Problem Machine

Well... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... I hope not

I may at some point. There's a PS3 here which doesn't belong to me, but the roommate who it does belong to hasn't been back to the house in more than a year now for... whatever reason. I should pick up one of the relatively newer Armored Cores and Demon Souls when I get a chance

Ahhhhh I used to love those games and still do a bit. Like, to the extent that I helped organize tournaments for the vs mode and ran one of the bigger fan forums for the games. They lost me after the PS2 -- as terrible as those controls were for you, I learned to play with them and got very used to them, so when they just completely stopped being a thing in AC4 and forward the combination of needing a new console and needing to completely relearn how to play lost me. Well, alongside massive gameplay changes, particularly underemphasizing the aerial game, where previously the three-dimensional maneuvering aspect had been one of the major appeals of the series to me. I deeply hope that at some point From comes out with a PC Armored Core game that recaptures some of that magic and has online play. I think the odds are actually decent at this point, given their newfound success on the PC platform and Miyazaki's stated intent to revisit the series.

We don't actually have a team set up since a partnered account has to create the team, we're just all mutually following and hosting each other. Maybe eventually one of the thumbs will see fit to create an official thumbTeam, or one of the channels will get big enough to get partnered, or someone with an existing partnered channel will take an interest in our little project. Apparently my streaming a week or so ago ended up weighing a bit heavily on the household bandwidth cap, so I probably won't be able to stream more until next month. Once that rolls around I'm hoping to get an actual schedule going, basically trying to tie all my obligations together to keep me locked into being awake and aware by the early afternoon so I can commit to doing regular things during those hours. Also, though this isn't strictly related to stream stuff, taking a sleep test next week, and what that reveals may also help me stick to a regular schedule, both streaming and otherwise. I can't remember if I've talked about this at all here, but what I'd eventually like to do is do a split gaming/creative stream. Either I'd start the stream with gaming and segue into art, music composition, programming, etc, or I'd have certain days be creative days and other days be gaming days. Ideally I'd like to do something where there's chat interaction, where chat can throw out ideas for music themes or character designs or whatever and I could try to compose/draw/whatever those. It's an idea that is appealing in principle, but I'm not sure if it'd work without a critical mass of audience under it to keep the energy up. Eventually, once I get work flows set up and get more comfortable with an on-stream presence, I might even be able to do live game dev.

His stern countenance?

Yo, spoiler tags work a lot better if you say what you're about to spoil outside of the tags somewhere

SL128 it occurs to me that if you want all the clips and the thumbs are still being bad about getting them to you, nearly all of them were I think clipped by either you, me, Kyir, or TychoCelchuuu, and we'd all probably be willing to give a list to you. Here's all of mine: DS1: https://clips.twitch.tv/idlethumbs/InexpensiveSpiderFuzzyOtterOO https://clips.twitch.tv/idlethumbs/PreciousJayBabyRage DS2: https://clips.twitch.tv/idlethumbs/FairToadOSsloth https://clips.twitch.tv/idlethumbs/ExcitedBeaverBloodTrail https://clips.twitch.tv/idlethumbs/AliveWalrusCoolCat https://clips.twitch.tv/idlethumbs/CleanZebraOptimizePrime https://clips.twitch.tv/idlethumbs/GentleGorillaSoBayed https://clips.twitch.tv/idlethumbs/CuriousMallardSMOrc https://clips.twitch.tv/idlethumbs/PoorJayBleedPurple https://clips.twitch.tv/idlethumbs/HealthySheepFuzzyOtterOO https://clips.twitch.tv/idlethumbs/TameQueleaRiPepperonis https://clips.twitch.tv/idlethumbs/ToughWolfDendiFace https://clips.twitch.tv/idlethumbs/CalmSnailFPSMarksman https://clips.twitch.tv/idlethumbs/ExcitedPenguinRitzMitz https://clips.twitch.tv/idlethumbs/EncouragingPonyUleetBackup https://clips.twitch.tv/idlethumbs/PreciousPorcupineMau5 https://clips.twitch.tv/idlethumbs/AmusedMinkMVGame

