darthbator

I know we've been doing the IRC thing for a while now, but in the last 3-6 months slack seems to have just totally taken over the bulk of my internet communications (especially since my long standing IRC group made the jump). Always looking for another excuse to not do work, I was wondering if there would be any interest in setting up an idle thumbs readers slack organization? Since organizations are controlled by invites I would be happy to set the org up and invite people as they PM me their email addresses here. Go ahead and sign up here! I think the tool itself is an amazing chat interface and I would love to have another organization in there where I could pop in and have some good quality game discussion! Hey, I guess there's also discord for all your gaming and voipish needs

http://www.theverge.com/2012/12/8/3744314/gabe-newell-valve-console-living-room-steam-box I didn't see anything posted about this! Looks like Valve stealth confirmed " steam centric hardware", coming next year, at the VGA's. Sounds sort of nebulous and vague but potentially really exciting. Seems hardware manufacture's will be able to take their shot at their own designs and valve will just be providing software distribution services. What do you guys think? Lemon? Great? To early to tell? Consoles are doomed? Discuss!

The idea that ideas and topics that promote extreme "otherising" of people on all sides seem to have seeped into absolutely everything. There doesn't seem to be any content created for the internet these days that doesn't have some kind of "Trump angle" or isn't clearly attempting to state where it exists on an increasingly divided spectrum of social opinion by which people now overtly judge one another. I actually love political and social discourse but it's become completely inescapable. It doesn't matter who you are, or what the forum or topic is it has become what I would consider extremely fashionable to overtly broadcast your social opinion and I've just hit a point where in non politically focused media I find it totally exhausting.

The choice to not talk about politically motivated subjects is certainly monetary. They directly depend on their audience for revenue via premium memberships. They're not shy in talking about how this is their major income source. Dividing the audience in any way is a sure fire way to lose subscribers and income. I think it's insulting to insinuate that people "escape" into media that isn't fixated on the current fashion of excessive social and political opinion. So the only thing of concrete worth in human experience is contemporary diversionary politics? That's a sad, sad world.

I tend to really enjoy the conference stuff. Sometimes people get hammered and it gets awkward but I don't think it's ever been "bad". I sort of wish they had more opportunities to do stuff like that where the schedule and surrounding circumstances aren't so hectic. It's a neat sort of late night TV vibe that you don't normally get in games. Usually when developers are sitting down on a couch with "games press" there's a TV right there and they're doing what basically amounts to a product demo. I like the extremely informal setting of it all even when it's gone off the rails. I hope they get a lady on the GBWest team. At this point I don't think you can really cover games well without a female perspective. However I think Giant Bomb's rather grey, hands off, stance on social issues makes it hard to attract that talent. In the era we appear to have entered into I think that continues to be both their biggest strength and challenge. A large reason that GB produces the only gaming podcasts I'm still listening to is because it's one of the outlets that I feel offers quality analysis of games and the industry without a lot of "political opinion". In a time when everyone is basically waterboarded with everyone else's social opinions on a constant basis it's nice to know that at least my video game podcast is still going to be about video games (and peoples house projects and stupid reader mail). However I think that same stance makes it hard for them to attract good younger talent and instead lands them folks like Dan.

I used to paint a fair amount of 40k models. I had a pretty reasonable eldar army for a while. I was probably more into painting and fussing over all the miniatures then I actually was into playing the game. It's one of the only hobbies I've pursued where for some reason I trended towards the aesthetics rather then mechanics. I've recently heard some pretty positive things about Infinity wargaming. Has anyone here played that?

So I recently finished replaying the supergiant games and was reminded of how much I REALLY love a well placed vocal track in a game! The examples that really stick out to me are Bastion - Zia/Zulf themes Transistor - "The Spine" and variants (or just red humming to the general soundtrack throughout the game while in Turn()!) Red Dead Redemption - Going to Mexico The Walking Dead Season 1 - Credits Special Mention Final Fantasy III (VI) - Opera Scene (cause it never occurred to me a video game could that at that time) Special Mention Final Fantasy VII - Sephiroth (once again never saw that coming but I should have expected it cause you know. CDs) I've also noticed a more modern practice where games (like moon hunters or axiom verge) incorporate faux vocal tracks using either "computer esq" voices or fake phonetically driven languages. I think this is really interesting cause it adds a sort of diagetic immersion (that song is written in the language of this world) while aiding in the pieces ability to loop as BGM. What are some of your favorite examples of vocal tracks in games?

I don't know how I forgot about this Upon relistening whoever composed the soundtrack for "Under the Skin" totally played this game!

I actually only stream my game development. However I've gotten into the habit of obsessively recording all of my gameplay and I'm posting that stuff basically every day into youtube. I also have a bunch of martial arts stuff up there that's set to private that I've been looking to do something with. I've also long wanted to try and produce some of those neat game analysis videos I see people make using my raw archive footage! So I guess I do more of a "traditional youtube" thing then game streaming. I guess I could get into that too? https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6RSK-HM9v8gQ7D7JzIFG9g

http://www.youtube.com/user/togaassassin/live So this is something I'm trying out. Hopefully it's something I can stick with. I'm going to start streaming out some of my game development! For the next 2 weeks my girlfriend is on vacation in Germany and for various reasons I couldn't go So I'm going to try and stay home and plug away on a game of the type we like to play together to surprise her when she gets back! I also need some ways to force some accountability onto myself. I've grown listless with the scale of some of my personal projects. Around Christmas I realized it had been multiple weeks since I had really worked on ANYTHING. So I figured this would be a god way to stay on target and do something positive coming into this new year!

