Deadpan

Yeah, definitely recommend desktop Twine over the online version if you can use it. I'm not sure if online Twine doesn't support multiple stylesheets or things like disabling the use of the back button to undo choices or if I just haven't found these yet. It's definitely not as intuitive as the desktop version for anything more complicated than linking passages together though.

Reminds me of this. That timeline would be so unbelievably cluttered right now if it was still being maintained.

That's still one of the less ridiculous names to come out of the generator.

Probably going to have to take a break from this until the end of the week now to address the matter of a paper that is strangely not writing itself when I'm not looking, but meanwhile, I uploaded what I've built so far for anybody curious. I figure this is about 33% of the game at the moment. Haven't gotten to any big choices yet, but I'm also following the Telltale school of only putting a few big hitters in there. Also, the tone might be a little inconsistent depending on whether you get a real sounding superhero name or some goofy goof.

I suppose it could also be them projecting way hard about how they instantly pick up any absurd accusations slung at their targets and enshrine it as part of their dogma.

"Unfortunately their opinion is being picked up by a lot of people" I really wonder what kind of twisted dialectics you have to come up with in your own head in order to imagine that people would just look at an article and go "Yeah, I believe in this now" instead of supporting it because they already felt that way.

This looks amazing.

More like babygame meets babygame meets babygame.

If you removed the Nick Breckon aspect, this could make for an interesting "goofy physics" game in which you pile babies on top of each other. Actually why has nobody taken Ep. 93: Babywall the Horse Armor yet?

I'm using it, but only in the vague sense that it'll be one of the possible results of the name generator that runs when you reach the right passage. Definitely still up for grabs. Right now I'm toying with the idea of implementing a couple of low-frequency special results like "Dishonored Nick Breckon"

I had trouble coming up with a name for the superhero person you're working with, so I decided to put that up to a random roll as well. Took a little bit of tweaking since most combinations of obvious words like night, crawl, blade, shade etc. are already taken (I forgot how absurd comics are), but I think I got it working decently now. Some interesting results.

I'm curious what you're planning for this mechanically.

They are doing the Lord's work. Or were.

Just a little, yeah. Certainly not, but it's also not his job to make the company look bad or to personally gloat over their error in any way. The deferential attitude you mention is an issue, but so is the us vs. them mentality of grilling developers and feeling personally wronged if they mess up (two different emotional reactions that come from a very similar place in people) and "Haha, they dun goofed" places itself in the tradition, if unintentional, of industry "watchdogs" who understand that role to mean making sure companies continue to churn out uninspired drivel and they actually get as many hours of wish fulfillment as was promised on the back of some box. Or else. This is part of a much longer conversation about the function of games writing of course, but for me that little goof is a good example of a scene that is less interested in asking challenging, broad questions about culture, art, or means of production than it is in asking "Why were you at that hotel last week when your game still isn't done?", "Why didn't you make the game the way I want?", "Why didn't you register the domain in time?" Which is challenging only in so far as it challenges the industry to keep up their part of the announcement, trailer, preview routine.

Fortunately, the Twine side stuff of this should be fairly simple to handle. Twine tracks variables automatically, you just need to set them once and can call them at any later point in the story (keep in mind though that when you test play from later passages, you might skip the passage where you originally set a variable, and that might cause issues). The background and color things will take some messing with stylesheets. You can probably find the right selector somewhere in that list and then cobble together what you need specifically with a bit of googling, at least that's how I usually do it. I'm not sure how to do audio (except that it's definitely possible) but this or this might help. You can set timers in Twine! Depending on what you want, the timedreplace or timedgoto macros could be helpful here. The former is for adding or changing text on the passage you're already on, the latter for moving you to a new passage. Good luck spinning that yarn!

