#IT DOESN'T EVEN HAVE TO BE AN INDIE GAME JUST LOOK FOR GOOD GAMES NO MATTER WHERE IT COMES FROM FOR FUCKS SAKE

[thegreatyin]

a collection of other nominee categories that i think are about to be a bloodbath this year

and, of course

the real battle of the fates

[ceejaytwoyoshi]

“urghrguhrg gaming isn’t fun anymore” stfu

"oh boy i do remember when gaming was driven by passion, not monetary gain, and devs that wanted to make good games" I say as I wax nostalgic over a yearly release sports game for the playstation 1 

[kedreeva]

This is Eris (left, 2020) and her younger half-brother, Bismuth (right, 2023)

This is Citrine (left, 2023) and her full brother, Bismuth (right, 2023)

I've talked a lot about how breeding and care matters so hugely to these birds, but I think this is a really obvious example.

When it comes to choosing breeders, 99.9999% of breeders I've seen and spoken to are mainly looking at the males and how pretty their colors are, and largely ignoring the hens. "Any" hen will do- I RARELY see people being choosy. Maybe they don't know how to be, maybe they think it doesn't matter - the hens are not as flashy, so what difference could there really be? - maybe they just don't care, maybe it's hard to find nice ones anyway because people don't care. I don't know. Once in a while I see people going gaga over a nice spalding hen with a lot of color on her, but by and large, they're ignored.

These three birds share a father. Indie is a beautiful boy, and he held his color very well, but honestly his train carriage left a lot to be desired and he was pretty small compared to my own birds. Regardless, he made a few really nice kids, including Amber (Bug), Bismuth, and Citrine (The Trio). He also fathered Eris, Opal, and Onyx, though not with my hens and not on property.

And here's where we get to the point. This is Eris' mom, Sasha:

And here is The Trio's mom, Aurora:

Sasha was itty bitty, with a small head, and very short legs. She also didn't have particularly good color- almost none, if I'm being honest, and her train carriage was Not Great. Aurora, on the other hand, while not as leggy as her offspring (which is partially due to feed... I raised her from 3mo old 15 years ago when 'game bird feed' didn't exist and the recommended "best" feed option was chicken layer feed mixed with kitten chow... atrocious by today's standards), still has pretty good type and excellent color. She typically carries her train high, she's spurred, she's Big. She's also an EXCELLENT mother and broody.

On top of having Sasha for a mom, Eris was raised in a brooder, and later in a small pen, and on feed that was 18% protein (instead of the 26-30% they should be on). She didn't have the space early on to use her leg and wing muscles, and it shows in her type. Even though i got her when she was just a couple of months old, those first few months are crucial to their development. Feed and environment can only go so far though.

Anyway, you can see the difference in breeding and care here. Eris is short, stout, short necked, and her rump curves down. Her face, particularly her beak length, is short like her mother's. It's hard to see in the photo, but I assure you her neck lacing is thick/muddy. In contrast, Citrine has thin, clean lacing, she's nearly as leggy as her brother, her neck has richer and more purple color, and her rump does not curve down- you can see the bend where her tail begins and is held down. She's also quite slender/racy in body type, like a good game bird should be, rather than heading toward the stout body type of domestication.

I can tell people that hen choice and care/environment matters until I'm blue in the face, but honestly, I think having comparison photos really brings it home.

[motziedapul]

Gonna take some time to feel proud of this for a little bit because when Cyrus was talking about his project for years often his tweets would only get 5 to 15 likes and not as many people were talking about it.

When he said it wasn't getting many wishlists, I felt bad but I wasn't surprised because of how little engagement he was getting, even though ostensibly he has a much bigger Twitter audience than I do. It was almost impossible to get his original work in front of eyes because of the absolutely horrendous algorithm.

So since I knew he didn't have a tumblr, I decided to hype him up here. Ever since my post got shared by some massive accounts, they went from 5000 wishlists to 15,000.

Cyrus is someone I look up to, and I've always felt so proud that we became friends. Knowing I helped contribute to his project getting more eyes on it (obviously not alone; my account is only so big) feels really good.

We've come so far since I sent him those E rated Burgerking (Asterius/Theseus) fanfics on his request 😂

He's a great guy. He sincerely deserves this. Lots of devs do of course, but I'm happy to have contributed to this one.

If you haven't wishedlisted this game already, please do! 15000 is amazing but let's not stop there ♥️

Another game I'd like to briefly shoutout from an indie dev is Nightmare Kart, which for legal reasons is definitely not Bloodborne x Mario Kart developed by the tall goth furry trans woman named Lilith who recreated all of Bloodborne in PSX style. If that's your speed go check that out too ♥️ though she doesn't need my help hyping it up given her massive audience~ I just think she's awesome 🙏🏾

[lobautumny]

Alright, guess this toy's gonna talk about Palworld, because it's seen Discourse™️ start to crop up about how "supporting the game is immoral because it's stealing designs from Pokemon!"

Now look, this toy's not about to sit here and tell you that all of the monster designs in Palworld are completely original and the game isn't, on some level, a bootleg. Obviously a lot of the designs are bootleg pokemon. That's not the point it wants to get at. The point is that it doesn't really matter.

First of all, nobody is being hurt by Palworld having knockoff pokemon among the ranks of its monsters. Game Freak is not some tiny indie developer struggling to make ends meet having their work unfairly co-opted by a big, bad corporation. Pokemon is, in fact, the largest, most profitable media franchise of all time, and Palworld is an indie game. The reason that something like this would hypothetically be scummy/shitty is if someone were taking someone else's work, changing it slightly, claiming it as their own, and thus depriving the original creator of credit/visibility that they should've had. But that literally can't happen here, because everyone already knows what Pokemon is. So unless it gets found that they're stealing designs from fakemon artists or something (there was one alleged instance, but it seems to have just been a coincidence of two different people having the idea of "what if Chimecho but with big, bulky arms?"), Palworld is hurting nobody through having bootleg designs, so the moral argument against the game falls flat.

With that out of the way, there's a much more interesting topic to discuss here: Why is it that when someone's fangame gets C&D'd, everyone immediately jumps to the creator's support, accurately assessing that our copyright system is broken and primarily serves to hurt independent artists, but the moment a developer makes the changes necessary to make sure their fangame doesn't get hit with a C&D (and to allow them to make money off of it), it's suddenly bad and cringe and unoriginal?

The argument that "Palworld is lazy and unoriginal and therefore bad because the monster designs are too similar to Pokemon's designs" is something that this toy would be willing to hear out if Palworld were a turn-based singles-format RPG with similar systems/overall structure to those found in Pokemon games, but, uh. It isn't. It's a third-person shooter with monster-catching mechanics and, like, Factorio-ass automation and base-building, from what this toy can tell. And it doesn't know if the game is good, as someone who has not played it (or even really seen gameplay of it), but it can absolutely tell you that the game's not lazy.

