clyde

-I'm really looking forward to the audio being implimented. -The character that "you" refers to seem to change abruptly and it was confusing. This is because I assumed that it was a CD they had made for me. If it's clarified that you gave them the CD early, this is not an issue. -I wasn't sure if my choice to not keep the CD was registered. It kinda sounded like I was reading text that said I was keeping it. Maybe if I put it into something that I was obviously returning, this wouldn't be the case. -The "pregnant pause" and "abortive 'Take Care'" comes off as an attempt to sound clever rather than as a corroborated metaphor. As a comparison, the dubbed videotape simile is expressive because it makes me think that the character thinks of things in terms of their own hobbies and vhs-collection fits with how I imagine the character. -"or the time you wasted trying to learn the names of the characters on Babylon 5" is particularly good. I like thinking that it is wasted time only because they are no longer together. I'm anxious to see how the music works into this.

Today I learned how to identify and manage my limits. Writing seems a lot like scripting. I really wanted to get to a certain point (tying a scene up) and that motivation actually helped me get a lot of the first draft done. But at some point I was just rewriting one sentence over and over for 15 minutes and becoming less and less satisfied with the results. That was at 6pm. I took a break from the game for a while even though I kept thinking about it involuntarily. About three hours later, I wasn't thinking about it as much and I was able to go back in and finish tying the scene up. I did rewrite that sentence, but it only took a minute and it is much better now. The first draft of that scene is far from perfect, but it is a a really good first draft. So now I know that I can push it out until I feel like I'm making everything worse. At that time I should take a break until I'm distracted by other things (rather than distracted by it while doing other things). This is useful information.

If you just focus on writing one of those cases by having your characters act within the circumstances of your premise, you will end up with a Twine that takes me 30 minutes to 1 hour to get through (and likely an enjoyable one). Personally, I prefer finding out about the worlds in speculative fiction by assuming that it is why my characters behave the way they do (the world necessitates it) than through explicit text I read in bulk. If you are interested, I think your goals would benefit from learning from my successes and failures which were described in this thread very thoroughly.

I haven't been following it, but here is my view as someone who just runs into it every once in a while: It seems like a hashtag-mob that is easily mobilized. I view it as a weapon that won't go away by pointing out its flaws because it thrives on low self-esteem and derision by others.

Mathnet fanfic. Makes me realize that I can much more easily visualize George's character than Kate's. This makes me think that George may be more campy. From my perspective, the author nails George.

Current Status: My first draft of the scene I'm working on is so bad. I can't tell if I'm investing in paths that I should probably remove or if I'm creating the necessary armature for narrative brilliance that will come after revisions. I don't really have a choice either way I suppose. I just need to be writing it. It's not like I am choosing between writing something good and writing this. If I had the choice, I would be writing something good. Here is a situation where I just need to keep going regardless of the quality. I can worry about quality once I have my armature to add to and manipulate. I think I probably feel this way more because the characters aren't being silly in this scene. I'm not used to writing dialogue that isn't sketch-comedy jokes. I'll keep pushing.

Great episode. The discussion at the end about what a grand-strategy game which expresses something besides the perspective of colonialism would look like was especially interesting. I enjoyed hearing y'all discuss whether this will come from a commercial entity or from passion-projects of hobbyists. It will come. I know it's a crude analogy, but it seems like strategy-gaming is waiting for its Minecraft. Eventually a small developer will realize that computational power has made the fantasy of what they've always wanted a grand-strategy to be, possible. Isn't the dream to play one of these games in a world where the other nations consist of alliances between tribes that can be manipulated? And that each one of those tribes be not only interesting in itself, but also in how it mixes with is nation? That's the game I'm waiting for anyway. I think that some small developer is probably going to tackle this with clever procedural-generation and genetic-algorithm A.I. and concise priorities. The U.I. in MineCraft was and continues to be shitty, but it doesn't make a difference if the fantasy is realized for the first time.

I like thinking that #StopWebH8 was just an easy honey-pot to set up so that any curious Twitter users who haven't seen gamergate can get a quick idea of how childish they are.

It might be an over-optimizing question but, is that code getting the component every frame? Does that slow it down significantly?

I compare it to shooting dudes in games. It's a power-fantasy that I enjoy experimenting with in a fictional world.

I liked that Liara had her own thing going and that it was based on something she was actively enthusiastic about rather than something she was avoiding or something she thought someone else wanted her to do. I wanted to help her reach her potential because I was also interested in her goals. The non-human aspect was also exotic.

I think Mass-Effect was the first game I played that had a romance-option so I pretty much ran into Ashley's arms even though she was pretty uninteresting as a partner. I was loyal though, we pretty much had a boring relationship. I think we both just wanted to forget it ever happened in 2(? my memory isn't good) more than it fizzling out. Didn't she die of a disease or something? I was totally into Liara during the ShadowBroker DLC and I thought Miranda looked hot, but nothing satisfying ever really happened with my romances. I just wanted to camp out in the ShadowBroker's base and watch TV with Liara for the rest of the series. Talk about shit, listen to music, fuck.

I'm in a similar position. I'm trying to write the armature-text for a single unbranching playthough this morning. I keep getting distracted by going into more detailed dialogue, but I need that detailed dialogue too so I'm not complaining. The process is just time consuming.

I love the look of the models. Is there a high number of polygons or is it a normal map or texture that gives it that wrinkly look?

Lol.

