#so the fact devs are still trying to keep it under the $100 is. Something to me anyway

[todayisafridaynight]

So Allegedly Infinite Wealth is 100 hours... not that you can't already spend that long on the games if you really want to, but I'd say it's the first time that could be said to be the base experience rather than a time only hardcore completionists are likely to get.

Yokoyama was talking at length about wanting to make the game worth the price tag since the team is incredibly conscious about the value of the players' time and money. They essentially feel they owe players ten times what they paid, so they're aiming for "an enjoyable 100 hours, but also an unforgettable 100 hours."

If they pull it off, I personally think it'd be 100% worth it and not just a "well other studios are doing it so we can get away with it too" price hike... I'm at least happy to know that's not the intent, and I'm intrigued to see how everything pans out and what the ratio is between story and side content

oh yayaya i saw that article this morning!!! 100 hours is actually so unfathomable to me in terms of an rgg game- i mean y7 was At Minimum around 45~50 hours but when i think of other RPGS that easily dip into 70's and 100's of hours, i'm not too surprised to see LAD start to climb towards those numbers now. it'd be such a jump in rgg's terms tho, so i'm TRULY curious to see where the nearly doubled gameplay hours comes from..

i really appreciate yoko's respect not just to RGGS but also to its customers: they want to make a great product, but they also don't want to sacrifice what they want to do to do that in the process

[sinsisters]

Postmortem: Launching a Kickstarter (or two) as a first-time dev

Also available to read on Itch.io

Hi everyone,

 This is going to be a very informal postmortem from me (Natty, writer/programmer/game director) about the development of The Spanish Privateer from conception to the release. This read is really for anyone who wants to run a campaign or be a first-time dev and hear from someone who has met their goals but not had any outstanding success. I’m also always happy to chat one-on-one with someone who might have specific questions about the process, especially for Canadians wondering about the technicalities of running a small business & shipping.

Conception

The Spanish Privateer was a collection of five pirate characters that sat on a Google Doc until 2018, when the otome game jam rolled around and I, working a 9:30-4 (dream hours!) co-op position in Vancouver, decided to join up and turn those five characters (now four) into the main characters for my very own visual novel. As a lead, I struggled with trying to delegate and felt that I hadn’t completed enough of the script to know what artwork needed to be done. I think we managed to pull it off well, though, and I was happy to hear people’s feedback to the prologue.

Ultimately, the project fell under the radar as I continued to work on it on my own time, not wanting to ask those who had worked on the game jam for additional commitment, and not knowing whether the finished project would be commercial or not.

In the future, I’m still interested in working on game jams, but only for game jams that are meant to be short, complete games. We’ll see if it happens!

Script Writing

The bulk of the script writing for The Spanish Privateer happened while I was living in Japan on co-op, from the summer of 2019 to the late winter of 2020. I had created a detailed outline for Flint’s route, a less detailed one for Lark, and a very sketchy one for Rico. I tend not to face writer’s block, and writing dialogue especially feels like it comes easily to me, so it was more about scheduling time each day to write. I decided to participate in the NaNoWriMo of 2019 to monitor my progress, ending with 51 547 words written! My goal at this point was to just complete the scripts, and focus on everything else once I knew what CGs I would need to flesh out scenes.

The First Kickstarter

It became clear to me that I would need to fund, at the very least, the CGs in the game. But The Spanish Privateer was ‘the otome I always wanted to play’, and I wanted the game to reflect that. Oftentimes, indie VN devs will buy their background images from stock creators (such as Minikle), paying a one-time fee for licensed use of the images. In fact, a few of the backgrounds in The Spanish Privateer are from these packs. But a pirate ship is a niche category, and I knew I would need to commission original backgrounds for the game.

I was willing to put down around $1000 of my own money towards the game. Keep in mind, I was a university student, and I figured I wouldn’t make any returns on the project. I commissioned three CGs, but all the other assets were from the original game jam.

The Kickstarter of October 2020 failed, but with 128 backers, suddenly this project that no one had heard about had come to life. Something that I didn’t know about Kickstarter is that… most Kickstarter backers are Kickstarter backers. That’s to say, 82% of my backers have backed over 20 projects, and 40% have backed over 100 projects! Only 11% of my backers have backed 10 or fewer projects, and I personally knew half of those people. Here’s a little histogram showing the data specific to my Kickstarter (the second one).

Figure 1: Number of backers sorted by the number of projects they have backed on Kickstarter. Data taken from The Spanish Privateer 2021 Kickstarter on January 11th, 2023

The people who pledged the higher tiers ($60+) varied between those who backed few projects and those who backed many.

My takeaway from this revelation was that Kickstarter itself has an audience that is worth tapping into. That’s part of the reason we see visual novel developers who have had financial success off their games and who have been making games for a while, such as Hanako Games and Winterwolves, start using Kickstarter in the recent years (and likely because the market has grown considerably).

The Bane of Kickstarter: Cancelled Projects

I spent a lot of time looking at visual novels (particularly otoges) that had done well on Kickstarter. Some of them succeeded because they had people pledge those platinum $1000 tiers, some succeeded because they had >500 backers, some succeeded because they had low goals. But amongst these, an unfortunately large number of successful projects got cancelled later on. For that reason, developers who follow through with their projects, communicate with their player base, and meet or exceed expectations, such as GB Patch Games, do well with repeated projects on Kickstarter. They have a dedicated fanbase who are happy to support their work, largely because they know the developers will make good use of it. As a first-time dev, I didn’t have that background. I also had a small number of romanceable love interests (but I still think three is the perfect number for a first-time dev and would recommend that to other first-time devs), the art wasn’t the jaw-dropping highly detailed anime style we see with companies like Great Gretuski Studios or Nifty Visuals, and aside from ‘PIRATES’, it didn’t have much of a grab.

The Next Steps

I released a survey that got quite a few responses, thankfully. Then, I knew I needed to use the last of my cash reserves to commission a few more CGs, and most importantly, commission new sprites. That was the big risk for me. It was a huge art style change, and the CGs clashed with the sprites much more strongly. But it needed to be done since I hadn’t heard from the sprite artist who had collaborated with me during the otome game jam, and in addition to needing more sprites completed, I didn’t want to use the work of someone in a commercial product without their permission or without being able to repay them.

I really love the new sprites and the art style of my sprite artist. It was also a good decision for me to request separate eyebrow, eye, and mouth expressions rather than set expressions. It allowed me to have much more variety with character expressions. I learned a lot during this process, and because of that, I think the final few characters I commissioned (Catalina and Vasco) ended up being the strongest because of that (in addition to the sprite artist’s personal improvements, of course!).

But the game changer for the next Kickstarter was the new key art and logo. The key art is what draws people in, and it was truly stunning.

I have mixed feelings regarding the physical items. The survey showed some people were interested while others weren’t, so I wanted very cheap physical items (compared to charms, for example). I’m not sure if I would do physical items again (I really dislike the process of packaging and shipping), but on the other hand, I’m delighted to have stickers and an art book of characters I made!!! From a game I made!! Isn’t that cool!! (psst you can still buy the artbook and get stickers btw)

The People Who Made The Difference

I did reach out to some people to review the demo, and Blerdy Otome and Sonic Nancy Fan both came through! Additionally, when you’re running a Kickstarter, you tend to check obsessively… and check out the other visual novels that are running at the same time. Off the top of my head, Henchman Story, Silver Blue, Somnium Eleven, Perfect Gold, and Heroine for Hire were running the same time, and some of us gave shout outs to each other, which was nice (especially considering I had a following of about 40 people on Twitter). Chouette, Akua, Naja, Ayael, and Neeka, in particular liked and shared many of my posts, which makes a difference not only for reaching a new otome audience, but for me to slowly get to know other devs and the indie otoge community! I’m thankful to them for that, and for the devs I interact with now as well.

Additionally, VN Game Dev, Sweet & Spicy, and the Otome Lovers curator group all reviewed my game at various stages, which I appreciated as well. In addition, I reached out to a few other groups, some which responded agreeing to review (but with long backlogs) and others who I did not receive a reply from. The otome community is small, so if a visual novel doesn’t have some stand out quality that appeals to the non-visual novel community, such as innovative gameplay or a connection to a larger franchise, it might not be worth reaching out to people who don’t typically cover visual novels. Personally, I actively sought out those who reviewed visual novels, particularly otome games.

The Second Kickstarter

The general rule of a Kickstarter campaign is that if a project can make one third of their goal after 48 hours, they’re likely to reach their goal (with the second third happening throughout the campaign and the final third during the last three days). Because of the previous Kickstarter, I already had a number of backers who were ready to back again, which helped a lot with that big first day boost. I wouldn’t say the campaign was a raging success—the total amount transferred from Kickstarter was 5206.49 CAD (this was transferred at the end of May, 2021) across 169 backers (6 backers dropped), which is less than 4000 USD today. This is a really, really small amount of money to make a game, but it was what I needed to make the game, which is all I cared about.

Here's how it all came together:

Writing & Programming: The writing was done, although I continued to edit and revise. Ren’Py is very easy to work with and the programming is minimal. My labour is all at zero cost, and I frankly don’t expect I’ll ever make a penny from my games (but wouldn’t that be nice?)

BGs: I worked with two different artists for the backgrounds, and supplemented them with stock backgrounds I paid a flat fee for, such as the shore, church, fancy bedroom, bedroom with two beds, lagoon, and tavern with the bear skin on the wall. Sometimes I realized retroactively that I needed a night version of a background and did this myself. The result wasn’t… great, but thankfully the scenes that needed these changes were minimal, and the ones with long scenes were properly done by the artist. I also did the ocean background because I realized belatedly I needed one and couldn’t find one I liked online. All part of learning more about the planning process…

CGs: I continued working with my main artist, Tsunya (Tsuume) on the CGs. Commissioning CGs was the most challenging part of the process. I learned a lot about how to better communicate certain things I wanted in a scene, as well as which ideas I had didn’t translate as well to a CG. For example, for Flint’s kissing CGs, I struggled with the best way to get two vertical people embracing to look good on a horizontal screen. The final CG ended up being them laying horizontally across the screen. As a result, the overall image is really intimate and pleasing to the eye. I carried this on with Lark’s route, which features Carlota’s hair blowing in one kiss scene to compensate for the space, and her dress blowing in another. I also learned that a close-up of a love interest can be simple but beautiful. In the future, I would probably like to incorporate more close-ups of the love interests rather than focussing on having so many couple CGs. With Rico’s route, I wanted some more action shots, such as the horse and Rico as a kid. I particularly liked the angle of Rico’s CG as a child, and I would use more of those sharp angles in the future.

Sprites: When you have a limited budget and you’re commissioning artists, rather than paying artists a monthly salary like regular studios do, you have to be very respectful of their time. My sprite artist was in school, so of course it was difficult for her to predict when she would be available or for how long (which I could relate to as a student as well). I probably would have commissioned a few more sprites from her, such as the grandee and the governor, but we ended up being limited on time and I figured that I would probably keep on adding more and more sprites if I didn’t end somewhere. I was just incredibly in love with her designs and work. She really brought the characters of The Spanish Privateer to life. Personally, I love non-anime style art such as Made Marion, Andromeda Six, Imperial Grace, ValiDate, Cinders, The Radiants, Angela He, Arcade Spirits, and Under Pretense of Death. But anime art’s biggest advantage is how incredibly emotive it looks. When art is less realistic, expressions can be exaggerated without looking disturbing to the viewer. Going forward, I’m still not sure which style I would prefer. It will probably depend on the game I produce—for example, if I make a game where the protagonist is customizable, then the art style will likely be anime.

Chibi CGs: I had worked with an artist to do some quick chibi designs of the characters, and I decided to work with her again for the chibi CGs. By this point, I had already commissioned many CGs from my CG artist, so communication was much better for these CGs. It was a great way to show off many characters in a scene (such as in Lark’s route) or characters who don’t have sprites (such as a certain man that we see in Rico’s route).

GUI: Graphic design and user interface design is really its own thing. I trusted the GUI to someone who had lots of experience doing visual novel GUIs and told her my vague ideas of what I was looking for, and she managed to turn it into something gorgeous! The important takeaway is that the less you know about something, the more important it is that you’re hiring someone with experience in that department. Since the visual novel realm is so niche, this can be challenging at times.

Logo: Pretty much the same as above! The logo is beautiful and tells a story all on its own, which I love. The artist also provided the base file, so I was able to add and remove different elements from the design, which was incredibly helpful for me as I simplified it for smaller images or darkened areas for better contrast. I would recommend anyone getting a logo done to request the illustrator or equivalent working file.

Music: The only music I paid for was a commercial license of a few songs. The other songs are all in the creative commons. Even if I had been able to commission an original soundtrack for The Spanish Privateer, frankly, I love the songs in the game so much that I wouldn’t change them for the world. I chose peaceful piano pieces for Flint, harpsichord and whimsical tracks for Lark, and grand, adventurous orchestral music for Rico. Some people pooh-pooh the importance of music in a visual novel, but I think the tracks make a huge difference in creating the tone of a scene. My favourite part was selecting tracks for the good endings and other endings.

Kickstarter Rewards: I worked with the same artist who did the two key arts for the wallpapers, and ended up with stunning results. Carlota’s in particular is breathtaking. I commissioned high-quality chibis for the stickers, and my big takeaway is to NOT have limbs jutting out the way Flint’s arm is. The spacing is awkward and makes the pricing of the stickers more expensive than they need to be. Additionally, it won’t work well for charms if that’s something you plan on doing. But other than the rogue limb I failed to account for, the process was smooth. The big challenge is not knowing how different the colours will look once printed. Even test prints aren’t foolproof because each printing company may have different methods of printing. I used StickerApp for the stickers, but Luna Chai has some great and relevant blog posts (current blog and archived post). I used Mixam in Canada to print the art books and they get shipped as oversized lettermail. Since I don’t get anywhere CLOSE to the small business cutoffs, I don’t have to worry about collecting GST. I ordered my mailers and labels from Amazon (like the common by-product of our capitalistic world that I am), and the nice ladies at the post office just let me plunk the addressed mailers down, pay the total, and be off on my way. If you’re Canadian and sending something that doesn’t qualify as lettermail, then don’t. I mean, try really really hard not to, because it gets very expensive quickly. But I won’t get in the way of your dakimakura dreams, either (I wouldn’t say no to a Harry or Luciel Choi body pillow. Or maybe I would. How could I even begin to explain that to my family.)

Sound: Shoutout to my brother for telling me about the massive royalty-free audio bundle Sonniss offers each year for free. Their work is awesome and greatly appreciated for small devs. The rest of the sounds were sourced from various online resources. Again, related to music, sound effects are greatly underappreciated. A great visual novel should use both of your available senses, not just sight (and they can use other senses if they’re extra creative).

And All of the Other Little Things That Add Up:

Registering as a business which included going down to the bank and saying yes, this is my company called ‘SinSisters Studios’, yes, I make games about romancing men (and hopefully others), please give me a business account and card to use (I did phrase it better because I’m an adult but that is surely what we were both thinking). The business account is an online-only no-fee one which is great, and I use the debit card for all business-related expenses. You know, in case I ever get audited in the future. I also had to pay a small fee to register my business name with the government, which has to be renewed every five years, and I might buy a website domain soon for the site. SinSisters Studios is a sole proprietorship business, which is what most small Etsy businesses might be, for instance. That means I get fewer benefits and legal issues would be under my name, but it’s easy to file taxes and the fee is small. Most indie VN developers don’t have any need to incorporate. If you’re a Canadian, incorporating is really something you do for liability insurance and would be recommended if you run a Kickstarter for $100K, for example.

On the game dev side, I had to do art touch-ups such as colour correction, making sure Carlota’s mole wasn’t all over the place, and some backgrounds for CGs and chibi CGs. I wouldn’t have been able to do this all with Gimp, so I got CSP. But I can’t recommend them as strongly now that they’re changing their payment program.

Things that I found tedious and that I was not good at and would have preferred to hire someone: creating the art book and guide, doing the graphics for the Kickstarter, doing the graphics, formatting, and ten million blurbs for the websites and social media pages and presskit (actually, the presskit was kind of fun because it looks professional).

Creating and uploading the game on Itch.io using Butler is very simple. Steam was a whole ‘nother ballpark. On top of having fifty billion different asset resizing requirements, they have their own method of uploading builds that I had trouble wrapping my head around (but now, I actually prefer Steam’s build updating method to Itch.io’s. Sorry! It’s just better at merging builds and making sure you’re using the right build).

