mostlyshalune

[mostlyshalune]

Wisp Protoframe fan concept sheet is finished!

I call this “the sheet that made me cry” (due to earlier loss of captions).

I am so excited to move onto the next protoframes and some memes!

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Thank you all for your name ideas. I decided to go with @dontbewhattheymadeyou ‘s suggestion. I absolutely fell in love with this name and instantly connected with it.

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I watched kpdh 💛 I luv them sm

dw they got her

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introducing HUNTR/X! (prints available here)

As an artist on KPop Demon Hunters it's been so incredible getting to witness the reception to the film first-hand. To celebrate, I drew this magazine cover fanart tribute that will be available as a print at my future conventions this year, and is currently available for pre-order in my online store! Thank you so much for the love!! (Saja companion print is also currently in the works~)

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temperature days ♨️

a commission by @dead-finch-420

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My exact experience earlier this year.

seeing so many people talk abt 1000xresist lately and i will not lie it is making me so curious

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Gamifying Everything - MWO Voting

People will turn anything into a game, especially within a game where they’re already primed for that mindset.

In Mechwarrior Online players vote on map before each match. If the map you voted for loses you get a stacking multiplier to your vote for future matches. Lots of players, myself included, turned this into its own game of trying to maximize the vote multiplier by never winning a vote. It even evolved a bit of its own meta.

There’s the obvious unpopular maps, but at higher multipliers you risk pushing even those over into winning, especially as other players try to play this minigame too. There’s also contentious maps that are largely unpopular, but have a niche audience that genuinely wants them. The safest bet at high multiplier counts are 1-2 maps that are extremely unpopular, but for less apparent reasons, and are not complained about loudly in the community.

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Underused Mechanic: Orientation

Mechanics that lead to interesting decisions come from individual actions affecting multiple outcomes that don’t coincide with each other. In a management game, raising taxes affects happiness and income, but inversely.

Orientation is rarely used here. in shooters you always directly face the thing you’re shooting, actions you want to coincide.

But there are great examples that demonstrate its potential. Mechwarrior subverts the normal pairing of orientation and shooting. Ideal play involves regularly turning to look at nothing in particular so that your mech’s side is towards the enemy. This shields more vital areas of your mech with often-disposable arms.

Hunters in World of Warcraft have a leap ‘away’ ability, Disengage that launches you backwards. It’s thematically an escape tool, but can be used creatively to launch yourself in any direction that’s advantageous with a quick turn of the camera.

Battleborn had a similar mechanic as a skill Thorn could use. Disengage could only ever launch you horizontally, but Thorn’s skill allowed a small push backwards in any direction.

Overwatch’s Ashe has a similar ability to Thorn’s with a much stronger effect, and interestingly paired with a strong knockback to enemies hit by the blast too.

Aircraft combat even has a bit of orientation as a conflicted mechanic. Orientation directs both movement, and where you can attack. While these overlap frequently, it’s still a balancing act. Consider that every strafing run at ground targets requires an airplane to accelerate towards the ground. If not for mechanical constraints the plane would likely fly parallel to the ground or maneuver freely while firing.

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Game design musing

Possible topic for future, more-serious writing: what I’m calling “illusion of efficacy”.

Related to and overlaps illusion of choice, but distinct from it. “Efficacy” here referring to ability to affect change of ultimate outcome, not just in the short term. Mechanically oriented games seem to rely on it heavily intentionally or otherwise. I noticed it playing MtG. You have many choices leading to many branched possibilities for a game. Imparts a feeling of being heavily skill-based always with an opportunity to improve meaningfully. But on closer inspection most of these choices do not even contribute to changing the outcome of the game. So much is up to chance that often cannot be overcome so long as the opponent is playing smartly (can be far from perfectly).