I'm thinking that the narrative-structure of the game will be similar to one of those jokes where something happens three or so times and then you get a punchline. I had two of the jokes, but needed a third. simbiotik came up with a good suggestion. Once I thought about the three jokes more, I saw how they could be connected for an amplifying effect. Now I think that I have a pretty good idea of how the entire narrative will play out even though I have only written excerpts of dialogue that are experimental jokes and events that I have decided I want to include. My plan is to write out a first draft directly in TyranoBuilder, use placeholder art for anything I end up needing, and send it to the rest of the team so that I can find out if they like it, if they have any concerns, and see if they have any major changes to the narrative that would be funnier or more expressive of the themes. I won't be able to do all that tonight though, it will probably take me a day or two. So I'll just send simbiotik and Capt. Haistings portions of the first draft in webBuilds regularly as I write it.

This looks so wonderful and goofy.

simbiotik sent me character art-assets the other day so now I can write the dialogue more easily. Before I know what the characters look like, I have a hard time imagining what they might say; I'm superficial like that. I have some ideas for some jokes I want to include and a pretty good idea for how the game can end in a satisfying way. This morning I was doing some conceptualization work and realized that the narrative needs more than humor to do simbiotik's art justice. Luckily, there basic narrative deals with interesting and complex subjects such as sound-territory and cultural zoning of times and places for work and fun (which are not traditionally mixed). Having simbiotik invest in the project makes me really want to make an interesting and compelling narrative for the game. I won't get overwhelmed though, I'm just going to write first drafts and then fix them multiple times. The structure is easy to understand and since I have an ending in mind and a theme I want to express, it'll be easier to pare the inessential stuff from a succinct, entertaining narrative.

For the week of April 13th, 2015 we will be playing: Work Drinks by thecatamites You can play the game in your browser here. You can download the single game from here for free Or you can buy the entire collection of 50 games from here.

Over the past year, I've been following @thecatamites on Twitter, reading some of excerpts from A1 Reviews, and I read Stephen "thecatamites" Murphy's article about the cultural practices of the RPG Maker scene of a certain time and place in Arcade Review #3 (now free). One of the things I've picked up on is that Murphy has a explorative interest in determining inherent qualities within RPG Maker games and top-down jRPGs in relation. I know very little about RPG Maker (and little about top-down jRPGs), but I get the impression that certain game-tropes were established by early jRPGs, those tropes were expected to be easy-to-integrate features by users of RPG Maker, and so RPG Maker games have a tendency to rely on and strengthen those jRPG tropes. I can easily see how this would happen with any genre-specific prosumer game-engine. It's interesting material, it's got a intriguing which-came-first feedback-loop going for it; do the community expectations of genre-signifiers determine inclusion of collection-quests and battles, or does the prevalance of collection-quests and battles determine the community's idea of what makes a top-down jRPG a top-down jRPG? Exploration of the jRPG-form's essential aspects will ultimately lead to this feedback-driven genetic algorithm of ambigious fitness-functions since it is the process from which the instances of detail come. Frank Tomato HD is an expression of what those established tropes and expected systems offer us indirectly. We are presented with a forgotten valley, what I see as the aftermath of earlier playthrough. RPGs tend to spot vast landscapes with small zoomable points of interest, denoted with map-icons. Once in those places of interest, we often have either NPCs to get quests from, puzzles to solve, enemies to encounter and defeat, treasure-chests to loot, or world atmosphere to take in. The player is typically encouraged to permanently plunder the use from all but one of those. In my personal gaming experience, Far Cry 2's respawning check-points is the climax of a debate between two sensibilities. There are those who felt inconvenienced by having to fight through areas they've already conquered, and there are those who fear the desertification of the fertile enemy-grounds upon which the player may test their weapons and skills. I'm a fan of watching that debate and others like it rationalize themselves with game-narrative implications rather than the arguments of the player's mechanical experience. In the case of Far Cry 2, this can become a debate that has some odd similarities to debates about U.S. military-strategy in contemporary wars; many believe that military-goals are achieved by fighting through the check-points, forgetting that this depends on the political views of those who repopulate the check-point. I apoligize if that analogy looks like I'm equating computer-game targets to actual people, my intention is instead to compare the simplistic fire-power fantasies of war-hawks egged on by defense contractors to the expectations of a gamer who wants worlds crafted exclusively for the execution of their own heroics. Frank Tomato HD is a commentary on the player-spoils-desertification side-effect of the no-respawn design-decision. Empty towns, dungeons designed with architectual psychology techniques that now lead to corpses you don't remember the details of slaughtering and empty chests that once held items you have since ingested in battle or sold for scrap are remnants that you now find yourself wading through. Frank Tomato HD doesn't entirely communicate the effect since we play through the snap-shot of this later state without playing through the earlier combat that it results from, but this is of course necessary in order to guide the player into this contemplation; it is the only thing to pay attention to in Frank Tomato HD. Later, the player may think of Frank Tomato when playing though a Dragon Age, retrieving an unique item they have dropped because it encumbered them, but now need in order to complete a side-quest. Though, I think those items have no weight and cannot be removed from your inventory which is something that thecatamites may have also made a game about.

This is some pretty dry stuff that I couldn't manage to get very far into, but coming across it was too much of a coincidence, so I had to share. http://dviaviation.com/files/59657033.pdf

It's really weird when you don't know that the x and y axis is moving the central form at first. I thought the bullets were moving.

I really enjoy how you've given a depiction of the protagonist's circumstances and survival-status so much space and separated the playable area from it. I love that connection between the two frames. That was one of the cooler things about DOOM for me, having the little guy's head depict your status. But the more separation between physical space, the more intriqued I am. Pamela's Adventures in DreamLand is probably my favorite use of the device. Eventually I should make a game where everytime you die, it flips the ligh-switch of someone's home in Germany (I'm in the United States) and they have your phone-number.

What are the trails/paint made of? Are they gameObjects, particles, or lines?