Setting up accounts, such as PayPal, a mailing newsletter, Discord, and Stripe are all in the unknowns. Just finding people to work with is a skill in its own (if you find an artist you like online, save them somewhere. I’ve found artists from Lemmasoft, Twitter, from finding images on Pinterest and then following the credit or signature ((dear artists, PLEASE make your signature something that allows us to find you!!!)), DeviantArt, even from searching foreign websites. The one thing I haven’t used is Fiverr, although I have no doubt that you can find lots of talent there as well.

But by far, the worst thing about being a game dev is…

SOCIAL MEDIA AND MARKETING

AAAAAAAAHHHHHH

The bane of most devs' existence. How I wish I could just hire someone for this role. I don’t like TikTok. I haven’t uploaded a video on there in forever, but I have this constant nagging that I need to. The only social media I like is Twitter, and that’s because that’s where all the game devs hang out. To be fair, I do think my largest audience is on Twitter as well. The company’s following has grown to over 680, which is crazy. Although a certain individual caused a mass exodus and generally Worse Time on Twitter, so who knows what the future holds. I like interacting with others on social media, but I never feel inspired to post or even comment on others’ posts. I did want to do an art book giveaway with fanart as entries, but I frankly don’t feel like I have the audience for that. Would I even get an entry? I don’t know. I would rather see people creating fanart for the game because they feel inspired to. Personally, if I could Art, I would draw several modern AUs. Maybe I will and just look at it in private, who knows. The point is, I am Bad at The Social Media and that is simply because I Do Not Try Hard Enough. It is very time consuming and mentally draining. If you’re looking for marketing tips, read Arimia’s blog, and support her games while you’re at it. She has so much awesome advice. All I have for you are tears.

I entered The Spanish Privateer in the June 2022 SteamNextFest, recorded me playing the prologue, used OBS Studio to loop it (of course, everything you do involves learning to use something new) and streamed that over SteamNextFest. The result? Not too shabby. Our wishlist balance had a spike even bigger than the release spike, so I would recommend doing it! I had no interest in talking or filming myself, so it was a low effort high reward event!

The Result (And The Numbers)

So, what was the fruition of all these efforts?

First, let’s look at Steam wishlists. If a game gets to around 8000-12000 wishlists on Steam, depending on the genre, it starts to get ‘noticed’ by Steam. That means it’ll likely appear on the upcoming list and in recommended sections. The Spanish Privateer didn’t get anywhere CLOSE to that. We were getting an average of 6 daily wishlist additions, with just under 1000 wishlists upon release. Today, we have 1553 wishlists and a conversion rate or 7.1% (meaning 7.1% of people who wishlisted it have bought the game). This is below average for games on Steam. I expected this, considering how things were going leading up to this. My goal has always been to break even. As of the day I’m writing this (Jan 11, 2023), we have sold 162 copies of The Spanish Privateer on Steam and 81 copies of the digital bundle, with 33 copies sold on Itch.io and 21 of the guide. The final amount that arrived in the bank at the end of 2022 is about 1800 CAD. It’s a low amount, but I’m not complaining, either. I’ve made back my $1000 investment!!!!!!!!!! YAY!  

That’s not to say you can’t make a living making visual novels. Just that I can’t. Maybe I will one day. But my best decision throughout this process was not investing too much money, only having three love interests, not getting feature-happy, and being careful with how I spent the money. Frankly, when I play The Spanish Privateer, sometimes I think to myself, ‘This is a $6000 game??? That’s it???’ I made the game I always wanted to play growing up, and for that, I’m proud of myself.

On a Personal Note

If you’ve read up until now, you’ve read all the game dev stuff! Hopefully this gives you a little perspective from someone who successfully published a game but has not made any income from it. You’re good to go, class dismissed.

In general, in online spaces, I prefer to be fairly private, especially when managing a company account. But I feel like I have had a number of transitions as The Spanish Privateer developed worth mentioning.

I started The Spanish Privateer following my second year of university, during my first co-op term (2018). I attended the winter semester of my third year, then moved to Tokyo for my second co-op term from summer of 2019 to March 2020. I took the summer off, then did the fall semester of my third year online (first Kickstarter launched). I then worked my third co-op term from the beginning of 2021 (second Kickstarter launched) to the end of the summer. After that, I moved back to Vancouver to complete my final year of university. I graduated in the spring of 2022, launched the game in the fall, and have been job searching ever since (☹). Which brings us to…

What’s Next

I have two major projects I would like to do. One is a TTRPG style adventure featuring EA and SEA pirates (haha, SEA, get it?). I’m running it as a D&D campaign for my friends, which has helped flesh it out, but it’s going to be a massive project in the end. The other is a Canadian mystery visual novel heavily inspired by the Ace Attorney series, Disco Elysium, and puzzlers like Nancy Drew and Professor Layton. Players will get to choose between two protagonists and play three different mysteries, getting to swap between the protagonists with each episode if they want. This one is something I really love writing. It’s murdery, it’s queer, it’s full of Canadianisms and sarcasm and features a cast of mid-twenties and thirties.

But I’ve actually been writing a classic interactive fiction/visual novel in an attempt to create an RPG system that works with Ren’Py for my needs. It’s fun, it’s text-only, it’s fantasy, and hopefully I’ll get to release it as a short, free adventure in homage of the modern IF games that I love playing these days. And of course, all of the games feature romance. It’s just optional this time. I’m sure I’ll want to create a traditional otome or amare visual novel at some point (ojijam is looking mighty tempting), but for now, I want to challenge myself in other ways.

Anyway, hopefully you have some insight as to what was going through my mind these past years. I’m always happy to chat dev stuff and give insight as to any part of the process. I’m also happy to be transparent about numbers, if someone wants any particular details on that. Thanks for reading ☺

-Natty

[rpgmgames]

March’s Featured Game: acai cOrner

DEVELOPER(S): moca & Mitty ENGINE: RPG Maker 2003 GENRE: RPG, Adventure, Surreal SUMMARY: acai cOrner is about Mizuki, someone who has fallen into the sewers and who happens to find their favorite electric guitar! Upon obtaining the guitar, Mizuki turns into a magical girl who must defend herself against spooky sewer creatures using the guitar's magical powers.

Download the game here! Our Interview With The Dev Team Below The Cut!

Introduce yourself! *moca: Hi, I'm moca, a Starbucks barista aspiring to be a writer and game developer. I have been making RPG Maker games for about six years now, with my first two projects being a Pokémon fan-game and a Corpse Party fan-game. Those two happen to be my two favorite franchises as well! I have also created the RPG Maker game MOMOKA (IGMC 2018). I have founded a group called 'Team Shibu!' dedicated to making horror games! Our current project is a RPG Maker survival horror game named 'Katharsis'.

*Mitty: Hey there, I'm Mitty! I've been working with Moca on several games for a while now, helping with mostly graphics! Please support him, as he is very kind and hardworking!! I'm also the main developer of a game called "Marinette", so I hope you'll check that one out too, when the demo is released!

What is your project about? What inspired you to create this game initially? *moca: acai cOrner is an experimental spooky RPG Maker game that only uses 4 colors! You are a magical girl with a just-as-magical electric guitar that you use to fend off spooky sewer slimes and other weird enemies you find in the surreal sewer system. It's half exploration and half RPG battles. What inspired me to create acai cOrner initially was to actually get myself back into the groove of making games again. I had just recently came back from a hiatus and found myself having trouble getting back into the development of 'Katharsis'. That's when I decided to make a short, experimental game to get the juices flowing.

How long did you work on your project? *moca: acai cOrner was finished in just about under a month!

Did any other games or media influence aspects of your project? *moca: I had always wanted to make a Yume Nikki-like game and thought this was the perfect opportunity to try. So for the more surreal parts of acai cOrner, I took inspiration from Yume Nikki and a Homestuck random planet generator. Gameplay wise though, I took inspiration from a RPG Maker game called Ghost Suburb 0! I really loved how unique it was, especially with the timer and no dialogue aspect. I knew I wanted to do something with a timer, so I tried a rogue-like approach with the gameplay.

Have you come across any challenges during development? How have you overcome or worked around them? *moca: If you played any of my previous projects, you know that acai cOrner is vastly different than anything that I have ever done. I'm so used to using words to describe the violence in my games, so when it came to making the story, I had a lot of trouble. It wasn't until I looked deeper into why people like these types of games that I had realized that people like to interpret the story on their own, guided by exploration, to enjoy these games. After that, I let loose a bit and made something more open-ended. Another challenge was the difficulty. I was the only one playtesting the game, and since I knew the game front and back, and had no trouble getting the ending. That's why when I sent out demos to friends, I was really discouraged to hear that the experience was mostly frustrating and rage quitting-inducing haha. I worked closely with their feedback and made changes accordingly to make the experience less frustrating but still difficult. *Mitty: I think I was going through a weird artblock during the development of the game, so for some of the illustrations and backdrops for each area's fights, Moca sketched out the basic idea of what it could look like, and I just put my spin on it! It made the work much easier and faster!

Did any aspects of your project change over time? How does your current project differ from your initial concept? *moca: Well, the game was meant to be short so there wasn't room for any big changes. Sure there are a couple gameplay changes and enemy tweaks, but not anything mindblowing. I added in the idea of making four surreal worlds kinda last minute, if that counts, haha.

What was your team like at the beginning? How did people join the team? If you don’t have a team, do you wish you had one or do you prefer working alone? *moca: In the beginning, it was just me! I didn't think I was gonna need any outside help since this was supposed to be a relatively easy project to release, but the further in development I got, the more I realized the game needed pizazz. The four color limitation wasn't enough for my lack of graphical talent. That's when I contacted Mitty about helping with the games battle backdrops and sprite animations! She is also a member of Team Shibu!, but we have collabed together even before that. Her art really made the project shine and I enjoy working with them on games! *Mitty: Moca contacted me, and I wanted to help! We are working together on another game called Katharsis, so we are quite familiar with each other. I like working with other people, especially if I'm not in the lead, it releases a bit of the pressure I feel sometimes ahaha

What is the best part of developing a game? *moca: To me, it's seeing everything come together and just... working exactly the way you envisioned it. As a game developer, you section the game off into parts to make development much more organized and faster but seeing it all come together in the end. Pure bliss *chefs kiss*. *Mitty: I like a bit of everything, but currently I've been enjoying animating and spritework, as well as map assets' designs a little more than usual!

Do you find yourself playing other RPG Maker games to see what you can do with the engine, or do you prefer to do your own thing? *moca: Mm... not really! I have an idea of what the engine can do, so when I do go out of my way to player other RPG Maker games, it's usually for writing inspiration rather than gameplay inspiration. Ghost Suburb 0 is something that I accidentally stumbled upon and immediately fell in love with it the minute I played it haha. (Fun fact: the developer of Ghost Suburb 0 is apart of Team Shibu! and is in charge of monster design!)

Which character in your game do you relate to the most and why? (Alternatively: Who is your favorite character and why?) *moca: There is a rat in the game that is internally called 'Ratthew' who leads you into a funky room. I relate them the most. *Mitty: I relate to the land sharks the most on a spiritual level. They are pretty much confused beans, and that's very relatable.

Looking back now, is there anything that regret/wish you had done differently? *moca: I wish I added more random spooky events and trap rooms. But the game was also supposed to be short and I knew that if I kept adding more and more things, development was never gonna end haha.

Do you plan to explore the game’s universe and characters further in subsequent projects, or leave it as-is? *moca: Well, by the time this interview comes out, there should be a new update for the game. The update should include 100% custom music by a talented composer, and a nerf in difficulty. As for sequels, who knows! The next time you see acai cOrner may be in 3D.

What do you most look forward to upon finishing the game? *moca: Definitely the fan reaction! The satisfaction of seeing your work being noticed by people and actually enjoying makes me happy. It's also the relief of just... finishing something! *Mitty: For this particular project I was obviously looking forward to seeing what people said about the little animations and such ahaha! I also was curious about the reaction to the timed difficulty mechanic, I had never seen anything like that before Moca presented it to me, so I had no idea on what people's feedback would be.

Is there something you’re afraid of concerning the development or the release of your game? *moca: How people will handle the difficulty. The game isn't supposed to be completed on your first playthrough, but in 2-3 playthroughs. There are rooms and places that are meant to waste your time that you should ideally skip the more you play. By later playthroughs, you should be shaving time and be better. I understand that it's not handled as best I could, but I think the experience should still be challenging and hopefully fun! *Mitty: I was a little conflicted on the timed mechanic, I loved it because it's pretty original and helps set an interesting athmosphere of worry and unease, and also seems to tell a bit of the vague story; and at the same time I don't like it much because I prefer more story-driven games and the vagueness mixed with the mechanic feels different from what I'm used to playing! I think it's more of a personal taste kind of thing, it was an experimental jam game, after all!

Do you have any advice for upcoming devs? *moca: Take it easy! Take short breaks throughout development. And most importantly, have fun. If it's a hobby and it's making you overly stressed, just take a step back!

Question from last month's featured dev @ressurflection: What would you say is the weakest part of your game development? *moca: Procrastination. I'm so bad at sticking to my own schedule, it's something that I try to keep in check when working with a team especially.

We mods would like to thank moca & Mitty for agreeing to our interview! We believe that featuring the developer and their creative process is just as important as featuring the final product. Hopefully this Q&A segment has been an entertaining and insightful experience for everyone involved!

Remember to check out acai cOrner if you haven’t already! See you next month! 

- Mods Gold & Platinum

[wildlyminiaturesandwich]

🏠 Tiny Living Stuff Pack Review 🏠

Thank you to the EA Game Changer Program for providing me with the opportunity to play with Tiny Living Stuff early!

I didn’t have a lot of time to play around with this pack because I had some real life obligations during the early access time frame and the embargo time was once again at a ridiculous hour of the morning for me (don’t get me started on that mess), but here’s what I did learn about the new Tiny Living Stuff Pack.

I feel like I need to say straight away that this is my favourite stuff pack so far. The reason I feel the need to say that is because when I sat down to go through the notes I’d made during early access and type up this review, the more I got into it, the more it started to sound... aggressively ranty 😬

I was going to try to tone it down a bit, but honestly there are already so many reviews out there that gloss over the glaring bugs that I figured I might as well just leave it. It’s my honest opinion of the pack, and what’s the point of doing a review if I’m not giving my honest opinion, no matter how ranty? lol

I’m gonna put this under a cut, because spoilers.

— What I loved —

🏠 Create-a-Sim:

I’ve been saying for a long time we need more comfy casual clothing for our sims and with this pack we finally got some! LOOK AT THOSE JAMMIES!

To be honest, I wasn’t expecting any CAS items with this pack, but we got some amazing clothing that I will no doubt use on literally every sim I make lol

The hairs are good too, and more options are always appreciated, however I honestly feel like we already have different variations of most of them.

The best part about the hairs is that every single one of them has been made available for kids and toddlers! Apparently one of the gurus found a quick and cost effective way to convert hairs, so hopefully we’ll see this happen more and more with each future pack!

🏠  Buy Mode:

The Buy Mode objects are 100% the star of this pack for me. I don’t think there is a single thing in the buy catalogue of this pack that I didn’t absolutely adore! Some of the objects have issues — and I’ll get into that in a bit — but overall I love, love, LOVE the general concept of everything.

[click for larger]

The objects in this pack were based off the Scandinavian concept of Hygge and I really think they hit the nail on the head! Everything feels so cozy and comfy, with a little hint of Ikea to the furniture and I just... I can’t even really put into words how much I love it all. I honestly can’t remember a single previous pack (expansion, game or stuff) where I have loved every item in the buy catalogue, there’s usually always something that’s like “Meh” or “I don’t like this at all” to me, but the objects in this pack are 10/10.

I also love that they combined so many things. Like the murphy bed with the couch on the front (though I do wish we were also given that couch as a separate couch as well) and the TV unit that’s also a bookcase AND a stereo. And I really appreciate that they went back and redid some of the old book ends to make them functional bookcases. 

— What I didn’t love —

🏠 Create-A-Sim:

I say it with every pack and I’m going to continue to say it even if no one is listening...

WHERE ARE THE KIDS, TODDLERS AND ELDERS CAS ITEMS!?

I know the kids and toddlers got some hairs but that doesn’t make up for the serious lack of CAS content that every age range besides young adults has and it’s getting really hard to make unique sims when there isn’t enough content to choose from.

🏠 Build Mode:

For a pack dedicated to Tiny Living, I was really disappointed to see literally only one door in the build catalogue. ONE. I was expecting some small windows, maybe some sliding doors, but nope; just one door. Hell I would have even been happy to have less CAS stuff in exchange for some build stuff!

I get why they haven’t added bunk beds and spiral stairs yet, those are a lot of work and I’m ok with waiting until they perfect them BUT this would have been the perfect pack to add ladders. We already have ladders in game that are fully animated (pool and island living ladders) it really wouldn’t take that much work to make ladders work between floors. I HATE the idea of having to put stairs outside in tiny builds and ladders are the ultimate in space saving “technology"; I feel like the team really dropped the ball on that one.

