Problem Machine

I've given away moderately valuable items to people who probably would have tried to scam them out of me if I hadn't. At the time I figured they just wanted the item and it was for a game I didn't play (at the time), so I thought it was a good deed. Knowing what I know now about how scammers target accounts with low play time and valuable items, I would have hung onto it until an actual friend wanted it. Oh well. It was a Bill's Cap btw. Not super valuable, but something. It's worth about $10 I think. Someone has since lent me another one, which is good because it looks fucking baller on spy.

Honestly I don't think I will ever play DayZ but I would totally listen to a podcast of people just telling stories of the crazy shit that happens in that game. The devs should just start one up, just a call for submissions of people telling their own stories, and feature the best ones on the game's website.

30 minutes in, just wanted to note that I believe the transparent overlay pre-load that Nuclear Throne uses is actually a Game Maker default.

Relying on other people is difficult. The one time I've tried to do a project with other people, for one of the tigsource game jams, it ended with everyone else flaking out on the project. Unfortunately, yeah, that tends to be the most common experience. I don't really have any advice on how to find someone who's not flaky... it sounds like it's the sort of thing you just have to try over and over until you hit the jackpot and find someone you can work with. Your situation re: grad school is weird, but this could be a good opportunity for you to find collaboration partners. One of the big advantages of such a course is that you will have, in the same general physical space as you, a substantial number of people who you know for a fact will be interested in game creation. As to how to get into such a program... I don't really know. I'm in kind of the opposite position, where I got a bachelors degree in a program supposedly about games but, in reality, more of just a fluff major to pull in gamers/suckers. I'd like to, some day, get a masters in a more concrete field, such as computer science or mathematics, so I have a degree that actually means something. I've learned to distrust programs focused on game design -- frankly, in terms of design, the 'common wisdom' is highly questionable in the first place, and I am suspicious of anyone who claims to be an authority on the subject. Chris mentioned this a bit on Idle Thumbs a couple of weeks ago, but what are considered 'best practices' in game design are often just ways to make a specific experience that people have grabbed onto as being the 'right' way to make a game, despite the fact that it shuts out a huge swathe of possibilities for what a game can be. But I digress. I guess my point is that it's easy to get sidetracked. Wherever you end up going, I guess, try to make sure it's someplace where you actually spend your time making games, since that's what you want to be doing. That way, you win either way. Put zero trust in the school itself to take you where you want to go, and spend whatever time you have there making what you want to happen in your life happen. Use it as a staging ground. Maybe it's presumptuous for me to say that sort of thing, but that's how I see it.

If what you want is to make games, I don't see how a master's degree would help you do that. If you're not interested in learning how to do the requisite art for a game, I think you'd best start looking for a artist partner who can get on board with your vision and handle that end of it and just make the game that you want to exist. Spending more time in school is just burning years you could be spending on making games, especially since it doesn't sound like you enjoy school itself anyway.

I think the term ripoff was used in particular in a discussion about how the term isn't really just when applied to Terraria given that there was a flood of actual and shameless Minecraft ripoffs on the best-selling list of XBLIG.

Of course, that's also the response made by people who are misunderstood, ironic, or making jokes, which makes it all a bit trickier...

I didn't read it as an excuse, I just thought it was worth pointing out that even if these things are technical in nature there's still an element of artistic intent -- even if it is just an oversight.

Hell yes just in time for Christmas

I wrote some words about Starbound. Sort of. Here.

The glands that secrete milk aren't what give breasts their shape or mass. Note that while all mammals give milk, very few of them have breasts in the sense that we mean when we say it. Breasts are mostly fat.

Well, true. I wonder if people would have noticed that so much if they hadn't woogidied their physics boobies though. Perhaps it worked out better this way.

Well, yeah, but someone still made the call that "Sure, that looks about right, put it in". I'm actually not sure whose job it is to tweak physics settings like that. It should be an animator, but games being games it probably just as often isn't. Oh a new post -- Um. Shouldn't it be?

I think I've only bought one album this year as well, so...

All I can imagine is that as reference the animator watched a lot of women jumping up and down in slow motion and then forgot to speed things back up... ... and also, uh, have the woman jump up and down.

As I said, even if it doesn't ruin your enjoyment of a piece of entertainment overall, it ruins one particular facet of it that you can only have once.

Which is a super frustrating thing to hear, because my position right now is that I'm kind of dirt poor and can't afford a lot of the games I want to play. Doubling down on that and then feeling excluded from a podcast is... difficult. I don't blame Idle Thumbs for this at all, but it's more that, as someone who wants to be able to participate in the discourse around games, being frequently FISCALLY UNABLE TO is incredibly shitty. So the spoiler thing presses my buttons in other ways that aren't really intrinsically related to the issue, I guess, is what I'm trying to say.

This line of logic bothers me a bit, since I think it misrepresents why people dislike spoilers. The problem isn't that the experience is ruined by knowing what's going to happen, it's that the experience of coming to something fresh and without any idea of where it's leading is itself valuable. You can only play a game for the first time once, and knowing what's coming leeches some of that specialness from the experience. Not that I think that line of logic necessarily holds together super well either. Every time you experience a piece of art, your life will color it in different shades. Losing the capacity to experience something in a surprising way is only unfortunate if you personally hold that surprise to be more important than whatever your brain will fill the experience with in its absence. Still, all that being said, I prefer to avoid spoilers myself. I want to meet the story, at least once, as a stranger.

Jesus

I think any time someone's on who hasn't been on in a while it's likely to be a good show just because it harnesses the energy of friends who haven't hung out in a while. Perhaps some sort of optimum could be achieved by the thumbs taking turns going off on prolonged vacations...? Has this already started happening......!?

I may at some point. I kind of hope that with the success of Dark Souls maybe From will start bringing some of their other properties to PC, since I really am not too into the idea of acquiring and setting up consoles any more...

So, uh, I actually used to help organize Armored Core tournaments, and for a while I ran a fan forum where people could share designs and stuff. I'm not sure where this idea that the series got oversimplified after AA came from -- the immediate successors were maybe a bit simpler, but Nexus may have actually taken things a bit too far by making it so, for instance, balancing the heat output between your boosters and your radiator were of paramount importance to making an even vaguely functional AC. If anything, AA is I think remarkable for being the point where they hit the sweet spot between arcade action and in-depth engineering complexity. ... I really miss those games. Basically nothing else offers the same combination of in-depth customization and ground-air spatial tactics.

I'm pretty sure that's the actual definition of a hipster

It's a lot easier to tactfully point out to someone that their headlights are on than that you can see their butt. For me, anyway.