SuperBiasedMan

@Gor I meant disproportionate to other games. Maybe my perceptions are off but a lot of buzz is apprehensive about this game where most other games get pretty uncritical responses until they can be properly played. @griddelol I feel like that would be a valid reason. I don't have any particular backing to make me think it's specifically the non traditional game play, just that this game has a lot of hype and it almost matches a traditional archetype but doesn't quite. Minecraft built its popularity post (sort of) release, it didn't gather hype based off the idea.

Tempering expectations is good but it's being disproportionately thrown on NMS cause it seems to have non traditional game play.

I imagine it's to do with the facts that video sharing is a hard nut to crack and Internet services are rife with monopolies because a service being popular makes it far more attractive on the Internet than a new one does.

Essentially I believe the idea is that sexy characters are given excuses to be sexy. The excuses can often be ridiculous (see: MGSV Quiet) but are never just because, they instead conjure an excuse when it's clear that the design came first and the reason later. Which is problematic since it means the female character is not being considered as a human character, so much as they're designed to look a way as a sexual prop that then needs to be justified elsewhere. Bonus shit points for the fact that reasons often give her no agency, instead making her a target or victim of others' actions.

Her outfit is part of her sexualisation, so yes the Quiet counts undeniably. The female character is rendered a sexual object, that includes how she's dressed.

When you have time you should read the earlier posts Moddy. If I remember right we spent a long time trying to narrow to something like this idea of trying to make a sexualisation logical instead of handling it just as sexualisation. (also did this discussion happen on Justice Points? If so I've heard it too)

I think the idea is that bigotry is worse than shaming. Which I could see the argument for if it wasn't that bigotry was viewed as some awful taint on your soul.

Yeah I don't often find ads very obtrusive. I do think the industry was gross, but even if I could pay everyone for the free stuff I consume, I know not enough people would to make it viable (at least not in the current systems). I agree as well though about buying individual podcasts feeling off. A subscription model seems more suitable to me. Radiotopia has one right now that I'll probably kick some money into once I look up how it works.

I'm not sure that's right. I listened to that show and they talked about people complaining when they started charging for their previously free podcast.

I hope you make an effort to donate to Patreons and buy people's digital goods to support better models of funding than advertising.

I don't think it's as much an issue of their options as it's an issue of them not being trained to recognise their biases and handle them to prevent flipping and over a black girl when they'd be more courteous to a rebellious white girl.

Also important chat. This is the serious stuff we discuss.

What's scarier about the authority answer is that the police officer is probably thinking exactly that, and that's why they feel justified in their behaviour.

Likewise I'm intrigued about pitching Divinity to my SO. Our games tastes occasionally overlap and this *may* be one of those cases...

I think the real meat of CK2 is not in beating it, but in interacting with it to create fun, interesting stories. Like one about how the Irish Count of Ossory's lineage created the British Empire (with an uncomfortable amount of kinslaying on the way).

I have used it to help teach one friend. Me and my girlfriend intended to at some point play so we could essentially turn our countries into empires and dominate the rest of Europe. Sadly we didn't find time to make a Europe comprised mainly of the Irish and Swedish empires.

Sweet collection of recs! Now to start testing them out and appease my dwindling backlogs. Thanks folks!

Hello Thumbs, this is my first log about an Android game I'm making. As in, I'm making it in Android Studio. The game is mostly an interactive fiction game about being a solo human traveling through space to seek out life. You pilot a ship with a dog your only companion, hence the working title being Laika. But that's all you need to know about the premise for now (and it's subject to change). This first post is going to be about how I'm setting up a system to randomly generate planets. A significant part of this game will involve randomisation, including the planet sprites. The game will be made with pixel art, as I think it can work as a naive space look. Since it's an Android app, I'm concerned about making the generation overly heavy on resources, as well as trying to avoid an approach that will involve storing tons of pictures on someone's phone. At the end of the game I intend to save a big chart of all the visited planets, so it's important to be able to recreate all the previously visited places. Since undirected random generation without any sense is a mess, I decided on a pretty simple approach. Each planet is comprised of a palette which contains 2-4 colour values. Then some pre-drawn sprites are coloured to match the palette and layered on top of each other. There's a set of specific base images that will always form the bottom layer of the image, and then each base has a corresponding set of textures to randomly choose from. I could technically make textures base agnostic, but I think that would be harder to do and lack a satisfying degree of specificity. The process, in simple terms is: One of the palettes is randomly chosen. A base is randomly chosen and coloured to match the first colour of the palette. Textures matching the base's size are chosen and coloured one by one until there's a layer for each colour in the palette. This essentially leaves me with a set of images that can then be layered into one picture, creating a planet. Here's some examples: Of course, there's immediately one big issue with this approach. When randomly combining assets it's harder to determine if one of them is bad or ill fitting. How can I quality control the palettes, bases and textures that I'm plugging into my generator? I thought of a pretty simple way to manage this and it's essentially tindr, but for planets. I set up a simple screen with , and buttons. I quickly evaluate the overall quality of a sprite and click the corresponding button to say if it's bad, acceptable or good. That button will then accordingly affect the 'score' of every asset used in the current planet. The idea is that bad assets will recurringly show up in bad looking planets, and a negative aggregate score will indicate that I should remove it, and more importantly look at why it might have been a bad one to include, to avoid making the same mistake on future assets. Likewise I can look at overall trends that seem to be going poorly. So even if there isn't a specific bad one, maybe I can detect that 4 colour palettes all have poor scores and there may be a problem there. Here's how the basic gif gist of how this process looks: spoilered for size) Also here's a still of a brief results screen: It's early, and I have quite few assets actually in the mix so there's obvious repeating already. But it does seem to be indicating that a 4 colour palette is overdoing it with the way I've been approaching textures. So maybe I stick to only 2/3 colour palettes? Or maybe my colours are just a hot mess (they are). Whatever the problem, I have a good feedback loop to plug in a bunch of assets and test them. Instead of humming and hawing, I can get a clear set of results from a quick simple blast through a ton of generated planets. That's all for now, next I'm hoping to work on directing the look and feel of this hot mess into a cool mess. That means whipping random assets into shape as well as the style of the UI elements and how you actually interact with the game.

Yeah I enjoyed Crimson peak as another movie by Del Toro where it's just a well made film. It doesn't do anything super unique or original but what he does do works quite well. In the same vein as Pacific Rim, but I guess by the books action movies seem to be received better for some reason.

I think this would be great and would solve so many problems with history podcasts. I tried out a bunch but I couldn't get into History of Rome or China because as hard as the dudes tried there was just too much information flow. I've been doing ok with Revolutions and the History of Byzantium but I would definitely appreciate them more if it felt more conversational. I think that's why Hardcore History is so easy to listen to. It has the feel of a friend in a pub going through a clear detailed story more than it's an explanation.

What Merus said, but also thinks like B being cancel in many cases is a kind of mapping. Your brain has learned that cancel is in that spot as well as "cancel-like" actions. A good QTE will establish useful mappable conventions, rather than spewing arbitrary button presses that have no real connection to anything. ie. Dodge might consistently be a certain button/s, then a block might be another, while running is some analog input.

This is why natural mapping is important.

Good "games discussed" list this week.

Back to the Future Today