Hermie

Alright Thumbeteers! Here is where you post a picture of you, the reader! There might have been a thread like this once upon a time, but instead of searching for it, I started a new one. Sue me. Here are the rules: 10 points for posting a picture of yourself. +1 point for every thumb visible. +1 point for every wizard related item in your picture. +5 points for reenacting an Idle Forums smilie. +10 points if the picture involves puffins in any way. +20 points if you are or have taken a picture with Chris, Jake, Nick, Steve, BM Bronstring "Marek Bronstring" Marek, or any other idlethumbs.net staff. +50 points if you are an actual wizard. If you get your actual picture taken with Jeff Goldblum, I will declare THREAD WIN, and ask a moderator to lock it. (PS: No shoops, I can tell by the pixels) I'll start it off! Go!

I don't you should think like that at all! Those all require different ways of using your brain than The Witness. In fact, the only thing "warming up" your brain for The Witness is other puzzles in The Witness. You've mentioned on Twitter that you have fun making games, but that art/asset creation is taxing for you. But it's not like you will get better at the art part of game making by doing more game design and coding, even though they're related. It kinda sounds like you're thinking in the outdated form of having one "IQ" that tells you that your brain is smart at exactly this level, no matter the task. It's okay to be better at some things than others.

Are we approaching..... The Breckoning?

This was the most Breckon episode to ever Breckon, and it was glorious. I particularly enjoyed Nick taking Mikamis iconic hat, and Breckon: Origins.

Oh man, I might try to make a Twine game without words.

On the subject of Rich-2-Rich hidden marketing: I love picking up and leafing through the absolutely real, ostensibly non-ironically-named Monocle Magazine. If you ever want to know which hotel bar is the hottest in Dubai, hit me up. I had the same thought. Also, it sounds hard to do in a computer RPG, but I've wanted to do something like this in a D&D campaign for a while.

I've probably asked this question before in this very thread, but: Why are Americans so afraid of unions? A lot of the work "luxuries" we enjoy here in Scandinavia like long holidays, proper parental leave and mandated overtime pay are things the unions here have fought hard to get through. But every time I hear Americans talking about unions it's in this weird hushed tone, like they're afraid of someone hearing them suggest it. Like Austin Walker talking about working conditions in the games industry on the Beastcast: "Now, I'm not saying they should UNIONIZE, but..." But what? Why not? I literally don't understand. In the specific case of overtime: I also have a salaried contract where overtime doesn't kick in until X amount of hours more than regular has been worked. But! It works both ways. So if I have to leave a couple of hours early because I have a personal errand, no big deal, I still get my regular pay. And crucially, I have a working environment where this is normal and even encouraged. I wont get a stare-down from my boss or a lecture about showing proper investment in the work just because I need to pick up my sister at the train station.

@Fobwashed on Twitter makes great gifs of Giant Bomb-and-related content. Here is the Patrick Klepek impromptu wrestling promo: https://twitter.com/Fobwashed/status/652506070254944256 It's worth noting that since then, Griffin McElroy (Polygon, MBMBaM) has made a level (the HYPERCUBE) that finally broke him.

Disclaimer #1: I'm more or less exactly like Patrick, in that Mario 64 was one of the defining games of my childhood, so I can't keep a "critical distance". Disclaimer #2: I'm writing this after 6 beers and an Opeth concert. I see what you're saying, but I feel like you're being way too harsh. Yeah, Mario 64 has a lot of rookie 3D mistakes, like making the worlds way too big compared to your size/speed, but almost no one else had made them before. But I don't think the designs and concepts were as bad as you make them out to be. For example, a lot of the worlds have a kind of natural end point, despite being open ended. In the first world, you can do whatever you want, but your eyes are immediately drawn to the mountain top, and you think "I want to go there". Think about this almost 2 decades later, when first- and third-person games still have trouble getting their players to actually look up. In a way, a lot of the levels are the answer to "how do we turn a 2D game into a 3D game", and deciding to wrap the levels around a zenith or nadir. But in some of them you start down, some you start up, some are linear, some are mazes and some are very open. Another thing is that the levels do have a cohesion, just not always in the visual theme. There's three distinct tiers of levels. The starter set, the basement set, and the top floor set. In the starter set the paintings are all on the ground floor, and the levels are all ground-focused, or rather single-planed. In contrast, the basement levels are much "lower". The progression is usually dependent on going down, or you have to be careful not to go further down, because death awaits (infinite pit, lava, quicksand, etc.). And the top floor set are very vertical, like the rainbow level, the level where you change size, the mushroom platform level, or even the water level (has you changing the water... level in order to get to the top). Together with the podcast (see my first post), this has come full circle back to 2008.

I love that Danielle is gone for one week and already the cast is back to: -Chris messing around with a weird music game. -Riffing on random non-sensical syllables. -Discussing the obscure project of a 90s PC game star designer. -Nick Breckon playing a hardcore war game. -Puns. -Jake playing an old Nintendo game instead of anything new. -Far Cry 2. -Super Mario Sunshine is under appreciated. [edit]-And now Wizard baboo, holy shit. [edit2]-I can't believe I missed the Goku shirt.

