#content developers

[ruushes]

sleeping arrangements (not sure tara would ever actually deign to sleep in the same 20ft radius as shovel but who can resist those big shiny insectoid black eyes 🥺)

plus:

[mehmetyildizmelbourne-blog]

The First Chapter of New Book “Substack Mastery” for Beta Readers

Why I wrote this book and how freelance writers and content entrepreneurs can benefit from it Introduction to My New Book for Free A few months ago, when I publicly announced that I would dedicate 80% of my time to Substack, 15% to Newsbreak, and just 5% to Medium, I received an intriguing call from one of my book publishers. This serendipitous encounter was inspiring, much like one of my…

[hinamie]

9 / 266

[creation-help]

Torturing your ocs ask game :)

(Delightful, I know. But we all do it sometimes)

1. Which of your ocs do you most often imagine sick? In what ways?

2. Which of them do you most imagine injured in other ways?

3. Who do you put through the most emotional turmoil?

4. Which oc has been tortured? Through what means?

5. Which of them has the worst luck?

6. Who goes through the most relationship conflicts? (applies to any relationships)

7. Who do you put most into stressful situations or other drama?

8. Who ends up in survival situations the most? How do they fair in them?

9. Has any of them had to be saved from the brink of death? Were there any consequences after?

10. Has any of them had to be revived / brought back to life? How did this affect them?

11. Who is afraid the most? How does this effect them?

12. What kind of health repercussions has your oc experienced through intense stress? How do they manage them?

13. Who cries the most often? What are the usual causes?

14. How does your oc cope?

15. To cap off what kind of hurt/comfort scenarios do you put your oc in?

This can be about canon story events or simply rotating scenarios for fun!

[littlecrittereli]

Thinking about @martincrushcameback's apocalypse au....

I couldn't get the idea of this interaction out of my head so I had to draw it...

[siflooping]

was talking abt this with a good friend earlier but we the people NEEEEED to make Content of siffrin having sifnsecurities (sif insecurities) abt their smile being gross/weird/dumb <3 <3 <3 LOVE AND LIGHT!

[bluejulius]

live action httyd2 confirmed you know what that means…

has this been done yet? probably!

I might start watching GoT just because of Eret 💀

[prettybluebro]

[anim-ttrpgs]

If any of y'all had tips for aspiring TTRPG creators, what would they be? I'm hosting a "How to Make your own TTRPG" panel at a con this weekend, and anything to show folks from a fellow indie studio would be great!

Yeah a bunch. Each one of these could basically be its own post, but here are the condensed versions.

Social Media

You need social media. No one will ever hear of your game without a strong social media presence. And as much as it sucks, your best bet is probably tumblr. It’s the only populated social media site that allows your posts to be widely circulated without you having to pay, and also long form enough to actually include information. I dedicate one day a week entirely to social media and that’s just about the only reason we make any money at all.

Also, when using tumblr, the first five tags you put on a post are the most important, those are the tags that make it show up on people’s dashboards. The first twenty tags are the ones that make it show up in search results. Don’t put the name of your game in the first five tags generally, because if no one has heard of it yet, no one is following those tags.

Don’t Paywall Your Game

You deserve to be paid for your work if you indeed did any work at all (we’ll get to that), but that just isn’t the world we live in. Unless you have an advertising budget to essentially trick people into buying a game that might end up being crap, you need something to prove that your game is worth spending money on. Without an advertising budget, that proof has to be your game. Setting your game to pay-what-you-want, or providing “community copies,” lets people try your game before they buy. Plenty of people will buy up-front when given the option, and others who can’t afford it at that moment will download it for free then come back and pay later. Some people will never pay, but what that means for you is that they either never experience your game, or they pirate it. People experiencing your game, showing it to their friends, and talking about it is one of the most valuable pieces of advertisement you can ever have. It will ultimately lead to more people who are willing and able to pay learning about your game.

Start Small but Not Too Small

Do not make a one-page game for your first game. Do not be like us and make a 700-page game for your first game. Try to aim for something between 20 and 200 pages, especially if you’re one person or a small team.

Play and Read a lot of RPGs or Your Game Will Suck

Would you watch a movie by a director who had only ever watched one movie? Would you read a book by an author who had only ever read one book? Hell no, those would suck.

Read many rpg rulebooks, from many different genres and decades, play as many of them as you can (by the rules) to understand how the rules work and why they’re there. This will give you the creative tools you need to make something that isn’t just a weaker version of the last RPG you played. No, listening to "actual plays" does not count.

Most actual plays stray significantly from presenting a regular gameplay experience in favor of an experience that is entertaining for an audience. If you want to learn martial arts, you should be watching martial arts tournaments, not WWE.

If you want an actual play podcast that has my “actually mostly presents a real gameplay experience” approval, try Tiny Table.

If you say you don’t have time to read rulebooks, then you don’t have time to design a good game. Studying is part of the process of creating. If you don't, you won't even know about gleeblor.

This will let you know whether your "innovation" is more like "Cars don't need to run on gasoline!" or "Cars don't need crumple zones and airbags!"

The Rules Matter, So Design with Intent

The rules matter the rules fucking matter holy shit what you actually write down on the page matters I can’t believe this is actually the seemingly most needed piece of advice on this list. The. rules. matter.

Design your game to be played in the way you designed it. The rules affect the tone and genre of your game, they affect the type of people PCs can be and the kind of stories that will result from gameplay. Bonuses encourage PC behaviors, penalties discourage PC behaviors.