Sure, they could have done more to make the monster designs feel more unique, and that's absolutely a valid criticism for the game. This toy doesn't want to come across like it's saying otherwise. It just wants people to recognize that that's kind of a nitpick when the game is, on a mechanical and genre level, something completely different from anything any Pokemon game ever has been or ever will be, and that nobody would be complaining about laziness or a lack of originality if this came out as a fangame literally just using actual pokemon. In that reality, people would've been popping off at how high-effort it is, actually. And like, even putting money aside, this game literally could not exist as a fangame. A while back, someone uploaded some videos on Youtube showcasing a fangame they were developing that was an FPS where the enemies were pokemon. They got hit with a C&D and their Youtube account was terminated within a couple days of the videos being uploaded. The game was not monetized, and in fact, never even had a download link, to this toy's recollection. Palworld would have suffered the same exact fate if it wasn't its own IP.

[kurooo-is-here]

hiii hello hiiiii i'm back with some more writing :3

writing for: Arven, Drayton, and Kieran

genre: selfship (x reader)

here are my general character interpretations of these three!

Arven:

loyal to a fault, because he's got abandonment issues. he never had anyone there for him besides his mabostiff, so he wants to be there for you.

his love languages are words of affirmation and acts of service. he'd visit you even if you were on the other side of the world.

he's an early bird. wakes up fairly early in the morning (~6 AM to 7 AM) to do meal preps and feed mabostiff. this comes with its perks though! you get to hear his deep morning voice and see his hair messy. :>

he secretly loves stargazing. to him, there's nothing better than sitting under the stars, hearing the outdoor ambience of the night.

he's super caring towards his pokemon! he feeds them on time and gives them extra love and treats.

speaking of food, he's got tons of recipes to share. he can make a KILLER mac and cheese. also, he absolutely wears aprons that have cute pokemon designs on them.

unironically describes his mood with food flavors. says he's feeling "sour" when he's upset, or "sweet" when he's excited.

he's like.... a puppy..,, he'll follow you anywhere and guard you when others try to steal you away..... (can you tell he's my favorite)

Drayton:

lowkey possessive. not just of you, but of things he's attached to. everything from his pokemon to the comfortable school life he's grown so fond of. he wouldnt trade them for the world.

his love languages are quality time and physical touch. he's a guy who loves cuddling and hanging out. he'd probably fall asleep with you while watching an hour-long youtube video about obscure 3ds game lore.

can't cook for shit!! he will literally just buy instant noodles and microwaveable meals because its easy and convenient LMAO

he doesn't like going out since he's lazy, but he's absolutely down to go shopping if its for snacks. he knows all the best ones.

he loves to battle! partly because he likes showing off how strong he is, but also because he thinks of it as a way to destress.

you'd think for being so lazy he wouldn't practice self-care, and this is mostly true-- but he definitely takes good care of his pokemon. that duraldon he traded you? make sure to keep it clean, it likes being polished every now and then. his flygon? it loves spicy foods. oh, and make sure to trim the scales on his dragonite every week. it gets a little moody otherwise.

he's the king of "this image/video is really funny but why do you have so many of them" over texting. he has a whole stash of silly images.

Kieran:

he gets anxious pretty easily, but he's usually more relaxed around you. he's also not used to receiving compliments, and will absolutely get shy and embarassed if you compliment him.

his love languages are words of affirmation and giving gifts! he gifted you an applin that one time, but he also shares his candy with you. what a sweetheart 🥺

speaking of sweets, he likes hard candies and chocolate! his fav chocolate is white chocolate. (conversely, carmine likes dark chocolate the most.)

gets both nervous and excited when he battles you. he hopes to win, but he also just wants to have fun!

he likes to listen to music when he needs to concentrate. it's good background noise, and more importantly, he is absolutely bopping his head to those tunes.

he likes alternative and indie rock music, plus edm and lofi. his playlist may or may not have a few "edgier" songs too, like "Gasoline" by Halsey and "Sarcasm" by Get Scared.

he absolutely had a nightcore phase.

regarding cooking, he prefers to get food from restaurants rather than cooking at home. he's not super confident in his cooking skills, but he isn't the worst at it either. (looking at you, drayton...)

he doesn't really understand internet culture since he doesn't have a phone. you might have to teach him about it yourself out of pity, because he gets so confused when people start saying they're getting "rizzed up" or something...

bro is absolutely autism-coded (speaking as someone with autism) and he hyperfixates sooo easily. he'll get obsessed with something for weeks and infodump to you constantly, and he definitely loses sleep over his interests. he's so shy about doing this with anyone else, so please lend an ear when you can. 🥹

[ivys-garden]

I, like many of yall, have noticed a vocal minority of people showing there support for Wilbursoot, going as far as to attack shubble and her supporters. In this post I'll go through the main points I've seen them argue with and explain why I believe that they are all wrong.

“Shubble was the real abuser” - No. If she was, William would have spoken up. There is no evidence for this, well, that isn't faked or saying one thing is another (like the guy saying a pic of will crying was because of shubble or the guy trying to pass a stream of a completely different girl of as shubble abusing will… live. On stream. Yah, think we would have heard of that before now.)

“She has no proof” - genuinely fuck of. In domestic abuse cases there won't always be hard proof, that's one of the reasons the police struggle to do anything about it. If a wife is struck by a husband and it leaves no mark that doesn't mean it didn't happen “why didn't she show the bruises” have you guys ever been bruised? Bruises heal quickly, and she doesn't have any to show since the allegations came out after their break up, all the bruises would have healed. “Why didn't she take photos at the time?” Look at it this way, if I punch you across the face you will have a lot of thoughts, none of them will be “I should take a photo of this so people belive me what I say it happened”

(Also don't pretend that people wouldn't just say the evidence was fake if she did have pictures)

Oh and she does have evidence, the fact William admitted to it.

“She just did it for attention” - bitch, shubble doesn't need attention she was doing great. Just because you never heard of her didn't mean she was some underground indie youtuber, she didn't need to lie to get attention. Also lying about domestic abuse is not a good way to do this since it's really easy to disprove. The other party would come out instantly to tell everyone the truth. William didn't do that because shubble WAS telling the truth.

“Her story changed” - no. It didn't. Even the idea that she changed whether or not wilbur bruised with the bites or made her bled (both of which are still bad, btw) is made up, she never said that, as was clarified by shubble herself

“She encouraged death threats” - She openly decouraged death threats. Saying she was like: “everyone go and tell people to kill themselves” is literally putting words in her mouth

Also, this by no means goes for everyone, but arguing about death threats while, wilbur hasn't told his supports not to send death threats and that wilburs supporters have been saiding threats to shubble and her fans while condemning the few shubble fans who sent death threats, is kinda stupid

(Also this is by no means the main point but I have seen people who support wilbur literally begging for death threats, soooooooo)

(Oh aslo I was mistaken in the early version where I said shubble had implied that she didn't belive wilbur could change, that was another misconception and I'm sorry for spreading it. Shubble does belive that people can change IF they put in the work to do so)

Also remember, William has not been shown to actually change yet. He still hasn't even given shubble an apology that takes proper accountability, when he does that, apologies to everyone else he's wronged, and puts in the effort to actually be better moving forward, then we can forgive him. But at the moment he has not shown that.

So until then: support shubble. Belive victims. Raise awareness for these issues in the gaming space (this has been going on for a long time). And don't engage with people who make up evidence to support there parasocial relationships, don't send death threats (obviously, because that's wrong) but also don't engage in any other way. This will be my last post on this subject. Move on from William and the support for him will die down when they realise there's no one to disagree with, and then William, Shubble and all of us can move past this and into the future as a (hopefully) better space

[sofiepofie20]

Tsukishima Kei headcanons!