He said he's starting BB tonight

I think the way I'd like to see you approach this is generally to start from games but to just follow that thread wherever it takes you. I think what's always set this pod is apart is a willingness to go down strange conversational pathways and see where they lead rather than start a conversation knowing exactly where you want it to end up. So I'd like to see IT maintain an identity adjacent to games, but also maintain a full willingness to spread out into wider cultural stuff -- since, really, games interact with all that stuff, and any picture that focuses on games too intently is doomed to crop out the wider and often more interesting cultural network which they affect and are affected by. This is a process I've gone through myself since I started my blog a few years ago -- originally I'd intended it as a place to talk about game design, but as it progressed I found that discussions of game design often lead to discussions about how we create and are influenced by art and what role apparently frivolous creations have in the world. A big part of the reason I was able to make that transition was seeing IT demonstrate that sometimes the most interesting and valuable discussions on a topic at first seem like silly digressions -- until we pull back and see how it all connects. And sometimes a silly digression is just that, as well, and that's fine too.

https://clips.twitch.tv/idlethumbs/ExcitedPenguinRitzMitz https://clips.twitch.tv/idlethumbs/EncouragingPonyUleetBackup https://clips.twitch.tv/idlethumbs/PreciousPorcupineMau5 https://clips.twitch.tv/idlethumbs/AmusedMinkMVGame

Good, getting our cat count way up here. Added, followed, hosted, etc.

You should have cut it right after "gave birth to atrocities and the people fled in fear" though

Those NPC invaders sure are persistent

Bastion is the big one for me, the most elegant possible expression of character and setting through soundtrack. Still Alive is also Very Good.

I thought some people might enjoy Idle Thumbs related streamer Feeona's first encounter with the ALMIGHTY SAGAT, so I clipped it here: https://clips.twitch.tv/feeona/QuaintOpossumShibeZ

I could get into a coop thing, though I only have like half of those games. I'm not sure about the logistics of doing a board game stream though.

Thanks! So, I've been super remiss about keeping this thread up-to-date, so here are the last two months DevBlog posts. I'll try to be a bit more on-the-ball in the future. ----------------------------------- Everending DevBlog, November 2016: Octopus (posted December 5th) This post is a few days late, and there's several reasons for that. I mean, first, I just forgot for a couple of days, but there's actually a good reason too. Over the past couple of weeks I've been participating in the Idle Thumbs Wizard Jam, a 2-week game creation event. For the early days I was just working on my project concurrently with all of the stuff I normally work on, but near the end I was really hammering on the project. Anyway, it's a small project but I'm quite pleased with how it turned out. You can check it out here. New versions may be forthcoming once I recover from the last few days, but in the meanwhile I need to take a break and catch up on other work. I may actually start doing these a bit later in the month as actual policy rather than accident. Ends of months tend to be rather congested – I may start just scheduling these updates for the 5th of each month instead of the 1st. Anyway, I still got plenty of work done before the Jam and during its early days. While I'm not as ahead of schedule as I'd hoped to be, I think I'm still comfortably within the parameters I've set, with 34/51 tasks done for this three-month block and 8 preemptively done for the next three-month block. At this point, all of the right-facing animations are complete, and I'm well on my way to finishing the left-facing animations, with just the hit stun, defeat, and harvest animations left to complete. Also, a few new animations were created when I noticed the motion seemed less than fluid, such as an animation for landing from a jump or completing a rising attack. I foresee no difficulties finishing the player character animations this month, though I do expect to have to spend a few days polishing up the animations and fixing minor continuity errors once I have them mostly done. Aside from that animation work, most of what needs to be done to keep on schedule is creating a couple more simple tilesets and building out some of the early levels at finished quality. -------------------------------------- EverEnding DevBlog, December 2016: Animated (posted January 5th) It's been a bit of a slow month for work on the EverEnding project for reasons which are largely obvious. About 10 days of the last 30 were taken up with a big holiday trip, under which circumstances I wasn't really able to find the time and energy to work on the project – and, what's more, left me tired and inert enough that I didn't get much done for a while after either. That being said, progress is starting to be made, and certain foundational parts of the game are coming together. So, to start with: The main character animations for chapter 1 are pretty much all done. I say 'pretty much' because I'm confident that as time passes I will notice improvements that need to be made, possibly even new animations that need to be created. However, for the time being that all-important part of the project is complete. Once I achieved that, I turned my attention towards various outstanding programming tasks that have been on my to-do list for some time. I finally found and fixed a very annoying bug that was causing entities to self-replicate when I saved a level I was editing, which was causing massive slowdown since the entire lighting system was getting duplicated several times over. I found and fixed another bug which was causing the background layer of levels to not match the size of the foreground layer, and also created a player profile system, which should be able to handle saving and loading all the necessary information for game progression alongside all of the player's controller/keyboard binding information. Somewhere in the midst of all this, I built a bunch of assets for the early areas of the game – mostly pretty simple ones, which makes them excellent test cases for the kinds of improvements I'll need to make to the details system to get levels looking the way I want them to. I'm noticing something strange now that I've finished the main character animations: Even though I frequently found the work tedious, having something straightforward, relatively brain-dead, and indisputably important to the core of the game to work on was actually incredibly useful. When I was feeling tired or dull or confused it was still totally feasible to get good work done just by focusing on creating animations. That is not to say that animating is easy or stupid work, but I'd already planned out all the animations such that easy and stupid work was mostly the only kind left to do on them to complete them. Now that I don't have these animation tasks to rely upon, I feel a bit cast adrift on the gigantic task list that is this project. Oh well, I'm sure I'll hit a new rhythm soon enough. I think building out the levels may be similarly straightforward and rewarding, though the level editing tools may need a bit of improvement before I can dedicate myself fully to that work. Perhaps those improvements should be my first priority, then, after I get the core game systems I'm currently focused on up and running.

