plasticflesh

Okay so I can appreciate how mousing for this game has more have more granular fidelity in mallet manipulation then timidly pawing a track pad. As I play the game I can't help but ponder the nature of the hammer jar man. Sitting in his cauldron he resembles a man conjured by a witch. Or perhaps a man who has will soon be eaten, and is indeed trying to escape his fate as a meal. Bennet says the jar is to protect jar man's feet. I believe it is actually to protect his head, to keep jar man bottom heavy. Hammer jar man resembles a man at work, with his ripped abs and toned guns. A man who shall fastidiously attend to his Sisyphean task. A man whose bare nipples exudes his human form, animal, sexual, macho. He is one with his tool, the hammer. One with his task- to conquer the insurmountable. Hammer jar man is the true avatar of a hard core gamer.

Super cool! I dig the expanding game play. Impressive synchronization to music at some parts. The humor works for me!

"Akwardness and Harmony" A score capturing arcade where you traverse a map of happy faced and sad faced characters. It is inspired by empathy games such as Jay Tholen's "Dropsy," "Everything is going to be OK" by Alienmelon, and the sword fighting sequences in "Secret of Monkey Island." It is loosely following the theory of Cognitive Bias Modification (CBM). More on that at the end. Game Design: The player and NPC's are all governed by an internal mood meter that ranges from happy to sad, with potentially 1 to 5 states of intermediate states, neutral in the middle and lesser extremes of happy and sad. PC and NPCs all share one basic interaction verb, Speaking. Any two NPC's will automatically Speak to each other when they pass by each other. Speaking will modify the mood meter of the two (or more?) adjacent characters. Happy characters will increase the mood of a sad character. Sad character will increase the mood of a happy character. Neutral characters will have no effect. The player can also speak but be deliberate about when speaking. There would be different personality styles for different characters. This would effect how those characters mood meters automatically change over time, and how a character responds to speaking. Different personalty styles would be things such as Optimist, Pessimist, Introvert, Extrovert, or some combination there of. Optimists would have naturally growing moods, Pessimists would have naturally decaying moods. Extroverts would respond well to speaking, but Introverts would have a cool down period where speaking too much actually decreases their mood. Scoring: The game will be in rounds have a time limit and a score system. player can collect points by speaking to happy characters. No points are collected or deducted for speaking to neutral or sad characters, the idea is to enforce the player's happiness through seeking out happy faces and communication. Difficulty modes and level design: The game would have several difficulty modes. These modes are where the character plays the game in the different personality styles. Technical and scope goals: This will be made in Game Maker 2. I've done a few tutorials that should help me get this amount of stuff done, character movement, interaction. I'm a complete novice so I'll probably end up with less that my basic scope goals for the jam. Basic scope: Move player around, speak with people. People stop when speaking. NPCs speak to each other automatically. NPCs do not speak to player. Get points, end time limit. Basic character art with simple color shifting to differentiate stuff. Simple animation cause I can't help myself Intermediate scope: Personality types for NPCs. more art, animation for environments and maybe different characters. Several Levels / Scenarios. Advanced scope: Playable personality types for player. Flavor text reactions. Saved local score board for different modes / levels / scenarios. Concept basis: Cognitive Behavorial Modification (CBM) involves software that feature a grid of frowning and smiling people, and you click on the smiling people as fast as possible in a limited amount of time. The concept is that a depressed or anxious person perceives threats in their environment, in the form of frowning people. By rewarding the user to increase their awareness of happy people in the environment, it is said that the user's outlook on life will become more optimistic. The CBM games I've toyed are dead simple, and I already see an improvement in my outlook on life having used them a little bit. Perhaps only by placebo effect of meditating on the idea, but placebo effects are real effects, self fulfilling prophecies and all. Ludo-narrative Problems: The trick with making a CBM style game is to ensure the game itself enhances the player's positive mood state, and does not actually cause a demoralizing effect in the player, via too much competition, or other strange social implications. In a way many games are already CBM modules, but focus on mood reduction, punishing world of frowning people. The design as I have above described has a potentially problematic implication, that the player is a sort of care taking cheer leader of the NPCs, and by having the player character running around trying to cheer people up, that could be an actually very annoying thing to certain people in real life. My hope is that the personality system could create an empathetic effect giving people space to feel the emotion they need to feel. One solution to help this dissonance could be flavor text bubbles that say things like "I feel better getting that off my chest" and such, to enforce that the happy faces are not literally happy and sad states, but are rather a reflection of a satisfaction state.

I'm watching a 2017 adaptation of the Legend of the Condor Heroes today. Wuxia story of Jin empire invading Song Dynasty. Plots move so fast in these dramas, quickly oscillating between melodrama and fantastical combat. I love it. This is what Star Wars needs to become. Okay the youtube upload I linked is amazing because it's one individual who did the english subs and she gives a recap of the previous episode at the start of each episode. So good. Seriously episode 2 starts STRONG!!