→ bro loves playing with LEGO, so of course he will call u to hang out in his house and u two will build legos together (he won't let u touch the legos and u will just watch while yapping about something and he nods, focused on the legos, pretending that he's hearing u).

→ he just loves when u engage on his yap about some nerdy interest of his and actually pays attention. he will melt even more if u do some research on his interests so u can talk to him more.

→ i have a feeling Kei would have a lot of dinasour stickers that he uses to send texts.

→ he mutes all the groups he's in.

→ he likes to wear grandpa clothes and doesn't give a fuck if he looks old or not. let him wear his comfortable slippers and walk around the house with an old ass sweater. i think he honestly doesn't care about what he wears or not, as long as its decent.

→ Tsukki would get really annoyed whenever someone would start whining to him about some personal problem that they can't solve, even if the answer to their problem is obvious, and he would tell them to think harder (if its someone he's close to, he would give his honest advice).

→ i think bro would like Cigarettes After Sex and calm, melodic songs. he relates to Lemon Boy and listen to some of Cavetown's songs.

→ He has rewatched Jurassic Park movies more than one time.

→ Tuskki likes to read magazines about scientific facts, volleyball and historical facts.

→ bro is grossed out by bugs.

→ i have a feeling that Kei would like cats, or he wouldn't like animals at all, or simply dont care about them.

→ if he was an animal, he would be a desert frog. that one frog that looks like a grumpy ball with arms and legs and squeals when he feels threatned.

→ Tsukki likes indie games and grew up as a Nintendo kid.

→ Kei and Akiteru grew up without a father, because of this, Akiteru felt like he had to be an example to Kei, and lied to not disappoint him. it ended up being much more painful for Kei to know that his brother was as lost as him (his parents divorced when he was still a baby, and his father was not present as he grew up).

→ When he started his second year in high school, Kei became more open with the people on the volleyball team and they became closer (still being the sarcastic prick he is).

→ bro's love language is quality time and acts of service, obviously. gets used to words and touch after some time.

→ he is canonically popular with girls, but he always rejects them all. the thought of dating never even passed through his head, at least not in high school.

→ doesn't swear all the time, just occasionally.

→ Tsukki had a dinasour pajama when he was a kid, and now he hides it in his closet.

→ I think he would like vanilla/strawberry ice cream. bro also likes strawberry shortcake, but he doesn't eat them that often.

→ takes hot baths only.

→ sometimes he applies one of his mom's cream on his hands so they don't get too dry and calloused from playing volleyball.

→ he HATES standing in the sun for too long.

→ he would hate beaches or just be neutral about them.

→ Tsukki loves table games, specially the card ones. he's a master at these.

→ bro would love Saiki Kusuo no psy nan and would relate to Kusuo.

→ has embarassing pictures of Tanaka, Nishinoya, Hinata and Kageyama and plans to use them for blackmail.

→ bro is shortsighted, can't see shit when he takes off his glasses.

→ Has stretch marks because of how fast he grew, and is slightly insecure about them.

→ Tsukki has a weakness for sweets. if u want something and u dont wanna beg, just give him a pastry and he will ask "what do u want?" with an annoyed tone.

→ has a dinasour plushie since he was a kid and now its hiden along with the dinasour pajama.

→ Likes Despicable Me minions.

→ Kei is good at videogames too.

→ He really appreciates his mother for taking care of him and his brother alone. he admires her a lot.

→ Knows how to cook since his mom has to leave sometimes and he can't just starve (makes pretty good chocolate pancakes).

→ bro stutters when he gets mad.

→ He likes Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter movies.

→ Calls u hobbit if ur close to him.

→ Likes Marvel and DC stuff.

→ Bro learned to play bass when he was a child and never stopped. he likes to play, and sometimes plays in his room. it kinda relaxes him, and it's no secret to anyone that Kei has a strong connection with music.

→ A complete dork geeky nerd (⁠´⁠ε⁠｀⁠ ⁠)

[devsgames]

"Is Tumblr Blaze Worth It For Promoting My Indie Game?" - a Postmortem

Lately I've been thinking about marketing and promotion of my games and wanting to explore new avenues. Tumblr Blaze was one of those things I wanted to dip my toes into a bit to understand how it works and if it has potential for advertising my sort of stuff. Like as not, there's no point in making games if nobody actually plays them after all!

Conversely I have also heard bad things about Tumblr Blaze; that it's not very targeted, the reach is fairly limited, and people on this site generally hate anything that is Blazed to them.

I wanted to test all these waters a bit to see if it's something worth investing in, and share what I found for my own benefit and the benefit of others. Finding various info on topics like this for indie dev can be a pain, so why not share my findings?

The Plan and Goal

While Centauri Dark is still in development and is the thing I actually want to advertise more of right now, Bombing!! 2 is already out and is much more marketable with some cool art made by community members. I think as a first impression it tends to show well, so I decided to make my test post with that to get exposure to it and see how it goes.

My goal was mostly to see what a Blaze post does for advertising a launched indie game and how much "eyes on" it actually gets in terms of actual engagement.

Posting

From the outset I knew I wanted to make a post that 1) wasn't annoying to people just looking at the webbed site 2) featured a call to action of some kind I could measure 3) wouldn't break the bank.

Here's what I came up with:

The intention was to flash some cool looking art to grab their attention, explain what they're looking at, and then link the game a couple of times while mentioning "Buy or Wishlist" for good measure as a call to action.

Since Bombing!! 2 is such an art-forward game, I found the coolest art pieces made by community members that felt the most "Tumblr" to match the audience, and would also show off the range of art you could make in the game. I also wanted to make it personal, like me writing a message to whoever would read it instead of something that sounded like a standard ad. Generally I think it was a fairly reasonable little post that catches some interest and doesn't overstay too much of a welcome. What I think also helps is it's explicitly a "hey this might interest you" sort of framing (as opposed to a more "why am I even seeing this" sort of post you tend to get from Blaze sometimes).

I also think it's worth emphasizing that writing a posted explicitly intending to be Blazed was a much stronger approach than just Blazing some random post I had made for my own followers months ago, because I could align it to my promotional goals. It also assumed that random people on the Internet would be the ones seeing my post, and not the followers and friends who already know me and my work.

Blazing

As I looked into Blaze early on there was actually a few key things I wasn't fully aware of about the system.

It guarantees a minimum amount of views

It guarantees it will be Blazed for a minimum of 24 hours no matter how many views

You pay a single base rate for the whole campaign (great compared to some ads which tend to price based on views/engagement).

You can define an audience explicitly (some info that was floating around lead me to believe this wasn't the case).

Campaigns come in a few amounts:

I paid for the 2nd tier; $17 USD for a campaign, which amounts to $25 CDN. I wanted to go a little more into it than the lowest tier offered, since I figured the lowest wouldn't give me as much data as I would've liked and I wanted to know what to reasonably expect should I decide to do it again in the future.

Since Bombing!! 2 sells for ~$20USD I also figure if the Blaze campaign prompts at least two people to buy the game then the Blaze would have paid for itself.

Blaze lets you use tags to define which audiences you want to reach. Unfortunately it doesn't let you view that data after you've applied it, but the tags I chose were generally anyone who spoke English and has an interest in Digital Artist or Video Game circles.

