#remap radio

[jpegsthatmove]

The more I stew on it, the more it seems that the shortcomings of veilguard are a failure of direction, both writing and art. I know people largely consider the game to be beautiful but what is all the design in service of? It’s not richly building the world to put everyone in pretty clothes and to gild every building.

On Remap Radio, Rob Zacny (a non dragon age girlie with a dragon age wife) described his experience of the world of veilguard like being on a movie set, like every character is a cosplayer, with lots of detail that is ultimately hollow and frequently nonsensical for the environment it was supposedly organically originated from- from architecture to costumes to the dialogue- (“these are supposed to be the mean streets of Minrathous, the slums, and it mostly seems… fine?”) and I find myself agreeing with that assessment.

And that kind of mishmash and muddying and over-filling of space that loses the good design and sharp plotting and smart characterizations? That comes from leadership that was unable to cut cruft and ideas that don’t work, an absolute inability to edit, or lack of interest.

[callmearcturus]

Austin comes back and of course it's the best fucking episode of Remap Radio.

Austin: We looooove a little shithead who gets stuff wrong and there's a bunch of big people around him like "Aw, c'mon bud, pick yourself up, try again." Or "Get on the fucking ground, grovel you little pig." And that's Apollo Justice. Patrick: Wait, is that-- are we-- did I miss this? Did we pivot to this as a society? Austin: We did pivot to this, don't worry, you're a dad now. Ren: Kristoph shows up 6 seconds into that game and calls Apollo Justice gay and then just like walks away. He's just like "hey I know its your first court case. You're gay, bro. Have fun in there." Austin: "Have fun, good luck." [...] Rob: Is this corrective for years of stories where shitty little dweebs were valorized, or is this quietly exorcising some kind of Ur-Kink that is deep within our psyche? Austin: It's the latter. And I think America wasn't ready yet for… Patrick: To be more honest about ourselves? Austin: About Apollo Justice, yeah.

[austinramsaygames]

Listening to Remap Radio's System Shock 101 and imagining an immersive sim where the audio logs are full on podcasts. Some bad, some good, all long.

[spankymerve]

What I've Been Reading: July 9, 2023

It’s been a while since we’ve done one of these. Let’s talk about SEO, Reddit, and Deathloop. Continue reading Untitled

[egg-tats]

I'm a big remap fan, after having been a huge waypoint fan, but oh boy do I hope patrick and Janet don't do the thing with blue prince that they did with ff7 rebirth last year! I don't want to hear them spend 8 months occasionally talking about how one of my favorite games of the year makes them miserable!

[dry-gold]

Wow what. The newest episode of Remap Radio has animorphs spoilers timestamped???

[3amsoda]

super mario rap (dirty)

[intertexts]

YAY undertale time tonight......

[phthalology]

I'm envious of everyone having fun with bg3 but unfortunately I am repelled by the d&d setting

[crlegge]

My newest game, F#^% C.A.P.I.T.A.L.I.S.M. is for all those that have ever felt trapped by their job. It has been inspired by the growing modern labor movement and takes place in a world where the protections from the labor movent of the last century were never put in place.

You can pick up the game for free here:

https://crlegge.itch.io/f-capitalism

[blacktabbygames]

LudoNarraCon starts this Thursday, and we've got a JAM PACKED schedule for you. For those of you not in the know, LNC is a digital-only Steam festival celebrating narrative games of all types. More info here: https://www.ludonarracon.com/ So here's what we've got cooking.

Starting at 1pm Eastern on Thursday May 9th, both Slay the Princess and Scarlet Hollow are each going to be 20% off. So if you've been itching to pick one of them up, hold off for a couple of days and save a couple of bucks.

At 7pm Eastern on Thursday May 9th, we'll be doing a retrospctive twitch Stream where we'll play through the ORIGINAL demo cut of Slay the Princess as well as the first episode of Scarlet Hollow. This'll be broadcast on http://twitch.tv/black_tabby_games/

On Friday May 10th, we've got 2 panels that will be broadcast on the LudoNarraCon Steam page.