🏠 Murphy Beds:

Listen, I love the concept of the murphy beds and the design of them looks really cool but I can’t see myself using them at all as they are currently.

I was almost immediately disappointed with them when I realised they were remote controlled. I know that it makes it easier for the Sims Team so they don’t have to work so hard to animate them, but I really wanted sims to pull them down by hand. The reason I wanted murphy beds in the game was because they would fit better with small apartments and homes of sims who don’t have a lot of money, and to me a remote controlled murphy bed sounds incredibly expensive. 

Oh but don’t worry, because apparently the remote control is invisible?

Now, the version of the game that the Gurus were using for the stream didn’t have invisible remotes BUT they use a dev build of the game that isn’t the same as ours, and many other Game Changers are also saying its invisible for them too, so I dunno what happened but that’s just one of the things that needs to be fixed.

The other issue, which is the biggest deal breaker for me, is that the damn things constantly break! And I do mean CONSTANTLY. You know how when you buy a cheap stereo or sink it’ll last a few days/uses before it breaks? Yeh, not the case for the murphy beds. They break instantly, and they break often.

I was REALLY looking forward to murphy beds being added to the game and I thought if there’s one thing I need to do above all else with this pack, it’s test out those glorious murphy beds! Well... I managed to play for roughly three sim days and here’s what happened during that time:

Bed 1 (never used before) got stuck on first use and squashed Sim 1

Bed 1 got stuck on second attempt and killed Sim 1

Bed 1 got stuck on third attempt and squashed Sim 2

Bought brand new bed

Bed 2 pulled down without issue for Sim 2

Bed 2 broke at 11pm while Sim 2 was sleeping and squashed Sim 2

Sim 2 refused to sleep for 3 hours out of fear while Sim 3 was able to sleep in broken, sparking bed for that time without issue because they weren’t in it when it squashed Sim 2

Sim 2 repaired bed while Sim 3 continued to sleep

After 3 hours Sim 2 went back to sleep and Bed 2 broke again almost immediately

Bought brand new bed. Again.

Bed 3 got stuck on first attempt and squashed Sim 2

Bed 3 got stuck on second attempt and squashed Sim 3

Bed 3 pulled down without issue on third attempt for Sim 3

Sims 2 and 3 slept for another 2 hours before Bed 3 started sparking again but didn’t squash them

Woke Sim 2 up to repair bed and immediately sent Sim 2 back to bed (the fear moodlet only happens if they get squashed but the bed can break without squashing them apparently?)

Bed 3 broke again 3.5 hours later and squashed both Sim 2 and 3

I rage quit.

For the so-called “Hero” object of this pack, this is just unacceptable. The percentage for breakage REALLY needs to be turned down because in my opinion they’re not usable as they are.

And even if it weren’t for all the bugs, I probably still wouldn’t use them in tiny homes because I don’t think they’re space saving at all. They take up exactly the same amount of space as normal beds do; 6 tiles. You can’t put anything in front of them or around them if you want them to be functional on both sides, and you can’t even put dangling lights above them because I guess, realistically, the bed would hit them on the way down?

It’s especially annoying with the murphy bed that has the couch attached. It would have been really nice to add a small coffee table or ottoman in front of it but you can’t because then your sims won’t be able to use the bed. I really wish they had have made at least the little round coffee table and the ottoman from this pack inventory-able. Sims could have them out during the day, and throw them in their inventory when they need to use the bed at night, then place them back down in the morning when they wake up.

I think it’s this aspect — not being able to put things around/in front of the murphy beds — that actually annoys the most; the bugs will probably be fixed eventually but I can’t see this ever changing. I spent most of the three days we had for early access trying to work out how to fit a murphy bed into a 32 tile micro home without having it just sitting in the middle of an empty room and let me tell you, it’s not worth the frustration.

— The Verdict —

🏠 7/10 Would go Tiny again

As I said, this is my favourite stuff pack so far and I will get a lot of use out of the CAS and Buy stuff, but because of all the things I mentioned above I can’t give it a 10/10.

I do love the content of this pack, but right now I’m getting kind of fed up with the issues that keep happening with every pack lately. It’s all stuff that should have been caught by QA testing, stuff that is glaringly obvious to the average player, and stuff that would have only taken two minutes of gameplay to find out was a problem. I don’t know who tests these packs, but whoever it is needs to step up their game in a big way.

Overall I really do love the pack, but some major aspects fell a little flat for me. And the fact that that’s not at all a surprise, and that this feeling of “I like it, but...” has become the norm with new packs is really quite sad.

If you have questions about Tiny Living Stuff, feel free to drop an ask in my box, anon will be on right up until the release 😊

[botwstoriesandsuch]

I think the biggest issue that I have with Botw’s writing is that in most every memory(which are basically a part of the main story), almost always focus on Zelda instead of Link. And I wouldn’t have an issue with this if they hadn’t made the fact that Zelda was kind of a b*tch to Link in the beginning a part of her character and in turn I really just don’t like Zelda that much! [1]

(Sorry this has been sitting in my inbox for awhile)

I agree that the main problem with the writing is probably the memories. You’re right that some of the more important parts of Zelda’s character are kept in more obscure diaries, rather than in actual memories. Although, I don’t know if focusing more on Link would actually help, as despite everyone wanting Link to express more emotions, I’m pretty sure that Nintendo is gonna keep him a blank slate (but I hope I’m wrong!)

And yeah, the failure to have Zelda actually apologies to Link is a completely justified complaint, and frankly I think it’s the fault of the memories being crafted with the goal of being watched in any order, rather than a three act structure. Zelda apologizing to Link in a memory would have been confusing to those who haven’t seen the other memories which I think is a big flaw in the system. The memories are made to be self contained, meaning they can’t interact with the other memories that much which pretty much the only exception being either the Yiga Clan one of the Calamities Awakening. Other than that, the memories all tell the same information, with static rather than dynamic characters. 

My personal opinion is that the way all the memory scenes themselves are crafted just fail at being compelling? There’s barely any subtext, and they’re designed to be seen in any order, so, all the information or exposition or character they give is basically the same. (Again, we don’t necessarily see Zelda apologize, since the developers wouldn’t want the player to be confused if they saw one memory before the other) All the memories convey is either broad characterization for the Champions and the dramatic stakes of Zelda trying to unlock her powers. That’s it...and it leaves a lot to be desired. 

Sure we can headcanon all day, but at the end of it the memories were designed too stoically, and independently that they fail to actually contribute to a flowing narrative. I feel like if there were more memories, and more structure to them it might have improved, oop it’s time for hypothetical and tangents about how it could maybe be improved below the cut

I think the whole thing where you are left with a simple photographs, and having to explore and find your way to these areas it really great! It keeps the player moving and adds to the games theme of exploration. But I feel it would have been improved if there was more substance rather than an X marks the spot

Like what if for one memory, you get a picture of a forest, and a stable is in the background. So eventually you find this location, but you’re still not triggering anything. Maybe sometime later, after you finish a Divine Beast or something, you can go to the stable and find an npc, and they talk about how 100 years ago a Champion or Champions were doing something blahblahblah at a certain tree. Maybe you hear a certain detail from their dialogue that triggers something in Link And that would be when you could go to that location and trigger a memory cutscene. 

Granted, this structure is more linear and not as open ended, but I think it’s strengths outweigh its costs considering now that you can add structure to the memories, you can actually craft compelling arcs. Let’s just do Zelda for example. 

Let’s say we have the original 12 memories out in Hyrule and you can go to any of them at any time. But, as you unlock more Divine Beasts, you unlock more opportunities to find even more memory locations. So you start off with the one in Sanidin Park, or maybe the one by the Sacred Grounds, or even the Ancient Columns. From those memories you establish the starting point of Zelda and Link’s relationship. 

Then, later on you might complete a Diving Beast, and that unlocks opportunities to find other memories. Since you’ve unlocked a Divine Beast, you were more likely to have done those other memories, so now you get the chance to delv further into these characters. Maybe now you get a chance to see Zelda and Link growing on each other and bonding, you could see Zelda apologize, you could world build or see more internal struggles. I really liked that memory of Zelda watching Link under the tree and expressing her doubts. You could do more of that stuff but now you can BUILD off of other memories that the player has already seen!! Even further than Zelda and Link, you could further characterize the Champions. Have a little banter with Revali or maybe have him see Link in battle and he could grow respect for him. Or how does Mipha deal with Link being Zelda’s knight? Fuck it, have some internal conflict with all the Champions with each other, then have them grow into a found family dynamic as you unlock more and more Divine Beasts and you unlock more and more memories.

If you add structure to what memories can be unlocked, you can add structure to how scenes and characters grow because you’re not limited to having each memory be independent. 

For the love of Hylia you could add anything so long as it isn’t telling the same thing for everyone of the memories, so long as it tells something different than “Zelda is struggling with her powers,” or “This character has a crush on Link.” If you structured the memories system you could actually have compelling growth and change and eVEN STILL KEEP LINK AS A BLANK SLATE NINTENDO! All the original memories do is talk about all the amazing things the Champion’s did. Zelda talking with Link after he killed 3 Lynels. Boy, would have been cool to see that fight and learn about how competent a fighter Link was. Oh, Link and Daruk are good friends? Would have been nice to see them hanging out and establishing what good friends they are rather than just TALKING about how good of friends they are. Even in the DLC, which does have really great cutscenes and diary entries to be fair, they don’t count because that was optional and not something that everyone can experience. How great would it have been to unlock memories that shows (show not tell!) Mipha caring and healing her people, or Revali training in solitude. Then as you play further into the game, you unlock memories of Link fighting along side Mipha, or Revali teaching Link how to shoot in mid air. 

and WHAT IF NINTENDO ACTUALLY HIRED WRITERS, instead of leaving it to their game devs, TO WRITE COMPELLING CUTSCENES WITH IMPROVED DIALOGUE, GENUINE SUBTEXT, AND INTERESTING DYNAMICS

It pains me to no end that the memories in botw are just...there. It could have been so much more. I love this game and I love it’s story despite its flaws and I really hope the sequel doesn’t have linear storytelling, but my god please pLEASE hire writers nintendo.

You can agree or disagree with my proposal all you want but can we all agree that more memories wouldn’t have hurt? Right?

As you can see I have a lot of feelings on this.... :P

[terrascookiejar-archive]

What about other official discords? I know Minecraft and New horizons has one. How come they are better handling it than CR despite with possible more massive fan base?

Well I’m not 100% sure. But I have a feeling those discords being ran by official sources managed to have a plan and keep things organized from the start. They probably had a strict process for choosing moderators, or hired their own moderation team whose job it is to keep things in line. Multiple people combing multiple channels and being there to hear things out when things go wrong.

The thing is, Cookie Run Official Discord didn’t start like this.

It’s a well known fact that the Discord was started without anyone on the Devsis Team really fully understanding discord. Originally there were NO moderators at all, aside from these “test mods” that seemed to be floating around, and it was essentially like a wild west where Dev Sis kind of assumed they’d just, figure it out over time? There’s no clear cut rules, they’re constantly changing. There’s no consistent moderation. They are in and out. So that means there’s no communication, so when Moderators come in that DO promise and try to change things, they very quickly realize that they aren’t getting the help they need higher up the ladder and yet are somehow expected to just keep things in check with a vague and broken system that DevSis assumed could build itself.  So often times those good mods leave in frustration, because like a bad job with poor communication you can only handle so much of that. In the end they bit off way more than they could ever hope to chew and... yet still kinda ignore/assume the issues will solve itself and they’ll just... figure it out later?

I know it’s not entirely Devsis and MicMac’s faults. But considering how MicMac responded kind of half-heartedly to CookieRunUpdate’s very blatant harassment by a past moderator... it gives off the impression that they don’t really care that their Discord is a shit show and would rather just ignore the issue until it “resolves itself”

Either because they don’t care/want money, or they don’t have the capacity to handle any of it.

That might not be their intent but that’s completely how they come off.

Edit: Additionally with Minecraft and New Horizons. THOSE companies, Mojang/Microsoft and Nintendo, is that they have a strong company base in the United States and Canada. And if something were to go wrong there they could very easily be sued there. So there’s a stronger pull for preventing things from happening to the best of their ability. 

Litigation is always a threat when it comes to america  as a continent, and even if it’s conjecture it’ll be a messy prospect to deal with any kind of lawsuit so they’d rather avoid it at all costs by properly staffing their forums with reliable moderators, having a system and rules clearly displayed, and taking proper courses of action legally to handle things as needed.

The thing with Cookie Run and DevSis? They’re based in South Korea. I don’t know Korean Laws! I’m assuming most of my english-speaking followers don’t either. 

The only time Devsis really took action over anything was when there was an uproar caused by the publisher of the comics for adding a Cookie Hitler to the plot of Adventure Masterpiece. I’m assuming only because it would cause a significant uproar in Korea- (For those who don’t know, Korea used to be the victim of fascist and abusive dictatorship when Japan had control of the country years and years ago. Plus considering the current state of North Korea, they generally aren’t exactly ones who take too kindly to any depiction of fascism in any facet, even if they are the villain.)

Since MicMac had to give a public statement about how this was not something under his control since the Publisher writes and makes the comics and they only license the Cookie Run brand name out to them. Subsequently the Publisher had to pull the issue and stop running it, so even though it’s still listed in korean online storefronts it’s limited and not in print. 

Yet that’s the thing. The Cookie Run Official Discord is run most mostly the Western Fanbase as far as I can tell, and if someone wanted to sue DevSisters for maybe putting their children in danger... well that would be harder than filing a lawsuit against Microsoft or Nintendo.

There’s no Devsisters of America. or Canada. They’re all based in Korea. So they probably have the safety net of knowing that if anyone outside the country could even have a chance of filing a lawsuit perhaps due to the Pedophilia issue, they’d have to be exceptionally powerful. Like Someone with a lot of power and legal prowess. 

The fact of the matter is, DevSisters ignored the Burning Sun issue, DevSisters ignores the harassment their fans inflict on each other on a regular basis, DevSisters will ignore pedophilic behavior because they either don’t want to deal with it or don’t have to worry about facing consequences.

You need to remember DevSisters is not a small indie group making video games as a passion project, DevSisters is a CORPORATION. Corporations aren’t your friends. They aren’t here to protect you. They aren’t looking out for you. Their only job is to make money and at the end of the day unless something threatens that, they aren’t going to do anything about it.

[thenugking]

Grand Academy For Future Villains II: Attack of the Sequel, Chapter 10: Rise of Chapter Ten. A commentary for Three.

General CW for the whole thing: parental abuse, internalised dehumanisation as a trauma response. Three’s not doing well.

Specific CW that there isn’t a chapter nine and it Bothers Me agh.

Game 1

Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7 | Chapter 8 | Chapter 9

Game 2

Chapter 0 | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7 | Chapter 8

Alternatively, read on Google Docs here

***

#"Guards! Darkboard! Mom! Intruder in the school!"

But your voice only echoes down the empty corridors. 

"DarkBoard can't help you here," says Val, zir pen working busily on the paper. "That's why I'm here in the first place. That and saving the world. Just like my destiny foretold, I guess, thought I never thought this is what it meant. Turns out destiny is a strange and ironic thing."

((The game actually reads “Guards! DarkBoard! Mom! Your mother!” I assume this is a bug.))

Scorpius is here with Val, of course, so Three’s first thought is that ze convinced zir to come back. But then why are they in the admin building, in particular? And what is Val doing with the paperwork? Three doesn’t have anything personal against Val, they’re even sympathetic to zir. But they do know ze’s dangerous. Val doesn’t exactly do anything to make them feel better.

"No, you disappointment," adds the clone, "not the replica, me. Do you know how hard it is to make one of these things talk? I'm in the School Head's decoy office and unless you come here and help me, Horror is going to lose the house tournament. I'll be ruined! As your original creator, I order you! Drop what you're doing and help me!"

Imagine that: teaching classes, the personal management of the mindless hordes of maintenance staff, the pursuit of tenure, the faculty sponsorship of the Science Fiction dorm, and the leading role in the final school tournament challenge might have been a little too much for your mother. Is this…is this the first time she's ever actually asked for help?

"Your mother's calling," says your former roommate, stacking up the papers on the desk with one hand, keeping the flashback gun leveled at you with the other. "Go on."

Three isn’t the kind of person to bail on plans, but they’ve already helped Aurion a fair bit, and dealing with Val really is more important. This, on the other hand…

They’ve spent years running around making Maedryn’s life easier, but she’s never just admitted she needed their help before. How are they supposed to ignore her now, particularly when she gave them a direct command? But even leaving aside the fact that this means betraying Aurion (as much as Three doesn’t want to, they know he’ll understand, and maybe even be impressed), they can’t just let Val walk free either. Not when ze’s a threat to the Academy. Val has to come with them.