The campaign ran for 24 Hours, starting yesterday and ending today.

The Results

I definitely noticed a sharp uptick in engagement during the campaign! It hit the target audience of ~7k around one hour into the campaign, after which point I noticed engagement take a sharp decline.

Here's the Blaze campaign analytics provided by Tumblr (which was also very helpful to have):

So it seems ~12.5k views from Blaze, ~370 likes, ~80 reblogs, 5 shares elsewhere. The post itself has ~520 notes, so I assume there's some reblogging and liking happening from beyond the Blaze campaign that isn't pictured here. The good thing is that despite having reached its 7k target after only 1 hour, it continued to circulate and be Blazed until 24 hours later. Eventually the post made it to ~12k views overall, which was nearly double the amount promised by the campaign - I attribute this mostly to a strong post/target audience/subject matter and I'm sure it's not standard.

Here's the general velocity of engagement around when the post was Blazed:

It jumped much more than I honestly expected, but you can tell Blaze seemed to put it in front of people's faces more than my regular posts do. You can see it drops off sharply as I hit the quoted amount as well, back down to the normal amount of engagement I get on Tumblr.

But this stuff isn't really what I was looking for; I was looking for sales and keeping an eye on 'conversions' - or how many users followed my call to action because of the post. Likes and stuff are fine and cool, but how many people bought or wishlisted the game on Steam as a result of seeing the post on Tumblr?

Tumblr and Blaze obviously have no way of telling me this, so I'm looking to Steam to show me changes there.

Here's what Steam shows me happened to the Bombing!! 2 views yesterday:

That's not nothing! This shows the last month's worth of traffic to the Bombing!! 2 page, and that number was at least double yesterday as it was regularly. It's very cool to know a number of people did actually click through to the game page in order to view the game from the Blaze post.

But the real REAL question is how many bought or wishlisted the game because of this post?

I'll start with Sales, on a graph of 1 month of data:

Flat line :( Which is fine though, as the game wasn't on Sale and was just reaching people for the first time. I didn't honestly expect any immediate sales from this, and was more focused on other engagement anyways. Honestly I would be surprised if someone saw the game on a Blaze post and bought it immediately. I mean it's good but it's probably not THAT good!

Now to Wishlists, which can be a good indicator of who might likely buy your game in the future. Basically if someone has added a game to their wishlist, there's reason to believe they might buy it in the future, which is good for your game.

Here's the Wishlists for Bombing!! 2 from the last month:

That's 23 Wishlists in one day! That's roughly ~18 Wishlists more than an average day!

It's hard to know if some of these are because of the post or just a statistical fluke. However, when compared to previous trends on the game page that's quite a noticeable difference. It means even if no one bought it now, they were interested enough to add it to their shortlist. Looking at it another way, if two people who Wishlisted decided to buy the game in the future the campaign will have paid for itself.

Conclusions

I think like any advertising if you go into it with a plan in mind and try to build something around a specific action, Blaze seems pretty worth it to me especially if I just want to get eyes on something. On top of the obvious data telling me people were interested in the game, there was a few folks who just plain complemented the game or acknowledged it 'was the first Blaze post they were actually interested in', which felt worth it in it's own qualitative sort of way. It's also worth noting my game sells for $20USD, so the margins are large enough that making it back isn't too challenging.

I think having an idea of the message I wanted to send really helped, and I'm sure I'd happily do this again with a larger audience and another plan (and probably will do it for when Centauri Dark releases).

[dduane]

What are your thoughts on companies like this that offer 'coaching services' for hopeful unpublished novelists?

This smells of scam to me but maybe I'm just a cynic:

Publishing Your Book

Query Letter Coaching/Editing – $550 per book (this includes two passes)

Synopsis Coaching & Editing – $750 per book (this includes two passes)

Proposal Coaching & Editing – $1,500 per book

Traditional Publishing Coaching – $200/hour (finding an agent, crafting your proposal, etc.)

Indie Publishing – $1000 (distribution to all platforms for optimal international exposure, guidance on pricing, blurb-writing, logistics, and keywords)

ISBNs for Indie Publishing – $150 per book format. Free if publishing through [the company selling these coaching services]

Briefly: before I got involved with any such operation, I'd want to talk to (multiple) people they'd worked with previously and find out what kinds of experiences they'd had. And in line with this, I'd be extremely cautious about any operation that wasn't run by professionals with a verifiable track record, and which wouldn't offer verifiable examples of feedback from people whose reality as non-sockpuppets could also be confirmed. And whom you could contact without having to go through the company in question.

On other issues: I'm looking kind of askance at some of those prices. (Here adding the disclaimer: I know people who do this kind of work out of a grounding of significant expertise and in good faith, and I'm not clear on what they're charging because I haven't really looked into it... not particularly needing it myself at this late stage in the game.)

At least part of the problem I'm having with the prices being charged in your example is based on the knowledge of how very much information of this kind is available free online. And yeah, there's the old chestnut about "The advice is worth what you've paid for it"... but that has sort of an unspoken negative corollary: "Except when you've paid for it and it nonetheless turns out not to have been worth much."

The trouble with the non-independent-publishing suggestions is that all of them deal with imponderables. Even if all the advice you purchase from those people at all those varied prices is absolutely right on the money, there's still no way to guarantee that any of it is going to lead to success in getting query letters, synopses or proposals actually looked at. Which puts this whole concept squarely in the nature of a gamble.

Not that luck doesn't have a role to play in a professional writing career. Sometimes you're just standing in the right place at the right time with a manuscript in your hands. But getting the idea that you can depend on that luck for any reason is unwise... as divine Fortuna is anciently famous for wandering all over the room, blowing on other folks' dice. (And if this makes me sound like I fall well down on the "Fortune Favors The Prepared" end of the spectrum: yeah, that.)

My advice would be to spend a good long while online, thoroughly researching all the free sites that have info to offer on all the traditional-publishing-facing topics. Then, after exhausting the available possibilities, if you still think you need to engage paid professional assistance... make inquiries among as many verifiable professionals as you can non-invasively query, before parting with any money at all.

As regards the indie-oriented fees: I'm finding those pretty steep. The prices for ISBNs in particular bother me. (Especially since in many places you can routinely buy packages of ten for about what these folks would charge you for two.) Yes, they're free if you publish with them: that sounds lovely. But publishers would normally buy many of those packages of ten. Or packages of a hundred: the more ISBNs you buy at once, the cheaper they get. And if you're paying the company for other services, who cares about the ISBNs? They're making money off you in different ways. Possibly equally overpriced ones.

So to finish: this is very much caveat emptor territory. There will inevitably be scammers out there, claiming their rates to be less than "bigger companies" are charging, but still too much. Therefore... advance only with utmost care.

...And adding this: @petermorwood glanced at the price list over my shoulder and said, "I wouldn't touch any of those with a barge pole."

At any rate: HTH!

...And now a word regarding our regrettably fickle non-sponsor, via Ol' Blue Eyes. :)

[alwaysaslutforfic]

Daichi Headcanons ❤️ - NSFW

Here he is! The man the myth the legend 🥰

Written in his memory 😔 RIP Daichi

Warnings: mentions of daddy kink, choking, and various position but nothing super explicit

Minors are not allowed to interact and stay out of the cut! Minors DNI!!

