Biweekly blog post time: I wrote about running a one-shot-ish game of Deathmatch Island, a pretty dang cool game that took me a little too long to wrap my head around. This led me to some thoughts about learning to run games and the part that one-shots can play in that process.
Biweekly blog post time: I wrote about running a one-shot-ish game of Deathmatch Island, a pretty dang cool game that took me a little too long to wrap my head around. This led me to some thoughts about learning to run games and the part that one-shots can play in that process.
I support you, reader wife
games should ask things of you and you should be willing for a game to do so
For my most recent Backtracking blog post (in which I'm playing a game from my backlog for each year since I was born), I played Resident Evil 4 (the HD remaster on steam, but still the original) and reminisced about the particularities of popular action games of mid-aughts
fromsoft game narrative discourse often misses how the words are very good. item descriptions blah blah yeah sure. but "all things flourish, whether graceful or malign" is very good words
I'm also only proximate to the Roblox dev space (used to work at the company itself) but my impression is that mobile game companies have dabbled, but they're chasing trends that younger devs on the platform understand better. grow a garden, dress to impress, even adopt me started very small
"Are indie games developing a gambling problem? We'll discuss this in our article by focusing in solely on recent examples that have slot facades while ignoring the entire history of mobile games made by actual gambling industry designers"
yeah, and the story would be so different if it was cynical industry people who had been making the biggest Roblox hits for the past 7 or 8 years...but it really hasn't been! so many successful games there have been small teams of very young folks who probably had never touched a slot machine
oh man yeah roblox is MARINATING in predatory monetization techniques that were imported from the worst of the worst elsewhere, it's baaad
Those kids didn't come from the gambling industry, they were too young. But they were downstream of it.
Not to say that the platform didn't also contribute to creating those incentives, but the wider games culture definitely helped enable it
I think all the time about how so many young game designers building on Roblox grew up swimming in this very same social media/mobile f2p sludge, and so many Roblox games unabashedly and uncritically reproduce those patterns. It's so normalized that they don't see it as exploitative
To add a layer on this - I hate that og spellcheck and grammarcheck tools keep getting replaced by objectively worse gen-ai counterparts...
So it ends up with gen-ai actively making the mechanical aspects harder, while simultaneously producing LaCroix Vanilla writing for lazy people.
KIM KITSURAGI - Never fuck with Kim Kitsuragi.
The amount I am able to naturally receive a compliment is to discord react to your message with a heart before replying with self-criticism. Sorry.
tbf I think they're developing and improving; it's a queer literature class so a lot of them are trying harder to engage because it's a class that recognizes their experience!
I would gladly use the Scolding Auction Paddle on professional critics and people online who do the same thing though lol
I'm in a literature class at my local community college and a lot of younger classmates strongly gravitate towards these framings in their discussion and critique... it's good that they're finding ways to engage but it does really bum me out sometimes
Reminder to all game designers: less text
Shockingly I haven't had any Big TTRPG Opinions to chatter about lately, so for my blog post this week I wrote something a bit like a play report for a story game that I played a week and change ago. I can't tell if it's compelling to read, but I had a good time writing it!
I'm very onboard with the sentiment but the graphics nerd in me must point out that raytracing is an actual realistic simulation that can produce really appealing results (pixar films are raytraced!)
you're right, though, that it's way oversold when less intensive techniques still do very well
wow I really woulda thought the filter would have made her a blonde
I wish I could remember specifics, but even the vague memory of it fills me with warm fuzzies.
It's really sad to think about how many cool talks or displays or demos at something like GDC are just fundamentally unavailable to younger folks in that way, "conference" designation be damned.
xkcd has long expressed a deep and encompassing fondness for not just math and science and technology, but also community, education, writing, art, and everything cool that humans do and make and ask. and hearing curious young girls get to ask questions at the end of that panel was just. so special
...and it called to mind a time that I went to a San Diego Comic Con panel featuring @xkcd.com when one of his books was releasing.
It was a small panel compared to the kind of scale you find at SDCC but the what amazed me was that there were so many kids (with parents), a lot of them young girls!
This is a really lovely write-up, and the specific attention paid to how kid-unfriendly GDC is.
It calls to mind something that sticks with me: I know there's a million miles of difference between conventions and conferences, but they're both spaces full of interesting talks from creative folks...
Elf With a 10 Page Backstory relies on players understanding the trope that it's a send-up of, but I think it fits the bill and is good fun devindecibel.itch.io/elf-with-a-1...
UNSIGHTED is one of those games I think is really slept on: an incredibly hard metroidvania with a really interesting (and painful) narrative countdown clock which makes what you do really feel like it matters
This week I wrote about Cairn, a game I was inevitably drawn to as a (casual) climber and a fan of The Game Bakers' previous work. I wound up with mixed feelings, but they were *strong* mixed feelings, enough that it took time to unpack. I hope you find it interesting! (and beware of spoilers!)
I think I'd argue that the 2nd one should be RPVG but also I think gamers deserve to have an acronym that's short for Video Game Role Playing Game because it's very funny
that's terrifying. that's a whole work week imo