Merus

Maybe Guards! Guards! or possibly Small Gods? Guards! Guards!, like Equal Rites, plays with fantasy and storytelling tropes like the hapless town guards, the destined heir and the million-to-one shot; Small Gods is my favourite Discworld so I'm biased but it's a razor-sharp satire of faith and how organised religion is often at odds with it. Both are early in the series; I really like the much more recent Going Postal as well, which works on its own. If you're giving the entire series another shot I'd go with an earlier one; if you just intend to pick out the choicest morsels then Going Postal's a good choice.

There's also the problem Idle Thumbs has brought up, in that if you're making a fantasy you still choose what fantastical elements you are introducing into your world. If you've made a world that's more misogynistic than reality then that is part of your world-building and open for critique. I think Arkham City is particularly problematic because, while those barks are definitely present, they also exist in a world with plenty of female supervillains, but all of them are dressed to be appealing to males. For Catwoman, this makes sense, because it's a clear part of her character and other writers have done interesting things with that element of her, so it's only natural that Rocksteady would find it obligatory, but Poison Ivy's in underwear despite her uniform being basically arbitrary, and Harley Quinn's essentially running the Joker's gang and she's just as sexualised. You never actually fight her, and towards the end of the game you find her tied up, relatively useless. All of the choices made about how to treat female characters by the developers err on the side of making them less powerful, less empowered and more sexualised.

So I put together a board game for the game design course I'm doing this semester (for an easy 6 credit points) but I really like it and want to take it further. Players are abominations of science, in a lab, and have to consume as much as possible before the hazmat team arrives to clean them up. Players move around the board and can gather parts, represented by cards. They get one card each turn, and one card if they reach a container (which is marked so no-one else can use it). Each part allows a player to do one thing - move, attack, defend - and has a food cost involved. Players can use each part once per turn but can use as many parts as they can pay the cost for. Each card also has a 'consume' bonus - if players willingly discard the part, they get that much food. When a certain amount of turns elapse - the board has a turn track - the hazmat team arrives, and instead of drawing a part at the end of their turn, they draw a hazmat card, which everyone follows. These force players to discard parts, and if they don't have that kind of part, to discard food. The last player standing wins. We went hard on the idea that parts should be weird, so there's like 10 different kinds of movement cards that all have different movements and directions permitted. We discovered that the game is already a bit complex so we cut a lot of mechanics and cards that had subtle interactions with others. Attacks and defence have a rock-paper-scissors relationship so that players don't have to read the other player's card to understand what just happened in the combat, which seemed to help. The game has this lovely three act structure where players start off in a small room all moving towards the centre, then start getting enough movement/attack cards to really spread out and explore the lab, and then they come under attack in the climax. We had a strict time limit in the assignment - a 40 minute playtime - but I'd like to develop it further and publish it. I'm not entirely sure where to take it, though - there are cards we cut because the board design didn't support them, but the board design was our weakest link so I'm basically redoing that from scratch. Some playtesters kind of hated the first act, and I'm concerned that it might get repetitive. A win condition we considered involved players growing powerful enough to escape the lab, which we cut because of the time limit - but I think bringing it back might be a mistake because there's a bit of a positive feedback loop. We could add tiers of parts, but I'm not sure what form that'd take. What opportunities do people see for things that the game maybe doesn't do?

Does Maya get used much in the industry, or is it used more for film? I'm doing a 3D Animation course and we're using Maya. (I really like its animation system.)

My bet was a draw! Mum and Felicity didn't lose enough weight to win either! (It was over three months, and losing a tight, but reasonable, amount of weight.)

I wasn't sure if that was an April Fool's joke, to be honest, but if it is then unless Matti is in on it, and I don't see why he'd participate in an indie developer gag, it'd be libellous.

I'd say it was a medium deal; there were bigger cultural touchstones, certainly, but Round the Twist was an adaptation of Paul Jennings' short story collections which were popular amongst the tween set in the 90s, back before they were called tweens. The big change was that all the stories now happen to one family instead of to unrelated protagonists; they had to write themselves out of corners where the short stories could just end, and the setting and some characters in the TV show change to make the story work. (In particular, Mr. Gribble bounces around to play whatever adult antagonist the stories required.) Thankfully, they captured the most important thing, in that the stories are fucking weird while still being fairly bloodless. Anyway, someone reminded me of Round the Twist the other day and I thought I'd pay it forward. So you're welcome!

The Phil Fish April Fool's joke is the kind of joke I disapprove of. Of course, if he's actually ready to return and he just waited for April Fool's to announce it, I'm back to approving again. I enjoy April Fool's announcements - I remember Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon was announced on April Fool's, and on April 2nd they were still saying it existed.