I murdered my beta’s like Tanaka murdered Daichi

Check out my headcanons for Tsukki and Kyoutani

Sexy driver pt2. One hand on the wheel, the other holding yours. Just watching his arms flex as he changes gears is enough to have you flustered. Always opens your door for you and helps you get in. Let’s you pick the music and pulls over if you want takeout

Concedes the aux cord but has pretty good taste in music. Prefers more mellow sounds. Indie, jazz, soft rock. He takes you to local shows as dates and will either watch you dance, or hold you close to slow jams. FestivalDaichi! is a new man. Get him drunk and he gets handsy. (Drunk kisses 🤤)

Just loves to spend time with you. The best day out partner. Breakfast at a cafe in the morning, holds your bags and your hand. He doesn't complain if you wanna try on clothes or shoes or browse games, he’s just genuinely happy to be there

A handyman. Owns a tool belt that you bought him and looks damn good in it too. Puts up shelves, fixes sinks, cleans gutters, mows lawns. And if it’s summer, then you have a shirtless handyman to boot. (Note to self: handman Daichi 😌)

Speaking of shirtless Daichi, because of his rota at the firestation (hashtag: FiremanDaichiForLife) he prefers to workout at home. He works out in the garden when it’s warm, and in the living room when it’s cooler. Either way, you have a free show at least twice a week. He will let you sit on his back while he does push ups, or hold you while he squats

Will indulge all your couple tiktok challenges with a sheepish grin, and fondness in your eyes. The comments are full of ‘get you a man who looks at you like that’

This man is romantic. I’m talking candlelit dinner, flowers for no reason, surprise lunch at your workplace. He’s just a modern, old-fashioned man who treats you like a treasure

The king of soft intimacy. Cooking together. Baths together. Wine and candles in your living room. Cuddles, cuddles, cuddles. Play with his hair and you risk just putting him straight to sleep, but who can resist the world’s best weighted blanket.

Daichi is forever your personal cheerleader. He supports all your choices, dreams, and goals. He’ll give you advice, or talk through anything you’re hesitant on. Even if they’re whimsical. You wanna start dance classes. He’ll go to any recital. You decide to switch to marathon running, he’ll be there with a sign and a gallon of water. Cosplay, chocolate making, fanfiction 😉. He doesn’t care, as long as you’re happy

Call. Him. Daddy. And let him fuck you into the mattress or kitchen table, or sofa, or floor as a result

I touched on this briefly once, but choke him. You are Not in charge, but he just loves the feeling of your hand on his throat. The flutter of your fingers as he makes you cum

An ass man through and through. At this point his fingerprints are embedded in your ass cheeks from the way he grips them. Doggy; he’s spanking you. Missionary; he’s using your ass as leverage. Riding him; better believe he’s squeezing it as he makes you bounce harder.

Speaking of handy men, he has big hands and puts them to good use. Sits you on his lap and fingers you until he thinks you’re ready

Thick thighs save lives, and Daichi wants you to ride his. He’ll lick your nipples while you do, and basks in the mess you make on his thighs as a result (clearly my thoughts revolve around sitting in his lap and having a great time)

Without fail, will pull them panties to the side. Even on days when you have time to get naked. Loves the way you look in lingerie and loves the way you soak the fabric when he makes you cum

Daichi just make brain go brrr. Nothing but respect for my husband captain

[nierly-amazing]

Controversial opinion: Nier Automata's story would have benefited a lot from the creative freedom of being an indie game with more queer & disabled writers, and writers from heavily colonized places

Probably less controversial to those who are still following my gay ass.

It already manages to be a masterpiece on it's own but there's always going to be constraints in big budget games to appeal to a wider audience--like the rumor/fact/idr that 9S was going to be a girl initially but got changed. There's a lot of good input queer and disabled creatives could have offered from their life experiences and how it relates to some of the transhumanist themes in the game. A lot of people seem to forget the machines have been colonizing earth and genociding the androids for 6000 years and those themes could have been expanded on more too.

Like yay we get lesbian 6O and implied trans Pascal but it doesn't really go anywhere with them. The anime does go more into Pascal and machines swapping parts and 9S completely dismissing it but then they never touch on it again (unless they still plan to but with 4 episodes left I doubt it). I want to see 9S have a crisis over it, (and 2E 2B have a crisis over him having a crisis about it).

It'd be interesting to see more a of a discrepancy between high-end porcelain doll yorha models and underfunded ancient Resistance androids. They all look like normal humans. Even the ship of theseus trader guy with the bad leg looks like a regular android. Give me some androids with fucked up body mods that causes 9S to have another crisis (because this boy can fit so many crises in him). Something something parallels with relationships to gender something something 9S is trans and transphobic--doesn't understand the FEEELINGS or what to do about them.

Yorha could have much stricter rules on body modification that's drilled into the android's heads from day one and then they see the machines swap parts with no reservations and resistance androids swap parts with some reservations. Even the whole "emotions are prohibited" thing could be touched on more with more internal struggle in 9S over his inability to act emotionless, and perhaps touch on the point of conflict with 2B who poorly pretends to have her emotions in check.

Maybe some conflict between the machines in pascals village and how rigid they are in trying to emulate humans. Like a group trying to emulate rigid gender roles despite not having assigned genders or sex characteristics, and a group that just does whatever. Like "no you have to choose" but also "humans didn't choose (mostly) so who cares".

And then there's the fact that most machines in pascal's village are not fully sapient, or are maybe coded as children still learning the world and something something its 1am something something how much should their level of sapience matter

Even with 9S's memory "issues" we only have 1 moment in the anime where he has a flash of past memories. Imagine if his descent into grief-stricken madness in route C had his old deleted memories start resurfacing and mixing with his current ones. Or maybe the machine network had copies of some of them and used them to torment him more.

Imagine if they showed Anemone and Devpop try harder to help him but weren't able to due to them not fully understanding what he's going through and their own hangups about machines. Imagine him being unable to really open up to anyone because he doesn't fully understand what he's going through.

9S """racism""" toward machines isn't at all unique to him. They've been genociding the androids for 6000 years, everyone hates them. I want to see more opinions from resistance androids, especially regarding pascal's village. Even Anemone/Lily aren't completely fine with the idea of trading with machines but are basically forced to out of desperation since the council of humanity left them on read. I want to see more of their internal strife with the concept. I want to see some conflict between resistance and yorha androids, too, and conflict within the resistance over the idea of aiming for a peace treaty.

There could also be some good conflict between 2B and 9S over 2B's willingness to just "accept" pascal's village. Since they both have valid points for their opinions (2B's a big softie and doesn't want to fight and 9S sees pacifist machines 'suddenly' popping up after 6000 years as a mega giganto trap (and why wouldn't he?)).

I would have liked to see more interactions with other androids and how they manage in a posthuman world and them trying to replicate humanity from 11,000 years ago. We have little bits and pieces like the bit where the operators give commander a bunch of brown things for valentine's day instead of chocolates.

