#the game reuses so much maps so anything new is a welcome addition

[randomnameless]

I've been wondering this for a while seeing a lot of your anti-Edelgard posts: what do you think of the events in the CF chapter Lady of Deceit? Edelgard continuing to lie to her friends about the Slitherers is the point of no return for me personally, after the chapter I had to nearly force myself to finish the route (well, from a story perspective. Field of Revenge and To the End of a Dream are great in terms of gameplay, and I admit I find the "stop fighting/no you" dialogue exchange between El and Dimitri so ridiculous it loops around to being good).

Are those posts really anti posts?

Anyways, I liked it, because it's fairly coherent with the character we've been presented.

IIRC in her version of Chapter 12 - when we attack GM - as soon as Emile pops up, Billy is shocked and she promises she'll tell them later on why Emile is on our side now...

But she never reveals a thing to Billy.

It's actually Hubert who does, in his paralogue, explaining why they had to side with Uncle and his pals, etc etc.

The Jpop song of the game explains it in better words, but Supreme Leader during her academy days was hiding with a mask and lying about her feelings, and even in Tru Piss, when we're not in Academy Days anymore, Supreme Leader is still hiding her feelings with lies. As you pointed it out, is it because she knows her "allies" didn't chose to side with her, but followed Billy? Or because she doesn't deem necessary to reveal the "truth" about her fight to her BESF comrades?

I ultimately think she knows her alliance with Uncle'n'pals sucks, just like Baldo and Waldi who are never ever mentionned in the War phase of the game, and most likely believes her "friends" of the BESF would ditch her the second they learn about it.

(and as we discover in the other routes, they actually don't! Ferdie doesn't mind fighting side by side with a "war asset" when he protects the bridge!)

Still, I must say the Jeritza thing irked me more when I played this route, because it was before the update where you could play with him! So it was just "hey it's that random we fought against who joins us as a green unit for this map", and then he is never re-used lol.

I loved Field of Revenge - it has the perfect amount of absurd double standard (see how the kingdom knights's transformation is portrayed and compare it to, again, Ferdie not minding fighting side by side with a "war asset"), Hubert dissing Dimitri for not fighting "fairly" and not saying them "hello" before the fight, the beheading scene, Dimitri and Dedue having a scene as they fight side by side when Dedue dies first, as opposed to any other vassal/lord relationship - and the plothax "Rhea and her forces were late because her sandals aren't water-proof and apparently rain prevents her from transforming in a dragon".

But yeah, even if some quotes are, uh, well, there lol, I really liked this map!

[bill-beauxquais]

Blogging my Bravely Default II Playthrough

Since I’ve been pretty involved in the fandom on this blog in the past years (you can check my 'bravely series' tag) I figured I would go an journal my playthrough of the long awaited sequel.

I will journal from chapter to chapter and I’m going abolutely blind (I played the two demos, and didn’t look at any media), so you will only get spoiled up to where I’m at each time.

Without further ado, here are my thoughts on the prologue chapter under the read more

Obviously, this will contain spoilers up to the end of the prologue. Please refrain from adding spoilers to this post, I wish to experience the game blind.

Overall opinion: It’s a positive surprise. I remember the miffed reactions to the demo and was myself not that much impressed, but I did hear the reviews had been mostly positive this past week. As this is only the prologue, I’m staying cautious, but the game was full of good surprises and looks promising.

Gameplay: Very fun to play, dare I say on par with the original, even maybe better. I will miss the old turn order, but this one work just as well, albeit differently. A lot more focus on the strategy and job synergy, and even right now, bosses demand a lot more diverse strategies, and it’s usually near impossible to know what to expect when you start a new fight.

I love how mure more rich the overworld is, instead of a badly textured world map, we now have actual terrain to explore, with hidden treasures (but like, better hidden than in BSel), and a lot of interesting, diverse and fun sidequests. Picking up the game, I actually need to ask myself “alright, what am I going to do this session?” instead of just blindly following the story. The addition of overworld monsters also encourage strategy (I’m literally beating a boss just with poison right now, because it just seemed to have way too high of a defense in both physical and magical) and will probably prove a precious ressource when grinding is needed.