At 1pm Eastern, I'll be doing a fireside chat with Meredith Gran where we talk about narrative design. At 5pm Eastern on the 10th, Abby and I are on a panel moderated by Patrick Klepek (formerly Vice, now Remap Radio) alongside Ben Gelinas (Times * Galaxy, formerly Bioware + Remedy) and Gareth Damian Martin (Citizen Sleeper.) The topic of this panel is balancing storytelling with player choice. On Sunday, May 12th, at 1pm Eastern, we'll be doing an art stream, specifically going through some of the process of how Abby makes assets for our games! Again, on our Twitch channel!

[spankymerve]

There is no sweeter sound in the world than Ricardo Contreras's laughter.

[callmearcturus]

It is like a week before the holidays, I emphatically am not allowed to buy anything

But Remap Radio released a deskmat and when I tell y'all, if I missed out on this I would legit lose my shit

[andmaybegayer]

Last Monday of the Week 2024-11-11

Getting into situations

Listening: New job which means I have need for a quick and easy source of music that I can throw down on any device with internet while I figure out exactly where I draw the line on mixing personal music files with corporate hardware. Hence, soma.fm, a really good family of internet radio stations that I enjoy a lot.

There's several stations here but to call out ones I like in no particular order:

Beat Blender: Slower house music and electronica

Metal Detector: What it says on the tin, mixed metals

Sonic Universe: Weird jazz

Secret Agent: Normal jazz

SF 10-33: The San Francisco emergency radio broadcast channel mixed with ambient music

Vaporwaves: Look we all have to get stupid sometime

Watching: Movie Night was also a sort of belated Diwali Night because a friend of mine has been getting extremely into indian food, so we watched "Sita Sings the Blues", an 82 minute, Creative Commons, mostly one-woman animation project that is a retelling of the Ramayana and also a breakup jukebox jazz musical.

There's about 30 minutes of a decent movie in here and another 15-20 minutes of the breakup part that would be hard to cut since it's the reason it exists. It's an animation from 2008 and you can see that it's exactly what it needs to be to run on one person who knows Flash reasonably well. The "blues" part is because there's numerous musical segments that use pre-existing 1920's jazz numbers to set the tone which reportedly cost the author tens of thousands of dollars to license, and she's now a free culture advocate so this is how you get Cory Doctorows I guess.

Is it good? I mean there's some really good parts. The legend is delivered in the form of three shadow puppets half-remembering the story to put it together which is very endearing in a Bill Wurtz History Of Japan kind of way. The amount of effort on display for 2008 is enormous. The concept is impressive, in that you found all these songs, but you could have probably cut the songs and got this down to a tight 40.

Reading: Work! Documentation! Learning so much about [REDACTED]. Very weird not working in an open source company again.

Also started The Book of All Skies on the metro the other day, and have gotten to the end of the first act. Compelling! Love an Egan, one of very few authors who can put a topology lesson into a book without it sucking ass.

Making: Made Gulab Jamun for movie night. From spreading my diwali cooking over more than three days I'm learning that actually this shit is easy if you don't try to cram it all into three days. I should make this stuff more often.

Playing: Poking and fiddling with things a little. Still not in the headspace to pick up a full game again. Once I have a schedule I can get back into video games but when I don't have a schedule that includes video games.

Tools and Equipment: Keyd is the new-ish hotness for client-side remapping of keyboard keys. It's not quite a custom build, but it's close.

Allows you to get 99% of the way to whatever zany custom mapping you want under Linux with fairly universal coverage and minimal faff in a very compact and manageable package.

