#b/c effort

[ranticore]

more trying to figure out a nice way to draw roan with whatshisface and a redesign of anja of 2016 fame with the tiger colours extending all the way up

i will have to start designing clothing for them otherwise u won't believe me when i say they have an extreme modesty culture

[ri-afan]

Anyone got a story where Amity Park becomes independent without the rest of the USA noticing until some hero stumbles upon (or crash lands in) it?

[hoofpeet]

Trying to work out the ergonomics of someone with a really long tail riding a bike without getting it sucked into the wheels and imagining someone tucking their tail into their socks

[gurlgallade]

Hi! Haven't been able to do much progress on this because we fucked up our wrist a little, but there's embroidery and a presentable amount of Four's assets have color now!

[isat-script-project]

Your amazing work here has inspired me to want to try doing a script project for DQB2 and I was wondering if you had any advice for me?

I'm gonna assume that's some sorta dragon quest game?

Well, ISAT really is a blessing in this regard, because the game is not encrypted at all. Accessing files and all text via rpgmaker MV and VSC is incredibly easy.

okay this got really long i'm putting it under the cut.

But before you get started, there really are some things you need to ask yourself first:

How am I going to get the text from this game?

If your answer is "write it down by hand as I play" then already know that there HAS to be a better way. If you're choosing that method, get yourself emulation, save states, or endless patience, because hooh boy, I've done a little bit of that for a different project (no, I will not elaborate) but save scumming on original hardware to get different dialogue options is agony.

Is there a text dump for your game? Is there a file dump or decomp for your game? Do you have the technical know how to access it? If not, are you confident in your knowledge of the game to accurately identify where all dialogue may occur? If not, are you satisfied missing out on nothing lines and just focusing on the non-optional? Is your game linear enough to not need a closer look at the code to figure out what happens when, as isat does?

2. What's my scope?

Again, do you truly want every line from this game, or just what's "important"? I personally cannot rest until I've exhausted the fucking Menus (which is why there's a script page for those, too) because I'm a completionist with delusions of grandeur, but some people are satisfied transcribing the cutscenes and nothing else (MUCH TO MY ANNOYANCE WHEN I NEED THE OTHER STUFF.... nobody cares about the optional collectible npc dialogue BUT I CARE!!! I CARE!!!!!)

Anyways, what exactly your scope is is gonna significantly influence what your next step looks like.

3. How am I going to present this?

Making the isat script project an individual website mainly came down to how finicky the dialogue in isat is. There's conditionals stacked on conditionals and I wanted a space where I had total control over how to present these factors without influence.

For more linear games, like, say, that time I made all the fewiki scripts for Fire Emblem 6 from chapter 12 onward, it was easy enough to present the scripts on a wiki page just because the game is much more linear, there's less dialogue to begin with, and all conditional text could be nicely divided up into similar groups, like boss dialogue where the condition is just "fight boss with x character".

isat script project would not exist without my fire emblem fixation, fun fact. other fun facts include that as a child i attempted to novelize Mario Party DS by transcribing all story mode text into a booklet by hand, and I did not finish this for reasons that are hopefully obvious.

This is, as you may figure, way easier to do. There is significantly less burden on you to actually understand how a website works - I cannot stress enough that the current state of the script project is only possible thanks to Gold, and without them, we'd still be at all dialogue being formatted as <p><b>Siffrin:</b> Says some text.</p>

For a lot of older games, you can also find whole game scripts being put up into a single document. Tis common on gamefaqs, I've used those plenty. There I believe you're just working with plain ol txt.

The rule is always though look at examples and if they do something cool figure out whether you can copy it. i did not create the website layout myself, i used a base and fiddled with it for a whole weekend until it stopped exploding.