Val doesn’t particularly care to help Three. They’re planning to pretend to leave, and then return with their gun raised and the replica as a shield, but luckily, Scorpius convinces Val to come and help Maedryn before they have to try. Scorpius, by this point, has stopped making even a token effort to pretend ze’s loyal to Thriller, has all but moved into Dev’s room, and even fought for Horror in the virtual DarkBoard quest. Ze’s still very invested in Horror’s win, and Val’s invested enough in Scorpius to agree to go with zir.

Cautiously you approach the throne room door. You're expecting a variety of traps to greet you—but you see they have already been sprung. Peering around the corner, you see your mother facing off against none other than Dev. Leader of the genre that you swore to undermine.Distracting your mother as a way to get her to call off the defending forces? Clever.

They circle each other slowly across the throne room floor, hardly needing to look down to avoid the bottomless pits, the illusory tiles, and the triggers for the giant descending pendulums. Your mother appears to be armed with a classroom laser pointer.

Of course, you've seen her blow holes in student projects from across the room with this particular tool, so she's probably as well armed as she needs to be.

Neither of them have noticed you in the doorway.

#Defend my mother from Dev. I know she'll make it worth my while.

Your mother catches your eye as she backs Dev towards you. She takes it for granted that you're going to assist her. You are, of course. It'll just take a little planning.

Dev is avoiding the bottomless pit in the floor with practiced ease, but is not counting on someone coming up from behind and giving a well-placed shove. Which you do. The long fading scream is a measure of satisfaction.

"There!" Your mother catches her breath and staggers back to the throne. "You have done well.”

I know Maedryn’s supposed to back Horror if Sci-Fi wins the semi-final, and considering she just told me she was worried about losing, this is presumably a bug. I’m not sure how easy Dev would be to shove into a pit, either.

Not that adny of that really matters. Three arrives to help Maedryn against Fantasy, but by this point, Aurion’s already distracted fighting Cazenar, who’s trying to sabotage him. Dev and Scorpius get distracted by smooching, because they haven’t seen each other since Scorpius went after Val. Three discovers that, as Maedryn’s RA, Sona is also here to help Maedryn out, so has to work out what to do in this chaos to make themself look better than Sona. Val really doesn’t care about any of this.

And then a forcefield appears around the seven students, and A Baroness walks in and shoves a very distracted Maedryn into the bottomless pit, before reminding everyone what she said at the beginning of the year. “You can accomplish so much when you bring people together. And even more when you play them against each other."

So, weak and mortal student, We cannot help but notice that you have selected none for your consort. Could this be because the flesh holds no temptation for you—that you know a stranger and more uncanny hunger? Join Us, join Us, and let your consciousness be absorbed into Our millionfold awareness! See with a thousand eyes! Reach out with a hundred hands! 

Think about it anyway.

I mean, yes, that is absolutely 100% why. And assimilating would be… a welcome relief. At present though, Three feels they can serve better outside of DarkBoard. And they’d like to know who, precisely, DarkBoard’s been assimilating, to get a hundred hands but a thousand eyes. Three respects DarkBoard greatly, but that doesn’t mean they’re not going to tease them about how unrealistic their attempt at sounding grandiose is.

"…Thriller is the reigning genre of the Grand Academy for Future Villains."

Well deserved. Three is pleased to hear it, both for Ulik, and A Baroness.

"We have been unable to reach a conclusion on the final accreditation of the Grand Academy for Future Villains."

Groans. Hisses. The muffled sound of elbows being jabbed into ribs as the eyes of the Head sweep around the hall and students hush each other.

"We will be summoning a fourth member of the Board of Visitors and Overlords to assist us in our deliberations," says Lord X, "and anticipate having a final ruling on the Academy's future within the week. In the meantime…"

Ms. Goul touches his arm. He looks down as she passes him a paper.

"In the meantime," he says, "we will be conducting interviews with individual students and members of the faculty. The following entities will be summoned to attend over the course of the next week. Three—"

You don't hear any of the rest of the list. Is this about Val? Have they found zir? What do they know about what you did?

You jam your hands into your pockets to stop them from shaking, and there you find something strange. A paper of some sort—you definitely didn't put it in there. 

Hunching forward over your table to prevent anyone from seeing, you draw it out. It's an envelope—yellow with age and smelling of dust. The last time you saw that envelope, Val was folding up a paper and putting it inside. Ze must have slipped it into your pocket over the course of your confrontation. How did you manage to miss it?

You take out the paper and unfold it. It's an official form from the days before DarkBoard digitized all of the Academy's records. You can't immediately make head or tail of it, but you see a spot on the printed page where information has been filled in by hand. 

BY CONSENT OF THE ADMINISTRATION AND UNDER SUPERVISION OF THE BOARD OF VISITORS AND OVERLORDS, you read, THREE IS AN OFFICIAL REGISTERED FATAL WEAKNESS OF THE GRAND ACADEMY FOR FUTURE VILLAINS TYPE 3.3.75

There’s a lot of terrifying things happening here. Firstly, the fact that the auditors are undecided. Three doesn’t know what’s gone wrong for them to be undecided still. Is it because of Val? Is it the way Maedryn’s slipping? Have Three and Professor Ulik not done enough to cover Professor Arthenes’ workload? Whatever it is, Three should have done better.

And then Lord X says the auditors want to speak to them, which carries the terror that the auditors know who they are and care about their opinion at all, but also the relief and hope if they give a glowing enough testimonial about the Academy, they can save it. And another wave of fear over the idea of the auditors listening to them…

And then there’s the paper, which is the most terrifying thing of all. Val’s been telling Three all year that they’re more important than they make out to be, that they have narrative weight, that they mean anything at all. And now they’ve made it true. Three is only just able to crumple the paper up tightly in their hand before the room starts spinning around them in the worst panic attack they’ve ever had.

[howlingwind]

01. what’s your name/alias you go by ??

my name is jeff !! lmfao (i don’t let memes die) it’s not my real name but i’ve gone by cody on tumblr for a long time

02. what’s your age ??

twenty. jfc i’m old. but also apparently a fetus??

03. what’s your zodiac sign ??

aries, which couldn’t feel further from correct lmfao

04. what’s your ethnicity ??

uhh mostly italian & sicilian, but you could probably point to any white place in europe and i’ll have a little bit of that in me. i’m also 1/16th native american but it’s such a small amount and sadly i don’t even know which tribe to learn more about them.

05. what’s your nationality ??

‘murican

06. what’s your favorite band and/or musical artist ??

i’m super indecisive about everything, so it’s difficult for me to pick faves (as you’ll see in a sec) but… mac miller,  post malone, johnny cash, eminem, tenacious d, colter wall, kehlani, bruno mars, snoop dogg, elvis presley, justin timberlake, sublime, the rolling stones, etc etc there’s probably a lot i’m forgetting tho. i like most types of music except country. well, modern country anyway.

07. what’s your dream job ??

uh, i don’t have one? i mean yeah, i’d love to be a writer, or game dev, or a narrative director on a game, or direct, write, or act in movies or television, but like…i could live without any of that stuff. i just want to make a decent living, be able to own a house, not completely hate my job. yknow, not a glamorous life but a good one.

08. what’s one place you would love to visit ??

idk there’s a lot of places i’d like to go, but i’d most like to visit alpha centauri, even tho that’ll never happen lol

09. what’s your favorite tv show ??

i can’t pick that! but i love a lot of shows. general hospital, lucifer, the 100, supernatural, stranger things, izombie, south park, legends of tomorrow, once upon a time, arrow (at times), dragon ball, big brother, riverdale, chilling adventures of sabrina, that 70′s show, the ranch, umm… i could probably keep listing forever.

10. what’s your favorite movie ??

hmmmm, again i’ve got a list but… joe dirt, the new guy, why him, the waterboy, 50 first dates, all the spider-man movies, thor ragnarok, man of steel, 21 jump street, 22 jump street ,and a fuckton more lol 

11. what’s your favorite song ??

constantly in flux, but the current faves are — creep by radiohead, stay by post malone, no below by speedy ortiz, unshaken by d’angelo, cruel cruel world by willie nelson, wanksta by 50 cent, shooter by lil wayne & robin thicke, stressed out by 21 pilots, self care by mac miller (along with practically everything on his final album), and i will always, un-ironically love only in america by riff raff. he’s not the greatest ever but that song is hilarious and always puts me in a good mood.

12. what’s your favorite sport ??

can i say rocket league? lol

13. what’s your favorite food ??

pizza, unquestionably. cereal is a damn close second tho. or pot stickers. damn, i’m hungry… 

14. what’s your favorite face claim to use ??

typically, i’ve always really liked using paul wesley, chris wood, and matt daddario. i’m using lindsey morgan for the first time now though, and i really like her as an fc too.

15. what’s your least favorite face claim ??

to use?? um pretty much any singer or model just bc their resources aren’t too great. i really didn’t enjoy using pete davidson as much as i thought i would, either lol

to see… uh probs emma roberts or andy biersack. emma for obvs reasons but also bc i once had a really bad experience with people using those fcs. idm people using whoever they feel like using tho.

16. what’s your favorite character of yours to play ?? which do you think you’re most like ??

oh man, uhh i really enjoy writing chrissy & theo. they both speak to me. but tbh i’m not much like any of my characters? i’m boring af so i tend not to make any like me lol. i am kinda like theo in the sense that i’m quiet, and really just try to be a good person. other than that i’m most like jason solely based on the fact we’re both human lol

17. what’s your sexuality ??

danversexual. attracted only to fictional danvers women, examples including carol, kara, and alex danvers.

lmfao but nah i’m just a boring straight boy. well, like 99.9% straight. jensen ackles makes me question shit.

18. what’s the last movie you saw in a cinema/theater ??

captain marvel (thanks to dani lol). only two months late but it was worth the experience haha.

19. what’s the worst injury you’ve ever had ??

thankfully i’ve never really hurt myself too terribly except for a broken wrist, but between the ages of 10-17 i’d occasionally hurt my back by sitting weird, usually in an attempt to play video games without the glasses i desperately needed lol. once when i was like 11 i laid belly down on the couch with my elbows up on the arm of it for like three hours, which messed me up for days, then a few other times i hurt myself, but another bad one when i was 17, i had my back curved while sitting and propping my laptop up on my knee, tried to move and literally just cried, crawled on the floor, and laid there all night until i forced myself to move in the morning. lol luckily it hasn’t happened since i lost a little weight.

20. what’s a random or interesting fact about you ??

uhm, nothing? i literally can’t think of one, i’m dull af. i uh.. i replaced my own cpu cooler once? lmfao

21. do you listen to music while you write ??

sometimes. a lot of time i just like the silence or ambient background noise, but if i’ve got a fitting playlist for the vibe of what i’m trying to write, i’ll use it!

22. are you a morning, day, evening, or night writer ??

i’m a never writer, apparently v___v but lol ideally a night writer, my best work is between the hours of 12am & 4am, but my sleeping schedule is so inconsistent, and so is my dad’s who spends literally every waking moment of his telling me different stuff he wants done, so it’s tough to hit that sweet spot. i write whenever i get a chance tho.

23. have you ever roleplayed intoxicated ??

lol nah i’ve never even had a drink. like what teenager doesn’t have a drink at some point?? i told you i’m lame.

24. what language or languages do you speak ??

english, barely. and assassin’s creed 2 taught me some italian swears. and ac: odyssey has had me occasionally dropping “malaka” bombs since the day i first played it haha.

25. how long have you roleplayed ??

officially, about 9 years. i started at 11 on myspace, rping dragon ball z stuff. but basically about 12 years, if you count how from the ages of 8-11 i’d put an anime pic up on my myspace, pretend i was older, and talk to roleplayers i didn’t realize were roleplayers lmfao.

26. favorite roleplay genre ??

i like pretty much anything, tbh. as long as it’s well thought out, has an interesting plot, or whatever. sometimes it doesn’t even need that, it just needs to catch my eye or line up with something i’m looking for. but yeah, supernatural, multi-fandom, sci-fi, romance, town rps, high school/college rps, anime rp (well, pokemon mostly), harry potter… i’ve done it all tbh and don’t particularly have a favorite.

27. one sound you hate & one you love ??

the sound of cotton stretching is the absolute worst thing to me. or scratching cotton. idk, it just sends chills up and down my spine and makes my hands feel weak lmfao. i’m weird. i really love the sound of rain, or fire crackling, or like “ambient” harp or ukulele music.

28. do you believe in ghosts ??

short answer, yes. long answer… i’m pretty sure i was friends with a ghost girl as a kid?? like no joke, even looking back at it through rational “adult” eyes, i’m still convinced. my fam moved into a new apartment, and pretty much right after that i started having dreams about a girl my age at the time (11-12). i’d never seen her before but the dreams would be like just conversations, like i was visiting a friend or something. i don’t remember them much, but i do remember the feeling of someone else in my room all the time, like you know how if someone else is around you just know even if you’re not looking at them? like that. there was even one night i was getting in bed, laid there a minute, and then i could have absolutely sworn somebody came in the room and sat down next to me on the bed because i felt the bed sink a little under their weight, but i looked and no one was there. i had a really vivid conversation/dream/thing that night. then a few nights later, for the first time since moving there i didn’t have one. the next morning my dad was really freaked out and said he fell asleep in the chair, but woke up and couldn’t breathe, and felt cold little hands over his mouth. he rationalized it as just waking up from a nightmare but i didn’t think so, so that night when i went to sleep and saw her i got really upset, yelled at her for it, and woke up right after. then i never saw or heard anything even remotely similar again, like she left or disappeared or something. it’s so weird, and i know how crazy it sounds, but yeah. don’t get me started on the topic of ghosts lmfao. THEN AGAIN, like a year later we had a carbon monoxide scare, but i really doubt the two were related because that would mean there was an entire year that we were breathing it in and the monitor didn’t do anything lol

29. do you believe in aliens ??

no alien story, thankfully, but it just makes no sense not to believe in them to me. like, we probably don’t have them on earth, and we’ve probably never encountered any, but it’s as close as you can get to a mathematical certainty that there’s some other life out there in the universe.

30. do you believe in true love ??

like, people who are just meant for each other, like romantic soulmates? nah not really. but i believe that two people can grow to truly love one another. whether it’s based off an initial attraction/infatuation, or a friendship, or both. i’d actually argue that’s a simple explanation of the biological science behind the feeling of love, but that’s an essay i’m not gonna write lol. but there’s apparently a lot of different types of love, so i guess “true love” is suggestive? 

also slightly unrelated but i don’t-quite-believe-in-but-am-open-to-the-idea-of soulmates, not necessarily as two souls who are just meant for each other romantically and always end up together, but more as two or more souls that gravitate toward each other to make up the important people in each other’s lives, like family members, lovers, or close friends. but that’s more of a theoretical idea/possibility than an actual belief of mine.

31. do you hold grudges ??

um, yes. lol i try not to, and i really do want everyone to be their best/happiest selves, but some people man… some people can take a long walk off a short pier lmao

32. do you have any obsessions right now ??

PO KE MON GOTTA CATCH EM ALLLLL. also… life is strange (thanks dani lol). supernatural. stranger things (thanks dani & steph) the 100 / clexa / becho  (thanks steph). lucifer. captain marvel (thanks dani). the song “creep” by radiohead and all its covers (tom ellis, haley reinhart, etc). cyberpunk 2077 (thanks dani). as you can see, i’m easily influenced lmfao.

33. do you drive & if so, have you ever been in a crash ??

nope i don’t drive, precisely because i’d definitely end up in a crash lol

34. do you like the smell of gasoline ??

uh that’s a big fat no from me, chief

35. do you prefer writing fluff, angst, or smut ??

i like it all equally, i think. i just really like writing & rp in general. i did run a smut rp once in the past tho. it gets old quick tbh and is the one of the three i can live without lol

36. are you in a relationship ??

bahahahahahahaha no.

37. grab the nearest book to you and turn to page 23, what is the 17the line ??

❝  “and why would that be?” kronos’s golden eyes glittered.  ❞

— the last olympian by rick riordan.

38. put your playlist on shuffle and list the first four songs that pop up:

1. season of the witch – donovan 2. riot van – arctic monkeys 3. busta rhymes – qveen herby 4. der kommissar – after the fire

also i gotta cheat because it’s too perfect that the next two are

5. stay – mac miller (one of my favorites ever that i forgot to mention above) 6. only in america – riff raff (i just love this ok. the video is hilarious but tw james franco for those that don’t like him)

[lostsolsdestinyblog]

Whose woods these are I think I know. 