[rolameny]

played through citizen sleeper--

i first heard of this game through waypoint/remap radio, who were really really high on it. then more recently a friend played it and went "the writing ain't that good they should not have hyped it this much." so i went in with expectations tempered for the writing, and had a great time.

the prose has the flavour of small dev team, person who did the writing is not a full-time writer and/or didn't have access to an editor. some clunky phrasing, lots of little SPAG errors particularly in the dlc endgame. didn't bother me because of the warning i had but would have been frustrating to have gone in with "this is the best indie game writing of the past X years" as the rec. so thank you fish for having a bad time so i would have a good time

looooved the art.

i loved the mechanics: managing hunger/stability/clocks. the beginning through the point where you get rid of your tracker is the most thrilling part of the game, because you have so much pressure on you and so few resources to play with. i felt at sea or stalled out a couple times once i hit the later game and didn't have any actively ticking clocks counting down on me.

how you interact with your resource needs adds so much texture to the story. you have a set of dice you roll to perform actions, and you lose dice one by one as your physical conditions decline. there's one point where you have to make a bunch of rolls within a short timeframe, so i used my stabilizer much earlier than i would have otherwise so that i'd have the dice to make it work.

i fucked up multiple drives first because i didn't realize what would happen and then because i had too many things happen at once. i realized too late that the guy who lets you stay in his container has a clock that keeps coming back; i ruined lem and mina's initial chance to get on board the ship because i needed the money from working on the ship and didn't max out mina's babysitting clock by the time i completed the ship.

i'm still not sure if there's a way to stop ankhita from shooting that guy.

i found it so compelling to treat my sleeper as just a guy -- someone doing their best who fucks up, who tries to make up for it, who may not succeed, who is making their best guess judgment for what to prioritize. when i got my ticket for the ship leaving the eye, i gave it to lem and mina. my sleeper fucked it the first time with them, but they tried to make it up to them when the opportunity arose.

i didn't leave with bliss, and didn't leave on the ship, and didn't choose to assimilate with the gardener, and kept committing to the eye right up till the end of the dlc, when i chose to leave with sol. that felt right for my sleeper.

when you finish a storyline, the character who it's related to disappears completely from the world-- the node is gone. this feels jarring (positive) when the story ends badly: that's it; you don't get closure. it feels jarring (negative) when the story ends well. i don't get to keep talking to my friend who i helped? they're still right there. come on. all i get to do with emphis is buy dinner? no more chats with my man??? this makes the world feel emptier and emptier the more storylines you close out, right when it should feel more and more full of life, as your sleeper builds a life on the eye.

castor was maybe my fav running thread through the main game and dlc. great buildup on that guy.

entropy real. the sleeper's body is going to keep decaying and eventually they'll run out of stabilizer to keep it going. the eye is going to fall apart someday. the political and social state of the eye is temporary as well. this too will pass, whether you want it to or not.

i said recently to some friends about a piece of art, "this is well made but fungus object heads are so ten years ago." cannot express how tumblr user cannibalism is passé i felt saying this but it is true. and it is true again here for the fungal network. loved all the creepy node stuff, loved my friend the vending machine, gardener was fun but gardener is--i am sorry--so ten years ago. we gotta pick something else. we're done with mushrooms for now. i'm sorry.

i saw credits like three times before my final credits roll. on the one hand it would have been so frustrating to have to replay the whole game to get to the other endings, on the other it feels a little weird to get tossed right back into the world after the credits wrap. with a couple of these i was at a point of, well, okay, none of my current storylines are urgent and i have no clocks ticking down, so what now? do i keep noodling around? do i stop here?

well, i kept noodling, and i'm glad i did, because i really liked the dlc storyline. i often feel the "nobody is entirely right" thing in games doesn't work, but here it felt good. the three ember ships all with their own takes, the different factions on the eye, it is a mess and it feels right that my sleeper can help in one direction or another, can in fact change things pretty dramatically, but ultimately can't decide the fate of any huge group--they can just choose what they do with their life.

which is to say i like that if you release the gardener it doesn't stop the flux and it doesn't stop corporations from coming in force.

so: overall: art gorgeous. prose mid. actual storylines good. resource/time pressure good. could have used a little more nudging from the game in the slow periods. loved how my sleeper's personal journey ended up going.

vibeo game.

[azeluslight]

I need to mentally dump this overdeveloped idea into the world.

