLEASED.

What will we do with ourselves and nothing new out of Korea or Taiwan for two WHOLE weeks?

Stand Alone

I rewatched Wish You (2020 Korean series WISH YOU: Your Melody From My Heart now retitled - thank fuck - and available as a movie on Netflix). I have to say Yoon Sang Yi delivers some excellent pining. I’m not a huge insta-love person and there’s some character dev flaws, but it holds up really well and delivers more as a movie then it did as a series.

One of my favorite catches on the rewatch was the way Yoon Sang Yi’s jacket sleeves are always too long. It’s such a perfect little character trait. He is so shy and careful that he shrugs smaller into his coat, and also he hides his hands - when, as a pianist, his hands represent his self actualization and art. He only exposes them when making music... or holding Kang In Soo‘s hand.

Incidentally, I was moved to look these two up... both out of K-pop. (This is my shocked face.)

Breaking News

Lovey Writer dropped its official trailer at last, looking good and trope-filed. It’s set to start Feb 24th.

Top Secret Together dropped its first promo material (Thai, no eng subs). I’m excited about this one, it’s being lead out by an IRL couple.

My Engineer 2

The ME boys dropped an adorable gossip heavy promo vid. ME 2 is finishing up the script and will probably begin filming in April. It’s supposed to still release in 2021 (which makes me worry about post and explains a lot about some of Thai BL’s audio quality issues). With April filming, my guess is for an October (but more likely November) release.

Close Friend

Lay talked about his Close Friend project, which is a MV series from BOX Music featuring musically-inclined actors with established BL pairings so:

KimCop (MarkKit from Gen Y)

JimmyTommy (SaifahZon from Why R U)

JaFirst (LeoFiat from TharnType 2)

YoonLay (NottPun from YYY)

Y-Destiny

Perth talked about Y-Destiny (previous title Destiny) which presumably is already filmed because he said it will be on air at the beginning of this year. As this is a Cheewin project, expect it to be something odd, campy, and frenetic in the YYY style. My guess is they’ll wait until You Only Eat Alone has completed its run before airing Y-Destiny, because who can take more than one Cheewin at a time? No one. Not even Thailand.

KinnPorsche

Perth also talked about KinnPorsche. He said it would be on air... but that he wasn’t allowed to say the date, so we can hope this means they finally got distribution. (The excitement over the trailer probably helped - it has over a million views.) He also said they would start filming soon (so Feb/March) which means, if everything goes smoothly, a late summer release at the earliest. However, with an independent studio, high production values, big cast, and fight sequences I would expect KP to have more post than most BLs, so my guess is it will air towards the end of the year. (And I would be scared for quality if they tried for any earlier.)

KinnPorsche cast also continues to work the BL talk show circuit, they made an appearance on Sosat Seoul Say. Mile & Apo are adorable + good chemistry, in fact the whole cast is adorable with good chemistry, so I’m excited for this series.

Gossip

Cutest beans, Sam & Yu of We Best Love, have been dropping the most charming little lives ever. I’m so pleased we are getting a second season out of them. I can’t remember the title because, ya know, Taiwanese titles are beyond bonkers. But season 2 is listed now.

Hong Kong is reported to be filming its first BL Series (15 eps to air on VIUTV). It will be an adaptation of 2018 Japanese BL drama Ossan’s Love (maybe same title?). Like Cherry Magic this is an office romcom: 30s single man who isn't popular with women lives with his parents. When they kick him out, he moves in with a coworker. Turns out this guy has a crush on him, as does another dude from his office. Foundational tropes: Office romance meets forced proximity meets love triangle. I expect the style out of Hong Kong to be somewhat similar to Taiwan, however they are politically less independent of China Main (although culturally VERY different) so this series could be DOA (for gay) or get killed early in its run (see Addicted web series - or don’t see it, if you’re in China). Also, like the Japanese original (and unlike most Taiwanese stuff), expect VERY low heat. That said, 15 eps is nothing to sneeze at, even if they are only 15-20 min each. So I guess I am... intrigued?

Next Week Looks Like This:

February Update: Others that are airing but I’m not following:

Fools (Vietnamese) - I don’t think it’s going to end happily (it’s from the Stage of Love peeps), so I’m waiting to binge if it does

Brothers (Thai) - deals with taboo relationships from the Thank God it’s Friday people (this will not end well)

Happenstance (Pinoy) - I don’t follow Pinoy BL closely

One Day Pag-ibig (Pinoy) - ibid

Love or Lie (Pinoy) - ibid

The Alter (Pinoy) - ibid

Upcoming 2021 BL master post here.