Oops I thought I was gonna write like 2 paragraphs but I blacked out and wrote an essay. It's late I might expand on this tomorrow but here's some stuff 2 think about

(and bonus extra controversial opinion but it's kinda fucked up that there's the whole theme about robot sentience and then you can go stab fish in the face for fun and kill moose and boar for a quest so an android--who doesn't need to eat at all--can try eating them. Like here we are arguing about fictional robot sentience and then ignoring actual real animal sentience in our daily lives to the point where we don't even question how messed up killing them for non-survival reasons is)

[duckchu]

Hello, honey! I've been following you for a long time and I adore your works! And I want to make a request! HEARTSTEEL members x Fem!Indie game developer!Reader. Reader has been creating indie games for a long time (such as Undertale and Deltarune), and also writes soundtracks for them (like Toby Fox. I love this genius!). I would also like to create an indie game based on the League of Legends universe (I would choose Targon from the regions, and I would choose Aphelios from the characters that the player would control). But I don't have any programming skills! So I'll have to write interactive fanfic... Thank you very much! You're just a sunshine!💋💋💋💋

Sorry for the long wait (I recognise how long actually named asks sit in my inbox for rather than anon ones, idk why) and thank you for the kind words

I also kinda didn't know how to go about this so every guy has 3 "parts":

You working late

Putting one of their items as cosmetic (kinda changed in Kayn's and K'Sante's part)

And music

Kayn

Thinks you're cool

Enjoys sitting with you late at night while you code

May or may not convince you to sneak a Rhaast easter egg in

Though will often try to distract you if you're not paying enough attention to him

Enjoys bothering you when you compose

He's silly like that

So please, for the sake of your sanity, lock your room

Yone

Doesn't mind your work, but will make you stop if you're pulling all nighters

Might even pick you up and carry you to bed, telling you you need some sleep

One day, while he was watching you play test, noticied one of the items in your game looked suspiciously like his mask

Finds it really cute

Will help you with the music, if you'd like

Loves working with you

Aphelios

You stay up all night working?

Cool, he is too

Unless he notices you're tired

Then he pulls you into his lap and works with one hand while petting your hair with the other

It makes you fall asleep in seconds

Let him play test pleaseee

When you do, he 100% the game in a week

Not because it's easy, but because he's a sweaty try hard

Found you put his mask in the game as a cosmetic

Melted on the spot

Sometimes will give you songs as gifts

So you can put them in the game

Loves hearing them if you decide to use them

Ezreal

He's such a bitch if you overwork yourself

Will try to direct your attention to him at all cost

-Y/N, I'm boreeed -

Please keep on torturing this little shit with lack of attention

He deserves it

But also

If you put his sunglasses as an item, he will love you ten times more

As for the music?

Doesn't really know a lot about composing but loves listening to your pieces

Sett

You're overworking yourself?

No, you're not.

You're sitting on his lap and watching a movie with him

Doesn't care about your protests, you have to take care of yourself

When he first saw your character having his beanie on when you were playing the game, he had to do a double check

Gave you a big hug

He thinks it's really cute

As for the music, he thinks it's really good

You scrap something?

He's gonna use it as background for his totally awesome solo

Don't tell anyone else tho

He'll get embarrassed

K'Sante

He can't force you to rest, but he will insist on it

If you have some important work to do, he won't try to stop you, but will bring you meals and drinks if you want

Will usually chill in your room and design while you work

Speaking of designs... he was surprised when you asked him if you could take a look at his tablet

But he trusts you, so why not

Was shocked when one day he saw you putting one of his designs as a clothing option

Loves it and thinks that it looks good even when pixelated

Although he's not the greatest composer, he will try to help you

It usually turns into fan favourite soundtracks

So you don't mind his suggestions

[ashintheairlikesnow]

one thing I love is when someone is reviewing a film, a game... anything... and they say explicitly, "Look, this wasn't made for me, this was made for the fans of (game name/movie/etc), and on that standpoint, it fucking rules."

Like, I'm watching the Dead Meat Kill Count of Five Nights at Freddy's. He explicitly notes that he didn't find the movie that compelling or even good, but then he also points out that it doesn't fucking matter, because the movie was made for the fans of FNaF and not for him.

I wish more critics would be upfront about that kind of thing.

"Did I like it? Nah, not really. But guess what, fuck what I have to say, this movie wasn't made to make me happy. Now let's talk kills and animatronics."

The film was made as a gift to people who took some dude's weird lil indie horror game and made it this enormous lore-heavy powerhouse that the internet embraced. And it made more than 300 million dollars in theaters, so like, fuck reviews and critics.

I'M not even a FNaF fan, although that's due to just not ever having played the games or anything. But even I could see that the movie was absolutely buried in adoration of the original story and property and full of tiny details fans would be thrilled by.

There is something special about films or shows based on video games where you can tell the people involved genuinely love or at least respect the fans' love of the property. Like Henry Cavill playing Geralt of Rivia with such a depth of understanding of the character that honestly, they should never have tried to play contract chicken with him and lost that talent.

(On the other hand, I am so fucking jazzed to see what he does with Warhammer 40K)

So, yeah. The FNaF movie is a gift, and it wasn't a gift for movie critics.

Also, I love literally any horror property where Matt Lillard shows up to be a goddamn brilliant nebula in the galaxy of fucked up bad people. Loved him since he played Stu in Scream. Love him now. Just. Love.

[cosmicpancakes]

Hi! So I saw your post about wanting to talk about Will Solace (me too queen, me too) so what are your headcanons? Or funny little tidbits about him and his friends? Love your blog!

OF COURSE THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THIS ASK!!! to hear that someone genuinely loves my blog is so surreal cause like??? You like my blog?? Where I literally just say what's on my mind and ramble???

(P.S. TO ANYONE SEEING THIS!! IF YOU WANT HEADCANONS FOR OTHER CHARACTERS JUST SHOOT ME AN ASK!!!! I WILL HAPPILY ANSWER THEM ALL :DD)

Okay without further ado, here they are!!!

My Will Solace headcanons! ☀️

He has curly hair! Think somewhere between 2c and 3a

Speaking about hair, his hair is naturally brown and he dyes it blonde

ANOTHER HAIR ONE but he has a very extensive hair care routine! You'd think he would have very damaged hair because of all the bleaching, but that shit is SOFT

Only uses feminine floral perfume cause it smells better (hes right. it does.)

Despite insisting on healthy eating, he survives off of random snacks and red bulls

Loves indie pop and jazz music but does listen to a lot a country as it reminds him of his mother

Hopeless romantic. He will cry to laufey.

90% of his closet is made up of incredibly cheesy dad joke t-shirts.

Wears lots and lots of bracelets! All very mismatched in terms of colour and texture, but it adds to the charm (or so he says)

His hair is just long enough to put in a very short ponytail when he works (but a few loose curls always slip out)

He sticks out his tongue when he's concentrating on something

Clarrisse practically adopted him as her honorary little brother and he went to her highschool graduation!! (she totally did not cry when she saw him. nope. not at all.)

everyone at camp owes him atleast 5 favours except lou ellen because she somehow never gets injured??? Cecil on the other hand, owes him about 13 favours.

Friday is the apollo cabin's game night, and he NEVER wins (kayla swears austin is cheating, but hes just really good at monopoly.)

the cabin is always spotless because he despises stable duty

(This one is canon but not talked about enough) when he said he's horrible at every apollo thing except healing, he was not exaggerating. an absolutely horrid singer and he would miss a target 3 metres away.

okay that was a lie because he can manipulate light.... to a certain extent. he's working on it he swears!!