There is a lot of variety in the common mobs, even in the very first area, which is a nice touch as well. If the rest of the game isn’t just recolors, we’ll be looking at a nice rich ecosystem.

I also like that the weaknesses aren’t as obvious as usual, and that not every flower is weak to fire for example. It mixes it up.

I welcome the return of sleep-mode play as well, even in this different form (although it seems we’ve all been naming Seth “Seth”, which looks goofy in the reports)

For now, I’m training everyone in every classes, but in general I try to avoid the “expected” roles (like, making Gloria into the white mage. I wanted to resist it for Agnès, I will resist it for Gloria). I would also like to avoid making a carbon copy of my BD team as well.

Writing: Nothing much happened in the prologue, I did hear the beginning would be slow paced, but I feel like the bases are there, and the writing seems more solid than the previous games. It’s hard to shake the feeling that it’s just the og_team.02, but I enjoy the characters for now, and they don’t seem to be slapped-on tropes like some other JRPGs

I really liked how the last cutscene of the prologue played (more on that lower). Even though it was obvious that it would happen sooner rather than later (op mentor can’t be babying us the whole game), I felt it was written well enough.

I am playing with japanese dubs, and I rather like it for now, especially Gloria.

Somehow, the dialogue and interactions reminds me of Bravely’s old universe, even though it’s a new one. In the themes and the vocabulary, it just feels Bravely still.

Writing - Theories: (Yes I will theorise the heck out of that game as I go).

Calling it now that Sloan isn’t actually dead. No body, no dead, no sirree.

From Dag and Selene’s redeeming blurb in the enemy sheets, I’m also expecting the usual twist where the asterisk holders are more of a grey area, and even turn nice guys at some point. After all, this time they do not always die after you beat them, and they even get their own freelancer design (which is an addition I LOVED in the demo already and that Bravely Asterisk’ lore needed), hinting that they will probably be reused in the story.

However, they *did* kill Horten on screen, so this time we might actually see the evil ones being punished, and the good ones being redeemed, instead of an “all or nothing” approach.

I WILL mention that I tried letting myself die during the Crystal Choice, and it just gave me a game over screen. Kind of ruins the “true” cutscene and shatters the illusion of choice, here. I’m expecting something like that to play into the 4th wall twist, if this game is anything like the previous two.

Graphics: Ah, the infamous graphics. To be fair, I have grown used to them by now, and I quite enjoy them. It is also to be commended that they’re doing way crazier cutscenes now, and the fact you can see your outfits at all time is such a nice touch. It feels a lot more dynamic, and as of now, it hasn’t looked ridiculous or uncanny.

The hand-drawn cities look beautiful and more complex (albeit slightly) than the old ones, which is also good.

Performance: (playing on a lite) Kind of surprised of how the game runs: the game struggle before each party chat and most cutscenes. Nothing game breaking or anything yet, but I do hope it gets patched eventually. It can also be very slow to load after a game over, or entering a town.

Music: I’m not quite as sold on the music as I was on Bravely 1 or Octopath, but I do like what I’m hearing for now. There’s no criticism here to be making, the tracks are good. I’m just kind of lamenting that they don’t stick to my brain quite as much.

[baconpal]

Bravely Default and BD2

Here it is, the partially prompted bravely default rant/retrospective/whatever the fuck!

With the announcement and demo of bravely default 2 out now for a bigger market than the original game ever had, I feel that as a massive fan of the original I should put some amount of effort into explaining what the appeal of the original is, why bravely second missed a lot of the appeal, and why bravely default 2 has been very, very worrying so far.

If you care about any of that, come on in and I'll try to actually avoid spoilers this time and make this a more legitimate recommendation of a game than usual.