Oh, I never saw this. Surprisingly not! Where I am from is where the gulf stream ends up, so it stays warmer than it should. It "only" gets to around -20C/-4F in deep winter. And even then it doesn't get the biting cold of still air that you will if you go some kilometers inland from there. Winter does last from around october to april, though. Additionally, I'm now living in Oslo. Which looking at this map, is around the same distance north-south as mainland Canada.

This music is so rad! I loved the Koji Kondo discussion on this episode. Can Idle Thumbs have a regular Nintendo Trivia segment?

Huh, weird synthesis this week where both Dropsy and Lara Croft GO has developers that are forum members here. Kool. Does that mean Kojima also has an account?

I had to stop the podcast at the "customized birthday/Captain zoom" segment, because I recently discovered that someone has made "[name] is a smoking hot babe" with 500 different names and put them all on Spotify. They're all exactly 1 minute long, there's 100 to an album, and each album cover is just a shitty flash photo of some girl. The band is, of course, called the Smoking Hot Babe Lovers.

I finished listening, this was a really fun episode. I vote to promote Gabe to official Podcast Cop and keep arresting them when they skip segments or say something factually wrong. Also, I have been scared of the Anno games, but Nick describing them as filling the same hole as Settlers II made me really want to try them out.

Nick didn't think we heard him referring to Vault Boy as Fall Out Boy, but we did.

Second this, Bordwell & Thompson are the ones to read when it comes to basics in film theory. If you're interested in film theory, read one of their books, then find the part that interests you most and keep going in that direction.

So, I'm making my first Twine, based on Cyberpunk Cop-Killer. It's a Noir-style murder mystery, set in a police station. I'm currently writing straight through the story, and avoiding any branching paths or mechanics. As soon as I have the story from start to finish, I plan to flesh it out to be more game-like, but that depends on how much more time I have left in the jam. Here's my tree so far, intro and case/victim information: And here's an excerpt: I probably wont post much of the actual text due to spoilers, but I'll try to post the tree as it's growing. Things to do: -Complete the story from start to finish -Edit the CSS to make it look like a cyberpunk computer terminal. -Flesh out branching paths and alternate endings Optional: -Implement a soundtrack -Get or make some art -Make a game mechanic (my main options here are either a time/number of screens limit, or a gun with limited bullets.)

Dang, that's really high praise, thank you so much! In regards to the writing process, it mostly came out of thinking of 'cyberpunk cop-killer' as a theme and setting and going from there. I recently started working at the marketing department of a very corporate job, so that influenced how I shaped the world. I basically thought "What if all this talk of target audiences and reach was taken to its logical extreme?". And then I extrapolated from there. Also, because this is the episode that revealed Danielles accent, I wanted to set it in New England. And thus, Neo New England was born. Basically, my writing process goes like this: 1: World/Setting 2: Theme 3: Characters 4: Plot So when I had my corporate dystopia in place, I started thinking about how to frame a story in it. Cyberpunk is traditionally very noir, and since the title is "cop-killer", a detective mystery starring a former cop just fit, and a police station setting would give me. Somewhere around here, the thought hit me that a murderer screaming is my kind of silly, so the ending with that is actually the original ending. Spoilery bit about the characters: There's a reason I put plot last in my order. It's the least interesting to me. I consume a lot of genre fiction, and what I like is seeing interesting worlds, interesting themes, and most importantly, interesting characters interacting. Now that I've arrived at a set of characters, and I have a start and an end state, I kinda just unleash them on each other, and let the dialog flow by itself. That's how Lucy became a major character: The more Kira talked to her, the more the sadness of her existence came into the light, without me having considered it in advance. Though looking back, I think this happened because I shaped the oppresive, techonology-driven world first. The same thing happened with Gamboni and Stafford, they both surprised me once they actually started speaking. Re: Problem Machine Thanks! I'm still thinking about going back and adding more investigation meat, like evidence and case files. I also wanted to try to add an actual mechanic in Twine. You already have a time limit, so if I could add a screen counter and say that every screen lasts 1 minute. That way I could add way more files and info, but not everything relevant, and not have enough minutes to go through everything.

Dang! Should be fixed now. Thanks for letting me know.

Game is finished! In the end, it's not as much a game as whodunnit with three endings. But that's okay! I learned a lot. Link: http://hermanlilleng.itch.io/murder-in-neo-new-england

Endings are in place! Now I gotta go back and fix everything that is broken, and everything I thought of after I wrote the relevant part. Then cut like a madman so it's not so long, and give it a cool cyberpunk flare using CSS, somehow. Bonus, my favourite line yet:

-I'm immediately writing in a fountain in Cyberpunk Cop-Killer. -I'm so happy Spaff is back on the podcast. I forget he's there, and then he suddenly appears with perfect zings in his smooth British voice. Lord British Zinglord. -Yay, Drop7 email read. I forgot to add that doesn't actually pause the podcast, but it mutes it. And of course, the ads never have audio, so it just goes silent until I can skip it, and then I lose 10 seconds of the podcast. But if I pay, I'm throwing money at Zynga. But if I don't, they probably make more money off the ads. Argh.

High quality Biden at the end there. This is all super sick.

Ok, I finally filled all these boxes, investigation part: finished! I'm aiming to have a wrap-up and endings set up by tomorrow. Will do!