I actually finally migrated everything over to a new host and set it up all proper with systemd and stuff. So all the crazy instability of the last 2-3 months (or longer?) should now be fixed and the sign up url shouldn't go down anymore.

So I've fallen pretty hard for battlerite, the game you would probably logically think of when you hear "multiplayer online battle arena". No lanes, no jungle, no items, no creeps just a battle arena where multiple players battle their lords. I think the game does a pretty amazing job at synthesizing the team fight phase of games like League or Dota2 into it's own game. In between rounds you choose from 3 different "battlerites" that power up one of your characters skills, a super neat way to encapsulate the progression mechanics in traditional Lords Managements. It's in early access now (19.99 gets you access and all the heroes they ever release).

I think that method of handling health is a really effective way to limit the power of healers. It does feel a lot like overhead WoW arena (with a more manageable bucket of skills). What's your battlerite name? I'll add you to my friendslist (I'm darthbator over there too!).

I have 0 confidence that Nintendo will have a sufficient program for indies. That's certainly my hope. I think the occupy a power and form factor sweet spot (and will probably attract a video game centric audience) that is perfect for indie games. But Nintendo has never been the best with working with external developers.

Looks amazing I want it! Give it to me!

I'll make sure that thing doesn't go down later on today. I am assuming the host had to reboot and I never setup any init scripts for those.

I wouldn't hold my breath for a lot of cross platform. Nintendo is on the "other side" of the CPU divide this time. Everyone else moved to x86_64 and now they're on ARM meaning there will be port work (especially for people outside of Unity/Unreal). I think it looks really awesome and I'm getting one and I'm already excited about it! Did anyone else notice that they never showed them touching the screen? Is it possible this thing isn't a touchscreen? That feels sort of crazy in this era.

I've used all kinds of stuff in the past but the system that generally works for me is this. Personal Evernote - I put basically all my thoughts and things I intend to "long term file" inside of evernote Wuderlist - I like tasks lists and checking stuff off. They happened to be the one I liked most when I looked at todo list apps. Pocket - I pocket articles that I want to read sometime later (never). When I read one of those and it strikes me as something I might want to refer back to I clip it into evernote. My Work Docs - Unless I'm sharing something from my internal process I process out stuff that I have been working on in there into a google doc Hack n Plan - Is a trello like application that is specifically tailored for game development. Once I get a project out of it's initial prototyping phase or start working with other people I like to manage tasks there. I also keep a notebook with me all the time. I tend to put anything I consider valuable there into evernote in case something happens to that notebook.

That particular email and the ensuing conversation kinda got to me. I was on my way to work and as soon as I got in instead of working I cooked up this little prototype! (Android only) https://www.dropbox.com/s/ww4r2pfjxnju6z5/Movement%20Proto.apk?dl=0 It's a basic statement of thesis on that idea. I was thinking about how I would want a "first person adventure" like Gone Home, Firewatch, or even The Witness to play on device and that's what I came up with. The controls are all based on multitouch. Each additional touch layers on an additional capability. 1 finger down looks around, 2 fingers down adds forward motion (while preserving looking), 3 touches down accelerates into a run moves backwards! If your initial 1 finger "look" touch lands over a selectable object that object "activates" (just turns green here for testing). I might be wrong, but when people talk to me about this kind of accessibility stuff I always scope it into mobile. If your audience is unfamiliar with FPS style controls their chances of going to any PC game are slim IMO. The future of the broad market is touch screen devices [face_shrug]

Post links to downloads here in this thread?

Check the initial post for sign up information

I feel like I got hack n slack and space base free when they stopped supporting them? I'm not entirely sure how those ended up in my steam library.

A lot of really high quality lifting instructors don't charge an arm and a leg (at least from my experiences). Just show up at some meets and ask guys where they're training and who they worked with and it should be pretty apparent who you should talk to. I tend to start working out mostly between 1-3pm or 6-7pm. I'm trying really hard to get out of the gym. Trying to reduce expenses and get back to training methods I find more enjoyable. Unfortunately I can't really find good replacements for heavy backsquats, deadlifts, and cleans at least once a week and I just can't justify barbells in my apartment...

I actually like slack more as a chat platform. They a have a reasonable API and highlight service integrations and stuff. For things like Wizard Jam that will actually probably be pretty useful. Discord is more for voice chatting and games stuff? It's insane you can't link your steam to this. Oh they have some black magic that can see what game is running... Also it doesn't have giphy so it's like immediately inferior right...

The nice thing about slack is that it's something that a lot of people just tend to have open for other purposes anyways. It's a nice kind of side channel I think (also it's easy to get into and there's a way to automate the sign up process). I would actually love to get a Discord group as well. While my IRC friends are all heading into slack a bunch of my gaming friends are now on discord. Well that's pretty easy I'll put the link for this in the top thread as well. https://discord.gg/0beO5YmLScBp2XsF