Oh boy, UFOs! In 2014 or so I was obsessed with videos from "Citizen Hearings on Disclosure." Well staged speeches with former congress people with the attempt to break open the truth that UFOs are ET visitors. This to me is such a brilliant smoke screen from new technologies. That the real conspiracy is that UFO's as ET's is a brilliant fiction to distract from the reality of UFO's as experimental new air craft. Drones, UAVs, are now a common place technology. This technology easily lines up with the images of UFO sightings from the 90s and 2000s. What better way to cover up and confuse people about experimental new technologies than to say it's fantastical alien technology. No matter that it's often seen in the skies of Arizona and Nevada where very relevant military bases for testing new aviation technologies exist. ET's are a very cool fiction, and I too admit I've spent a long time wanting to believe in this. But I also used to be terrified of the apocalypse and look forward to an afterlife. So to me, the ET conspiracy is a brilliant play to prey on the ontological fantasy that there is an afterlife (here represented by life outside of Earth), that priests can indeed have direct communication with God (here represented with Earth governments actively collaborating with UFO visitors or technologies), or that there will be a rapture (that the aliens will let us visit their planets in their sweet flying saucers). The ET conspiracy realigns that fantasy to a less religious but still completely gullible public.

Thanks! The speaking has very limited and unpredictable effects on the NPC behavior at the moment. Basically it's something like one speech bubble causes a +2 tick in mood, and the NPC's colliding with their invisible walls causes them to get a -1 tick in mood. But when the player speaks, it can tick the NPC mood past the top value and flip back to the bottom value. Its extremely broken! I've been trying to refactor everything to be more modular so i can introduce more NPC's with ease. Instead of making more NPCs and content. So it's a bit of a bummer to release the game for the WizJam in such a raw and sort of broken state. But I'm learning so much and hope to get more going and I justified it by thinking hey, mainstream games are constantly released in broken states, so why not just appeal to that precedent? Right now I'm amused that my attempts at refactoring code, the characters are doing weird things such as the cat getting pissed and clipping through the left wall and out of the screen.

This Zelda Link to the Past No Sword exploration glitch speedrun amazed me. They spend much of the game in the wrong layer of the world

That's a very interesting a cool read because it makes a clear delineation between Star Wars and almost all other popular sci fi. Perhaps it becomes a sort of hard sci fi versus fantasy sci fi dispute. Star Trek, Farscape, Voyager, Deep Space Nine, Babylon 5, The Expanse, all continue to speculate on 'hard sci fi' concepts of technology and politics. But Star Wars is indeed unique in its focus on dynastic space magic. Perhaps one analog is Dune. Perhaps another is... Game of Thrones?

This, to me, was definitely the appeal of TV shows like Battlestar, Red Dwarf, Firefly, or to a weirder and lesser extent, Lexx. Maybe those are a stretch but they all carried the character based feeling of rag tag crew in space jalopy.

This is an excellent article. I did enjoy the Rashomon style flashbacks and it does reinforce this article's thesis, and the general reception of the film, as a film about unreliable narrators and the general battle over narrative itself, such as is it Rey's story or Poe's story or Rose's story or Kylo Ben's story & etc. The AV Club article does well to enumerate some other Japanese films that TLJ draws from, only glancing off of the topic of wuxia which I'm still amazed isn't touch on more directly.

I also played Yorkshire Gubbins, a very short and cute SCUMM style point and clicker game. Great voice acting.

I just did a marathon tour of the Norwood Suite. I knew this game would be a surreal and evocative soundscape of hipster weirdos, exploration of a dream world in vein of Myst, the Witness, Yume Nikki, Kentucky Route Zero, LSD: Dream Emulator. I really enjoyed what was in there. I didn't expect the game to have any sort of puzzles at all, and indeed it is a actually a character based quest chain, which is a style of adventure game I really enjoy. What I didn't expect was that it had such an interesting story and cast of interesting characters, which I don't mean to over hype, everything had an understated tone. It didn't over stay its welcome, perhaps just the right length for a restful trip. Short and suite. edit: here's an interesting article about Cosmo D's broken leg influencing him to get into Unity, on how he views it as music creation, and how he pours his love of New York into his games. https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/mvbk5b/how-indie-dev-cosmo-d-is-humanizing-new-york I played a bit of his other games, Saturn V and Off Peak, and it was like a real life Beginner's Guide, seeing the signifiers of this man's life.

I've never been comfortable using the mouse as a game interface so there's that. It's funny how this game makes higher sensitivity feel like I'm super strong. It really fulfills my power fantasy about being a hammer jar man.

