#IT integration guide

[globaledtools]

🔗 Still Wasting Time Switching Between Systems? It’s Time to Integrate.

Disconnected tools, double data entry, messy workflows… sound familiar? System chaos doesn’t just slow you down — it costs you time, money, and sanity. 😵‍💻

This guide shares 5 proven strategies to help you master system integration so your tools talk to each other, your team stays aligned, and your business runs way more efficiently.

🚀 Read the full guide here: 🔗 5 Proven Ways to Master System Integration for Business Efficiency

Work smarter. Scale faster. Stress less.

[findmeinthefallair]

Mindscape, based on this post I made weeks ago

The yellow light is Flapjack's life force 😭😭😭😭

[aspirant1598]

[indigequeer-babe]

- Somacultural Liberation An Indigenous Two Spirit Somatic Guide to Integrating Cultural Experiences Toward Freedom, Roger Kuhn.

I'm gonna frame this on my wall or something.

[potato-lord-but-not]

You have driven me down a pipeline… I’m obsessed with Malevolent now all because I saw your art because I thought it looked cool and you’ve led me down a FUCKING pipeline! I now listen to Will Wood and Jhariah, Im listening to The Magnus Archives, Welcome to Night Vale, Wolf 359 AND I’m trying to get my own copy of Going Postal and it has all made me realize how invested I am in your cult, I’m now a devoted follower… PLEASE all I’m hearing is the words of my head going (one of us! One Of Us! ONE OF US! ) and now I’m converting my friends… what have you done to me…?

YEAS YESSSSSSSS confessions my wife would hate to see but we welcome you to the commune dear friend. Get your hands on the holy texts as soon as you can, it will change you for the better

[shisasan]

Twin Tribes - Monolith

[kharla-k]

Arknights' Premptive Boss Design Through Game Mechanics

Recently went down the rabbit hole of how you actually go about beating Boss 5 of IS5, and it made me think about the boss design of Arknights.

To explain my thesis; I believe that many of the best and well designed bosses impart a large deal of their complexity onto the mechanics of the event; by doing this, it allows you to take advantage of previous player knowledge without overwhelming them. Lots of text ahead!

Many of the Integrated Strategies bosses suffer from this, because unlike normal or seasonal events that have unique mechanics to the tileset, they typically just blast you with mechanics. Which is particularly bad when you only get the chance to figure them out or practice at the end of the run, and failing once sets you back an ~hour.

While there are many examples (a subjective and varying list: Andoain, Captain Mateo, Clip Cliff, Damazti, Dolly, Kirsten, Lappland, Mandragora, Manfred, Mudrock, Patriot, Rat King, Rathalos, Rosmontis, Sui-Xiang, and Witch King) the ones I want to focus on is the most recent in Anastasio and Harold.

Anastasio has several of his own gimmicks, primarily dealing corrosion damage and his inquisitor technique. To further complicate things he can also pierce through operators at his own health thresholds. These are all of the mechanics that are strictly his and are few. He trends towards easy, because he can't do all that much by himself, and the Salt Heap cannons that he relies on can be removed.

However, said cannons will massively amplify his strength in the second phase, retargeting to what he's being blocked by (making it that much harder to block him) and during the first part of his boss fights he will buff them and make them hit in a wider area.

Instead of dropping those 1.2k phys damage spikes himself, he provides an avenue as a boss to weaken him and work with the existing idea of going out of your way to kill the cannons, something which you've practiced.

Unlike Anastasio, Harold is one of the most dangerous bosses in the game if you ignore the mechanics. But the relative complexity and the difficulty of him directly hinge upon the mechanics! Meaning all of the previous levels have directly helped show you how to beat him.

You have to use emergency heaters to keep your operators alive and functional, and they ask that you have an order of operations that will respect the heaters. You have to respond to enemies that are much stronger in the cold, and those that will themselves turn off the heaters. How do you keep them on, let the right enemies in, keep the right ones out, keep your ranged ops alive, how you lay your units out, etc. Harold does the same, operates exactly on the same principles.

He's only a threat because of how he interacts with the heaters. He is squishy without his heaters, with the same HP as Pompeii and only 500/700 defense. But he takes 35% less damage multiplicatively, per unlit heater.

He takes less damage, and does more damage, only if there's unlit heaters. He doesn't do very much damage and has no durability without the heaters, so what's the catch?

Instead of having entirely new mechanics that you need to learn, he puts a twist on the existing mechanics. He'll shut them off consistently from at any range. Instead of introducing new issues and new vulnerabilities inherent to only him, he expresses his threats and weaknesses through game mechanics that the player is already familiar with.

By doing this you can have an advanced and difficult, even more so than usual, boss that can still be dismantled by putting into practice things that have already been established.

Fundamentally every boss has (or should have) unique mechanics that make them a threat in interesting ways, and allow you to engage with them in interesting ways. This is unavoidable; but by imparting the dynamics of their fights onto the game mechanics you can have bosses that are simultaneously more intuitive and complex, thusly rewarding and satisfying to beat.

