SuperBiasedMan

I was introduced to it by the Friends at the Table podcast and it works really well there. Austin Walker is the GM and he knows how to take the moment and do something interesting with the moment. There's one scene where a character gets to choose from a list of options what bad thing happens to them. Austin begs them to choose "something breaks" because when the player does, Austin uses it as an opportunity to reveal a new detail about their character.

Agreed with Problem Machine. As someone who only played DnD for the first time this year, I'd like to hear what Sean's approach to the system is.

Dungeons Today

They were probably thinking of Captain Walimar.

Oh woops, guess it was voicebox.py. Also it looks it's meant to run in Python 2. That line with the error is valid syntax for version 2, but not 3. That's poor choice on their part. :/

If it helps, you don't need to do any jiggery with the Python scripts if you don't wanna. Can just run main.py from the commandline and it all works. Besides that you just need to fiddle with putting your source texts into a folder. It's not a super intelligent thing, it only checks two words back, and it offers you 20 choices with the idea that you can pick good ones more so than it manages to provide a small sample of relevant options.

There's a tool someone wrote in Python, it's not Web based but pretty easy to run if you have Python installed. https://github.com/jbrew/voicebox I can talk you through how to do it, if anyone is curious.

I don't think anyone would be begrudged for adjusting to something more their level. I think part of the idea is to die early so that your game doesn't drag on long though.

I wonder is it inertia or has someone calculated that it wouldn't sell much better even as a cheaper product?

I'm most keen to see no sudden death, and more of a tough scrap to squeak out a win.

I haven't played this yet, but I think the thing is that for me I'd get bored either way. I didn't like Don't Starve at all, or Terraria. So no matter how good the survivalcraft mechanics are, they're just going to be an annoying obstacle to me. I'd rather be able to explore some planets for a little while and get tired of it relatively soon than spend a longer time exploring less planets because I spent so long with filler.

So the saga of my colony was pretty short lived. We struggled badly with nature, in constant need of food. And mentally these people were weak. TheWizard, Phaedrus Puffins and their dog Matilda all began their first day together by half building a shelter and then lieing under the stars to sleep at night. It's a lot less romantic than it sounds. But in spite of their poor construction skills, they all plowed on. We soon had a new wanderer join us. She was Sparkles, a depressive that ended up being much more trouble than she was worth. But we let her in for now, Puffins even gave Sparkles her own clothes, since Puffins wanted to be a nudist anyway. However there was some problems when we tried to recruit prisoners. We successfully got Ian to join our cause, but another prisoner turned on Puffins, nearly killing her. Puffin's father Phaedrus was cowering in a corner until Ian swooped in to attack the rogue prisoner, so Phaedrus could drag Puffins away. However with 5 mouths to feed we started running into food troubles. I realised just how bad it was when Puffins sat down at the dinner table to feast on a recently killed raider. I then made sure to focus harder on sustainable foods to last us longer. I built up a potato corn and strawberry farm, and it was going well. Things were even quiet enough that TheWizard finally wooed Puffins, and they became lovers. Sharing a room together. Though the hunting definitely left a mark on mother nature But then, the seasons were against us. Weather started getting colder, we still had only a bare electrical system. No heaters, just shoddy clothes. Even worse, all that food we had prepared froze solid. I had nothing but raw corn for food, since every time meals were prepared, they'd be frozen before anyone would eat them. Ian and TheWizard fell ill with hypothermia. Low on medecine, all Puffins could do was desperately feed her husband raw corn in the hope that she could nurse him back to health. With even more colonists dropping off, Phaedrus was starting to lose his cool. In a berserk rage, he attacked Matilda the wonder dog. She was such a wonder dog, she literally knocked him out and then dragged him to bed to get better. I feel so bad for this dog. However Puffins too began going berserk. The settlement was falling apart, her lover was dead and everything kept getting worse. Her and Phaedrus eventally killed each other in their rages, even wounding Matilda bad enough that she bled out alone. It was an unsustainable place, at their best they managed to house stray lost souls, but at their worst there was blood from four different creatures on the dining table.

My bad! I only paid attention to their traits and incapabilities, I didn't actually make sure people were good at all things. So uh, maybe drop the difficulty? I already played and died, so I'll post up my story soon.

I rolled up a new save, I went with better characters who weren't incapable of anything (but apparently have awful stats) but this time in a Boreal forest. The map looks pretty different, so that should be fun. The file is here, hope it generates some good stories.

I did some early testing with pseudo random generation and I've been having fun with it. I got a paragraph out of it that I like, after a few runs with it. I feel like getting used to it helps me figure out what are good words to choose. Sometimes I accidentally wrap around to a bunch of prepositions, which are less interesting than a bunch of adjectives or verbs. I'm not sure how much the Jane Eyre is coming out, it feels like that just bursts in occasionally to what's otherwise a very Thumbs-y, but I might play with weights to see if I can fix that. (Also even though it's tonally inappropriate I am entirely reading this in the voice Chris used for reading the Batman thing on the cast)