Again, like, using an existing structure like a wiki or gamefaqs or just google docs or a spreadsheet is a significantly eased burden. One of my favorite things ever is actually a text dump on github, of all places. For this one, the person putting it up chose to leave all text in as close to original state as possible, doing no trimming of things like character emotes and leaving in all original string titles of every line. This is also incredibly useful, even if it is more difficult to use for your average schmoe! (This has fucking saved me doing wiki stuff for engage. engage text dump i ADORE you)

Do you want to be as accurate to the code as possible, or as accurate to the game? Do you have the time, energy, and skills to make the visual presentation nice? Or do you want to keep it rudimentary to streamline your process?

If you ARE doing something like making your own website, it is crucial that you figure out your visuals early, lest you be like us, and be stuck in Reformatting Hell for several months, because someone figured out how to make a thing prettier and nicer to read, and now you need to update the 100+ pages you've already created.

Reformatting code like that takes just as long as making a page in the first place, by the by, because you're just not getting around copy-pasting everything line by agonizing line.

This stuff takes HOURS. If I went at it alone, I doubt I'd have finished by now, or within the next like, two years. This is a really time consuming hobby, and I love doing it a lot, it scratches my exact fixation itch, but if your game is huge, consider seeing if people would be interested in joining you? I will also say being autistic about your game of choice is also a bonus in the sustainability department.

Many a times there were just no updates (as they are now) cuz I am just. Distracted by something else. Like yes on one hand I'm going to uni now and have less time but it's not really less time if I can still put 17hrs into a new video game in three days.

Stuff like this is ALWAYS a long-term project and you WILL need to take time off from it or else you'll start seeing html in your dreams and get burnout.

STREAMLINE YOUR PROCESS!!! FIGURE OUT HOW TO DO THIS WITH AS LITTLE EFFORT AS POSSIBLE!!!! Gold introduced me to Espanso, which is a program that lets you set up keyboard shortcuts to insert phrases, which was a MAAAAAASSIVE time saver in the html department, as it allowed me to just rapid fire paste in all the many html classes we stacked for the presentation of the site. even if you are doing a script on a wiki where everything does look like ['''Siffrin:''' says a thing] you will still be doing yourself a favor if you can shorten that '''Siffrin:''' to just typing :s .

As a side note, I also wanna say like. The popularity of isat script project is a complete outlier. Other game scripts may be used by a maniac like me to overanalyze the plot structure of Sonic 06, but you're very likely not going to see that recognition. I love doing this, because I want these resources to exist for myself. I don't do this for the good of the fandom, but because it is useful to me. I started this because I was writing isat fanfic, and got tired of looking up dialogue on youtube or booting up my own game.

Do I know if anyone found my FE6 scripts useful? No. Do I know if anyone is going through Veyle/Quotes and appreciating that I transcribed all the fucking battle voice clips? No. Do I know if someone appreciates me accurately labelling all voice lines from the ring polishing minigame in engage? Hell no. I don't know, I'm never going to get feedback on that. Those are wiki pages, anyone can edit them, they don't have viewcounts or comments I can look at, and the fandom just isn't as prone to taking screenshots and posting about them line by line as isat.

Isat blew the fuck up on tumblr. I'm not saying you'll get no recognition at all, but if you are relying on external motivators, you are probably going to peter out. There are pages I've worked on for other script things that I've genuienly not touched in two years because I just didn't feel like it, and that's also okay.

TLDR:

Figure out how to get the text you need with the least effort possible (and figure out whether doing that is even possible at all!), figure out what scope you're actually willing to put up with, and present it with the least effort possible, because everything else just isn't sustainable. Streamline streamline streamline. Be prepared to spend hours on this and maybe like find a new favorite podcast to just copy paste text to, because honestly, doing this is also pretty zen.

And most importantly, sparkle on, don't forget to have fun! Even if it seems big and intimidating, you can still make it just a fun side project, and slowly chip away at it over time. Rome wasn't built in a day, and with all the advantages going for isat script project (additional manpower, unencrypted files, easy tools for game examination) it still took over a year to complete.