Ultimately this isn't to say that both of these bosses, or any for that matter, can be understood in your first fight. To some extent I believe you should always lose the first clear of a boss stage. And bosses that are completely irrelevant to the mechanics can be awesome!

But I do think that IS bosses, and a lot of the more questionable ones would benefit from having a mechanical lead from their respective events rather than blasting multiple never-before-seen mechanics at once. When I look at many of the ending bosses, it looks to me as though you have to trial and error just to understand the mechanics, nevermind stand the chances, if you don't want to consult a guide, explanation, or the wiki.

Spoilers for the new IS5 boss ahead:

So to loop all the way back around to said new IS5 boss that prompted this post:

It absolutely sucks to just deploy operators, have them spawn sealed, and then immediately lose with no understanding whatsoever as to why. It seems as though it would be relatively easy to have levels leading up to that fight, with the same sealing mechanics.

I would, as a game designer, execute everything I've said in this post accordingly: It starts slow, there's only a few lanes you can put your operators. You put a sealed enemy at the end of a long lane, and when it gets hit and unbound by a 'Vestige of Creativity,' you understand that these things will hit Guideposts and unbind the enemy inside. When the player goes to put down an operator to block the now active enemy, the Vestige will hit and unbind your sealed operator.

By doing this, you'll understand that everything spawns bound here (which could also help establish the setting and nature of where you are, ludonarratively!), both the enemies and your operators, and they can only be unbound when hit by vestiges (and it prompts you to wonder what happened, who did this?- building up tension for the incoming boss).

Such a level, maybe even multiple, would totally serve as a way to take a lot of 'Furnace's Finale's' complexity and explain it beforehand, and allow for the player to digest and experience the mechanics in a safe...er setting, and stand a chance of understanding how the boss works without instantly losing.

[flittingthroughthepines]

WHY ARE ALL MY TOP POSTS AFFINI RELATED? WHAT ABOUT MY FREE USE WEREWOLFGIRL ROOMMATE POST???

[prismbearer]

"All you will find in there is pain."

Harmony Cobel being deprived of the closure of her mother's death and suffering. Her mother as only a nonbeliever, all the better for her daughter to work at the factory for Kier, to redeem the family. A woman she probably hardly knew and doesn't completely remember... Separated not only by death but before that by the structure and belief system of a cultish faith.

Severance allowing a disconnect from emotion, Harmony having to work through the grief she was denied so many decades later without even being severed herself...

Severance as the evolution of the structure of cult mentality integrated with technology.

[syringavulgaris]

Kasey Jueds

[fetuswithfriends]

I feel that every person who wants to criticize game design decisions or game developers should all be required to play The Beginner's Guide. It explains the importance of the artist/designer's intent so well and does a great job of criticizing people who don't create but feel the need to demean an artist's decisions.

It also does a fantastic job warning the player about misinterpreting what an artist is feeling/saying. So many people feel the need to assume what an artist is going through via their art, which can help elevate what the artist is saying, but are often parasocial and weird about it.

Please play The Beginner's Guide if you are interested at all in what creators deal with, game design, the relationship between player and creator, and the importance of artist's intent. It's such a slept on game and it is so important in today's age

[healingthroughvisions]

What is Integration?

What is Integration? The Sacred Art of Becoming Whole Again Integration is the sacred work of making space for all parts of ourselves to come home. It’s the process of absorbing what we’ve experienced—mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually—so we don’t stay fragmented or stuck in cycles of bypassing. Integration is where the medicine settles in. It’s what happens after the realization, the…

[indigequeer-babe]

Somacultural liberation is a somatic, cultural, intellectual, emotional, and existential modality. The somatic invites us into proprioceptive and interceptive awareness, recognizing the way our body moved through spaces externally (proprioception) and internally (interception) and how our body is shaped by cultural experiences.

-Somacultural Liberation An Indigenous, Two Spirit Somatic Guide to Integrating Cultural Experiences Toward Freedom by Roger Kuhn

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Friends: Try this breath meditation. I'm a subscriber to this program but they do have a lot of free videos. Great self-treatment fascia work that can provide a lot of relief.

[weedle-testaburger]

I had the funniest mental image just now: kicking arthur dent and ford prefect 40 years into the future and explaining people scrolling wikipedia on their phones to them

[primordialruin]

Due to Lilith representing the dark side of the moon, new moon and the subconscious and its disowned parts, she represents the innermost, primal, hidden truths that belongs to all of us. These are the parts of us that we do not want to integrate because of the shame it would bring us if we were to admit that those feelings and thoughts belonged to us. Little does anyone know that in order to process them and eliminate/move past them, one has to become completely honest about owning those uncomfortable parts about oneself.

She represents the axiom of the inner self and she will do whatever is in her power to bring it to the surface. Her desire is for you to accept them, own them, and become accountable for them. This also ties with the legend where she is seen as a punisher/whip of God that kills those who give in to her temptation. I will be interpreting her temptation as her bringing out your inner self to the surface (temptation) and giving you the choice to do something about it (punisher). This is you, in your fullness. Darkness and light combined as the earth no longer eclipses the moon.

Monster and divine.

What will you do now?