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We are proud to announce that Justin Truman will be stepping up as Bungie’s new Studio Head as Pete Parsons retires from his position to pass the torch to a new generation of leaders.

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i think the near-extinction of people making fun, deep and/or unique interactive text-based browser games, projects and stories is catastrophic to the internet. i'm talking pre-itch.io era, nothing against it.

there are a lot of fun ones listed here and here but for the most part, they were made years ago and are now a dying breed. i get why. there's no money in it. factoring in the cost of web hosting and servers, it probably costs money. it's just sad that it's a dying art form.

anyway, here's some of my favorite browser-based interactive projects and games, if you're into that kind of thing. 90% of them are on the lists that i linked above.

A Better World - create an alternate history timeline

Alter Ego - abandonware birth-to-death life simulator game

Seedship - text-based game about colonizing a new planet

Sandboxels or ThisIsSand - free-falling sand physics games

Little Alchemy 2 - combine various elements to make new ones

Infinite Craft - kind of the same as Little Alchemy

ZenGM - simulate sports

Tamajoji - browser-based tamagotchi

IFDB - interactive fiction database (text adventure games)

Written Realms - more text adventure games with a user interface

The Cafe & Diner - mystery game

The New Campaign Trail - US presidential campaign game

Money Simulator - simulate financial decisions

Genesis - text-based adventure/fantasy game

Level 13 - text-based science fiction adventure game

Miniconomy - player driven economy game

Checkbox Olympics - games involving clicking checkboxes

BrantSteele.net - game show and Hunger Games simulators

Murder Games - fight to the death simulator by Orteil

Cookie Clicker - different but felt weird not including it. by Orteil.

if you're ever thinking about making a niche project that only a select number of individuals will be nerdy enough to enjoy, keep in mind i've been playing some of these games off and on for 20~ years (Alter Ego, for example). quite literally a lifetime of replayability.

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wplace sure is a milkshake duck

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Sheridan and Delenn were my original OTP and one of the reasons for that was the fact that every now and then one of them would be like "sweetie you're being a bit fascist right now" and the other would say "yeah fair enough, I'll stop" and become a better person

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This and song Radiohead [Nice Dream]☔️🫂

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Thank you, D2 devs. I know it can't be easy– I know you're very likely overworked, underpaid, and understaffed, based on past reports– but you continue to prove that your team is stellar at what you do even under all that pressure from the top. I sincerely hope that Bungie is beginning to understand that they're nothing without you.

I would like to think I speak for the majority of players when I say, from the bottom of our hearts: we appreciate you. You're the ones who make this game worth playing. You deserve better.

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Telepath

A telepath who only ever hears people's conscious, waking thoughts, but otherwise has difficulty controlling it... may well find that the best time of day for em is when the majority of people are asleep; that's when there are less distractions and e can get more work done.

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I may not be able to love you, but I can learn to love myself in your honor.

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a pretty sad detail about telepaths is they aren't from anywhere.. they're just from the corp

if you ask ivanova where she's from she would say russia and if you asked sheridan he would say kansas but if you asked talia for example she would just say she's from the corp

ivanova and sheridan both have fond memories of their home countries but all talia has memories of is the corp

the only place telepaths have known is the corp

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Haha funny pac-man game.

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i wish i was better at metroidvanias

i love the genre but good god they’re all so difficult

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Shadow Labyrinth makes me feel a lot better about my wild fanfic concepts because nothing I make can be as unhinged as a dark fantasy metroidvania about Pacman

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i know this is about baldur’s gate but this also fits with destiny

why is orin doing murder shit when we all know her true calling is slam poetry

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DELTARUNE Chapter 4 and weird route spoilers

I’ve been thinking about the weird route and how it feels lately. About how it feels very different from Undertale genocide. That doesn’t surprise me per se, since I think Toby is going for something different this time. I think I’m interested that it feels so different because it, superficially, has a lot of the pageantry of geno. It shares many of the same themes, but does different things with them.

It is about getting stronger.

It skips the funnies (no Berdly, why even live 😭).

It leans into the abuse of meta elements. Using the text box to teleport is my favorite example from Deltarune. My favorite example from Undertale is literally pushing the battle box in the sans fight to access the FIGHT button.

What’s interesting to me is that despite sharing these similarities, it feels completely different. A heavy theme of the Undertale Genocide run is dissociation. In order to embark on the genocide run, you have to shatter your suspension of disbelief. The systemic mechanical slaughter of the characters you once had genuine attachment to is symbolic of you discarding any hold the game has on you. In order to do a genocide run, you have to discard the game. It’s why Chara calls you out in the end if you choose to go back. They cannot understand why someone would do what you do if you still felt attachment to the world after all. Why do all this if you still care? You must have a perverse sentimentality.

Undertale Genocide is about what it means to feel attached to characters. It’s about whether it’s worth it to discard that attachment if it means you can see more of them. Is it worth it to mutilate a story into a shape you no longer can love as long as you don’t have to let it go? I had… let’s say, a strong emotional response to Undertale Geno (I called my best friend at the time an evil asshole for playing it, sorry Widget). But, eventually, I played it too. I learned a lot about myself through thinking about my emotional response to Undertale Geno. I realized that I’m actually okay with letting something go while I still love it. It’s helped me process a lot of things.