Here it is, Version 0.0.1! https://stiegr.itch.io/awkwardness-and-harmony I've learned a lot about Gamemaker, and myself, in the process of this Jam. As usual, I perform best at the 11th hour, which is to say I won't work on a project until I know it's absolutely due. And then I'll complain about the lack of time and petition to extend the deadline, this is a life long issue. I spent most of my early parts of the main time line getting comfortable applying the few tutorials of Gamemaker I know into one project, and setting up a version control repository. Trying to expand my skills in the code, which is a frustrating endeavor for myself, so it was punctuated with long naps and distractions and life chores. At the 11th hour I decided to finally make all the other art assets, and this was something I probably should just start with next time, once I start pouring assets into the beast things get really exciting. I intend to update this with content and, who knows, maybe even game systems that meet the goals of the initial guideline. Good times, -Stieg R

This is probably a well tread line of thought be here I go. The strength of Star Wars IV was definitely how it had a strong meme-pool, taking Kurosawa films and WW2 films and mixing them with Flash Gordon films. The films after the original trilogy are suffering recurring generations of memetic inbreeding, the result of which being the contagions of goofy in jokes and stale retellings. Perhaps this is what's going on with mainstream cinema, lots of cultural memetic inbreeding without a diverse meme pool. How could star wars benefit from a more diverse meme pool? This almost happened with Rogue One and bringing in Donny Yen. There is a dazzling and brilliant world of Chinese and Korean martial arts cinema that make laser sword battles look dim by comparison. But Donny Yen was just one fun cameo and the wuxia themes have not been integrated into Star Wars. Maybe a less creepy thought is to look at it from Hegelian terms of the dialectic. The interesting thesis and antithesis of the original films was blending of different film genres between eastern feudal period pieces and western . But there's no more dialectic inside the Star Wars movies, it's become only within itself, which has become. A McLuhan-like media analysis perspective is also interest, to examine the way media trends influence Star Wars movies between the 60s 70s and the 2000s. Films used to be in the cinema, and a film goer would be exposed at least to the existence of the many options. With TV and internet, and the huge amounts of media to consume in the world, the selection process has become more specific. So there's less impetus to draw inspiration from outside a genre or market place, of the Hollywood blockbuster Marvel cinematic universe sphere. So my question is, what are the modern meme pools to pull the new dialectic from? What is the larger ecosystem of other non-Star Wars sci fi that are doing interesting things with genre mashing. The ones that come to mind to me are Her, which couid be a melding of 2000s proto-mumble-core with Wes Anderson style 70s new wave revitalism. Ex Machina, what did something. Black Mirror, that mixes twilight zone with social media. Video game narratives like Tacoma and SOMA or Talos Principle, that use epistolary format to submerge the reader into the the space world. It might be asking a lot for a big cash cow religiously devoted franchise to reference, pastiche, or rip off something interesting, like A New Hope did that to breath life into the Flash Gordon genre. But the current trajectory, of the franchise referencing literally its own parodies like Hardware Wars, is foreboding. Edit:

Oh wow I never knew about this Hardware Wars thing. It is such a specific style of 70s schlock. Fabulous. I'm feeling the criticism here about the original trilogy being about interesting character interactions and themes of friendship.

I have high expectations for episode IX to involve

I've been really enjoying Nick's stream. I picked it up myself and have been enjoying it. I actually think I enjoy playing it on a track pad. But I'm not really a good mouse input player in general, it just feels so random to me. Something about it captures the weirdness of 90s macintonosh games. I think its the mouse input. Harry the Handsome Executive comes to mind but that isn't really a mouse input game.. I also finally figured out why this man is in a cauldron. It's so that his center of gravity is always under him, so he doesn't have to worry about flipping over onto his head.

Very true. It also doesnt help that i was also viewing it in a 4DX theater with 3d glasses that was shaking my seat and blowing wind on me.

Ah that make a lot of sense. I honestly hadn't thought of the digital makeup approach but that's definitely at play. It's interesting because the scenes before the bridge destruction seemed like unadulterated Fisher, and everything after that had the uncanny glossiness. Which digital makeup explains. I'm sceptical if they were missing total coverage, pehaps scenes were collaged from different edits of footage with lot of cgi body actress replacement, e.g. in the Salt Hoth scenes. Perhaps the early bridge scenes had the least of this. What a morbid line of thought. Space Princess <3 👑

How much of Carrie Fisher's sequences were CGI and how much was authentic?

That is a really cute game! Congrats! That is a really cute human! Congrats!

Oh another thing I enjoyed,

Wow yeah! The new trails, changing color styles, and constellation titling is brilliant. Amazing work!

Just saw this in a 4DX theater, which is an experience I do not recommend. It's 3D glasses in chairs that rock back and forth and kick you in the back and spit water on you and blow fans on you.It was a bit like a three hour Star Tours ride, sure that is neat, but just like 3D glasses –which I admit I do find novel– it get physically painful after about 5 minutes, which is when the trailers are over. The fans were on during all the Ireland scenes which competed with the more chilled dialog and music there. I was interested to try the experience but I'll try and never do it again. 3D glasses, –which I admit I do find novel– are strenuous enough. As for the movie. I have thoroughly consumed all the spoilers I could get my hands on, that is just my way of consuming media. So my expectations carried that ambivalence of lowered expectations. Despite knowing all the plot beats, I was engaged and entertained in the whole movie, although tired at the 6th act. The Devil is in the details and there are lots of cool details. Perhaps my irritation at the 4DX made me grateful there was an interesting movie going on. As for plot specifics,