There's still a pretty big difference between somebody punishing Lego for their mistake and you actively deciding to be that somebody (if a pretty kind version of that person). If he wanted to resolve this agreeably with them, he could have simply pointed it out to them, or secured the domain and completed the handover before tweeting about it (briefly put up a funny image on there if you want to joke about it later I guess). To avoid claims of favoritism or getting entangled in the affairs he writes about, he could have stayed out of it entirely. I'm not sure which of the two is ideal, honestly. Likewise, there's a big difference between making assumptions about what could have happened if everything suddenly moved in a completely new direction for no reason, or speculating on what might have happened if events continued along the track they were already on. It's patently absurd to assume for no reason that you or I would commit horrible murder, but does the assumption stay patently ridiculous when we buy a toy gun, take it to a public event and wave it around for laughs? Is it still clear to everyone that we mean no harm? Or does our behavior in some way make us responsible for the misunderstanding we are then upset about?

Is that IRC channel going yet?

The idea that this is bad because GG will use it to their advantage is obviously ridiculous. They are a uniquely abysmal arbiter of ethics. As has been noted, they really don't need anybody's help to come up with new spurious claims, and on the flipside, any genuine ethical quandary has so far proven to go straight over their heads. The guy also probably doesn't deserve to be fired for pulling a prank. That said, it's still unprofessional behavior for somebody writing about games. He didn't register a , but the one Lego would be interested in themselves, which has the uncomfortable air of ransoming it, even if that wasn't acted on. That he transferred it to them without demands doesn't change that he created a scenario he easily could have abused - similar to how a stranger grabbing your phone without asking to make a quick call and then giving it back is not the same as it never having been gone. Especially since it's impossible to tell exactly what his original plans were here: his original tweet was only pointing out that he got the domain and the handover happened some time later after just about all of games Twitter pointed out that this looked more than a little shady. Plus the entire kerfluffle only draws more attention to Lego's goof in not registering that in advance. He isn't doing their job so much as drawing attention to the fact that they didn't do their job. There's a reason most of us can probably more easily imagine this coming from some too clever by half, vindicative nerd than a professional writer. Unintentional or not, it feels like somebody going "Gotcha!" at a company they have a complicated love/hate relationship with.

Really weird how GG thinks he used his position to his advantage there. Yeah, he might have heard of the new game before you, benefit of being tapped into this kind of thing, but he certainly wouldn't have heard of it before the company that makes the game and could/should have secured the domain months in advance. It's not like there's any laws saying domains have to be up in the air until there's and official announcement and developers have to scramble to register theirs the second when they release a trailer or something. Still, this is a pretty silly move from the Polygon guy given the internet's history of squatting on domain names in order to sell them for profit.

I prefer the physical duels in Dark Souls to any special type bossfights. If what I fight ends up spitting poison, breathing fire or tossing magic, I just feel like I'm being punished for not researching in advance which shield I was supposed to bring. Or not having the right kind of shield at all. Giant humanoids are more impressive than regular sized foes in that regard, but the games always walk a kind of line there with how badass something looks and how lumbering and ineffectual that makes it. Not as impressive when you learn that you just kind of have to walk under it and towards the side to make it flail ineffectually. Ornstein and Smough was pretty good, so was Artorias. Also that big guy on top of Sen's Fortress.

I ended up spending way more time during my break playing Dark Souls than preparing for this or getting things done in advance so I can focus on jamming. Probably whatever I do will be small and unfinished as a result of this.

Both of which are different from but still confused with idealization. Here's a good article on all that.

The idea wasn't to engage them in conversation so much as to drown out their meaningless babble about conspiracies and agendas.

The Escapist has closed its GG megathread and has instead created a subforum for discussing "games industry issues" with the intent of breaking the conversation into manageable threads and reintroducing some amount of moderation. So there's another place to nip potential conspiracy theories in the bud, and it might be interesting if, while GG scratches its head trying to work out if they still trust the site, somebody created discussions about actual games industry issues, like crunch, conflict minerals, unsustainable pay for art and criticism, app store censorship (Phone Story and such), etc.

Speaking of Bloodborne envy, I've been playing OG Dark Souls 2 the last few days to tide that over and it's nice to see it's still busy. I played the first Dark Souls way late, so it was a much more solitary experience. Strange seeing the pools of blood and messages in DS2 close to launch, but then I gave up on it after my save file got corrupted when my PC crashed during some online thing. I'm catching back up (and backing up that file every so often), and there are still plenty of people to summon or be summoned to, which is nice. The design changes in how humanity is awarded plus limited enemy spawns really make this a quite different game than the first, despite the directly quoted setting and set pieces.