THE APPEAL OF BRAVELY DEFAULT The games obviously have a beautiful art style, especially when it comes to the backgrounds. Every city is like a painting, a beautifully composed shot that you see from just one direction to give you one very strong impression. While the overworld and dungeons are fully 3d and do not have as strong of an artistic impact, they are still very competent and have good colors and cohesive elements. The character design, including the job outfits, the monsters, and all the villains are just top notch. Simple, evocative designs that make the most of the 3DS' limited hardware and build upon the teams skill in making handheld games look good. (its the same team that did the ff3 remake and 4 heroes of light, which looks absolutely kino on original DS) The music is also consistently excellent, with great use of motifing, a full and varied orchestra, and many good slow paced tracks for most of the non-combat segments. Shit like "Conflict's Chime" being the main battle theme, "Infiltrating Hostile Territory" being a common dungeon theme, and "That person's name is" as the rival boss themes makes even the seemingly repetitive songs a constant joy to listen to.

The story is pretty decent, it's not the best part of the game, and there are definitely some aspects of the story some people loathe, but the characters (specifically ringabel fuckin love him) are pretty good and the make for an enjoyable experience. The side material like D's journal are really well done and integrate into the main narrative well for how tucked away and ignored it is.

The gameplay and systems are also some of the best of any RPG I've played, and I've played far too many. The job system from ff3 and 5 is brought to an even greater depth with the addition of universal job abilities, allowing any character of any job make use of another jobs features to create an endless depth to strategy. The way various jobs can mingle together, and how no job is completely perfect on its own makes for very compelling team composition and unit design. The extensive amount of jobs helps as well for replay value and for assuring that no easy winning strategy is found by all players.

The BP system makes battles take on a very unique pacing as the player and enemies can choose to save up turns or blow them all at once to make more complicated strategies possible, or to make the most of an enemies vulnerabilities. This powerful option gives the player a meaningful way to capitalize on their knowledge of the game, while also allowing them to make truly detrimental mistakes. That may sound not good if you're a fucking baby, but nobody wants an RPG you cant lose, but losing because you fucked up is much better than losing because the enemies are just stronger than you or anything to that effect.

But the single greatest part of bravely defaults, which creates the games wonderful balance and unique design philosophy, is that the player is expected to hit the level cap long before finishing the game. Reaching level 99 should occur somewhere just after the middle of the game, at the point where the player has access to almost every job and has encountered almost every type of threat. Reaching level 99 brings with it a certain security, the implication that from then on, all enemies will also be level 99, and that any failure to defeat an enemy will be a result of a bad strategy or the players own mistakes. The game is not easy, and is certainly intended for veteran final fantasy players used to the games with job systems and changing up your entire party to combat a single encounter. Leveling up is not a slow grind part of the game, as you have a lot of control over the speed and frequency of battles, and it is not difficult to keep up with the games level curve.

The other layer to this unique design is that the game expects you to "cheat", or use strategies that would be overpowered and frowned upon in most other games. Bravely default easily expects you to know or discover strategies such as: applying a status to all enemies and killing every enemy with that status using another spell, cycling a counter move over and over to have a nearly invincible party member, applying a healing attribute to a self-damaging character to get huge damage at little cost, casting reflect and dangerous spells on your own party to bounce them at the enemy, or duplicating a move that does maximum damage 15 times in a row. The game builds all of its encounters with the knowledge that your team will be the maximum level and that you will be using the most vile tactics you can come up with, and the game will do the same. Bosses and even common enemies will employ equally vile tactics using the exact same moves that you have access to, meaning you can learn from your enemies or quickly grasp the enemies strategy through your own experiences. One of the late game dungeons is entirely optional, but involves several fights against parties of 4 just like your, using the same jobs and skills you have gained during the game as a perfect test of your ability to develop counter-strategies, instead of relying on your own overpowered tactics. This type of design is really not something you find in many games due to the prominence of grinding or the lack testing strategies, and it is the most true appeal of bravely default to me.