High level play in MtG and most games is dominated by a mindset of “if you lose, examine what you could have done to improve yourself. There’s always something you could have done better”. This is totally valid, and healthy. And in the context of players it makes sense. If they’re not willing to engage with a game on that level, they don’t have to. But from a design perspective it’s very misleading to the point of being inaccurate. It dismisses the possibility that there literally was nothing that could be done, because even if this is true it’s not productive for players. But as designers we need to be more pragmatic, acknowledge, and engage with this concept. Particularly because players do so obviously try to avoid its existence. We need to do everything in our power to hide the many deterministic elements of our games. We create illusions of efficacy.

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Beat Saber - Intersection of Design and Marketing

I see now that Beat Saber is brilliant. It got a ton of attention in various waves previously. Then I thought it was clever, but also a natural iteration on the Audioshield / Soundboxing formula.

Cool and smart, but the idea didn’t get me fired up until they did this.

https://i.imgur.com/yM0yDqo.mp4

I love it. A maxim I go by with design is that ‘interesting mechanics control multiple things from 1 input’. It’s no longer about ‘do the correct thing with the red saber, do the correct thing with the blue saber’. Both must be considered at once.

But musing on this also made me realize why Beat Saber was so smart to begin with. Its core design lends itself perfectly to marketing via gif. You only need a couple seconds of easy-to-get footage to communicate what it is, along with a visceral feeling of bad-assery and I-want-dat.

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Core Fantasies of Game Genres

Something a lot of games miss is the core fantasy players expect just from hearing a genre’s name. Great example: RTS, strategy game.

What game do you think of with this name? Starcraft.

What do most people imagine a “strategy” game is about? 

being a master planner, outwitting, and outmaneuvering

the spectacle of smashing 2 giant armies together

By today’s standards Starcraft isn’t about either of these things. It has some strategic choices, but above all else it is a hardcore micromanagement game. It’s also the most iconic and popular RTS. So people copy it. That’s the mistake that has shattered the RTS genre.

Starcraft shipped in a different time. It was a time before online matchmaking, and hardcore online game communities were common. Nobody knew how the game was ‘meant’ to be played yet. It was a time when showing 40 animated units on a screen fighting was the cutting edge of visual spectacle.

Starcraft became popular because it delivered on a core fantasy of RTS at its time. It was only after people were in that they unearthed the hardcore gameplay of the modern RTS.

Today traditional RTS are struggling. They’re trying to copy a formula built for another time’s sensibilities. Are there devs delivering a contemporary take on the battle spectacle?

Yup. Relic, and Creative Assembly. And both make vastly more successful games than most trying to break into the RTS space. Both also deliver on the fantasy of being the master planner. The Company of Heroes and Total War series place massive importance on positioning compared to Starcraft.

Other genres wandering from core fantasies:

PVE Shooters

Often good at the action movie feel, but often fail at the core fantasy of aggression, and imperviousness. Doom and Warframe capitalize on this, reward constant movement, and exploded in popularity.

Racing Games

Big budget end of the genre is dominated by sims. Sure, core fantasy includes knowing your car inside and out, and having expert technical driving skill. But core fantasy is not about embodying an idea. It’s the feeling. Classics like Burnout 2 give the feeling of white knuckle dangerous street racing without the barriers to entry.

Flight Sims

Same deal. Players want to feel like a combat ace, not have to learn the actual skills to be one. Would love to see a game do to this genre what Xcom did to adapt the original, without going into the realm of cheap arcade-y flight game.

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The in-crowd problem of video games analysis

Increasingly I see a problem with how game design is discussed both in dev and critical circles. There’s an unspoken canon of what are great, and even popular video games. These games are indeed great, and popular where discussed, but what’s unusual is what’s omitted. Many of the most commercially successful, and most played video games in the world are rarely ever discussed by critics, fans, or even devs on Gamasutra, and popular conferences. It’s easier to look at what doesn’t make the cut and draw patterns from there.

