purple-hel

[purple-hel]

Free Advice for Game Developers

Don't make it so I have to guess whether the issue is "the game does not allow this" or "It's perfectly doable, I'm just not doing it right/standing in the right place/holding my mouth right."

If it's an obstacle that my middle-aged-mouse-potato ass could climb over, then my twenty-something-action-hero character should be able to climb over it. It is literally less immersion-breaking to just be stopped and have an onscreen message saying "You cannot go this way" than it is to encounter a perfectly surmountable object that is nonetheless inexplicably insurmountable.

If I can regularly interact with a specific kind of object (example: door or container), then don't put that type of object in the game where I can't interact with it at all, especially when context suggests that it would be useful. The container can be empty. The door can be impossible to unlock. (Alternately, have a separate model for "door that cannot be unlocked"-- I'm thinking of the original Bloodlines, which used doors without knobs.)

If a specific kind of object is normally entirely cosmetic and can't be interacted with, and in order to progress you have to interact with that kind of object, then there needs to be some kind of hint.

When I finally break down and look up the solution to your puzzle online, my response should be "Dammit, I could have figured that out" not "I would never have tried that in a million years."

When the answer is "This object can only be interacted with while facing it from the southwest at 8:37AM game time, with six rocks and a stuffed poodle in your inventory, after you've put the green cup in the red trunk in the blue castle on the other side of the map", that better be an easter egg rather than gameplay.

I understand why your fast travel system won't let me go to a place that I haven't been already, especially in an open-world game. That makes sense...unless your fast travel system is integrated into the game world, and the limitation doesn't make sense for, say, a public transit system or a taxicab.

When you have one button that does multiple things, please make sure that the game doesn't hijack the button click. The most common (and enraging) example of this is when I go to interact with an object, and I press the "interact" button, but just as I'm doing so, dialog pops up, and my "interact" has not only cut off the other person speaking, so I missed it completely, but has chosen a reply from the list that I did not get a chance to actually choose.

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You can tell when someone’s frame of reference for “normal people” is more “people at the church sponsored ice cream social” and less “people on the bus”

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Wait while we’re all being unhinged about, like, stew. We all obsessed over the Joy of Cooking as children right. Right

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Your dislike or phobia for certain animals never outweights the animal's right to exist and live, i keep running into this behavior and i don't know why some folks never got to learn that. Who do you think you are

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Ball lightning while visiting a parking lot… Ball lightning is a rare phenomenon described as luminescent, spherical objects that vary from pea-sized to several meters in diameter....

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Favorite bird genre has got to be 'that's literally just a dinosaur'

Groove-Billed Ani

Hoatzin

Pheasant Coucal

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hey guys i-

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I just think everyone should take a moment to consider the question "what is your visual shorthand for cruelty?" and then follow it up with a critical "and who taught you that?"

specific examples include but are not limited to

why is an evil timeline character design disabled? (why do the heroes go through equally punishing battles and never lose an arm, a leg, an eye?)

why are the futuristic scifi terrorists uniformly darker skinned? (why are the heroes so much lighter?)

why is the greedy boss fat? (why are the heroes skinny?)

why is the criminal mastermind heavily scarred? (why is the brooding, traumatized hero unscathed?)

why is the predatory creep a bearded person in a dress and makeup? (why are none of the heroes trans women?)

who taught you that this is how things are?

how long do you plan on repeating it?

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when are jews allowed to be scared?

when jewish hospitals are protested? when jewish children are harassed on the way to school? when we’re chased through the streets of amsterdam in the year fucking 2024?

when our homes are being firebombed on the first night of passover? when we’re gunned down in front of a jewish museum? when 11 of us are gunned down during shabbat services?

when 1,200 of us are murdered? when 6 million of us are murdered?

what needs to happen that’s finally enough for the well-meaning people of the world to believe us and give a shit?

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hi im relistening to artificial condition and just realized that at no point do murderbot or ART make proper introductions and it's making me giggle. ART pretends to be a normal bot pilot to lull mb into a false sense of security, waits until murderbot is effectively trapped and unable to escape, and then proceeds to threaten it and scare the shit out of it by way of greeting. and murderbot, understandably, does not then proceed to ask what to call it or anything, it's just like. this guy fucking sucks. i'm gonna call it "fucking sucks".

AND ART PUTS UP NO PROTEST.

like okay we don't know exactly how much access ART has to murderbot's... data? thought data? we know it derives something from how murderbot interacts with the feed (access to interpretable emotion), we know it just sort of barges in wherever it wants, we know from system collapse that "no, ART can't read my mind, it just knows me really well", so like. it probably doesn't have context for the origin of this new nickname, which murderbot presumably begins calling it with no explanation.

but ART's smart so like it definitely knows what ART stands for, given (gestures at murderbot's entire disposition), and this is just so funny to me. ART refers to murderbot by some complicated string of letters and numbers that any other bot would use, and murderbot refers to ART as "you jackass" and ART's probably just soooo pleased that its newest bestie4lyfe gave it a nickname it's all so unbelievably funny

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