BRAVELY SECOND EXISTS I GUESS So bravely second, a direct sequel to bravely default, definitely is a video game. It uses the original game as a base to generate more content, but completely misses the appeal of the original, and the new content added makes the experience even less focused. Overall, it's still a fairly alright RPG, but it fails to follow up on bravely default in a meaningful way or to provide as compelling of a gameplay experience. Here's some of the things it fucked up.

The game reuses almost everything the original game had, including the same music, world map, and most of the original's towns and dungeons, while adding a few of it's own. Going through areas you've been before never feels good, and the new areas lack the quality or brevity of the original game, leading to uninteresting areas that overstay their welcome, despite being the only break from repetitively reused content.

This extends to the classes but in an even worse sense. One important trait of the original jobs is that they were not perfect by themselves. While every job provided some useful abilities to be shared with other classes, or provided a good base with which to make a character, no class was without flaws. The new classes in bravely second are a lot of the opposite, they are closed loops that think of everything they could have to make a good standalone character. The 4 starter classes you get in bravely second are all brand new, and there's almost no reason to use any class besides those 4 as they are just insanely good. The priest and magician specifically augment magic in a way that makes spells infinity scalable into the end game, completely trampling on any other magic classes territory without needing the extra effort of grinding a new class out. Many of the new job concepts are actually really interesting, like going back in time to return to a healthier state, or a class that changes the stats and attributes of all units in a battle, allowing for all new kinds of strategies; but these classes lack any opportunity to be used to their full potential since they don't mesh well with other jobs and are limited by their self-centered design.

Another completely missed aspect of the original is the level curve discussed before. Bravely second only really requires you get somewhere in the ballpark of level 60-70 to comfortably beat the final boss, and getting too leveled up is really hard to avoid if you are plan to try out various jobs.

Second also fails to account for how many incredibly strong strategies the player can come up with, and even introduces some of its own strategies that it has no way to counteract, such as halfsies (the first skill the first class gets) pretty much splitting the game in two by tripling the value of items like phoenix downs, and allowing for fool-proof strategies by making 1 character focus entirely on defense, effectively making the party unkillable. Essentially, if you play second after having played the original (like any sane person would) then you will absolutely destroy the game with no sense of satisfaction.

The story is also a large step down, enough to become an annoyance, as the writing style changes to a strange romantic comedy situation with, for lack of a better term please forgive my sin, anime writing, but like bad anime writing, ya know the kind of shit that makes people write off all anime cus a lot of it is awkward and unpleasant to listen to. The story tries to mess with some big concepts like "what if new game + was a real thing???" and time travel and shit like that but it doesn't mesh with the tone the rest of the game has and that tone doesn't mesh with the world or art style and it's just a mess.

BRAVELY DEFAULT 2 SEEMS KINDA POOPIE SO FAR So unfortunately, the big appeal of bravely default being part of it's end game makes it hard to judge how 2 is gonna go given we only have a demo of the beginning, but given that the original team behind bravely default has slowly been stripped out of the series as it goes on, the outlook is bleek.

Most immediately obvious is that the artstyle has made a horrible transition from handheld to console, somehow even worse than pokemon. The areas are all fully 3d and lack the style or compositional excellence of bravely default, and the outside environment look like asset store products. The small proportioned characters with simple features to be readable on a small screen have been replaced with identically proportioned characters with excessive detail and ugly features, and look horrible up close on a big screen. Only the negatives of the art style have made it over, and everything good has been made unsavory. The character and enemy design overall is much worse as a result, everything is messy, unclear, and clashes with everything else. It's an absolutely shocking downgrade.

The characters themselves are overly hammy and feel like shallow attempts to have a similar party dynamic to the original without having identical character types, and the writing as a whole doesn't seem to have improved from second, which was already quite a step down from the original.