Until the recent marketing push with Plains of Eidolon Warframe was rarely discussed outside specifically Warframe circles, but was a top played game on Steam and PS4, other examples include:

World of Tanks

EA sports games

racing games

hardcore 4x, and wargames (paradox has helped bridge this a bit)

mobile games

browser games

These get completely excluded from so many discussions. It’s a tragedy because they are immensely successful, and we have a lot to learn from them.

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New Media’s Full Potential

A core thing in new media critical spheres is to embrace, but make visible personal bias rather than trying to suppress it. But in watching Lindsay Ellis’ excellent video on Guardians of the Galaxy (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VulkN5OLEM) I realized how far we still have to go.

As a creator this video was uniquely useful for learning about the medium because Lindsay took the time to explain a point of deep personal resonance with the piece. I realized I’ve rarely seen this done. While biases may be embraced, we rarely get to see why they exist, or what effect they really have on a personal level. But this is essential for creators. We want to know how and why things reached people.

Ironically, it’s through relating these feelings that the critique becomes a story of its own. Counterintuitively this could be an important piece of critique. After all, at a meta level we know that every story, no matter how constructed, is retold differently in how each viewer processes it through the context of their own experiences.

I hope we see a lot more of this in the future.

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Payday 2 VR

Demonstrates the value in porting over existing games. The amount of content it comes with compared to other VR games is staggering because of this. Most VR games, even good ones, suffer from lack of content.

Excellent implementation of VR teleportation that intuitively upholds the logic of a constant run speed. Instead of having a set teleport distance, the projected circle to teleport to moves out from you towards its max length depending on how recently you last teleported. The result is that repeated teleporting, even at irregular intervals, results in the same movespeed as constant/fluid motion, and can be rendered to others as such.

Reload mechanic is also elegant. You remove an old magazine but must wait a set time before grabbing a new one. Allows for cool motions of VR reloading, but retains control over reload time stats on weapons for the devs.

UI is very well done. Toolbelt design is nice and customizable.

I noticed an interesting challenge with VR UI design. When you have hovering objective overlays in 2D it's rarely an issue. You are constantly moving, and get the effect of seeing through a fence as you walk by it for anything beyond. But if using teleport movement in VR there is much less drastic, and fluid motion. As a result some UI markers that'd be fine in 2D obstruct effective vision more in VR.

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Game mechanical abstraction - Flight

Gave myself the quick challenge of creating a simplified, mechanical metaphor for airplane flight. And done in the context of game design. So as simple as possible, but still interesting, and with a large possible design space.

Kay variables:

Speed

Altitude

Maneuvering

Core rules:

Each action available to the plane’s controller can be the following configurations, with any arrangement of the variables.

Increase 1, maintain 1, decrease 1

Increase 1, decrease 2

Ex:

Plane turns gently (maneuvering increases, altitude maintained, speed decreases)

Plane dives (speed increases strongly, altitude, and maneuvering decreases)

Plane flies in a straight line (speed increases, altitude maintained, maneuvering decreases)

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Quick Thought - Narrative

In World of Warcraft, the core narrative of every playable race falls under at least 1 of 2 categories: declining/fallen empire (trolls, night elves, dwarves, humans), or defined by catastrophic tragedy (blood elves, forsaken, orcs, worgen, draenei, night elves).

Also noticed in playing that WoW lacks a clear through-line. It does a pretty good job of setting up narrative arcs, but does little to establish the player character’s motives. As is, characters are players first, faction second, and race a distant third.

Would be interesting to see this done on a racial level. In the intro zone establish a clear, driving motivation behind what the race is hoping to accomplish. Have callbacks to this as the race appears in various quest hubs throughout. But doesn’t need to build on an explicit arc after intro. The themes will resonate with the player, specifically ones familiar with that intro, creating a greater feeling of identity.

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Quick Thought - Games

Long running gameshows are a perfect model to draw from when thinking of what successfully inspires backseat gaming / makes an appealing streaming game. People backseat gamed Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy, and Price is Right before backseat gaming was a thing.