Destiny has been for me, more than I ever could have dreamed when I first logged in back in September of 2014. It came into my life at a time when not a lot was really in the best place for me and it gave me an escape and a world I could throw myself into and, for a little while at least, forget about the problems of the real world.

I've experienced Destiny a lot of different ways over the last 4+ years. I dabbled in Crucible in Vanilla but strikes were really my jam. I would grind them for hours and hours as I leveled, trying to get the highest kill count and I loved how diverse and incredible they all were. I remember when Queen's Wrath dropped and I was still under-leveled for it and there was the strike in Winter's Run and I tried to do it but wasn't able to get past about halfway. I was disappointed and so I started really trying to level up more to be able to experience endgame and the next Queen's Wrath when it came around.

Of course there weren't more Queen's Wrath events, but there were the Nightfalls with their chances to get exotic drops and I wanted exotic drops. So at level 26 I headed into my first level 30 Nightfall solo. It was The Summoning Pits and the depth of the challenge was felt immediately upon walking to the first doorway and facing the Knights and Wizard. I don't know how many times I RTOd before putting together a successful run, but when I did, that run took me over 4 hours, but it was one of the greatest gaming experiences I'd ever had and I was hooked.

One of the coolest things looking back on those early days is again, seeing all the different ways I would play, level and progress. While soloing the Nightfall on all 3 characters would become the first thing I'd do each week thoughout year one, as we got to the end of vanilla and into TDB, I became completely hooked on Crucible and Iron Banner. I started in Crucible when I first got Suros and it was Dumbo's feather for me, giving me the confidence to feel I could compete. I almost immediately switched to MIDA and then in TDB found Coiled Hiss and Fusion Rifles.

Not everything was roses back then of course. The game had a lot of issues and growing pains, from the initial backlash to what shipped verses what players expected from pre-release hype, to TDB locking players out of Nightfalls, to the desire for matchmaking in raids because come on, Vault of Glass. Then HoW released and suddenly, as a solo player, it became much harder to play Destiny.

With the inclusion of Trials, there was endgame PvP with no matchmaking and Prison of Elders added even more PvE endgame that required fireteams but didn't add ways to be matched in-game. This was the first time I really felt like, as a solo player, that I really didn't have a place in the game in PvE and it sucked. I still did my Nightfalls, but outside of that, I was only playing PvP by the end of the expansion. The PvP itself was phenomenal and truly the Golden Age of the Crucible with everything at pretty much the height of its D1 power.

TTK was another shift. It made sweeping and dramatic improvements to the PvE experience. Grinding, leveling, getting gear and all the QoL changes were incredible, but it also marked the beginning of the end for what was D1 PvP. All our favorite year one legendary weapons were left behind and the great nerfening really began as Thorn, Red Death, MIDA and on and on found themselves neutered to shells of their former glory.

I had loved the TTK content release, but I found myself really struggling to find the same feeling HoW had given Crucible. Where I'd had weapons that felt so perfect and fit how I played so well in HoW, I couldn't find anything I liked in TTK and it got to the point where I took about a month off from the game and just wasn't sure if I'd keep playing, but then something happened. We'd started a community podcast to bring on everyday forum community members to talk Destiny and on our 6th episode I met RedWingGirl1999 when one of my co-hosts invited her on as a guest.

Once I met RWG, we became friends and the way I played Destiny changed again as I joined her raid team and we raided or chased Triumphs and Exotic quests pretty much every day through the second half of TTK. It was also from that point until the end of D1 that I started cycling through favorite characters. I really got back into my Hunter after we started playing together, then Rise of Iron was all about my Warlock and Age of Triumph saw me playing a bit of everything.

And Destiny evolved and devolved along the way as well. PvE got better and better, but the state of weapon balance and PvP continued to implode and those implosions all too often bled into PvE as well with the nerfs to ammo economies, artifacts and anything that players could blame for them not succeeding in the Crucible.

I want to take a moment to recognize that throughout this process, the developers were really trying to build the game they thought we wanted and while communication was not optimal in 2014, there were tremendous strides over the lifespan of D1. I know I have a special and more unique take on this because of the relationships and friendships I was able to make within the studio and I'm truly blessed to have gotten to experience, but from those experiences I've gotten a much more humanizing insight into the people who create this game.

RWG and I got to experience the D2 reveal event and all the hope and excitement going into the sequel and though there was the immediate uh-oh we had when they said PvP would all be 4v4 (we feared it would hurt 6 player raid teams that would no longer be able to stay together and play PvP, and unfortunately it did just that), overall the gameplay had been incredibly fun and felt like a genuine evolution of play.

At this point a thousand things can be said about what year one was and there were a lot of issues and things that didn't work how the developers had envisioned, but it was always extremely unfair to say the game was trash or a dead game. No one who still played and enjoyed year one ever said the game was perfect and everyone knew and everyone acknowledged it needed to be much better, but while there wasn't enough to chase and grind for, D2 was incredibly welcoming to be played how and when we wanted and also a lot of things that the studio felt would keep players invested with timed content to keep things fresh- Faction Rallies, IB, etc, just fell flat, and PvP that had been so reworked to be the best Crucible experience ever based on D1 feedback, turned out to not be what anyone really wanted.

Things went south.

When Bungie began to lose the streamers and YouTubers everything hit the fan and suddenly Destiny 2 found itself with the most toxic community in gaming and after initially turtling a bit (I'm sure out of shock as things went sideways), we started to see one of the most honest and open outreaches from a game company to their community as Bungie acknowledged the mistakes they'd made and started working feverishly to correct them, giving us road maps of what we could expect and when.

I got to be a part of the Community Summit and though there was a lot of mistrust in the community as to its goals and motivations, I felt very strongly that though it was mostly high profile content creators, that the fact that players like myself, Mercules, Aer0knight and others were invited showed that it wasn't just about the streamers and what they wanted.

I am incredibly grateful to this day for the opportunity to experience that and get to have so many face to face conversations about the game with the people who make it and these are really, really incredibly down to Earth and just awesome people. Anyone who thinks the developers don't care or that Bungie is just a greedy corporation just don't get it. They're just like you and me. They're human beings with lives, families, passions, dreams, loves, fears and hopes, and like us they are capable of success and failure, good days and bad.

That's called being human, and to be human is to understand that sometimes things don't turn out the way we or others want or expect, but life goes on and it's up to each of us to decide how to keep going forward and when we or others fail or succeed, we have a choice; to support and work to elevate them, ourselves and everyone to try to better things or as is all too common these days, try to bring people down to our level or keep them below us when we succeed.

I 100% know that everyone's voices are heard within the studio and that Forsaken has been a monumental turnaround for Destiny 2 and in many ways a real love letter from the Devs to the community, but I think that there has also been a larger focus on the community that play and stream Destiny for a living and I don't think it's a case of the studio trying to consciously cater the game more that direction, but rather an overcorrection in the desire to have them back onboard, because let's face reality, they have tremendous influence over how the game is perceived not just on forums, but also in print and social media.

Which brings me to why I'm writing all this today. Yeah, I write a lot about Destiny and I've covered a lot of this is past posts, but things are different for me in the game and I'm not sure the game Destiny is becoming has a place for me in it. It's so weird to actually write that, but I also know it's becoming increasingly difficult to feel like I can experience this game and universe how I want.

I play Destiny much differently these days from the last couple years and strangely, my experience has almost been a perfect bell up and back down to where I began. Our raid team mostly survived year one to the end, but our 6 player groups that used to PvP the rest of the weeks were no more and things really began falling apart with Spire and all its excessive mechanics.

We weren't a coordinated team anymore. We weren't a cohesive group of friends traveling the Destiny universe together and failures led to frustrations and tensions that didn't exist before, or were more muted by the ability to say “let's stop for the night and just play Crucible”. When suddenly the raid ends and people are left behind for new activities, it's a recipe for disaster, but Forsaken brought the hope of a new beginning and what ultimately did turn out to be an incredible Destiny experience and worlds, but again, just not for everyone.

The raid release was the end for our raid team. The pressure to grind 10+ hours a day trying to get ready (and for me getting drop after drop in spots I didn't need and below what was equipped because of the harsh return of RNG caused huge anxiety going in that I'd let everyone down not being high enough light). Still we all took off work and were incredibly excited to go into the raid, and the first forays in were just beautiful, but then like 99.999% of the players who stepped into Last Wish that day, we were all power checked.

We actually figured out the mechanics and understood how to beat the first boss about 20 minutes in, but after a couple hours of attempts, we knew we just weren't high enough light and that was it. We never raided as a group together again.

Of those of us there that day, everyone but myself has gone on to complete the raid. I've finished it up to Riven, but never completed that fight and it's just sad, and certainly there's more to our falling outs than how the game has been designed and content released, but it's also very true that for what Destiny wants to be a far as a social experience bringing people together, it has never done the best job of translating that into the actual in-game experience.

I kept playing after that, though mostly solo since and I do truly love the content in Forsaken, but I never really got to experience any of it how I wanted or felt excitement about drops that I knew I wouldn't be able to use consistently because of the incredibly punishing infusion system.

I loved year one and that I could play so many different ways, but always how I wanted and I could experiment with different weapons and armor at my choosing and not things I know I hate, but had to use because it's what I had at level.

A day into Forsaken, I stopped using shaders. There was no point when nothing has permanence and it was frustrating that here we had the content and things to do with the gear we loved that was so missing in year one and I couldn't play it with the gear I loved.

I don't know how others experience the game, but I played 850 hours of D2 Y1 and a large part of what kept it fresh for me was cycling through maining different characters and subclasses, as well as using all the countless new loadouts D2 allowed. So I continued playing all 3 classes into Forsaken. For the first 5 weeks, I ran almost every single powerful bounty in the game on all 3 characters and I found myself hating everything.

I didn't like any of my characters. I didn't like my weapons half the time and I started seriously questioning what I was grinding for if I couldn't ever use any of the things I got that I loved. So I took a big step back and started just focusing the Dreaming City each week since those were the highest drops and not running much else outside of teaming up with friends for Gambit, Crucible or a Nightfall occasionally.

All throughout Destiny up to Forsaken, I'd loved and played different aspects of the game and leveled up in different ways as those interests changed. Forsaken changed that. We couldn't just play strikes if that's what we loved, or PvP or Gambit, and I'm not saying that was necessarily a bad thing, but when it was combined with all the insane RNG (titles? Yikes!), punishing infusion and 100 level endgame grind, it was just too much.

I finally hit 600 halfway through November. I got there on my Hunter and Warlock and I hit 596 on my Titan and I just couldn't do it anymore. I hated my Titan desperately at this point, and not because the new subclasses aren't fun, but because I was tired of looking like a clown. I got a really good gear set on my Hunter, put the mods and shaders I wanted on him and I was done. With my other characters and with PvE. Destiny just isn't a game I feel I can keep 3 characters going anymore, and that's kinda how it began and I've thought that, well maybe over the next year, there will be time to go back...

Then Black Armory released and not only raised the power level another 50 levels, but brought back "meaningful infusion". This system championed by streamers who play for a living and has ultimately little too no effect on them. Most of them are already at 650, while 9-10 hours in, I'm up to 604 and I refuse to wear the higher gear I hate and I'm not burning my infusion cores. I'm up to 60 of them. I buy them everyday from Spider, but I refuse to grind for ghost fragments to then grind bounties for them.

I've played 280ish hours of Forsaken and probably 30 of those playing how I wanted using what I wanted, I'm not spending even more hours grinding content I have no desire to play just to be able to use what I want.

Even PvP as incredible as the sandbox is, is completely RNG who wins and loses as no sbmm means uneven teams and one team usually with one or two much higher skilled players than the rest.

Matchmaking was just addressed in the TWaB, but it's only Comp and the complaints of solo vs fireteams and low glory facing much higher glory and I don't understand how it's an issue in Comp, but solo vs fireteams and lower skill vs much higher in QuickPlay is perfectly okay.

I love the game. I love the community. I love Bungie and have friends there and care about everyone who makes this game and it hurts when days like Tuesday happen and things go sideways and there's more negative press, but that never should have happened. It's the exact same mistake that was made with the Last Wish raid release and power locking everyone but Joe and Jane streamer out of it.

So here I am, writing one more novel hoping for the best and maybe that is where we are and this is what Destiny needs to be going forward and maybe it's just not a game for a player like me anymore, but I still believe it can be everything it's wanting to be for the players it's trying to cater to without leaving a player like myself behind, and I don't think it would take a lot to get there.

I'm burned out on PvE and leveling because of infusion that adds NOTHING to the game and the inability to just play what I want and continue to level.

The daily and weekly bounties are fine, although the weeklies should drop higher gear than the dailies, but regular legendaries are deflating now. They are blues for all intents and purposes and they need to at least have a chance to drop higher.

Valor now gives Legendary drops every rank and it's tiered like Gambit, but those drops are meaningless because 1) I already have the gear/perks I want and 2) they drop 15-20 levels below my character power. Why not make them powerful drops? Who cares if I play an hour or two in Crucible for a powerful drop verses run around doing other bounties? To me it just adds to the experience. If you want variety and to experience a lot of different things in smaller portions, all those bounties are there. If we just love PvP, why can't we just play it and get drops at about the same rate (or a bit slower). Strikes could be tiered the same with ranks and resets.

I think about what it would be like to walk into the Destiny franchise for the first time right now and I can't even imagine how a player could ever begin to experience all of what the game has to offer with 150 levels to grind to endgame and starting with no materials, no cores, no Legendary shards, and yes games like WoW have those heavy investments and focusing on one character for a long time, but the way D2 is currently formatted, I don't see a near future where I'm able to or would want to go through this leveling experience again on my other characters if I'm going to hate them and (by proxy) the game because I can't play and use what I want.

So that's it and I'm not trying to bash or say the game is bad because it's not and when the teams are remotely fair, PvP is the greatest thing since HoW, but this world is really fucked up right now and my life outside the game is in an as bad or worse place than it was when I first stepped into these worlds, but I'm not finding escape and freedom anymore. I'm finding I'm stepping into a job that I don't want to be at and I wish things were different. Thank you.

  Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village though;   

He will not see me stopping here   

To watch his woods fill up with snow. 

My little horse must think it queer   

To stop without a farmhouse near   

Between the woods and frozen lake   

The darkest evening of the year. 

He gives his harness bells a shake   

To ask if there is some mistake.   

The only other sound’s the sweep   

Of easy wind and downy flake. 

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,   

But I have promises to keep,   

And miles to go before I sleep,   

And miles to go before I sleep.