Well, as they touched on, Dark Souls updates a lot of these concepts to great effect. Health potions become limited by their very nature and harder to use, so spammability is no longer a concern -- blocking line of sight and choosing the optimal place to deal with tough enemies emerges intact -- and weapon durability... still sucks. Weapon durability always sucks. So those mechanics may not hold up when used as-is, but can clearly be used as a basis to build longer lasting versions (since I've got like 500 hours in across DS1, 2, and 3). Even Diablo 2 addresses a lot of these issues, making potions slow enough that they won't save you if you get in too deep and each act presents drastically different terrain and encounter types -- at the cost of losing some of the weight and intensity of D1. It seems like in Diablo 3's case, though, Blizzard just wanted to get away from Diablo's tension and more towards a 'popcorn' video game -- which is a fine and reasonable decision to make, but also is super uninteresting to me.

I dunno I just did it with Pursuer Greatsword and 45str and while it wasn't super hard it wasn't that easy either, even using golden pine resin

His name's actually just Super. They cut him because test audiences found it confusing.

Yeah darkwhateverer. I don't think gank squad is very hard, I'm surprised that's one people have a lot of trouble with. As long as you keep moving and hit and run it's pretty easy to divide and conquer. That said, it usually takes a few tries to learn the arena well enough to be able to do that. Tigers are a pain, I just did them today. What I'd forgotten about that fight is for some reason they do HUGE durability damage. I lost one battle after nearly breaking my pursuer sword, repairing it with powder, and then breaking it AGAIN just before killing the second tiger. Very frustrating. I'd recommend Bracing Knuckle Ring for anyone looking to do that fight. Also, charcoal resin is super effective. I actually like the fight itself, though, aside form the durability thing -- it's just the run to the fight that's awful. I figured out how to navigate basically straight to it using my shadow and it still took like 3 minutes of running every time.

Darkstalker Also you can't get Vendrick's blessing without beating him and getting his soul first, which doesn't seem to be acknowledged.

Excellent, can't wait. Though I have a class on Monday evenings so I'll probably miss your triumph over Blue Smelter

Yeah, once Lork brought it up it made a ton of sense, it just never occurred to me that it wouldn't be an NPC for the reasons mentioned before. I feel silly!

Whaat? The ladder appearing that way is so arbitrary and weird that the possibility never even occurred to me. How does that make any sense at all???? I guess I'm not sure that wasn't a player. I don't usually ember, but had it left over from the champion grave tender boss fight. I suppose it could be a player who normally cosplays as Yuria changing things up for novelty and inadvertantly creating Lore!