clyde

Thanks for posting this. I knew nothing about it and it looks like my kind of thing.

Jake Clover just came out with a 3D game. I really enjoyed it. Headphones are strongly recommended. Wilbler Park Here's a 5mb gif if me enjoying the night skies. I spent most of my time looking at the satellites and textured planets.

Now I wonder how to do this.

The pattern I see is that the distinctions which are used to identify us, such as racial ethinicity and gender, are used to gerrymander popular support in order to gain enough power to attempt to legitimize and determine property claims. So for instance, Native Americans were classified as savages so that their rights to property would be considered invalid. From what I hear about Israel and Palestine, the main conflict is between the violence of legitimatizating particular property-claims rather than others and the terroristic attacks that are trying deter the State in power from continuing that process. I've heard that similar methods are being used to disenfranchise the Romani people. When the rights of a group to the means of labor and wealth (property) are removed, that group becomes impoverished. Then the dominant power amplifies the the voices claiming that the disenfranchised are inherently selfish and that they just want things given to them rather than jumping through all the hoops (labor that benefits of the system that came into being in order to disenfranchise them). My understanding of social-justice is that it is a matter of understanding this pattern and alleviating it so that we can all have tons of opportunity to be awesome regardless of the identities imposed on us by larger society.

I think Moppy Returns shows a representation of moments of self-doubt and possibly overwhelming depression. Moppy Returns feels like an rethinking of Pete's scene from Operative Assailants. Instead of depicting the appearance that an action is going to be futile before necessitating an attempt (like in Pete's scene), Moppy Returns shows a protagonist that is trying to pretend that self-doubt (or possibly depression) will not be a factor in their performance so that they can push forward. This idea that everything is just a matter of will is shown to be absurd when Dark Moppy repeatitively knocks the character into a cutscene depicting a monologue about their resulting inability to get the key. The pacing of Dark Moppy's descents upon Moppy and the omnipresent (minor-chord?) tone reinforce the oppressiveness of the inevitability that the task will not be completed (in contrast to the seeming ease of having all the necessary elements on one screen).

The State maintains a threat of violence in order to enforce laws. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I would consider it violent to put someone in a cage against their will or threaten to do so.

This is an interesting perspective. For a long time I've thought that the purpose of nonviolence in dissenting groups was to encourage the State to act with less violence and exemplify to the populous how egregious State violence is. It makes sense that the State would be doing the same thing. Personally, I think social justice is rooted in property-rights and I see the State's legitamacy coming from being the arbiter of those rights, so it seems like a good place for the discussion.

Microsoft announces an AR device and made a mock-up video. I'm unable to separate the real from the illusion. http://www.polygon.com/2015/1/21/7867641/windows-holographic-is-the-next-era-of-windows

Someone on Twitter asked if the could try the visual novel system I'm attempting to build in Unity. I commented a bunch of it until I felt the need to make a demo and now I don't want to comment anymore (for right now). Anyway, if anyone finds this useful or wants to change it and make it their own, have at it. It's sloppy because I don't know what I am doing. RenPy was a big inspiration. https://db.tt/8rmgJIWm

So if the idea of Storyboardo that you upload single panels, arrange them and add pans and zooms? I would think that would be well received, especially if you included some backgrounds and characters in case they don't want to draw. As far as which project to commit to, I am bad at this myself. Personally I wouldn't want to maintain something like that unless it was making money. But a single priject doesn't take much maintainance. If the single project is similar to the tool-project, maybe you could make the single project to demo the tool? You might have already said that.

You may be interested in Bad Piggies and to a lesser extent Robocraft. They aren't nearly as detailed in physics and customization, but they are very accessible (you can build stuff fast) and the activity is pretty similar to what I imagine this game is.

I don't have much to say about this issue, but I'm hoping that it becomes a discussion about "When is violent action is legitimate?" I know that it sometimes is, but I don't know how to tell the difference.

That's a cool interpretation.

For the week of February 2nd, 2015 we will be playing: Moppy Returns 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.

I just started playing Beeswing this morning. I'm not very far in, but I'm surprised by how valuable this game has already become for me. I've read reviews like this one that talk about how much Beeswing brings to mind a particular place, and I've read reviews like this one about how sophmoric the dialogue is. I think both critcisms are accurate. Jack King-Spooner fills a sketchbook with drawings of places in his hometown and writes down what he remembers about conversations he has had with people there. It feels incredibly voyeuristic. I would never feel comfortable revealing all this stuff about people I've met and how I summarize them, but I sure do enjoy playing through a game where someone else has done it. The best comparison I can make to Beeswing is Daguerreotypes by Agnes Varda. Agnes Varda is much more successful at removing herself from how the folks are depicted (though it's still mostly her perspective), but I've never seen such an explicitly autobiographical game before. More of this please.

I just bought this for the iphone and I'm enjoying it. I have no experience with turn-based roguelikes on tiles. Does 868-HACK add something to the genre? I don't have enough knowledge of the genre to know. This game is pretty much exactly what I imagined a turn-based roguelike on tiles would be.