One of those people that are incredibly insistant about wearing sunscreen even tho he doesn't need it himself

And now for some angsty ones because I know you all love them:

A very obvious one, but he has pretty bad PTSD.

I'm pretty sure this one is canon, but he saw Lee die in botl (i have had a oneshot idea about thia for months, but i literally never finish oneshots so theres no point in trying to write it ☹️)

A lot of people thought him and Lee were biological siblings because they looked so similar and also because they were super close

him and Micheal were also really close, but they were a lot more distant after Lee died and they never really got to reconnect

Post botl, the apollo cabin had about 17 kids. 3 survived the battle of manhattan.

has a really bad habit of overworking to distract himself

Way too many scars for a medic. (He won't admit where he got them from, or why most of them are on him arms.)

Okay, that's all for today!! I hope you enjoyed those headcanons :)

Once again saying this but if anyone reading this wants some headcanons for other characters please please leave me an ask 🙏 love you all okay bye bye

[dirt-piper]

The TF2 problem

Don't take anything I say here as gospel - much of it is my own speculation and musings.

TF2 is my favorite game of all time. I started playing it wayyy back in 2012, and while I don't have that many hours racked up total (a meager ~1K), I can at least consider myself to be a few rungs above 'total n00b' in terms of familiarity with the game. I've experienced the best and worst eras of the game - from the Love & War update to the current botting crisis, and I have loved TF2 every step of the way.

But just because I love it, doesn't mean I think it's flawless!

Around 2015-2016 I noticed (alongside damn near everyone else playing TF2) that TF2 was changing, and not in a particularly good way. Love & War was in many ways a perfect update for TF2 - it gave attention and goodies to both the highly casual and the highly competitive ends of the playerbase, with a fancy new taunt system bundled with some pretty fun new weapons. At about this time, Blizzard announced the imminent release of their new game Overwatch, which was directly inspired by TF2 - and now presented itself as being a direct competitor to TF2 in its own niche. This, of course, turned out to be bogus - Overwatch is its own game with its own niche that has a playerbase nearly wholly separate from TF2's.

A common trend amongst the TF2 playerbase at the time was this sense of dread regarding Overwatch - either that it would suck up the entire TF2 playerbase, leaving the game to die, or that Blizzard would try their damnedest to manifest such a reality. Either way, a ton of die-hard TF2 fans began to absolutely loathe Blizzard's new game (before it even came out, I might add) for so much as daring to 'unthrone' TF2.

This entire premise is stupid. It's stupid now, and it was stupid then. But the fear became so pervasive throughout the community that, eventually, it seemed like VALVe was getting scared too. The tone and focus of TF2's updates began to shift far more heavily towards the competitive end of TF2's playerbase - which has never been the majority - as VALVe appeared to try to pivot TF2 into a stance where it could better "compete" with the upcoming Overwatch. Bits and pieces of this started showing with Gun Mettle and Tough Break, before Meet your Match completely revamped the game into a more competitive-focused format.

Why they would do this didn't really make sense - if VALVe wanted to compete against Blizzard's new AAA FPS with a competitive scene, then why would they try to remodel TF2 to position it as a "more valid competitor" to Overwatch when CS:GO was already a proven champion in that space? TF2 doesn't need to compete with Overwatch. It never did. So why would they expend so much effort to change TF2's course when, frankly, it was doing fine as-is?

Looking back now, with nearly a decade of hindsight and a bit more insight into VALVe actually works, I think the picture is a bit clearer, or at least the one I've formed in my head is. I don't think TF2's sudden drastic shift in focus was the result of VALVe scrambling to shore TF2 up against the onslaught of Overwatch - I think it was, rather, the TF2 team scrambling to shore TF2 up against VALVe.

VALVe is not a normal game studio. VALVe is not only lucky enough to be their own publisher (therefore making them a completely independent studio - yes, VALVe games are 'indie'), but also extremely lucky enough to be the de-facto publisher for nearly the entire PC game industry, thanks to Steam. VALVe makes money off of every single game sold through Steam whether they made it or not, essentially guaranteeing them a constant stream of exorbitant income regardless of their own output. They have a complete vertical monopoly of their own industry - they own themselves (VALVe has no shareholders whatsoever), they own their products, they own their publisher, they own their distributor - and now, with the Steam Deck, they own their hardware platforms too. VALVe answers to nobody but themselves, because they own everything that could possibly impact their business.

VALVe is, in a lot of ways, in a somewhat similar situation to AT&T (aka 'Ma Bell') back before the breakup of the phone company back in 1982. AT&T owned the entire phone network - from the switching equipment to the phone lines to the handsets plugged into them - and they charged every person in the country who leased phone service from them (you couldn't own a phone back then!) a subscription fee. AT&T, then, had basically infinite money to do whatever the hell they wanted with (though the government strictly regulated their commercial activities so they could not compete in any industry but telephony). As a result of this, Bell labs, the core Research & Development branch of AT&T, was in a very unique scenario - projects undertaken by Bell labs researchers weren't given budgets - they were given quotas.

AT&T didn't care how much money or time was spent on a project by a Bell labs researcher, so long as it ultimately resulted in something that benefited the company. And this model worked very, very well - Bell labs' researchers gave the world the transistor, the laser, the CCD, the Unix operating system, the C programming language, and received 10 Nobel peace prizes.

VALVe, through Steam, has a free, infinite revenue stream. VALVe's staff, then, effectively have infinite money and time at their disposal to make whatever they desire - so long as it ultimately results in something that benefits VALVe. Or, at least, so long as the people who hold the most seniority at VALVe think it would benefit VALVe.

It's no particular secret that the old guard at VALVe are, largely, unenthusiastic about TF2. Remember - Team Fortress is VALVe's oldest franchise. The original Team Fortress mod was released in August of 1996 - a mere one month after the Nintendo 64's initial release - a full 2 years before Half-life. Sure, VALVe didn't initially create Team Fortress, but they bought Team Fortress Software for a reason - Team Fortress was insanely popular. And it's not just TF2 that has absurd longevity, it's the entire Team Fortress franchise; here's a match from a Quake Team Fortress competitive tournament that is currently ongoing as I write this post:

VALVe acquired Team Fortress software with the premise that the sequel to Team Fortress would become an expansion to Half-life, thereby increasing Half-life's desirability by attaching it to the sequel of one of the most popular FPS games available at the time. TF2, of course, took a bit longer than expected - so Team Fortress Classic, a more-or-less direct port of Team Fortress to goldsrc, was released in 1999 to satiate people until the real TF2 came out.

That took another 8 years.

When TF2 finally released, it pioneered the concept of games as a service - that you could buy a game once and it would receive new content, features, fixes, etc. indefinitely - for free. These were not paid expansions or DLC, these were actual updates made directly to the game that anyone could get access to so long as they happened to own the game. And, once TF2 went free to play, the deal became even better. This model was utterly groundbreaking in 2007 - it's the standard for how most games operate today, sure, but only because TF2 proved how well it could work.

The issue, of course, is that VALVe was eternally working on TF2. By 2015, Team Fortress 2 had been in development in some form or another for 17 years. With this perspective, it seems understandable why some of the more senior members of VALVe would have grown sick of Team Fortress - they'd been doing or dealing with the same game for nearly 2 decades.

