NorthernBoreus

Hey all! I've started work on a tiny Wizard Jam game with the title "Great Play, Dad!" The back-of-the-box summary is this: Impress your kids by putting on the theatrical experience of a lifetime! Unfortunately, it looks like the rest of the stage crew called in sick, so you'll have to work hard if you want to hear "Great Play, Dad!" when the curtain falls! The game will be a single-screen 2D platformer where you play as the only member of a theater's stage crew who showed up for work today. You'll have to perform all the various tasks of the crew: running the sound board, operating the spotlight, changing out scenery, etc. This will be done by running around backstage and on the catwalk and interacting with different stations, responding to prompts coming from the stage (for example: an actor saying "He's got a gun!" will require the player to run to the soundboard and select the "Gunshot" sound effect). Each job will have a small minigame-esque task the player will have to perform in response to each particular prompt. As the play goes on, the prompts will start occurring with more frequency and the player will have to run around to get to them in time or else be penalized (likely with boos from the audience). I'm hoping to go for a Cook, Serve, Delicious kind of increasingly-frantic vibe, with a control system similar to Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime. As of now, I've got a simple platformer up and running, using Unity's built-in 2D Platformer assets with some tweaks made to allow for things like ladder-climbing. I've got placeholder sprites in for the backstage environment and the soundboard, and I've set up the scripting for the soundboard interface. I'm in the middle of setting up a GameController to manage when prompts appear, the player's score, ending the game, etc. Hopefully soon I'll have a vertical slice with all of the game's basic functionality, and I'll be able to add more prompts and tasks as time allows. I've had trouble in the past leaving projects unfinished, since I try to make everything perfect as I go and try to do everything myself. I'm making an effort to organize this project into discrete tasks that allow for multiple iterations, so I don't get bogged down with one aspect for too long. I'm also forcing myself to use things like Unity's 2D Platformer package rather than making all of that from scratch, which is what I've tried to do in past projects. I have to keep telling myself that it's better to finish an imperfect game than to give up on a perfect one.

How did we get to this point (Thanks, kickinthehead)

I'm watching for the first time, and I'm starting to see why people might drop the show around this point. When I was growing up, my mom used to tape Days of Our Lives and then fast-forward through certain storylines. I never really understood the mindset behind wanting to skip huge swaths of a story like that. Watching this episode, though, there were a couple times where I got up to grab something from another room and thought "Should I pause it? Who's in this scene? Dick Tremayne? Nah, I won't miss anything." There's still a lot that I want to continue to see, but with some of these storylines, I keep wondering what the point is. I'm definitely going to stick with it because I know so many people mention that there's a lot of payoff at the end, but it's getting tough. The Netflix description for the next episode mentions "concerns over little Nicky's past," which isn't exactly promising. When the episode started with that 50's-style music and a motorcycle approaching from the distance, my heart sank. I really loved the Denise stuff, and a huge part of it was the way Cooper was so on board with no hesitation. He's just so pleased to learn that someone has found a way to be happy. He's such a genuinely positive person, it's so endearing.

I was pretty disappointed by the scene in the Roadhouse, and it kind of made me realize something that's been bothering me about this season. All of these interesting characters have spent the entire series diverging off into all these different plot lines, many of which have nothing to do with Laura's death. And now we have them all in the same place finally, Leland and Ben Horne, Bobby and (comatose) Leo, Major Briggs and the old room service guy, all the law enforcement people, and then... Cooper just remembers a dream. It just feels like such a wasted opportunity to have some of these characters interact with each other in an interesting way, but instead they just hang out in the background. I know that the show can't only be about Laura's murder (and it shouldn't), and I enjoy all of the side stories that all these characters have (even the silly ones), but I wish that every once in a while there'd be some reminder that all of these people are living in the same world. In the first season, we had Bobby dealing drugs with Leo, who was working for Ben Horne, who was plotting against Catherine and Josie, who was romantically involved with Truman, who was in the Bookhouse Boys with James, who was doing his Teen Detective stuff with Donna, etc etc. It all felt like one story with lots of individual parts. Now it just feels like most story lines are happening in a vacuum.

I was guessing the word was skeuomorph: "a derivative object that retains ornamental design cues from structures that were necessary in the original." Apparently it's been around since the 19th Century, but I think it became a popular term more recently because Apple applied that design philosophy a lot.

I went back and replayed Super Mario 64 and Banjo Kazooie about a year ago, and I was actually a little surprised at how easy they seemed to me (Banjo Kazooie especially). I think a huge part of it for me, though, was that I had played both of these games a lot when I was around 7-8 years old (and I definitely remember struggling quite a bit), and they kind of built the base of my video game experience. I didn't recall every detail of every level, but at any point, probably for the rest of my life, I could pick up an N64 controller and beat "Wall Kicks Will Work" just from muscle memory. So I guess I may not be the most objective judge of these games' difficulties. I've never touched a PS1 or PS2, and have zero experience with any Sony games from that era, and I wouldn't be surprised if I had the same reactions to them as you have to Super Mario 64.

"I tell ya, this neighborhood has really gone to hell since these Kongs came here. Ya know, last night that Funky Kong drove past my house in some rocket-powered barrel that was so loud in damn near broke my windows. It's just plain indecent, I tell ya. And the banana peels! They just leave their banana peels all over the -- oh, hey Diddy, I didn't see you there. No, no, no, don't worry Diddy, I don't got a problem with you, you're one of the good ones."

I think this Onion article demonstrates your point pretty effectively. These horrible violent tragedies happen in the U.S. and we all freak out about them for a bit, but then we just kind of shrug our shoulders and move on, and accept this sort of thing as "normal." But you only have to look to other parts of the world to see that it isn't normal at all. And whatever reason people want to point to as why these things are more common in the U.S., whether it's lack of support for people with mental illnesses, or gun control legislation, or people's attitudes towards violence in general, all of these things are a direct result of our culture, and the media that we produce and experience makes up a huge part of what defines our culture.