Links to watch are provided when possible, ask in a comment if I missed something.

#thai bl #thaibl #bl 2021 #bl gossip #upcoming bl #my engineer 2 #kinnporsche #y-destiny #close friend project #ossan’s love #hong kong bl #chinese bl #taiwanese bl #Vietnamese BL #Vietnamese drama #pinoy bl #pinoy drama #lovely writer #We Best Love: No.1 For You

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skysometric · 1 year ago

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dev commentary time! as we start going through the remixes it's important to keep in mind how much of a technical marvel these have always been, both in old and new versions of the engine... in ways that frequently made it a headache to work with them.

current versions of the red coins are a fully custom object – collecting one does all of the work behind the scenes to adjust the timer, spawn the flashing time indicator, and count both how many and which ones have been collected. they can be collected in all the ways a regular coin can – such as being bumped from below – and they can also be "precollected" when restarting from a checkpoint. there's even dynamic red coins set up to fly around or fall in from the top of the screen!

new "single-object" red coin on the left, old hacky nonsense on the right.

suffice to say, all of that was practically impossible in old versions of Mari0. the old red coins were a much different beast; they were in fact regular coin tiles with a custom graphic and a region trigger attached to several stage entities that would adjust the timer and track collection. there was no way to make the coins move from their spot, and no way to "precollect" them from checkpoints – meaning no checkpoints in remixes AT ALL.

worse still, those old red coins were very challenging just to add to the level in the first place. let's say i placed one already and i wanted to move it later; there's no way to just "move" the coin and the entities attached, so i'd have to delete it completely and replace each component in the new location.

on top of that, the size of the coin's hitbox is less than one tile, and the region trigger couldn't be made that small in the editor... so when i was ready to "lock in" the red coins, i would open the level in a text editor and manually adjust the size of the region triggers. yes, really. (pictured on the right is how i got "bumping" the coins below the bricks to work – the region trigger extends below the brick!)

the little orange squares over the top of the red coin show the size of the region trigger. it's tiny.

anyway, you get the point by now. the old red coins were inflexible – hard to place, hard to replace, and hard to find good places for. but i was ambitious enough that i did all that work anyway... i finished HALF of the remixes in the old version! and Applesauce Autumn is probably the best of those early attempts, because it has the least changes of them all.

most of what i did to patch up this level (besides smooth out the enemies a bit) was add things that i wanted to do in the original but couldn't, like… pre-placed Koopa shells. can you believe something that simple was impossible in older versions of Mari0???

also pictured is a star that was removed due to being too hard to reach.

adding red coin bits was also a pretty major change – those weren't possible in old versions either. the old red coin location was just floating over these bricks, just out of reach for anything but a running jump. really mean for being the first remix!

there also wasn't a koopa shell here originally. i like how the shell bounces around after it's kicked, meaning the floor here is never truly safe~

finally there's the two coins between the pipes, which had their times adjusted. in the new version, both give 20 time. in the old version, the first gives 30... and the second gives 10, which was purposefully not enough time to reach the next coin.

no old version needed, the difference is just numbers.

why did i do this? i wanted the player to puzzle out why the first one was giving way too much time and the second wasn't giving enough, with the eventual solution being to grab the one on the right first and double back for the one on the left. i wanted the player to discover this early on in the remixes... because i intended to pull a similar stunt in several remixes!!

suffice to say this did NOT survive into the final release. it's purposefully obtuse, it adds nothing to the level, and it's impossible to tell this is happening on your first time through because the coins aren't marked.

a recurring theme throughout these remixes is going to be how much more mean they used to be, because when i first made the remixes, i did not intend for anyone but the most hardcore challengers to tackle them. these weren't supposed to be for casual players; that's what the main levels were for. besides, it's not like i could add checkpoints or anything...

well, thank god i eventually could, because that got me to rethink practically all of the remixes.

youtube

Applesauce Autumn (A-1) | Retrush

Welcome back to familiar plains of bricks and pipes... with a seasonal shift! This first Red Coin Remix is crawling with Spinies, all lined up for a good old shell combo. Just watch where you kick those things!

#gaming #level design #mari0 #retrush #writing #levels #developer commentary #retrush dev commentary

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