But, of course, newer hires at VALVe would have nowhere near the same level of fatigue - many of them were likely still very passionate about the game, and eager to continue its lifespan - but when the people who sign their paychecks and review their employee performances are sick and tired of hearing about Team Fortress, it becomes less and less attractive to pour effort into the game, no matter how much they may personally wish to.

Under these circumstances, the tonal shift TF2 experienced around the release of Overwatch appears more as an internal struggle - the remaining TF2 team trying desperately to prove to their seniors that TF2 was not yet ready to be phased out, that the game could modernize and remain relevant in the modern competitive gaming scene, that just because they were sick of TF2 didn't mean that everyone was.

So, they gambled. They bet TF2's future on a new revamp to adapt it to the then-modern world of competitive e-sports... and fumbled it pretty hard with Meet your Match.

The problem with the TF2 team's attempt to make TF2 more suited to the modern world of competitive gaming was that they seemed to overlook that, to the average non-competitive TF2 player, the game as it was was perfectly fine. Through Quickplay, any player could be automatically placed into a server matching their desired criteria and just... play. A server would stay on a given map for roughly 45 minutes (though players could vote to extend the map timer) regardless of how many rounds there were, meaning that everyone got the same amount of time to play the map regardless of how good or bad either team, as a whole, performed. This game players plenty of time to just... have fun playing TF2. There was no rush or hurry or incentive to play the game in any way other than how you wanted to.

This made TF2 very unique in the FPS world - the truest example of a "casual shooter". There were no ranks or rewards or incentives to play every day beyond random item drops and the enjoyment derived from simply playing the game itself.

The TF2 team's attempt to 'modernize' TF2 in Meet your Match effectively ruined this.

In addition to the introduction of a new, dedicated 6v6 competitive mode, Quickplay was replaced with 'Casual' - a matchmaking lite that tried to find a middle ground between the chaotic ad-hoc freedom of Quickplay and the more rigid, competitive structure of Competitive. It didn't work. Most TF2 players just wanted to play TF2 - casual forced them to stop and wait for the matchmaking system to find a server for them matching its desired criteria, stop and wait every other round for the server to change maps, stop and wait for matchmaking cooldowns to run out if they left a game in progress - so much time was spent stopping and waiting to play the game that hardly any was left to play the game itself. Yes, some of these problems have since been smoothed over, but Casual still forces the play to spend less time playing the game than Quickplay did. In my opinion, Casual, as it was released, could have been perfectly fine if Quickplay was kept alongside it. Instead, in one fell swoop, the way the vast majority of people played TF2 was effectively removed from the game.

In fairness to the TF2 team regarding this gamble, they were under enormous pressure - not just from a TF2 community growing increasingly paranoid about TF2's future due to the imagined threat of Overwatch - but also from the higher-ups at VALVe they were trying to convince.

However, the TF2 team snuck a back-up plan into Meet your Match - the Heavy vs. Pyro war. By outright promising a future major update (or perhaps two, even!), the TF2 team could at least insure that, no matter what their 'bosses' thought, they could justify their continued work on the game as fulfillment of a promise made to the community. And, if the new update was enough of a hit, it could perhaps inspire their 'bosses' to let TF2 continue to live on, at least for a little while.

So, the TF2 team pulled out all the stops for the next update. Jungle Inferno had an animated short, new maps, new weapons, entirely new features (ie. the contracker), it had a massive hype-spiraling 4-day-long update announcement, major weapon rebalances and overhauls - they clearly tried their damnedest to make the best TF2 update possible.

Whether or not the team managed to convince their superiors is unknowable. Jungle Inferno was followed by the fanfare-less Blue Moon update in early 2018, followed by radio silence. The TF2 team may very well have still been hard at work on the elusive Heavy update, but the double-whammy of the all-hands-on-deck push to get Half-life: Alyx finished and released immediately followed by the COVID pandemic likely reset whatever momentum or motivation the TF2 team had left.

This scenario, as described, is painful enough. From the outside, it appears as though VALVe had rebounded from Meet your Match, and was doing its best to improve the game in the wake of their own missteps, only to suddenly drop TF2 with zero explanation given. TF2 was left in a state of indefinite limbo with no clear outlook whatsoever on the future.

What made this infinitely worse is that VALVe had left the game in a state that wasn't just unfinished, it was broken.

TF2 has literally always had a botting problem. For the first span of the game's life, this generally manifested as idling/trading bots, but later on more and more bots began to appear that sought only to disrupt gameplay. Micspam, false votekicks, aimbotting, speedhacks, etc. - purely for the sake of irritating real players. Until Meet your Match, these cheating bots were relatively uncommon - real players could very easily either kick them from the game or simply join another server via Quickplay. Their impact on gameplay was no more than a minor, brief annoyance, and thus they were considered a non-issue.

Meet your Match's new Casual system, however, dramatically restricted the player's ability to hop to other servers when bots arose. Not only this, but the ability to switch teams at will was disabled on Casual servers, meaning it was now impossible to deal with bots on any team but your own (previously, if the other team was too slow to kick their own bots, it was possible to just wait for an opening on the other team, hop over, and call a votekick against the offending bot that would usually end up succeeding). Now, the disruption caused by a single bot was far more impactful than it had been before - because it was a far greater chore to either kick the bot or find a different server. Moreover, Casual outright incentivizes players to stick to the same server until the end - awarding them extra points the more they play, and nullifying any progress they've made towards a given contract that match if they leave before it ends. Players are thus, in effect, forced to play even when bots have made the game unenjoyable.

This resulted in a feedback loop - bots were now more irritating, so people complained about them more, so bot hosters hosted more bots, making them even more irritating - and that feedback loop has continued nearly unabated until modern day.

The TF2 community has been begging for an end to the botting problem for ages - and there have been genuine efforts from the TF2 team to try and fix the problem, but they have been too small and too infrequent to make much impact. And, to be frank, there is no way to effectively, permanently remove the bots. Attempting to keep any and all bots from the game would require enormous, constant effort from the TF2 team - something which is a very tall ask given VALVe's attitude towards the game for the past decade.

What can be done, however, is to simply make the bots less impactful. To let players more easily avoid them, to let players enjoy the game for longer so the bots are no longer such a nuisance, to let players have enough freedom in how they play that they are no longer forced to suffer through games with bots. It won't outright remove bots forever, but it will make them so much less of a nuisance that bot hosters will likely lose the incentive to bother with them. As soon as that happens, the feedback loop will be broken, and the botting issue will decline in severity as their potential impact on players' enjoyment of the game is neutered.

The simplest way to do this is to make Casual just as free as Quickplay was.

45 minute map timers, extensible by vote.

An Indefinite number of rounds per map.

Ad-hoc joining, leaving, and team switching.

Progress on contracts not erased by leaving mid-round.

These are not overwhelming changes. If anything, it's something of a return to form - not outright bringing back Quickplay, but making Casual into a suitable replacement for it - at long last.

And - most importantly - it's a one-time fix. It does not require an eternal arms race against bot hosters, nor a full return to frequent, massive content updates (though those would be nice).

One update to make TF2 more fun, to make the bots less impactful, and to give the game a better standing for the future.

One update to fix TF2.

-DirtPiper