(loop voice) Don't make the same mistakes I did, okay?

oh, yeah, one last thing, if you're not putting it on a wiki and ARE making your own website, ABSOLUTELY PUT IT ON GITHUB!!!! setting up so any changes to the main branch on github get reflected onto neocities is pretty easy and you only need to do it once, and what this allows is to just have random strangers show up and fix your problems for you. sometimes someone will just show up and fix five bajillion typos and then leave. or they'll stick around and help with more stuff and wowie you have a semblance of a team now.

if you're doing it on a wiki, find like, the wiki discord, if someone is interested in chipping in. if you're doing your own website, put it on github. do it. do it do it do it.

[unproduciblesmackdown]

wwaah ✨

[leechaeryeonqs-moved]

12 DAYS OF BLACK EYE ⇢ a celebration of the two year anniversary for the release of VERNON's iconic mixtape, BLACK EYE.

[sonnet18s]

MY GRADE IN A SUBJECT BECAME C → B+ UEUEHEJDYEUDHHEJXH

[bagelarts]

doodling rokuken for good health

(kenichi is based on his rainbow parakeet appearance :o))

[spaciebabie]

your friendly reminder ta not be an idiot during this election like the one back in 2016. if you're still thinking/spouting "i wont vote b/c both sides are bad" bs you're at best incredibly ignorant and at worst an actual fascist spreading dangerous rhetoric on purpose.

[grahamcarmen]

[coquelicoq]

wei wuxian's argument about he couldn't have been the one to curse jin zixun isn't even the classic "if i wanted you dead, you'd be dead," it's "if i wanted you dead, you'd be suffering so much more than you actually are." oh yeah, the ol' Not Enough Torture defense. your honor i'm innocent! he's not in nearly enough pain for it to have been done by me. not guilty!

[yellllowstar]

you can make songs be about The Character if you try hard enough.

(song is "deep in the ocean" by lemon demon)

[idolsummons]

do ppl mind if i reblog non-meme posts from them until tumblr stops gaslighting me into thinking posts don't exist

[rathologic]

hey i just watched andy north's patho2 mod video and i have to ask what inspired the creation of smooth grief? i need to know all about him

(also you managed to get his dialogue to match the games writing so well!)

Thank you! It's always great to see a smooth grief appreciator...

In 2020 I was playing patho2 on a bootcamped ~2014 MacBook Air which got maybe 5 FPS on a good, clear day. Naturally it had a lot of issues running the game (entering buildings took minutes of real world time in the door cutscene; I could frequently just sprint through walls before they loaded), and it sometimes used low-detail models in dialogue screens. For example, here's an andrey that scared me enough to use faceapp to put a smile on him:

This kind of thing happening in-game gave me the idea of manually blurring images of Grief's face to make him smooth, based on the assertion that Grief would have the roughest skin out of the Pathologic cast. Smooth Grief was born on June 14, 2020 with this photo:

After that, I posted Smooth Grief edits occasionally under the tag #smooth grief sunday. The well of "unique images of Bad Grief" dried up after about two years, but I'm hoping they'll return as Pathologic 3 content is released.

When I figured out how to make installable texture/dialogue edits for p2, Smooth Grief was the only thing I genuinely wanted to implement into the game, so he got his own lore-compliant mod 🙂 which you can download and install on your Pathologic 2 for the low price of 0.

[recurring-polynya]

why do i have poster's disease? i wanted to write a weird little vaguely horny story that i've thought about for a long time but i did so under the pretense that it was 'just for me' and i wasn't going to post it b/c i really do not want put it up for public opinion, but then i wrote it and was like 'what if...ha ha...j/k...unless...?' Part of my problem is that i always think 'what if someone else wrote this and they wouldn't let me see it...i would be so saaaaad...' and then i feel bad for this theoretical lurker me who doesn't even write me fanfic back. Like, I read all these posts where people are like 'no one interacts with fic anymore, i'm going to stop posting my work' and i'm always like 'hmm, i understand your feelings, i have noticed the same' but it could not be me. i will keep posting my unpopular shit and feel bad when it doesn't get much in the way of kudos and have a hundred regrets and then i'll just do it again later. idc. (it's a lie, i very much do care)