I finally came back to playing this, and it was a journey. This was only me second Rimworld game, so I was woefully unprepared to survive and I think it showed. This time, I wanted to tunnel into the mountain for my settlement (a decision which Rich, Cool and Goldblum weren't happy with, as they spent most of their stay unhappy with the surroundings). So here's the beginnings of the settlement ZUNE: You'll notice that at the front, I took the game's advice and set up traps for invaders. I was worried that people wouldn't be able to walk through that space, but it seemed that they were able to carefully sidestep the traps. ...though not always. RIP Goldblum, you just weren't paying attention that day. Goldblum's loss was tragic, I set up a grave and sent her to rest. This left a mark that Cool never forgot, and really this became her story. I did not remove the traps, as they helped us repel invaders more than once. But I did get a little less over eager to reset the traps each time. Soon after, trouble arrived. Phaedrus, an ex-lover of Cool, turned up. He was a valuable addition, even if he couldn't resist attempting to rekindle things with a woman grieving over the loss of her friend. We had a minor electrical fire, which confused me at first when I thought the steel table had spontaneously combusted. Little did I know, this would be the first of a bajillion electrical fires. Next time my people will just be amish. Soon after, we lost Rich to raiders. That wasn't that big a deal though, as Cool didn't particularly care for him. It did mean she was alone with her over eager ex lover, but thankfull they were soon joined by Cool's brother and ZUNE was finally able to amass decent food supplies. We had a fridge going, and tables set up for production. It was all going good. Then we received a distress call from Cool and her brother's grandmother. She was being chased by pirates, and badly needed shelter. How could anyone say no? What would be the worst that could happen... Her grandmother was killed very quickly, panicking as she tried to get in she tripped one of our traps. We did repel the invaders afterwards, but suffered bad injuries. Phaedrus started going berserk, broken down mentally. I tried to get Cool to whisk away the bodies, but she took one look at her deceased grandmother and went into her own berserk rage. She finally confronted Phaedrus over... everything, but he beat her down and carried on his restructive roaming. Her brother managed to get Cool to bed, and Phaedrus too shortly after. But with gunshot wounds, severe bleeding and no doctor, both were in dire straights. They got infected and died in the medical beds. Cool's brother was left all alone. With no idea what else to do, he did try to maintain the settlement. Shouldering every burden, he restored some of what ZUNE once was, but his fate was inevitable. Raiders attacked, they were repelled but he did not escape unscathed. He lay bleeding out, as a caravan arrived outside, wondering what all this stuff was. And what happened to the people who set it all up. This was a lot of fun! I'm gonna read other people's posts again now, but are we thinking of doing another save?

@itsamoose I might have read you wrong, but I would argue that if your actions don't have consequences in NMS then it's worse than if they did. The issue I see is that the ideology of consumption isn't particularly challenged, and the game modelling little to no consequences for your rabid consumption are part of that. The shallow simulation just restates a worldview that's too common to games. Of course it's a game about escapism, I think some people (like me) wanted the escape of having to go through devouring worlds. But also, the fact that this is such a common problem in games I wouldn't have singled out NMS for it, except maybe because people didn't expect it to be a survival game.

When I saw the whale part of the description I hoped it was just going to be Jake talking about this tweet for no reason. (the actual WhaleTalkTM was better)

Well you nailed it. I also meant to say I think it's better this way, than if it was an easy start that ramped up. Makes me feel like I've earned the points I get. 1) Hmm, I double checked and my phone setting is set to always be portrait. I may have been holding it in a landscape angle when starting the game. If you need more details on OS version, model etc. I can pass those on to you. 2) I'm not sure really! To be clear, I think what you have now is good and does make a lot of sense. I just read them wrong the first time, and wanted to say that. An arrow would read as less health-like anyway, the main thing that made me presume it was health was the plus shape being like the classic 'med pack' look. Sounds good! I'll try to discover new enemies then. Oh one other thing, does connecting to Google Play's Game service thing help with data for beta testing at all? I usually just ignore that on games I play and skip it, but if it provides anything useful for you I could sign in on your game.

I had a quick game and I am baaaad. I got about 15 points in on my best go, but it was a lot of fun. I agree on the soundtrack being great. Since I didn't get far I don't have much feedback, but two minor things. 1) I played on my phone, where it defaulted to being a widescreen view with the cabinet pictures either side. It should really default to locked portrait on a phone, and just have the switching option in the menu. 2) The power ups looked a bit to me like they were some form of health or shield (despite the fact that it's a one hit kill game). I don't know if you can change the picture much to mitigate that but I figured I'd bring it up anyway. Definitely fun, are there other enemy types I can find if I manage to last long enough?

Yes, if you ask politely.

Clunky compatability is something Nintendo has done, and it's better than nothing for people who never got a chance to play the game last time round. I'd be happy to get clunky access to games I missed from the Wii U if it were possible.

I have a weird idea for a starting point on this. On the Thumbs recently, they read a Batman episode summary, it was semi auto generated. It's an algorithm that reads source texts and can output suggestions of what words to put out, which a human then chooses leading to a new set of suggestions. Given the "reader" in the title, I want to use Thumbs episodes and Jane Eyre as sources, then see what possibly coherent thing I can write with this algorithm. It'll obviously be a first draft, but it's a fun way of trying to get inspiration so I hope I can pull it off.

As someone who's played Metroid games but not 2, I'm very interested in checking this out.

I just noticed how relevant the title of this thread is again.