-R Frost

[yutark]

tbh i hate bringing this up, and this isn’t directed at anything or anyone in particular, but i thought it’d be best to clear up that yuta’s ic feelings are not connected to my ooc. 

whether those be towards his company, friends, strangers, other people, he remains ic and i think people might be confusing it because in interactions, yuta still is only grasping at his issues and rarely recognises them ic. he has a serious lack of self awareness and he’s always had that. so in an attempt to reconcile any doubts people have, i’m going to breakdown yuta’s state of mind and where it comes from.

first things first, yes, yuta is angry about the sns ban and then rumours of the trc girls debut. those two things are intertwined. and those connect to why yuta currently hates his time in trc. there are a few things people need to realise,

yuta expresses anger before he does any other emotion

he’s sensitive to things he feels are unjust or unfair

and he struggles with things when they are uncertain

these three things connect a lot to his childhood and teen years. anger, gets an immediate response and attention. yuta being upset as a child, did not get him much attention from his parents, but if he was angry and threw a tantrum, then they would deal with him. this was ingrained further during high school when he was bullied, being upset did not get anyone to solve the issue, but being angry either, scared them off or caused the teachers to be involved. that bullying also connects to why he reacts more to things he feels are unjust or unfair, to him, because he has a strongly held belief that the world is against him. throughout his life, he has sought out situations and validated his own belief, over and over again. it gives him an excuse for his anger and frustration, and justifies his actions for himself. 

none of these are good things and i’m not excusing his behaviour, he needs to learn and that’s what some of this is. 

finally uncertainty and doubt. yuta has walked through life going, ‘this is this’ and ‘that is that’ and ‘im nakamoto yuta, and i know everything’. so when something truly causes him to become uncertain and doubt, himself and everything around him, he has no proper skills to deal with it. when someone else doubts him, he proves them wrong by doing it, but when he starts to doubt himself, he’s faced with a situation he doesn’t know how to deal with. the doubt and uncertainty, feeds itself. yuta is nagged by the constant, ‘if im having these, there must be something to doubt’, and he craves something to prove him wrong or right. it’s why he acts out.

he wants someone to make the decision for him, and if that decision is negative, he can be angry, feel its unjust and validate this whole cycle again. this is how yuta has handled and gone through his whole life.

as for feeling suffocated and hating trc, there’s more things that factor into that again. 

he has a history of being non-commital; short relationships, one night stands, and a messy work history ( one i did a hc on here ). the longest job he has had was 7 months, trc is already at 12 months. but unlike these jobs, trc is his dream and he’s struggling with a couple things: is it trc or is something wrong with him, and what does he do on both those cases.

his expectations and reality are two different things: he thought he would join trc, be signed and then debut in a year -- but that is not how it works. and seeing ten and taeyong, who signed the same time as him debut, adds to this. what he thought would happen, is not happening to him, but it is happening to his friends and boyfriend. this increases his confusion, his doubts and slams reality harder into his chest.

nothing is happening in trc. there’s been no sign of his efforts having value, he’s seeing everyone else be rewarded, even people he feels have caused him to be unfairly punished. when he joined trc, he put his entire energy into it--100% or nothing--and then when nothing happened, 110%, 120%, trying to be on his best behaviour, do everything he’s told, and then left tired and feeling like he’s not getting anything ( add in his doubts, uncertainties and fears, and he’s frustrations at what he feels is unfair ) and he feels like he’ll never get anything, and he wants to blame trc for it.

his personality also add fuel to the fire of how he feels. he’s always been someone who fixated on something and would do anything for it. for ttc, he’d been in a car accident weeks prior and he cut off his cast to perform, nearly re-broke his arm doing so and went into trc audition with a cast on. he’s fixed on debuting, on catching up to those around him, on being better than them. with nothing happening in trc, he’s exhausting himself and feels like he’s treading water, they’re all getting further ahead and he’s not.

one of the last things is jaebum leaving trc. it might seem minuscule, but they were close and yuta could buffer out his discontent by hanging out with his best friend. now he has to deal with every schedule on his own, and face himself in practice, and not have that distraction to take away from his focus.

everything yuta does, and how he acts, has been there the entire time. it might be more noticeable now because these issues are coming up for him, but they are genuinely him. and as a mun, i wouldn’t care to explain my muse, but because of how people react and the feeling of uneasiness i get, i restrain from taking plots or playing him true to who he is. i’m curbing his behaviour and keeping it to dms or chats, bc i think that there are some people who are under the impression that i’m putting my ooc feelings into things. 

it’s affecting how i roleplay my own muse because i worry people will make assumptions.

rkseokwoo and rkshua are both my muses too, very few people take on their feelings as ooc, but i think because yuta does have issues, is more vocal and can even be mean, there’s a confusion there. 

at the moment, in yutas dev, he’s been working on more healthy coping mechanisms. he’s talking to his boyfriend about how things make him feel, he’s been vocalising his frustrations with other trainees and his friends, and he’s having to take a true look at himself. its imperfect, he’s still not learned how to calmly express himself or talk clearly. this is something i’ve been doing to him as a mun since back in may last year, when he walked in on his mother cheating. back then, i was working on yuta’s self-awareness and open him to realising how his actions/words/thoughts/feelings effect those around him, and begin to identify where they come from and how to properly channel them.

in fact, the situation of his mother cheating is a major seed of why yuta is, where he is now. it weakened some of the foundation, damaged his confident persona, and pushed in some doubts, on how, who he sees himself as and who he is, might not be the same thing.

it’s a slow development, it’s something he will succeed and fail at, over and over again, learning more every time. 

and i know this is super long, and if you read this far, i applaud you, but i just wanted to be clear on this since it’s affecting how i play my muse and i thought if i cleared up what people might misunderstand with yuta, or not know. it’ll ease everyone’s conscious that, ‘ah, yuta’s just being a dick because he’s like that’. 

as for people telling yuta/me to leave trc if he’s unhappy, that generally won’t fix the issue yuta has, he will simply leave and be signed, and the same thing will happen, and as a mun, i’d rather use this as a way for him to dev and grow, and maybe become less of a asshole ;;

i hope this will clear up any confusion on where/why/how yuta is how he is. thank you if you made it this far <3 lol

[weekendwarriorblog]

The Weekend Warrior 7/30/21 - JUNGLE CRUISE, THE GREEN KNIGHT, STILLWATER, NINE DAYS, THE BOY BEHIND THE DOOR and More!

Well, this is going to be the most interesting weekend of the summer. Don’t believe me?

What would you say if I told you we have three wide releases this week, one a mega-studio movie that cost hundreds of millions with two huge box office stars, taking on two smaller indies -- one with a big star, the other something more artsy with an actor who should be a bigger star? That’s what we’re looking at this week, since Disney has a movie, taking on two of the smaller studios with what are likely to be strong, well-reviewed movies that (fingers crossed) we’ll still be talking about at the end of the year when it comes to awards.

One thing that I feel I need to point out before continuing is that we’re starting to see a potential third or fourth wave of COVID, this time the Delta variant, slowly creeping up, and while I don’t think theaters will completely shut down as they did last March, I do wonder whether capacity will be lowered again to prevent the spread by allowing for more social distancing inside movie theaters.

Normally, I would start with the Disney movie -- which I really liked -- but I actually want to start with one of the smaller movies, because Thomas McCarthy’s STILLWATER (Focus Features), starring Matt Damon, is this week’s “Chosen One,” and honestly, it needs a lot more support and love than the other wide releases this week.

In the movie, Matt Damon plays Bill Baker, an out-of-work oil rig worker from Stillwater, Oklahoma, who flies to Marseilles, France where his estranged daughter Alison (Abigail Breslin) has been imprisoned for four years, accused of killing her roommate and lover. Once there, Bill learns from Alison that there might be more evidence that could prove her innocence, but when her legal team refuses to look into it, he instead tries to find anyone that can help him free his daughter. Along the way, he meets French actress Virginie (Camille Cottin) and her eight-year-old daughter Maya (Lilou Sauvaud), and they become fast friends and then roommates, helping Bill whenever they can.

I have to be honest that I went into Stillwater knowing very little about it, including the general plot, and I honestly didn’t even know that most of it took place in France -- 95% of it, in fact. Another thing I didn’t know in advance was that it was co-written by Thomas Bidegain, who has been working extensively with the brilliant Jacques Audiard in recent years on films like Rust and Bone, A Prophet and Dheepan. Just thinking of that combination of McCarthy with Bidegain is reason enough to give Stillwater the benefit of the doubt, but it also proves to be quite a sympatico combination of skills, since both writers have long had a proven knack for creating emotional character dramas.

As much as the overarching story involving Bill’s daughter and him trying to find the person who was really responsible for her roommate’s murder -- and yes, It’s hard not to think of the Amanda Knox case while watching the movie -- I ended up enjoying how Bill’s relationship with Virginie and especially Maya played out much more. That said, Damon’s performance is fantastic, and so is that of Abigail Breslin, who we really haven’t seen in this kind of dramatic adult role before, at least not that I have seen. Damon and Breslin’s scenes together are probably some of the film’s strongest, to the point where once it gets back into him catching the real killer, it certainly adds another layer but maybe one that maybe isn’t as interesting.

The one negative I have to say about Stillwater is about how the marketing spends so much time focusing on the thriller and crime aspects of the movie and fails to illustrate what makes the film so wonderful -- which is the character arc Bill goes through by spending time with Virginie and Maya, who bring so much to his life he would never have found in Oklahoma. That was really the biggest takeaway for me, and why I enjoyed the movie enough to make it “Chosen One.” Like so many of McCarthy’s great earlier films like The Station Agent and The Visitor, he has a way of creating compelling drama by bringing people from different backgrounds together.

On the other hand, if you’re unwilling to give a Red State working man like Damon’s character a chance, maybe Stillwater won’t be for you, but if you’re willing to learn about people that are different than yourself, put into situations in which you might never be, then it’s just the right cure for those who want something more grounded and authentic during the summer.

Personally, I’m convinced Stillwater will be one of the Top 10 Best Picture Oscar nominees this year, and I’ve already had people wanting to bet against me, thinking I’m wrong,, but I honestly think that once others see this film and allow themselves to appreciate the story and character-work done by McCarthy and his small cast, the film will find many fans. Maybe that won’t happen right away in theaters, but it’s likely to be on VOD in a month or so and then awards screeners later this year will help remind people and find new recruits.

As far as the box office prospects of McCarthy’s latest, I’m not really sure it can open with more than $5 million even with Matt Damon’s face plastered everywhere, because it just doesn’t seem like the type of movie that should get an immediate wide release vs. a slower roll-out.

The biggest movie of the weekend and by far the widest release into over 4,000 theaters is Disney’s JUNGLE CRUISE (Walt Disney Pictures), teaming Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt -- Blunt having led one of the second biggest female-led movies of 2021 so far after Black Widow -- and putting them into a fantasy-adventure based on the Disney World (or Land?) theme park ride. This is an idea that worked well for Disney’s 2003 action-adventure Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, and its sequels, but maybe not so well for movies like The Country Bears. The fact is that theme park rides based on hit movies work great, but trying to create a hit movie out of a theme park, it just isn’t done, and for a very good reason.

If nothing else, this one stars Dwayne Johnson, who has been absent from theaters for quite some time, having bailed on the “Fast Saga” franchise for his own 2019 spin-off with Jason Statham, Fast & Furious Presents Hobbs and Shaw. That made about $173 million domestically and another $586 million overseas, but Johnson’s last movie was 2019’s Jumanji: The Next Level, which made $300 million domestically and another $483.3 million overseas. Not all of Johnson’s movies have done so well -- Baywatch and Skyscaper both bombed domestically -- but Johnson is clearly an A-list star who just needs the right vehicle. Jungle Cruise may be just that, because it combines the type of action and humor that are Johnson’s strong suits with the family draw of something like the Jumanji movies but then also adds the Disney namebrand, which has led to many huge blockbusters.

It certainly won’t hurt that his on-screen foil Emily Blunt is coming off her hit A Quiet Place Part II, which continues to move her into the realm of beloved A-lister ala Julia Roberts and others. In between the Quiet Place sequel and the original movie in 2018 (which grossed $335 million worldwide), Blunt starred as the title character in Mary Poppins Returns for Disney, which made even more than the first Quiet Place worldwide, but it firmly placed her in the Disney realm that makes her a perfect co-star for Johnson. She previously starred in the Disney musical, Into the Woods, which also did very well, but it clearly has put Blunt into a category that should make a draw on a similar level as Johnson but more for women and girls.

Since the original Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl will be the benchmark for how Disney is hoping Jungle Cruise might perform -- keeping in mind that we’re still in the COVID pandemic and the fact that Jungle Cruise is available to buy for $29.99 on Disney+ Premier Access starting Friday -- we have to remember that the first “Pirates” was looked at rather cynically, so when it opened with $46.6 million in July 2003, that was thought of as a huge boon for the Disney property. It ended up grossing $300 million in the U.S. alone, which showed a huge amount of word-of-mouth and repeat viewing, which I personally feel Jungle Cruise

Unfortunately, we do have to take into account both COVID and the ability for families to see the movie on Disney+ for $30 vs. the $100+ it usually costs to take a small family to the movies, especially with kids under 12 still not being vaccinated. In normal times, I could maybe see Jungle Cruise opening with $40 to 50 million or more, but these aren’t normal times, and some of the factors mentioned above might keep it down around the $30 million mark, give or take.

I reviewed Jungle Cruise over at Below the Line, incidentally.

Next up is David Lowery’s THE GREEN KNIGHT (A24), starring Dev Patel, which is a fairly faithful adaptation of the “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” Arthurian legend poem written by “Anonymous,” and it’s a grand sweeping epic in the vein of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, although it’s a far more R-rated affair. It stars Dev Patel, Oscar winner Alicia Vikander, Barry Keoughan, and Joel Edgerton as well as others, and it’s a movie that’s likely to be talked about by many over the next couple weeks.

It’s an interesting new film from the filmmaker who has done small indies like Ain’t Them Body Saints and big studio movies like Pete’s Dragon (and the upcoming Peter Pan and Wendy), and mid-sized movies like A Ghost Story and The Old Man and the Gun in between. He’s reteaming with Ghost Story distributor A24 who knows the best way to attract the cinephile Millennial audience (aka #FilmTwitter) that would appreciate The Green Knight. They’ve done particularly well with horror and genre films from the likes of Ari Aster (Hereditary, Midsommar) and Robert Eggers (The Witch, The Lighthouse). So far, A24’s top-grossing film is the Safdie Brothers’ Uncut Gems with around $50 million. That starred Adam Sandler, who is a much bigger star than anyone in The Green Knight, but Heredity’s $13 million opening, or more likely, Midsommar’s $10.9 million five-day would be a better barometer for Lowery’s latest.

You can read my review of The Green Knight here, but I fully expect others reviews to be just as favorable and glowing, along with the excitement by #FilmTwitter to see this movie after it was delayed over a year. In many ways, A24 has created a niche for this type of film with Ari Aster’s Hereditary and Midsommar, and this will probably be effective counter-programming against a mainstream studio movie like Jungle Cruise. The fact that this won’t be available on streaming or On Demand should help it bring in between $7 and 10 million this weekend, as the amazing visuals and marketing for the film should make it the first choice for those between 20 and 40 of both genders.

Essentially, this week’s Top 10 should look something like this...

1. Jungle Cruise (Walt Disney Pictures) - $32 million N/A

2. The Green Knight (A24) - $8.7 million N/A

3. Black Widow (Marvel/Disney) - $6.5 million -44%

4. Old (Universal) - $6 million -64%

5. Snake Eyes (Paramount/MGM/Skydance) - $6 million -56%

6. Stillwater (Focus Features) - $4.8 million N/A

7. Space Jam: A New Legacy (Warner Bros.) - $4.5 million -53%

8. F9: The Fast Saga (Universal) - $2.5 million -48%

9. Escape Room: Tournament of Champions (Sony) - $1.6 million -54%

10. The Boss Baby: Family Business (Universal/DreamWorks Animation) - $1.6 million -44%

Opening in limited theaters in New York and L.A. on Friday before a wider release on August 6 is Edson Oda’s NINE DAYS (Sony Pictures Classics), a movie that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival way back in January 2020 to rave reviews across the board, but has to find a renewed push now that it’s finally coming out in theaters. It stars Winston Duke (US, Black Panther) as Will, an enigmatic individual who watches people’s lives on a wall of monitors but who also has the power to test individuals hoping to be the next to get a life. Yeah, it’s a pretty enigmatic and metaphysical idea for a film, but Edo’s script is great, and he’s put together quite an amazing ensemble cast around Duke, including Benedict Wong (from Doctor Strange) and Zazie Beetz, but we also see the likes of Tony Hale, Bill Skarsgard and Arianna Ortiz playing very different characters we’ve seen from them before.

I don’t want to go too deep into detail about what happens in this highly metaphysical existential film, but essentially Duke’s character is putting a group of “souls” (for lack of a better term) through their paces in order to be allowed to have a life. The different things they’re asked to do, including watching those aforementioned monitors, makes it hard to really stay completely absorbed in the story, mainly because you might not know what you’re watching. But Duke is great while Wong is very amusing, and Beetz’s character Emma is great as a nut that Will has a particularly difficulty cracking. (In some ways, the movie reminded me of a far more grown-up Soul.)

There’s also Will’s obsession with a violin prodigy whose life he has been observing for a number of decades that makes it hard to understand what we’re watching. But there are many nice moments, plus a few that just seem like an acting exercise, and that intriguing storytelling style is embellished by a beautiful score by Antonio Pinto, which beautifully complements the visuals created by Oda and his cinematographer, Wyatt Garfield.

Nine Days certainly won’t be for everyone -- it’s slow and kind of contemplative and deliberately enigmatic; I’m certainly not sure I fully got it -- but it’s still an intriguing movie because filmmaker Edson Oda has such a unique storytelling style, which in some ways, makes this feel more like a movie we might get from A24 or NEON than Sony Pictures Classics. (I’ll discuss the film’s box office prospects next week as Sony Classics gives another movie a far-too-wide expansion following a platform release.)

This week’s Shudder release is THE BOY BEHIND THE DOOR (Shudder), the second movie by filmmakers David Charbonier and Justin Powell after The Djinn, their first movie, which was released earlier this year. Got all that? (The Boy Behind the Door actually played Fantastic Fest last September but is just finally hitting Shudder on Thursday after playing a bunch of festivals, including, most recently, the Tribeca Film Festival.)

The movie stars Lonnie Chavis as 12-year-old Bobby, whose best friend Kevin (Ezra Dewey, who starred in The Djinn) has been kidnapped and locked up in a house, so Bobby tries to rescue him, having to fight off a couple adults (pedophiles, in fact) while hiding in the house and trying to escape himself.

I really wanted to like The Boy Behind the Door more, because I did enjoy what the duo did in The Djinn and Dewey pretty much carried that movie. I’m not sure that Chavis does as good a job carrying this one, which is odd since the filmmakers already had experience getting good performances from a younger actor.

