katt, migrating 🌟 🌈 @starkatt@awoo.space

Oh hey awesome someone *has* made the comparison between Stardew Valley and Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor.
https://marek-kapolka.tumblr.com/post/152168396587/october-22-2016-routine?is_related_post=1

Stardew Valley and Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor are weird inverse mirrors of each other.

Anyway now I'm buying Stardew Valley because I keep hearing great things, and I want something relaxing to help me with having kind of a bad day.

I can see the utility of indicating tone (angry/sarcastic/reassuring/whatever) in dialogue choices but that so often slips into coding an artificial framework on top of choices.

Oh, another thing I liked about Firewatch: dialogue options don't have any morality tagging in the UI. No "this is the nice option, this is the mean option". There is no niceness tracker. Again, letting you make choices free of gameplay constraints.

Also it has the best jump scare I have ever seen.

Because it isn't.

Gone Home gets a lot of points for the way environment, narrative, and metanerrative interacted to build mood, though.

I didn't get the same feeling from Gone Home or Dear Esther. Part of it is those games don't have nearly as many verbs, and part of it is the open-world design of Firewatch.

Weirdly, Firewatch gave me a bigger sense of freedom than a whole lot of games I've played recently, even though it was basically on rails.

I think that a lot of that feeling was caused by how my choices had no mechanical affect on the game. Not worrying about how my decisions would affect gameplay gave me more ability to choose what felt right.

In a related way, the world being basically empty helped with that too.

Not a perfect game, but I'm glad I played it.

or I could commission a more skilled artist than me to do the texturing!

There's so many options and I can rapid-prototype different ways of doing it.

Benefit of doing it on cardstock: I can draw art digitally and print it right onto the mask.

I wonder if I can lasercut some heaver material (sheets of plastic maybe?) to build these out of and to have stronger attachment points for accessories.

:D :D :D okay I found exactly what I'm doing for making a fox mask
https://wintercroft.com/collections/masks/products/make-your-own-half-face-fox-mask

In case you haven't seen that (and seriously, please look up video -- I'd link but it's bedtime)

They're placing 3-4 blocks per *second*.

Just watched repay video of the Tetris block of SGDQ.

I cannot comprehend how humans are capable of playing that fast. I just don't get it. It's beyond absurd.

Just.

How?

Okay folks

If the best books I've read in the last year were the Ancillary series and the Craft Sequence, what should I read next?

Or: please recommend books that are definitely speculative but also centered around people and their feelings and interactions.

it's time for a fuckin'

AWOOOOO

Whoops should have bought those games while they were still on steam sale...

I remember, just barely, the days of existing on the internet when you could have a rich social life on some random forum and be reasonably confident that even though technically public, niche visibility would shield your words from being exposed to groups who wanted to cause harm.

I want that back.