The Guardian also reported the discovery that lamingtons were originally a New Zealand creation, like the pavlova before it, which is just cruel. I think the best gaming one I've seen is ArenaNet's one from last year. The punchline was that they actually built a blocky platformer inside Guild Wars 2 that took about an hour or so to complete.

There is certainly a view, which I hesitantly called the Kierkergaard view, that the most important element of a game is mechanical conflict. The game has to push back, or else it isn't responding to your actions. I'm pretty sure that's bullshit but the strongest evidence I have is that by calling it the Kierkergaard view I may well have summoned his followers, who will come here and be dicks about anyone disagreeing with them.

In that case we'd better see some Round the Twist being shown.

I use fuckwit a lot, particularly as a replacement for 'retard' in the pejorative sense, and 'fuckwittery' for 'retarded'. Sometimes I'll get creative.

Or you be witty within a highly constrained format that's just enough for two sentences, but not three. But only those two options. There is no middle ground with Twitter, which is why I like it. Traditional first tweet is something dumb about how you made a twitter account

@merusworks

THANKS OBAMA

Well I don't know how else we're supposed to make one of the world's major religions feel isolated and self-righteous.

Re: FFX: I will defend that laughing scene because it's clear in context everyone else thinks he's being weird but they're not saying anything because Yuna's making him do it and girl gets what she wants

Talking about someone on a social network without providing enough context so that people can tell who you're talking shit about. I suspect it's the last bastion of passive-aggressiveness; it's kinda cowardly, and I'm hoping in a few years the response will be that instead of complaining to the audience about your problems, express your frustration to the actual person.

Apparently evangelicals think that atheists go into nursing homes and mock the faith of dying family members. "Oh no, you're old! Guess all that praying didn't make you immortal after all!"

It doesn't do eye tracking particularly well; you feel like you've got a screen strapped to your face, which is basically what it is. They kept getting me to avoid tilting too much (because I wanted to look around a corner); it actually worked, but I guess it also breaks the illusion pretty quickly when it doesn't.

It's easier for me, now, to speculate about ways in which this could work out. Facebook's core product is on the way out, and they know it; they've been spending money to ensure that they can use that sweet, sweet Facebook money to pivot into mobile. They are clearly not planning on being the Facebook company forever. So what if we're seeing a company that's planning on pivoting when they get something that's worth growing? What if Facebook recognises that Oculus' ties to developers are stronger than the parent company's, and on VR let them call the shots? What if Oculus bought out Facebook and not the other way around? I think it's probably healthy to burst the hype bubble on the Rift. I've tried DK2, it's still not that great.

I think 'circular reasoning' basically does the same job as the traditional form of 'begs the question'. The distinction's not useful.

There was a fascinating study recently that demonstrated people's tastes are strongly influenced by how they perceive other's tastes to be. There is enormous pressure on reviewers to appear discerning; unlike in film or literature, game reviewers are not seen as being a separate class of person, of having better opinions than other people. This has the unfortunate effect of placing pressure on reviewers to be aware of what their audience believes they should be feeling, because their audience by and large believes their opinions are just as good, and thus that if those opinions differ, that the review is wrong because everyone loves this game only the reviewer has played. There are basically two options: convince everyone that they shouldn't have an opinion on the game until they play it, and thus that PR should be banned; or make cultural elites out of game reviewers. Neither are spectacular options, really.

I made a board game! It is called Hungry Hungry Horrors.. I had to make it for a course on game design, and settled on the design really quickly. Players are abominations of science in a lab, and the hazmat team is on the way, so they have to mutate and grab parts (cards) so that they can survive the longest when the hazmat team arrives with flamethrowers. I really like it; I'm going to try and develop it further and maybe Kickstart it if I think it might make money.

FLACs are lossless compression, that's why they're bigger. Best to think of them as the raw audio data in a kind of zip file. Vorbis (and MPEG-4) is lossy, which means the compression destroys a part of the audio to crunch it even smaller. If you convert a lossy audio clip to another lossy audio format, it'll degrade further. For game development, keep your raw audio in FLACs, and convert that to either Vorbis or MPEG-4 (assuming you don't need your own license for the codec) when it's time to ship. For end-users, having Vorbis (.ogg) or MPEG-4 (.m4a) audio files are fine. You can keep FLACs around as a backup if you're really keen on chucking your CDs. You certainly don't need FLAC for anime unless you're explicitly doing archiving. MP3s are out of date at this point.