What’s surprising is that this is debuting on Shudder, because it isn’t particularly scary. It does have a lot of violence, and it’s quite brutal and grueling at times, if that’s your sort of thing, but I don’t even think the writing is particularly good compared to The Djinn.

The Boy Behind the Door offers an interesting one-location thriller, but it’s very tough to watch kids being put into and through some of these situations, so it kept from being able to fully like or love the movie, let alone recommend it. But if you have Shudder, it’ll be on there, so there’s no reason not to watch it. I’ve certainly seen worse. (How’s that for a recommendation?)

Dan (Dirty Grandpa) Mazer’s THE EXCHANGE (Quiver Distribution), written by Tim Long (The Simpsons) stars Ed Oxenbould from The Visit, Justin Hartley from This Is Us, and Avan Jogia from Zombieland: Double Tap. Oxenbould plays Tim, a socially awkward teen who decides to order a “mail order best friend,” but instead of getting a sophisticated exchange from France, he gets Jogia’s chain-smoking sex-obssessed Stéphane, who becomes a hero of Tim’s community. Hartley plays the school’s gym teacher, Barry. This is a fairly bland high-concept indie comedy that treads on Napoleon Dynamite territory without really being particularly funny. I will give props to Music Supervisor Nick Angel, who managed to get some awesome period songs for the score, but otherwise, I really don't have much to say about this one.

Joshua Leonard and Jess Weizler co-wrote and star in Leonard's new movie, FULLY REALIZED HUMANS (Gravitas Ventures). They play Elliot and Jackie, a couple who have been trying to have a baby but don’t want to screw up their kids the way their parents screwed them up. In order to become the perfect parents, they’ll have to rediscover themselves.

Opening at the IFC Center in New York this Friday and at the Laemmle in L.A. on August 6 is THE EVENING HOUR (Strand Releasing), Braden King’s Appalachian drama based on Carter Sickels’ novel, which follows Cole Freeman (Philip Ettinger), who is caring for the old and infirm in the community while selling painkillers to local addicts. When his old friend Terry Rose (Cosmo Jarvis) returns to town with new plans that threatens to unbalance Cole’s lifestyle. Cole also has to deal with the return of his other (Lili Taylor) and conflict with a real drug dealer (Marc Menchaca). The film also stars Stacy Martin, Kerry Bishé… and my good friend, Susan McPhail (in a very small role, though).

Other movies I just didn’t have time to get to include:

A DARK FOE (Vertical) LORELEI (Vertical) MASQUERADE (Shout! Studios) MIDNIGHT IN THE SWITCHGRASS (Lionsgate) RIDE THE EAGLE (Decal) SABARA (MTV Documentary Films)TWIST (Lionsgate)

Next week, James Gunn’s THE SUICIDE SQUAD!

[mandalorian-mayhem]

★ Favorite things for all your ocs?

I’ve been trying fordays to do this thing but I was having complications. And because this requestis going to take like 40 years to complete if I literally used EVERYONE, you’rejust getting swtor ocs. I don’t make the rules, I just make the characters.

tagging @ikarralives because her ocs aretotally going to show up in this because I have a severe love for the ships.

This is all going under the cut.

GrandpaVywyn: Spending the holidayswith his family and getting to tell all the great-grandkids stories from whenhe was younger.

Dev: Running cons with his daughter, Nonicia. Hemissed out on a lot of her life because he was in prison, so he’ll take thebest father-daughter bonding he can get.

Malus: Controlling everything. His motives are notgood and you should be concerned with what he has planned.

Udo: meeting up with Lumaili for caf.

Orar: Spending time with Usatau. And later gettingto know Akiwo.

Usatau: Seeing the accomplishments of all herchildren. (Also the look that Orar gets while he’s cleaning his blaster and hegets all focused.)

Larana: Her sons, wife, and stepdaughter areliterally everything to her. But also knowing that one of her sons helped(indirectly) take Malus down is also something she is pretty damn pleased with.(Originally, Loreqo was supposed to be the one to kill Malus, with Lotharelignoring Malus’s demand for support and later joining the fight, but it waschanged to Yonnul because lost so much because of his father and the sith thatit felt right. THE MORE YOU KNOW.)

Rainee: Knowing that her work was actually helpingthe republic. But she also was a sucker for greasy diner food. (Where is she?No one knows.)

Tamau: The look on Myraala’s face when she’s tryingto process a joke. And knowing that all three of his daughters managed toinherit that look.

Myraala: Smuggling. And her kids. And Saechacontinuing the family business.

Idrinas: The sound of rain when she’s stuck insidewith a cup of tea and something good to read. And knowing that her daughtersare both safe and equipped to handle anything that comes their way.

Coryn: He gets a kick out of hearing Malani bitchabout people. And the way that Idrinas’ hair falls into her face in waves.

Nonicia: Spending quality time with her girlfriend. Orher dad. Mostly the girlfriend.

Rhori: Literally anything and everything about Sivanis her favorite. But if it has to be just one thing, it would probably be thatSivan chose to marry her of all the people in the galaxy and that after longmissions, they get to come home to each other.

Yonnul: Besides playing pranks on the jedi? He reallyloves the days when there are no planned parties and he, Hemile and Theron canall just chill out and have a day off.

Loreqo: Making things for Emin and Vector. Whetherit’s weaving something or sewing something or spending forever trying to make adish that just doesn’t turn out, it’s everything if he can make them smile.

Lotharel: Prior to being reunited with Keth, he verymuch enjoyed getting to know a variety of bounty hunters (Except for Rishuud,whom he never liked and will never like). He also likes rain.

Lumaili:Spending time with her father, Udo, and getting to know him. It’s not a veryjedi thing, but she quite enjoys getting caf with him.

Uliccol:When the morning light creeps over Talaar while she’s still asleep and he justgets to lay there a little longer and memorize her face and the way her hairfalls.

Numelia:Being free to choose is a huge part of her life and she loves it. She alsoloves when her kids try to sneak attack either herself or Torian. And alsogetting to spend time with her husband is definitely her favorite thing buteverything else is super high up there.

Akiwo: Getting to brag aboutPitha and Sahdrein. And the loth-cats. But damn if he doesn’t get all sappy ifhe is ever asked about if he is married. Because he totally will sit there andtalk about just how much he loves the both of them. This usually ends with himeither calling them to tell them how much he loves them… Or him coming home andadoring them.

Saecha:Surprising Sid. Hands down, she will surprise Sid by coming to visit or bysending her little things on a whim.

Karei: Getting things donefor the Resistance. If she can free her home, she will take pride in knowingshe did everything she could for it.

Pitha: Being the anonymousdonor for things that her husbands are passionate about. They eventually findout, but she tries to keep it quiet for a while because she just loves seeinghow their eyes light up when they talk about the things they enjoy and if shecan do something like that for them, she’s going to.

Sev’rana:After she leaves the Empire and is allowed to unapologetically be herself. Andthat she can openly be with Rast and Felix after that.

Malani:Force lightning. Force lightning is her favorite thing.

Rasee: Hearing all ofNundhiasa’s stories when she calls or visits. And spoiling his niece because hewould definitely hype Hirani up on sweets and then return her to Nundhiasa andwatch hell break loose.

Emlaiyaliya:Sleeping in or getting a day to herself where she can watch her holodramas withno one to judge her.

Nundhiasa:Pretty much doing anything at all with Talus and/or Hirani is her favorite.Especially around the holidays.

Eryata:Teasing Nun about that one thing that happened that one time and flirting withall of the ladies.

Rishuud:In short… Cekke. But I think he would fight anyone who referred to her as hisfavorite thing. He is crazy about her, though. He writes poems for her anddefinitely serenades her and figures out like 100 different ways to show her heloves her and she is pretty much the only person he wouldn’t correct if she calledhim Dzârrus.

Fallastia:When she finally gets Karei’s mind off the battlefield and they can finally relax.Or just remembering when Karei caught her at the spaceport and told her sheloved her. And lazy morning kisses.

L’eiva:Relaxing in the sunlight. Especially if there’s a nice, sandy beach to lay on.Even better if there’s a cute person on the beach with her.

Virith:Getting to spend time with her brother, Sicarth, and discussing the things thathave happened since their last meeting. But she also enjoys spending time awayfrom the rigid rules of the Jedi and getting a breather.

Sicarth:Despite the fact that he decided to focus more on the ideals of the jedi, hecan’t help but enjoy the time he gets to spend with Virith (and, as if topunish himself, getting to see that Yonnul is still okay is always nice forhim.)

Korr Treja:The fact that he works on the same squad as Rannei and he gets to see her allthe time, even if she’s yelling at him for getting himself hurt and now she hasto worry about him while she’s healing him and that is just distracting damnit.

Rannei:When Korr laughs, not just chuckles but really laughs, that’s one of herfavorite things. It means he is happy.

Kri’hi:The fact that Nexu squad has taken her in and treated her like family. It tookher a while to warm up to them, but she now feels super comfortable with them anddoesn’t think that any of them would defect like last time…

Ghiwa: Messing with the merchantkids and playing pranks on all of them when she can. And stealing things withTiryn. (But she won’t steal from the merchant kids because she knows just howhard they all work to make the money that they get and she wouldn’t do that to them.)

Tiryn: Surprise visiting hiswife while she is playing the merchant and chuckling to himself while she triesto keep her calm. And when she comes home and they can resume their usualbusiness. (He’s glad to have left the order to be with her. They have a lot offun adventures.)

Sela: While she loves the senseof calm she gets while blowing glass and making bits of jewelry, her favoritething is when Kazic sits with her and mindlessly discusses his day whiletending to the plants around the house.

Kazic: Decorating Sela’shair and glass creations with all sorts of flowers and making flower crowns.Sela also once made him a glass flower crown because she couldn’t make him anice one with real flowers so she made him one the way she knew best and it’s probablythe most precious thing to him.

Daesha:Picking pockets and impressing the ladies. Sure, it’s nice working with Dev andhis crew, but she really likes being able to just go back to her roots to stealfrom the rich and buy some ladies a drink or two.

Artus: Sparring withhis dad in hand-to-hand combat and learning cool mechanic stuff from his mom.And learning force things from the collective group of force-users willing totrain him.

Naiad: Playing pranks withIdash, even if it means getting in trouble with his mom. (And later, hecontinues playing pranks with Idash, but his favorite thing is that he marriedthem.)

Cecima: Showingup her brothers. She likes being a better shot than them while being one of theyoungest. (But later, one of her favorite things is noting different thingsabout how beautiful her crush is.)

Ritosh:Listening to his parents and siblings and trying to figure out things about them.And when one of his siblings say something like “are you seeing this?” becausehe can just go “No” and then sit there trying to figure out what he meant for amoment.

Idash: Playing awesomepranks with Naiad until they’re both in trouble. And later running jobs with theirfamily. (Idash loves running jobs with Naiad, though it does get tough when… aparticular incident happens. Then they wonder if it was all worth it for a bit)

Shakka:Visiting Hirani and getting to call her “little sister” and teaching her thingsabout being a twi’lek that her mother taught her back on Nar Shaddaa when she wasyoung.

Hirani:Any time that she gets to spend with Nun and Talus? Her favorite. Her stuffedakk dog? Her favorite. The real akk dog? Her favorite. Knowing that her adoptiveparents are, by no means, perfect, but they’re trying and they love her meanseverything to her.

[pictorialplanet]

6 ways to sharper prints!

Setting up the camera as the predawn light fills the horizon you prepare for the photograph running a well rehearsed list through your mind.

Right film…right exposure…camera on tripod with the added weight of your rucksack dangling between the tripod legs…best lens and best aperture selected…mirror locked up…the sun rises…you squeeze the shutter release cable…

Click

With the film developed in your favourite soup it's time to make the print and after all that effort you want it sharp. So what can you do to get the best from this fine negative in the enlarger?

1. First, let's just think about how big are you want to print the image?

What's that got to do with sharpness? Well, when it comes to sharpness size matters. Bigger is not always better and is certainly not sharper. In fact, the bigger you print the less sharp your final image will seem. However, many photographers feel the urge to print big and end up with unclear images.

"I mean, it's a landscape isn't it, it should be big, right?"

Wrong. In fact, often a smaller print will have far more impact. To start, think about the viewing distance. Will someone view the print in their hand, or on a wall. On the wall might mean bigger, because of the longer viewing distance, but that's not necessarily true. Even on a wall a print might well look better printed small, especially if people will walk up to it to look. Try this, print smaller and frame bigger. This is a trick the masters showed us. Weston, Strand and others often liked to contact print their negatives. This made the final images anywhere from 4x5 inches, 5 x 7 inches up to 10x8 inches (sometimes but rarely more). The smaller size gives the print a certain precious quality, better tonal range and greater sharpness. Strand apparently printed his images in multiple sizes until he decided upon "the one". I don't know if I'll do that for every print but know, smaller is sharper.

2. What lens should I use on my enlarger?

It's a commonly held belief you should enlarge with the same size lens as the "standard" lens for your camera. For instance, 50mm for 35mm negatives, 80mm for 2 1/4 square and so on. This works but is it the best option? Well no, not really.

If you print with the next size of lens up from the "standard" you'll be getting sharper prints (assuming the same quality of lens). This is because you are using the "sweet spot" of the lens. When we use the standard lens, we magnify the negative from edge to edge of the glass. Using a longer lens means you are only really magnifying through the centre (and best) portion of glass. Yes, you must reach higher up the enlarger to focus but if you are printing smaller (as above) it won't be as bad as you think. Try it.

3. Which F-stop should I choose?

Your enlarger lens is not at its best wide open. Just like your camera lens it improves in quality as you stop it down and peaks around three stops down from fully open. This is where you should make your prints. Focus wide open and close down three click. And, the longer exposures will aid in dodging and burning giving you more control in perfecting your image.

4. Focus with a piece of photo paper on the easel.

I have a piece of enlarger paper ready for this. It's a sheet I use for dodging and burning and it sits right beside the enlarger. Make sure you place a piece of your photographic paper on the easel before readying your grain focuser. By lifting the focuser by the thickness of the paper you'll achieve a more accurate focus. Oh, and ensure you have your filter fitted for your VC paper. I use "under the lens" Ilford filters and ensure the filter is in the holder before I grain focus. This helps sharpen the grain at the right wavelength. Before VC paper was popular darkroom users would place a blue filter over their grain focusers to sharpen the right wavelength. VC papers react to various wavelengths of light so choose your filter first and pop it in.

5. Don't let the enlarger move!

This is the gotcha we might all forget about. The slightest and I mean slightest movement of the enlarger head will reduce sharpness of the print. It's just like takin the photo in the first place right? We use a heavy steady tripod to stop camera shake but do we think of steadying the enlarger?

There are ways of making your enlarger rock solid from attaching it to the wall to making sure the enlarger table is big and heavy and solid. You can help by standing absolutely still when making the exposure. Set up the easel, check your filter and timer, wait and let the enlarger steady for a moment and then carefully make the exposure. Setting your enlarger table legs on a rubber mat might also help dampen vibration from the road or the kids running around upstairs if that's a problem.

6. Add some contrast to your developer.

This is unusual but a valid technique and a useful tool to have. We all have our favourite print developer. I often use Dektol or my home brewed AGFA 100 and here's a little trick that might add some perceived sharpness to your prints - add punch! By popping a little extra Sodium Carbonate into the developer we can add a ton of "je ne sais quoi" - "special something". The added Sodium Carbonate makes the blacks richer. Now, we used to do this in the "old days" and it worked to punch up the image. It adds that special something to your perceived sharpness including the micro-sharpness; it's like moving the detail slider up in Lightroom. By always having a 10% solution of Sodium Carbonate on hand we can easily add 30ml to a litre of working print dev. See what you think.

That's it for now. 6 ways to sharper prints. Why not leave your tips on sharper prints below?

Till next time, keep firing those shutters!

John

More at: pictorialplanet.com

[suzanneshannon]

The Twelfth Fourth

CSS-Tricks is 12 years old! Firmly into that Early Adolescence stage, I'd say ;) As we do each year, let's reflect upon the past year. I'd better have something to say, right? Otherwise, John Prine would get mad at me.

How the hell can a person go to work in the morning And come home in the evening and have nothing to say. - Angel From Montgomery

See the Pen Fireworks! by Tim Severien (@timseverien) on CodePen.

Easily the biggest change this year was design v17

We redesign most years, so it's not terribly shocking I suppose that we did this year, but I think it's fairly apparent that this was a big one. The biggest since v10.

Here's a writeup on v17.

I still get happy emails about it.