The gameplay also has not done anything different or interesting yet, and seems to be selling itself to people haven't heard of or gotten enough of the BP system. Enemies being on the overworld as opposed to random encounters shows they have dropped the player agency over encounter frequency, which is dumb. The battles lack any of the flow the original had, especially when using the battle speed option, as the camera does not present everything very well and changes position often as a result. Overall, I have not enjoyed the bravely default 2 demo and feel it shows nothing but a continued decline in the series that likely should have just been a single game. With the release date being set for sometime this year, I feel there is no chance any amount of player feedback could save the game or even begin to pull it in the right direction, as it seems to be fundamentally flawed with an inescapable feeling of shovelware.

SO WHAT? Basically, all I wanted to say here is that the original bravely default is a very unique experience I think every RPG fan should give a good chance (and just do all the optional stuff during the "repetitive" part of the game, it's where all the best content is you bozo) and that the sequels are NOT the same experience. I guess it's kind of mean to just say "hey don't buy or like this new thing cus its not like the old thing" but people should know why there's a bravely default 2 in the first place, and should fight for what made the original great. I worry that BD goes down the same sad path that FF did, becoming a completely hollow, middling series that strayed so far from it's home that a whole new series had to be made to give the fans of the old style a place to go.

Thanks for reading, and hope you got something out of it.

[gascon-en-exil]

I Liked Fates Before It Was Cool!: The Opening

Prologue

Here begins my run of Fates, in which I react to things that I believe merit either praise or criticism and that hopefully haven’t been thoroughly picked over yet hundreds of times by everyone else in the fandom. I’ll be doing each route in the sequence I used last time, with gameplay details to follow as they come up. To answer @damoselcastel, I’ll be doing an all-male run, and it does indeed suck that the game screws this over a bit at the very beginning by forcing me to take Felicia over Jakob first. Breeding will come when I feel like it, more to have extra chapters to play through than anything.

Prologue

In what I assume will continue to be a series trend going forward, all of the 3DS FEs open somewhat in the abstract, including a flash forward to a future event. Fates’s particular take is both the most surreal and the least dependent on shock value, as the events it depicts are only several chapters away rather than near endgame. Azura picks up her Lady of the Lake associations right from the start, there’s a very early glimpse at what will be eventually revealed to be Valla, and Ryoma and Xander and Xander’s ludicrously acrobatic horse square off to set up this setting’s central conflict. The chapter proper is (fittingly) dreamlike, with surreal music and a high-energy scenario that begins in medias res and doesn’t entirely follow the normal rhythms of FE combat. I have absolutely no idea how this would come across to a newcomer to the series - I got my hand held through Lyn Normal Mode, cut me some slack - but I imagine it would be disorienting.

Chapter 1

That’s apparently official concept art of Nohr. Reasonable worldbuilding, what’s that?

The in-game presentation starts off rather less absurd. Hell, if it weren’t for the ominous castle rooftop setting of Xander’s training session one could almost find Corrin’s slice-of-life interactions with their servants and their Nohrian family quaint. Xander is just a drama queen like that. This fight calls back to Path of Radiance and New Mystery, which also start off with training sessions against significantly more powerful named characters. For Birthright it also forms a narrative bookend, but I’ll get to that in due time. I have Feelings about the presentation of Xander...and not just because he’s my husbando either.

I like that Corrin’s retainers are domestics first and combatants second unlike those of the other royals, because it stresses that they’ve been isolated in a non-combat role during their upbringing, their exposure to Nohr’s allegedly spartan military culture limited to sparring with Gunter and Xander. I have no idea how that would be enough for them to survive when they evidently live in Mordor, but then Nohr is the source of the most consistently sloppy worldbuilding in Fates so at least we get that established right away.

Oh, and Lilith is here. There’s never a point anywhere in this game where Lilith’s character is competently handled, so I have a tendency to forget she exists unless she’s on-screen. Here she’s just an unassuming stable girl with an unusual design, and Elise makes an incestuous insinuation in her direction that’s only funny if you played the appropriate DLC. 

Chapter 2

Structural contrast with the towering Hoshidan royal palace aside, I don’t entirely get how Krakenberg works. A dragon did it?

