Tale

And the good one out of my Steam sale purchases ends up being Helen's Mysterious Castle. Just a fun game overall. Star Wars Battlefront II has not aged well, especially mechanically. The campaign makes me want to hurt people. Red Faction Guerilla I'm positive is still good, but I'm not making time for it tonight. Maybe tomorrow.

Bought some games on the Steam sale, some of them were cheap, short, with great reviews so I thought I'd try them first. First up was Lisa. Absolutely terrific reviews! Also with some cheap as heck fights. Ran into one fight where the thing prevented me from taking any actions while beating me up. Game over. It was a poor early impression. Helen's Mysterious Castle. Great reviews and it was easy to see why. It has a very interesting combat and leveling system. You're not leveling up your character, but their weapons, and all combat is about trading attack and defense stats between the two combatants. I really liked it. Then I kept wandering in circles because it looks like I hit a dead end. Can't find any way forward. Not a great feeling to have a little over an hour into the game. On Tale Plays Free Games we have Saira. Well that's an interesting default control scheme... It's a puzzle platformer that looks like someone accidentally made the entire thing in paper crafts. It's not bad, it's just not interesting. Completed the tutorial and felt like I'd seen enough. Next up is probably the highlight of my sale purchases, Hector Badge of Carnage. Among the last adventure games published, not developed, by Telltale games before The Walking Dead set their direction, it looks hilarious and has good reviews. It was also released originally around the time of Puzzle Agent. And I freaking love Puzzle Agent. Can't wait to try it.

What in the ever loving

Screwing around in RPGMaker MV still. Splitting my time between just seeing what everything does and seriously overwriting the script.

Played a good deal of Battlefront over the weekend. I really enjoy this game. I'm sort of pre-emptively missing it for when I stop playing it. Trying to familiarize myself with RPGMaker MV, too. I kind of wish it came packed with a strong sample game to take apart. That's how I'm used to learning these things. Taking apart Morrowind, Oblivion, Neverwinter Nights 1 and 2, even Shadowrun. I wanted to take apart Dragon Age: Origins for a mod project, but then I found they won't even let you access most of the core games assets or scripts. But it's probably not time efficient to try the old methods. I'm challenged by the desire to learn aspects of the tools that aren't really relevant to what I'm doing now. Played briefly with the character generation system, found things it was lacking and almost went around hunting for ways to get what I want. Fought the urge to fill the database with items, set up classes, equip the placeholder characters with equipment analogs. I also tried seeing if their Javascript system had a built-in editor. It doesn't look like it. I have no need of scripting my own plugins yet... Distractions... Took a look at their event system to see how I can apply triggers and am a bit lost already. That's precisely where I'd go to dissecting existing content to figure out. But maybe youtube tutorials will get me the same results with less trial and error.

Finished my first run of Tyranny. I'm liable to wait on a second run until there's some news about DLC. Battlefront has a 4x XP weekend, so hitting that up now.

I'm actually adapting an existing story I've already written and adding bits from another story I abandoned. The ending is in hand, but seeing how the adaptation process and limitations of the medium will change it excite me.

Yesterday I crafted the foil badge and initiated trades with two fellow Obsidianites for regular cards so I can craft the regular badge. Today I got a booster pack. The card gods have a sense of humor.

Motivational tools are always required. An update system enables people to ask me "why was your last status update a month ago? Are you actually doing any work?" It's one of the main objectives of a writing group. If you don't show any progress to the group every week, they will laugh at you. This is a strategy I've barely thought about. I've worked on mods for several games and usually get bogged down detailing Act 1. I'll give this a shot. I was going to get everything in rough detail first, but I was thinking more "placeholder art in real layouts" by that. But maybe that would take more time than I should spend on the first pass.

I'm going to ignore my total lack of artistic skill. If I get far enough for there to be a chance of completing it, at that point I might just hire someone to do the sprites I need. The current plan is to get enough rough areas and characters (complete with bad custom editing) done of the first planet for pre-alpha screenshots as a first milestone. I find that there's a fine line to tread between talking about a project and being held accountable. If I just talk about a project, that sort of replaces my motivation to actually produce. But if nobody even knows I'm doing it, they can't shame me when I'm being lazy.

So I'm about to start a project in RPGMaker MV. I decided that one of my stories would be super cool if it had an 80s neon look. Since I think that would absolutely fail in text, I'll try and realize it in crappy sprite based JRPG format! And my first task was to build a progress bar signature in GIMP to make visual gags about how badly I'm procrastinating. And maybe actually track real progress occasionally. After 2 hours of working on it, mostly trying to figure out how to do easy boxes, I export it just to see if I'm wasting my time and realize that it will be a complete eyesore. I decide to switch to just text updates in my sig. That's called triage. Progress? Progress.

You're alive! I don't remember that song. I guess it's not Oldwalls?

I'm starting to get annoyed by the Sunset Spire just standing there taunting me. I can cheat to claim it, but I'm afraid I'll skip content if it turns out there actually is a quest that opens up later...

Hey, I love Farscape as much as the next guy but I do feel compelled, compelled I say, to point out that Farscape is indisputably set in the Milky Way rather than another galaxy. Well yes, but John Crichton isn't a member of a galaxy spanning civilization. He's thrust into a completely foreign location far from home, to a point where he doesn't even know where home is. Extrapolate!

It might be nice for a sequel to re-evaluate that and dismiss it as KIS having spent time in Sage capitivity and picked up some nonse from them, and they actually run in complex family units.

In Mass Effect, it does not take much time at all. On the scope of weeks, not millenia. If the enemies have to hide to be unknown, it sort of makes it hard for you to be the one hiding your home, doesn't it? To find you, all they have to do is stop hiding. And if they're hidden by a single nebula, they aren't very vast. Certainly nothing on the existing alliances of the Mass Effect universe.

You're not going to operate an active stellar empire in the Milky Way in Mass Effect without everyone past a certain tech level noticing you. Their transmissions and sensors are FTL with fantastic fidelity. If your new villain isn't technology advanced enough to pick up your TV signals, they're not a big threat.

I've been saying since ME3 that the next Mass Effect should go to a new galaxy. And my main inspiration for saying that was Farscape. End up somewhere new, with terrifying new villains, and do you very best to try and stop them from finding out where you're from.

They fixed the trading cards and now I have 3 Bariks. Speak up if you want to trade, because I'm selling my duplicates tomorrow.

Vague, but putting in spoilers just to be nice.

What the hey, man? You just started your second playthrough. I'm about 12 hours in and only unlocked my second tower.

PoE is $45 for the base game right now.

I'd recommend Tyranny generally speaking. But Pillars of Eternity is a longer game by many accounts if that's a factor for you.

If you think the entire game is just choosing between the Scarlet Chorus and the Disfavored, then you're jumping to conclusions terribly early.

Confirmation from Paradox that the game should have trading cards: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/why-no-steam-trading-cards.981447/