Do not fall for the trap of “oh well people will just play it their own way based on vibes anyway so it doesn’t matter what I write the rules to be.” Write that you wrote this game to be played by the rules and that significant changes to the rules mean that players are no-longer playing the game you made. Write like you deserve for your art to be acknowledged by its audience. If you don’t, then there is no point in anyone playing the game you made, because if the person who wrote it doesn’t even care what the rules say, why should anyone? The people whose “playing” of TTRPGs consists of never opening the rulebook and improving based on “vibes” will still do that no matter what, but the people who would have actually tried to engage with your game will find that it sucks if you don’t even care what the rules are yourself.

Playtest

You need to playtest your game if you want it to work as intended. You need multiple sets of eyes on it. If you don’t have the opportunity personally to do so, just release your game anyway with the acknowledgement that it’s unfinished. Call it an alpha or a beta version, and ask for people that do play it to give feedback, then update and fix the game based on that feedback.

Ignore Feedback

Most people do not have any game design credibility, perhaps least of all TTRPG players. You do not, in fact, have to listen to everything people say about your game. Once you ask for feedback, people will come to you with the most deranged, asinine, bad-faith “feedback” you can imagine, and then get really mad at you when you don’t fall to your knees and kiss their feet about it. You do not need to take this feedback at face value, instead you need to learn to read between the lines and find out which parts of the rules text are being misinterpreted by players, and which incorrect assumptions players are making about your game. Then, you update and improve the game by clearing those up. Only like 30% of “feedback” you receive will actually be a directly helpful suggestion in its own right at face value.

You can’t please everyone, and shouldn’t, so appeal to the people who actually like your game for being what it is, not the people who don’t.

Read Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy

Yeah this one sounds self-serving but hear me out. Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy is as much a treatise on TTRPG game design as it is a game itself. When it presents mechanics and rules, it tells you what they are, why they are, how they are, and what you’re intended to do with them. This makes it an excellent example to read for anyone wanting to get serious about game design and learn how TTRPGs tick under the hood, and an excellent example of a TTRPG that expects players to play it the way it was written to be played, and why that is a good thing. Also you can download it for free.

[dukeofthomas]

Here's my controversial opinion; if you're trying to write Bruce as a non-abusive, good parent, you should also write him respecting his kids' privacy, boundaries, and not stalking&surveying them.

[elodieunderglass]

I haven’t watched Dungeon Meshi, but I always enjoy the dashboard osmosis experience and have a peculiar visual memory. Here is what I believe Dungeon Meshi to be mostly about. No complicating experiences with the text, or indeed character references, fed into this extremely clear vision, which I believe I torrented directly from the astral plane at the same time as the creator was logged on

[shepscapades]

I completely forgot live was today, what's the cliffnotes? What's the deets on the pale garden? How does New Guy work?

Hi! Cliff Notes are:

New biome: The Pale Garden!

> Overworld dense forest biome > Features a brand new wood type called “pale oak” and it’s basically white wood :D and the “growth-style” of pale oaks mimic dark oaks, so there’s a lot of wood per tree > The canopy of the biome is thicker than a normal forest, the grass type is really desaturated, and it’s very graveyard-esque— they’re definitely going for an empty, vacant, spooky “something is wrong here” vibe. > New foliage! Hanging moss and Pale Moss Carpet (that, when placed next to vertical blocks, put little vines growing up the side of walls and stuff) > It’s safe during the day, but at Night the new mob can spawn, and there are new ambient sounds (creaking, crunching, very horror-esque sounds).

New Mob: The Creaking!

> They only spawn at night > They work like Weeping Angels— they’re completely still when you’re looking at them, and they scramble towards you as soon as you look away. > They deal relatively low damage, but damage can add up when there are multiple ganging up on the player > They do not take damage at all, but are instead linked to nearby “Creaking Hearts,” which are special-texture wood blocks nestled in the trunks of nearby trees. When you destroy/mine the Creaking Hearts, The Creeking mob will shatter, so they’re more like puppets. So this is a whole new way to manipulate/defeat this hostile mob :D > You can silk touch the Creaking Hearts, meaning you can place them down again and spawn a Creaking.

In my personal opinion it was really discouraging to see how negative the comments section was after genuinely enjoying the live/video (They had a cute animated section to tease the reveal of the new mob that I thought was really cute too, I couldn’t stop smiling), and I do think there are some small things that could be added to make the new biome a little more immersive or unique (new leaf textures, new tree-growth-style, a new flower type, fog, particle effects, things like that that could enhance the atmosphere!), but I honestly think this is all really exciting and it gives a lot of life to the Minecraft world-building/ecosystem :3

(In other news, they added hardcore to bedrock, gave some insights on the minecraft movie set building, and did a cool little community-feature pre-show. After the reveals above, they did an after-show where they went more in depth on all of the new blocks!)

Also, if I missed anything, feel free to add stuff in reblogs/comments/etc!

[bobbiesquares]

Tabby: I love all of the Pilot Program equally.

Also Tabby: I don’t care for Jammer.

[eyra]

it is my firm conviction that tagging is a courtesy that should be managed at the author's discretion - it is not a requirement from AO3 and therefore it's not something that a reader should expect or demand.

[astrogirlythings]

[night-market-if]

The Night Market's Forgotten Memories

After book one, a @mooreaux and I underwent a project where all of the extra Patreon stories that were post chapter shorts for that novel, were compiled together. There, I edited them all, wrote more, and then sent @mooreaux over a list of ideas for art pieces to go with the stories. Containing over fifty stories and over forty images, this is the perfect little evening of reading.

To purchase, buy here

Featured above is the Eternal Staircase. :)