The aesthetics of it still feel fresh to me, 6 months later. There are no plans at all yet for what the next version will be. I imagine this one will last a good couple of years with tweaks along the way. I'm always working on it. Just in the last few days, I have several commits cleaning things up, adding little features, and optimizing. That work is never done. v18 might just be a more thorough scrubbing of what is here. Might be a good release to focus on the back-end tech. I've always wanted to try some sort of MVC setup.

In a way, things feel easier.

There is a lot going right around here. We've got a great staff. Our editorial workflow, led by Geoff, has been smooth. There are ebbs and flows of how many great guest posts are in the pipeline, but it never seems to run dry and these days we stay more ahead than we ever have.

We stay quite organized with Notion. In fact, I still use it heavily across all the teams I'm on. It's just as fundamental as Slack and email.

We're still working with BuySellAds as a partner to help us sell advertising and sponsorship partnerships. We've worked with them for ages and they really do a good job with clean ad tech, smooth integration workflows, and finding good companies that want to run campaigns.

On the 10th anniversary I wrote:

If you do all the work, the hope is that you just keep to keep on keeping on. Everyone gets paid for their effort. This is not a hockey-stick growth kind of site. It's a modest publication.

Yep.

Check out a year over year chart from Google Analytics:

I can look at that and celebrate the moments with growth. Long periods of 20% year over year growth, which is cool. Then if you look at just this last month, we're more even or a little bit under 2018 (looking at only pageviews). Good to know, kinda, but I never put much stock in this kind of generic analytics. I'm glad we record them. I would want to know if we started tanking or growing hugely. But we never do. We have long slow steady growth and that is a comfortable place for me.

Thinking on ads

The world of advertising is tightly integrated around here, of course. I'm sure many of you look at this site and go JEEZ, LITTLE HEAVY ON THE ADS, EH? I hope it's not too big a turnoff, as I really try to be tasteful with them. But another thing you should know is that the ad tech is clean. No tracking stuff. No retargetting. No mysterious third-party JavaScript. There might be an impression-tracking pixel here and there, but that's about it. No slew of 100's of requests doing god-knows-what.

That's not by accident. It's clear to me now how to go down that other road, and that road has money on it. Twice as much. But I look at it as what would be short term gains. Nobody is going to be more mad at me than you if I slap 80 tracking scripts on this site, my credibility amongst devs goes out the window along with any hopes of sustaining or growing this site. It's no surprise to me that on sites without developers as an audience, the tendency is to go down the golden road of tracking scripts.

Even the tech is easier.

Just starting in July I've gotten all my sites on Flywheel hosting, and I've written about that here just today. Flywheel is a new sponsor here to the site, and I'm equally excited about that as I am in actually using it. Between using Local for local WordPress development, GitHub for repos, Buddy for deployment, Cloudflare for DNS/CDN... everything just feels smooth and easy right now.

The way I feel about tech at the moment is that nearly anything is doable. Even stuff that feels insurmountable. It's just work. Do a bunch of work, get the thing done.

Fancy posts

One thing that we snuck in this year is the idea of posts that have special design applied to them. The term "Art-directed articles" seems to be the term that has stuck for that, for better or worse, and we've added to that.

There are posts like The Great Divide that I intentionally wanted to make stand out.

And now we've taken that and turned it into a template. The point of an art-directed article is to do something unique, so a template is a little antithetical to that, but I think this strikes a nice middle ground. The template assumes a big full-width header with background image under big title and then is otherwise just a centered column of type on white. The point is to use the template, then apply custom styles on top of it as needed to do something special for the post. I have a good feeling we'll keep using it and have fun with it, and that it won't be too burdensome for future designs.

Elsewhere

Last year at this time I was just settling into living in Bend, Oregon. It still feels that way. I'm in a new house now, that we've bought, and it feels like this is a very permanent living situation. But we're less than a year into the new house so there is plenty of dust to settle. I'm still honeymooning on Bend as I just love it here so much. My daughter is just over a year and a half now so stability is very much what we're after.

Professionally, most of my time is on CodePen, of course. There is a lot of overlap, like the fact that we work with BuySellAds on both sites and often sell across both. Plus working on CSS-Tricks always has me in CodePen anyway ;). Miraculously, Dave Rupert and I almost never miss a week on ShopTalk Show. Going strong after all these years. Never a shortage of stuff to talk about when it comes to websites.

Thank you

A big hearty thanks from me! Y'all reading this site is what makes it possible.

The post The Twelfth Fourth appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

The Twelfth Fourth published first on https://deskbysnafu.tumblr.com/

[vice-s-assistant]

Voices of the FGC: Andre/Dream Boy Purple of Skullgirls Latin American (SG LATAM)

Over the last five years, Skullgirls has been the “Lil’ Darling” of the Indie movement in Fighting Games. It the game that’s thrived when people said it was “dead”, multiple setbacks, from its former publisher, and various other hay-makers that come with its game development. Through all of that though, it has not only survived, but grown. Now as the actual final patch for the game comes out, the current call for the game, it’s a good time to look back and see it lasting effect on the fighting game landscape. I sat down with a friend of mine, Andre/Dream Boy Purple, who was the lead organizer for SG LATAM, a Skullgirls Latin American group, for his thoughts on Skullgirls, its effect on him, and his organization.

Vice’s Assistant: Alright let's start off with your name for the folks who don't know and what you do with Skullgirls?

Andre/Dream Boy Purple: Name is André, well basically I created and have been running SG LATAM a Latin American focused community for Skullgirls, as well as trying to use the group itself as a medium to spread the word of SG on other LATAM communities.

Banner from SG LATAM Facebook page

VA: How did you find out about Skullgirls?

Andre: Well, back in the day of 2011, I happened to stumble upon a trailer for Double, a character in the game before the game came out. It honestly left me pretty surprised: just the sight of the animation was pretty cool on itself, but it also looked like a really fun fighting game, especially considering I was into Marvel at the time. It was a no brainer (sic) that I soon got it for the 360 when it released.

VA: And when you first got the game, did it just "click" with you, or did that just come on later down the line?

Andre: Ha ha, that's actually a curious question. When I first got the game, I had my fun with it, but I guess there were a bunch of things that I didn't really enjoy with it. Things like the speed, the constant touch of death combos, the animation having to display the hitboxes for it to run smoothly, and even the netcode even though it was still rollback. It was in a rougher state than the one we have now, I endend (sic) up playing it casually during that time and no thinking much about it.

VA: After you spent time with it though, when did things start to feel like "I really dig this game"?

Andre: That was way down the line, after the whole fiasco with Reverge Labs having to dismantle and reform into Lab Zero, and the launching of their crowdfunding campaign. I started to take interest in the game again after all there were a lot of things that were issues of mine adressed (sic) on the game since then like the speed or balance patches (we didn't get those on the 360 at the time sadly), plus new characters and a PC port after hearing that I made up my mind of giving the game a second chance and ended up falling in love with it then.

VA: Nice. I kind of started to dig the game after I've spent time with a few months later. Skullgirls was my "burnout" game after I would do long sets in SSF IV AE. After a while started fooling around with Fortune and started to realized I like her rush down stuff...even though I was probably abusing some of her nasty damage stuff she had in Vanilla Skullgirls.

Andre: Yeah, damage was kinda ridiculous in vainilla (sic) I remember seeing some videos of Severin back in the day of him killing characters anywhere on the screen with just one bar.

Couldn’t find a combo of Severine killing with one bar but here’s a 100% combo. These were common (and annoying) in Vanilla Skullgirls.

VA: I couldn't do that kind of stuff, and still can't, but I remember basically using the head to trip someone, going to rekkas, blockbuster. It was super easy to do and boy howdy you could get some nice chunks of damage off.

Moving forward, what in you decided that you wanted to foster your local community to get more people into the game?

Andre: Well when I really started to get into the game once again I started wanting to play more against people and Quick Match did only so much. So I searched around forums and Facebook groups for a LATAM community only to find out there were really none. I found a couple that talked about the game, it's (sic) lore, and played casually but not really one focused to compete with each other. So I quickly took action into it. After all if you want something done you should do it yourself. I created a very basic logo in PS and started a FB group which I tried to promote constantly to friends and in FGC groups. Thinking back to it, it was probably annoying for them to see me do that but I was determined. Ha ha.

VA: Since starting it, how has thing’s gone?

Andre: Well it has been growing pretty nicely and steadily. We're around 600-700 unique members between the FB, Discord, and Steam groups. The Discord is pretty active every day and people are constantly talking and playing on it. We got an actual logo for our group and not just a photoshopped SG logo. We have done plenty of tournaments now under the name "Trifulca en el Ring" with custom flyers for each edition. We've also since have partnered up with Arcade Rumble (a FGC Latin American group) and they have helped us do things like have better production streams, bigger audience to announce our stuff, and in ocassions (sic) even give out money prizes for our tournaments.

Poster done by Abraham Rodriguez

VA: Beyond just the SG LA community, how do you think Skullgirls has grown within the last 5 years? The prevailing joke is "Skullgirls is dead," but the truth is the opposite: Skullgirls is one of Steam's best selling fighting games (CORRECTION: Skullgirl is not one Steam’s best selling fighting games, far from it, but there are a lot more people who have then you think) , showings a plenty tournies, and even a "mini" convention at AX in Phoenix, AZ  (Correction AX is in Los Angeles, California, not Phoenix, AZ).

Andre: The SGC (Skullgirls Community) has grown a lot, right now we have things like the Skullgirls Tour which is basically or own version of CPT or KI's world cup with 12 tournaments both offline and online. A lot of people have also joined through the PC community, thanks to it being a complete steal at just 15 bucks for the game, having one of the if not the smoothest online in a fighting game beautiful animation, great gameplay, and the low specs it has. You see new people trying out the game constantly, be it the Skullheart* or Steam forums, as well as in the SG LATAM community. We get people who are new all the time and it also helps the abundance of helpful people and events that are run online by the community. Things like Skullbats, Monday Night Blockbusters, SG Brazil weeklies, and even our own "Trifulca en el Ring" series just goes to show that SG was never or ever will be dead. You'll always have people to play with, you just gotta look for them.

VA: With the last patch finally out, do you feel the game has finally reached its ideal state? Or are there things to feel still need worked on?

Andre: Well considering how Mike Z is, he will always find something to work on, but as it stands, the game is really balanced to the point where tier list are pretty universaly (sic) thought as a matter of opinion, and even then there isn't that much of a diff (sic) from the bottom to the top. Considering SG is pretty unique with it's (sic) focus on resets, I think in it's (sic) current state it will pass the test of time just fine.

VA: What do you think Skullgirls' lasting legacy will be?

Andre: That a community and it's game can last and grow as long as they keep pouring love into it. There's only so many big tournaments for SG (biggest being Combo Breaker) since the whole EVO ordeal of 2013, and barely losing to Smash SG hasn't really been a mainstream fighting game at all. Which to my eyes only makes more impressive what it has been able to acomplish (sic) thanks to the developer support and the constant effort by the community to run events; making tech, helping the devs find bugs, the community being so inclusive. I think SG will still be played many years from now, and until the eventual SG 2, I doubt the constant income of players will slow down anytime soon.

VA: Finally, do you have any advice for people still timid about getting into Skullgirls?

Andre: Well SG is a fighting game, and like any of them, it's not easy to get to certain competitive level. That's the first fact that you have to accept but there's so many resources and people willing to help: on Discord and the Skullheart forums as well as groups targeted towards new players that you'll have people around your level to play against. A lot of people get discouraged because they jump online first thing, and they get massacred since SG is a fast game, and also focused heavily on resets. Even people with past fighting game experience have a hard time when they first play against experienced people, but it really doesn't take that long to get the hang of it, and SG having such an amazing training mode also helps. To sum it up, I know it may seem overwhelming now, but there's so many people willing to help you, and it really is worth it to form (sic) part of such an amazing community.

VA: One last thing: Where can people reach you and be a part of SG LATAM?

Andre: People can reach me personally through my Tumblr or Twitter

http://dreamboypurple.tumblr.com/

https://twitter.com/DreamBoyPurple

For SG LATAM they can reach either through our (sic) FB group or Discord, Discord being the more active one of the 2

https://www.facebook.com/groups/SGLATAM

To both Andre for the interview and Yahoo’s E-sports’ Michael Martin (https://twitter.com/Bizarro_Mike) for advice with interviews

You can also watch Andre attempt to go against the world in a 100-man quick match kumite in Skullgirls today at 6 CDT on his Twitch channel:

https://www.twitch.tv/dreamboypurple

[reneeacaseyfl]

Blockchain is finally becoming the next-gen database of choice

When I think of why we need a blockchain, I think of one guy. There was a dev we had hired to build a few important parts of our product for us. A few years previously, in another life, he had been hosting his own servers and one of them crashed. He was telling me this with tears in his eyes: The database, a massive mess full of customer data, point-of-sale info, and inventory information had gone up in smoke. The backups were hosed, as well. And there was no way to rewind the data.

He spent almost 24 hours in an air-conditioned server room, a monitor attached to the rack and a keyboard on his knees, trying to resurrect it. He was partially successful, but the real question was whether the data was accurate. Whether the transactions all matched up, whether he would keep his job in the morning.

Everything turned out fine and, since then, it has gotten a lot easier to do his job. Cloud replaced servers while also being cheaper and more reliable. His lingering fear never went away though. Things are better, but he can’t be 100% sure things will never go sideways again. He believes, though, that there’s a stronger safety net available now than we’ve had before: blockchain.

Benefits like disaster recovery, security, availability, and automation are all baked into blockchain. The serverless architecture of public blockchains makes them powerful proofs of how blockchain can deliver on enterprise-grade reliability for business databases. The costs are also not much higher: Blockchain’s ability to instantly replicate may even allow you to safely get away with the same (or even less) redundancy compared to a traditional database.  Perhaps the biggest advantage? Smart contracts will regulate changes, so a new hire can’t throw a wrench into everything — the blockchain will protect you from changes that could compromise data or stability.

In short, a blockchain is a server that can’t crash and a database that can’t be corrupted — all in one easy to deploy package.

To be clear, blockchain isn’t perfectly suited to solve certain data problems, the same way that email isn’t suited for instant messaging. Big data analytics is crazy expensive to replicate, and unless you are directly monetizing the data (like selling ads), it is not worth the cost to shoehorn blockchain into an analytical workload. Blockchains are best for core business transactional data, like your account balance. They are absolutely mission-critical when it comes to account data and ownership records, the loss of which would be an existential threat to a company. A company like Walmart can probably survive the loss of all website traffic data, but it would be very much at risk if it lost its inventory ledger.

Business continuity is a major concern for enterprise players as customers demand nothing less than always-on availability. As businesses grow though, the pains of migrating databases and updating systems can lead to massive fumbles. According to Boston Computing Network’s research, 60 percent of companies that lose their data will shut down within six months of the disaster. There exists an entire industry of SysOps, DevOps, and others who monitor code pushes and database migrations, giving humans plenty of chances to foul up a launch.

So blockchain represents a big opportunity for businesses to move quickly while keeping their operations secure.

Today, it isn’t just about the speed of transactions, it’s also about verifying and securing those transactions. That’s what has always been missing in system management and is something that anyone from our beleaguered dev to the teams that run databases for Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn are learning.

Blockchain tech is the evolution of the database. Smart contracts enforce business rules, while databases are backed up and verified continuously. All of the infrastructure and computational needs are calculated before deployment, and embedded rules ensure compliance from day one onward.

In fact, it looks a lot like the next generation of what APIs look like. You’re encapsulating processes, tying them together with requests for data, and expecting results. Right now, the business logic is processed on central servers of some kind. What’s innovative with blockchain is that you can take that logic, wrapped as a smart contract, and run it on your own. It still adheres to the rules set by the people who created it, and it must interact as expected.

Now, imagine databases on blockchain using these same robust rules. Robust databases that are unkillable. You don’t have to worry about your main server going down. Replication is built-in. Immutable laws exist that you can’t lose or change. If you’re on a public blockchain, this is as robust as possible, and you don’t have to pay for any servers. With a public blockchain, your data is stored cryptographically by the blockchain’s miners all around the world. If you’re on a private blockchain, you may run several replicated systems. Or, you can own all the nodes. You can also use blockchain on cloud platforms like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. The key is that blockchain is built to be replicated, again and again. Traditional databases must be migrated in specific, expensive ways under certain conditions to guard against data loss.

Ultimately, this is where blockchain really proves its worth: combining the basic elements of security, robustness, replication, and business logic all in its “DNA.” Smart contracts are safe, distributed, and secure. Your entire dataset is more secure this way, too. This is why blockchain promises to be the next-generation database.

Will Martino is Founder and CEO of Kadena.

Credit: Source link

The post Blockchain is finally becoming the next-gen database of choice appeared first on WeeklyReviewer.

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