I’m currently in the throes of feelings about the weird route. Obviously we don’t know exactly what the thematic endpoint of Deltarune is yet, but I’ve seen enough of the weird route already to highlight some throughlines. I think the main difference, and why the weird route makes me viscerally ill, lies in the emotional closeness. Ultimately, Undertale Geno is about the sacrifice of emotional closeness for the sake of remaining in the world. Deltarune, however, is emotionally distant from the get-go.

There is a greater degree of separation between you and Kris than there ever was between you and Frisk. Frisk, while their own person, makes very little attempt to resist your commands. They are wholly on board for murder, as far as we can tell. The only actions they take of their own accord on that run are to further the aims of it. Stepping forward during cutscenes, skipping puzzles. Kris, however, opposes us throughout all of Deltarune. They set (honestly reasonable) boundaries with us, refusing to allow us to take things they deem too important. I feel distanced from the story because of Kris’ clear acknowledgement of our existence and their own preferences. There is a line drawn by their actions that we cannot cross. Kris serves as the eyes, ears, hands and mouth through which we interface with the world, but they use their role as a cage to limit our reach. It’s a testament to Toby Fox’s writing and game design that this still feels immersive. I am still drawn in even as I’m made to feel like an outsider. Hell, I want to be drawn even further in. I want to be friends with Susie and Kris and Noelle and Ralsei. I crave the emotional closeness that I cannot have. This exactly mirrors how Kris feels in hometown: like an outsider that craves attention and connection but is unable to realize those things. The emotional distance is a part of the narrative.

The story seems to already be heading towards tackling this emotional distance in the normal route by heavily discussing the irreality of certain characters (Ralsei mostly, but other Darkners too). Lightners entering dark worlds somewhat heavy-handedly lampshades the real-life interface between two narrative layers that occurs when you interact with a story. The fact that Darkners don’t consider themselves real (and Susie’s firm rejection of that) is a criticism of the notion that just because things don’t have physical form doesn’t mean they can’t affect you like any supposedly more “real” thing can. I think both routes in Deltarune will lead to resolving the emotional distance of the player, but in either a healthy or an unhealthy way depending on the route.

There is a reason the weird route fixates so heavily on Noelle. The relationship she has with Kris is complicated. They’ve been friends for a long time, but Kris has withdrawn into themselves recently. Their connection has floundered and they’ve grown distant. This interpersonal distance is similar to the intrinsic separation we, the player, must feel from the characters in Deltarune. We think we know them, but there’s a disconnect in communication that is mostly bridged through Kris’s creative interpretation of our commands. Could we really consider ourselves friends with Susie without Kris’s silly little goofs? The little flairs of personality they tac onto the membrane of our interaction? It feels… both resonant and saddening to know that Susie doesn’t really like US, they like Kris. We’re just kinda forcing Kris to put themselves out there. We’re forcing Kris to expose themselves to intimacy in a way they never would have on their own.

There’s a selfish part of me that wishes for a blank slate, that wishes I COULD be closer to these characters I love. And… well… Kris CAN be made blank. You can force that emotional closeness if you really want. You can force Noelle to become “friends” with “Kris” again. The weird route is about our refusal to accept a lack of intimacy and our refusal to respect boundaries. Both with us, the player, and with Kris’s friend Noelle. Kris pushes everyone in their life away. They’re traumatized from the disappearance of Dess, they feel dysmorphic due to being the only human in a family and town of monsters, they’re queer and weird and don’t relate to anyone they know (me too thanks), and their parents are so divorced it gave a TV separation anxiety. While the abuse of Noelle does make me feel wretched, it is the erasure of Kris that really gets to me the most. God, the little crumbs we get of their mental state in chapter 4 weird route after Noelle’s house… it’s heartbreaking. Poor kid.

This is why I think the end of the weird route will be us “killing” Kris, or taking absolute control over their body. What greater violation is there than annihilating someone’s personhood? Hell, we’re already doing it. It’s also why I think the end of the normal route will be with Kris and us reconciling our conflict. Coming to a healthy mutual understanding of each others’ boundaries and limits. Or at least arriving at a somewhat less adversarial relationship. Sure we keep making them do stuff they don’t want to do, but they keep ripping us out and shoving us in a cage or beating us with hockey equipment. We’re stuck together, we’re gonna have to figure out how to make this work. I think as we come to understand Kris as their own person, they’ll come around to us too. If chapter 7 ends with Kris playing piano for us in the final rendition of Don’t Forget I’m going to actually sob.

In a similar way that Undertale genocide is about dissociation from the characters, Deltarune as a whole is about the rejection of dissociation, both textually and thematically. It’s about the celebration of attachment. Attachment to friends, to loved ones, and to fiction. Undertale no-mercy was doable for me in an emotional sense because its very structure necessitated detachment. It just got easier and easier as it went on, each step necessarily demanding a little less than the last. The weird route however is the opposite of that. It demands emotional closeness. Indeed, emotional closeness is the entire point. Every stage of the weird route has made me feel worse. It’s making me realize that it might not be worth it. I couldn’t even finish my chapter 4 weird route save, I just stopped after Noelle’s house. If I’m right about where things are heading, I don’t know if I can go there. I don’t think I can do it. I don’t think I want to.

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Minor Holiday || UNDERTALE Sans Animatic

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Minor Holiday || UNDERTALE Sans Animatic