(Trigger warning: Depictions of self-harm, mental illness, spiritualism, magic, and absurdly long post length compared to the average)

Part 1: The basics of the "Third Eye" system

A magic system based on awakening "third eyes" that, instead of granting psychic abilities or divination, grants the user the ability to see/sense more things. This can be split into 2 main categories:

1. Expansion of traditional sensory inputs: the ability to see UV, radio waves, x-rays,... as visible wavelengths (the most basic and low-power example baing seeing the colors that shrimp could and humans couldn't normally)

2. Supernatural add-on senses: seeing spirits, magical energy, timelines, causality, vector directions and forces,... as actual things.

These abilities usually manifest once puberty hits in basically anyone, but can awaken earlier or later in life depending on a variety of conditions. They can also awaken multiple Third Eye abilities, which will cause severe mental strain from the sheer amount of sensory inputs (this is further explained in part 2).

Awakening the Third Eye doesn't immediately grant you any understanding of the ability or what it does, you still need to get it tested, classified, and trained to make sense of what you're seeing. If you don't have the money or access to these things, tough luck I guess...

Also, synesthesia in this world allows the user to remap their Third Eye ability onto different senses, which can allow for very interesting combos (you all can come up with something here).

For the sake of simplicity, and instance

Part 2: How do multiple "Third Eye" abilities work?

To start off with, not anyone can develop multiple "Third Eye" abilities. It's considered a rare genetic mutation, or linked to having multiple genes that correlates to different abilities (there's no clear explanation yet). Most awakened Third Eye abilities happen in puberty, but the second ability usually only awakens under extreme emotional outbursts (anger, sadness, happiness,... any strong emotion counts). Since the brain is not built to handle a massive influx of unknown information, it causes massive amounts of mental strain if one tries to process it, even with training. Due to this, the other Third Eye ability is also forcefully enabled as well, leading to even more mental strain. If you happen to awaken a second Third Eye ability, you're basically cursed with two source of unknown information constantly bombarding your brain 24/7.

To combat this, peoplr have developed the following approaches:

1. "Phantom senses": For people that lost or lack a natural sense, they can use those empty pathways as a route for their Third Eye ability instead. This method stops the pain caused by multiple abilities, but you're still down a regular sense compared to normal people. It also causes massive complications if you somehow restore the missing sense (detailed in part 2.1.)

2. Suppression: Forcefully suppressing a Third Eye ability is never going to be easy or cheap. It's the most humane way for people with full sensory profiles to at least keep a Third Eye though. When a Third Eye ability gets activated, an eye patch or blindfold is put over that eye. Over time, the eye gets weaker and weaker, eventually going dormant and require another awakening moment. It also stops the pain.

3. Self-mutilation: This is a way people try and lessen the pain from it, usually by removing their own eyes or numbing their tongue completely and attempting to do method 1. The pain of the secondary Third Eye ability persists though, since the eye is still fighting against a working sense and the brain can't process it all.

It's a bad time if you managed to awaken two of them, but you get two (or even three) different ways of experiencing the world as the prize (if you survive).

Part 2.1.: What if you restore a person's missing senses?

Scenario 1: They previously had that sense, and that sensory pathway is pre-occupied by a Third Eye ability

- The brain re-establishes the original pathways to the senses.

- The Third Eye fights back but fails, going dormant (see part 2 on suppression).

Scenario 2: They never had that sense before

- Since there's no pathways for it, it is basically like introducing a new sensory input to them

- The brain will attempt to re-use a pathway, targetting the most recently formed one (usually the Third Eye) to develop from.

- Results: a "reversed Third Eye" that grants normal senses instead of enhanced perception.

Part 3: What is the Third Eye used for?

Generally, anyone who works in jobs that require any form of visualization of abstract data gets a pretty nice buff. Having human radars operating military or commercial vehicles is also insanely useful. Honestly, if you can think of a way to use x-ray vision, seeing actual ghosts, or the Mystic Eyes of Death Perception, you'll have a good time with this system.