What's the difference between something that is surreal and something that is phantasmagoric? Which one would you use to describe the typewriter in the movie Naked Lunch?

So for those of you who don't read the Game Development forums my game-making goal for 2015 is to experiment with episodic character-driven games with an emphasis on romance. So obviously I need to play romance-games. I don't want to buy any though. Discussion is incredibly helpful for me because it keeps me excited about stuff over a long period of time. Discussion of games also helps me learn from the mistakes and successes of others with much less effort than making them myself. I can get a lot out of putting my thoughts on a game into words, but hearing what other people have to say about them reminds me of how different everyone is (which is relevant because eventually other people will be playing the episodic character-driven games I make which emphasize romance). I think you get the idea. I'll be posting free romance-games here. If you have something to say about one of them, then please share. If you find a free romance-game that you want to share, please post it.

I just played With Those We Love Alive. I played it a few months ago but I didn't have enough ground in order to appreciate it as much as I did the second time. I enjoyed it the first time, but because it can often feel unresponsive (Save the Date can also feel this way for different systemic reasons) I didn't have the patience to appreciate a lot of what it has to offer. I was enraptured by the world as the politics and threats on a personal scale excited me. I didn't really pick up on romance at all; I didn't even have a sense of a convincing friendship. So when TychoCelchuuu recommended it in this thread I was confused, but trusting. Playing it with a good understanding of how time progresses mechanically and looking at in a romantic context greatly increased my enjoyment of With Those We Love Alive. The majority of the story is spent establishing the role/duties and reputation of the protagonist after separation with the friend has occurred and the original relationship feels ambigious for the most part. Certain specificity is presented once in a while to add persuasiveness to the relationship between the friends, showing that it existed with in manifested detail and establishing a relatability for the reader in this phantasmagoric world. When considering this game as a romance, all of this build up (the world, the politics, the personal history, the threats, the duty, the pomp) can be seen as something for the hallucinagen-scene to kick off of. The scene where old friends remember their trust, forged in shared suffering, puts everything else into perspective. This is most certainly a form of love, a romance and Porpentine accomplishes the denotion of it extraordinarily well. When an old friend of mine comes near, it can be stressful because my role has changed in the time since they were around. I'm invested in the decisions I've made while they were away and it can feel that my old role and my new role are competing. The most succint example of this in my personal experience is one time I came back to town from college and got picked up by my friend Dan who was still in highschool. We drove out to a strip-mall chinese restaurant where our friend Katie was working. She comes to our table and is like "Do y'all want some food?" Dan looks around and says "No, do you want to come with us?" Katie looks around at the situation and says "Sure", quits right then, and we went on an adventure. My old friends will most likely win that battle you know? That's romance. So why? Why does it work that way? Well in the garden-scene I think that the case is made. There is a freedom that comes from the unreasonable sense of security that some friends can give you. In that protection, you can take off the uniform and remove the ranks you've earned in order to get about within the current, local system of resource-allotment. When that happens the control-orientated part of your being that gets you the shit you need can be replaced with a vulnerability, a state of receptiveness. It's child-like. And in that receptiveness, one may look around at the set which has felt so oppressive since so many things have been negotiated over time, and it just becomes matter. It's just bullshit. The uniform becomes silly as soon as you take it off and your friend jokingly pretends to wear it themself. The stuff that you thought was making decisions for you becomes a material that can be used for that, or any other purpose. I know it sounds corny, but this is one of the powers of love.

I'm so glad these small Unity games tend to have terrains that can be traversed in small quantities of time. Things like what you describe Karmarot, and the descriptions about what it takes in Journey and Shadow of the Colossus seem like they take enough commitment to dissuade me.

I don't know but my moods fluctuate in a way where I am content with my general experience. Sometimes I feel shitty for no reason, sometimes I'm excited, most of the time I feel like ate too much oatmeal. It's alright. Naps solve most of my problems. I'm very fortunate and doubt that my experience translates well. I love it when I'm enthusiastic about things but other days I do nothing that needs to be done successfully because I can feel my disinterest. What I'm trying to say is that I've had success not with always being happy and enthusiastic, but by paying attention to my demeanors in order to get good at identifying them and then accepting my limitations while within their influence. Sometimes I have to take drastic action if I've been in one mood for multiple days, but mostly it's just trying to be flexible enough to take advantage of my range of moods when they occur.

So I've been curious about Minimum because it looks vaguely similar to Super Monday Night Combat in its game-mechanics. It's on sale so I just said "fuck it" and paid the two fifty. These are initial impressions based off of an hour or so of play on a day when it's likely populated with noobs. The main mode and appeal is called "Titan Mode". What happens is that both teams have a single giant that progresses in a single lane towards each other to do battle. You can do damage to their giant in order to give yours an advantage. One giant defeats the other and then moves toward a goal that it will try to destroy. Once that giant is destroyed a "creep phase" begins where harmless loot-goblins spawn in various parts of the map. The loot allows you to upgrade armor (which is kinda like a class-system) and give your giant an advantage during the next titan-battle. So the titans spawn and repeat the process until one of the titans destroys an enemy base. During all of this you will be shooting enemy players and getting shot, the also have swords. When a player is killed they drop a weapon power-up (I think). Oh, you also have grenades that are on a cool-down system. The movement is in third-person and movement speeds feel maybe like Halo? My first impressions on how this works in practice: Not knowing the maps, if I run around alone, I die and power up other players, so I try to stick with my team. When the titans meet in the middle of the map, I try to take cover on our side and lob grenades at the titans. I've been assuming that there is no friendly-fire, this may not be the case because every once in a while the words "Sabaooge" appear on the screen. As I'm shooting the titan, someone will inevitably flank me with a sword, kill me, and go through highlander-convulsions. During the creep-phase, it appears that your melee sword is the best bet because you have to pick up the loot and if you shoot the creeps at a distance, the enemy might eat your lunch. I kinda feel like the titans and the creeps in this game are things that distract you so that you will get flanked. I do not feel that Super Monday Night Combat is like that. In Super Monday Night Combat, I'm pushing my lane. Even when I'm damaging the enemy titan in Minimum, I don't feel like I'm hitting it (maybe I'm not), it doesn't feel like a push, it's more similar to an air-drop in Rust, it's bait. There are a few other major differences from SMNC. There doesn't appear to be a grappling mechanic which is a huge part of how SMNC encourages teamwork. Comparatively, Minimum has zero personality; the featureless, glowing low-poly environments are pleasant, but they don't encourage me to imagine the world and there are no characters. Of the abilities/weapons I've seen, it's more of a customizable loadout than a balanced class. Maybe it's because I don't realize how much damage I'm doing by feeding because I'm new, but the intensity of this game appears much more relaxing than SMNC. Like I said, I haven't played much so subtle reads of the match-state are beyond me but so far I really have little concept of which team is winning or what I should be focusing on. Should I be killing players to keep them nerfed since the weapon-leveling resets on death? Or should be be trying to control the middle of the map to give our titan an advantage. I don't even know if there is friendly fire. But as my first impression goes, Minimum's phases in titan-mode feel orthogonal. I'm not at all unhappy with my purchase though. I can see myself playing this game every once in a while after the inital high of discovering the systems. There is meta-leveling with weapon, armor, and gadget unlocks that are completely unattached from the leveling in the matches. It'll take a while to figure out how to use the weapons and armor I have available because they change during the match. I enjoy spending a little bit of time testing the small amount of weapons. Just finding out what the maps are like and how different people play the game is worth $2.50 for me. It takes a good amount of hits to kill someone with the assault rifle so I've had some fun Halo-style stand-offs at mid-range and had teammates back me up. I just don't know enough yet; I wonder if there are more effective ways to influence the titan-battle, I don't know where the creeps spawn, I get disorientated a lot and end up in the enemy spawn. But I am enjoying the game. It feels like a third-person Halo 3with no vehicles, a titan-battle to focus on and farming instead of powerups. I haven't seen that combination before and it's interesting to explore for a bit. The biggest appeal for me are the multiple times per match that I end up in 15 second scuffles that include retreats and manuevering. Minimum has a much, much smaller scope than Titanfall and initiallly, the objectives/mechanics don't feel tightly woven like in SMNC, but it's different and I'm having fun playing it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vkGEFknEd0

I've put some more time into titan mode and it doesn't take long to learn the maps and get familiar with the rhythm (which is good). But I have started to find some nuisances that make me think I won't spend to much time with Minimum. -The collision detection of some things doesn't seem refined in important ways. I keep getting stuck when very close to titans and when jumping over knee-high geometry. (I don't get stuck for very long, but in a competitive multiplayer shooter, it doesn't take long for a snag to be a problem). -I don't know if it is my controller, the net-code, or something else, but sometimes shooting, jumping, and especially throwing grenades does not feel responsive and snappy. The grenades have a cool-down so I think that complicates them a bit, but still. -Of the first three weapons available, I don't like any of them. The assault-rifle is my favorite, but when it levels up it turns into a horizontal spread rifle which is so irritating. I want it to be good for burst fire on one target. The shotgun is great at short-range but it encourages sneaking up on other players the entire time and I like the cover-based skirmishes most. The sniper rifle suffers from that lag I was talking about before, it's pretty much unusable for me. I get the impression that a competitive shooter requires more refinement than this team is capable of. I wouldn't care much about these problems in other types of games, but snagging on geometry in a counter-intuitive way when being chased in a multiplayer shooter is infuriating. Pressing the grenade button and it only getting thrown a little bit after your third press when it was immediate a moment ago when I'm trying to get someone dead so I can get to the golden creep is really off-putting. Maybe they will fix the problems or my internet will get better. But I run into one of these issues atleast 3 times a match and it takes away from my enjoyment of the game.

The linked article in there about Shadow of the Colossus's Last Big Secret is really exciting.

Chris Priestman wrote an article about BottomlessPitsInGames. http://killscreendaily.com/articles/bottomless-pits/?utm_content=buffer0b647&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer The article makes it sound like such an interesting way to appreciate a game.