Anyway, Corrin gets an under-explained and clearly evil magical sword from his shamelessly homicidal father only to balk at the thought of killing anyone with it. Leo salvaging this faux pas isn’t the silliest example of Corrin not understanding the basic concept of lying - it’s presumably easier to fake someone’s death with magic than with a giant sword - but it’s definitely up there. The Nohrian royals on the other hand have no trouble with such things based on their traumatic but mostly implied experiences at court. Important to note that everyone here up to and including the prisoners of war calls out Corrin for their sheltered worldview; their development from here on out really is dependent on the player’s choice of route. I vastly prefer this approach to Awakening’s for explaining why the Avatar is such a relatively blank slate - almost no amnesia necessary this time.

And while they appear in most chapters, I want to praise Dragon Veins here for being a really cool concept that doesn’t get as much love as it should. Draconic or otherwise superhuman bloodlines in FE are usually expressed in gameplay with the ability to wield certain legendary weapons, and while that also makes an appearance in Fates Dragon Veins represent more dramatically visible utility. They really make a difference in some chapters, and I’d like to see them reuse the concept in future games where it would be a logical addition (which would be most of them since humans with dragon blood pop up all over this series).

Chapter 3

I chose this image because I want everyone to appreciate as I do that Hans dresses like the world’s most tasteless leatherman. A harness and straps that show off all the wrong bits, and it’s in purple. Not even the overall weirdly fetishistic look of this game’s berserkers can excuse that.

But aside from that, Hans sucks. Iago also sucks. Less characters than plot devices that pop up whenever there’s a need for someone to act completely despicable to move the conflict along, there’s no way to spin them in a way that sounds like they contribute anything positive to the narrative. Case in point: in this chapter Hans single-handedly reignites hostilities between Nohr and Hoshido by Leeroy Jenkins-ing his way through the chapter and later (possibly) killing Gunter, with the only interesting caveat that he claims to have done so at Garon’s behest. And sure, Garon is also flat over-the-top villainy incarnate, but he at least has gravitas and a master playing a long game that arguably succeeds in two of the routes. Hans and Iago are just two more in the line of FE villains with flat motivations and personalities who lack even the good grace to be attractive, but unlike Desaix and Darin and Chagall and others like them they stick around in the story long after they’ve worn out their welcome. Did Nohr really need not one but three flat antagonists in its ranks around for most of the game?

I haven’t even gotten into the first appearance of Camilla’s...issues surrounding Corrin or whatever the dimension-hopping hell Lilith pulls with her invocations to presumably deceased dragon “gods” now that she reveals her true form. This is really the first chapter to offer a hint of how disjointed and frequently contrived Fates’s stories are going to end up, saved only by the very end when Rinkah puts this game’s new blunt weapon category to its logical use. Not like the game wants us to feel bad for Corrin....

Chapter 4

...because Hoshido is paradise. And also Takumi.

Everyone knows the story, both as it’s explicitly told and as can be read through the lines. The writers weren’t afraid to let their biases show, the localizers and the Western fandom did a fair amount to mitigate that with some bias of our own, and the final product is one big mess that fails to make logical sense in-universe and teeters on the edge of real-world two-way racism. Here we’re introduced to Castle Shirasagi, glimmering and verdant and awash in cherry blossoms, as well as Azura, Corrin’s foil in Stockholm Syndrome. But it’s all good, because Mikoto is tranquil and peace-loving and enforces her tranquility through a plot contrivance magical barrier that is just one of many examples in Fates of magic not working the way it does in the rest of the series (or at least I can’t think of anything else like this, correct me if I’m wrong). We don’t learn just why Nohr is so hellbent on invading Hoshido that they’d resort to summoning soulless monsters to do so until much later (and only in Birthright of all routes!). For now they just sound like unprovoked aggressors, and the Hoshidan royals Corrin’s true and loving family.

However, what I really wanted to bring up for this chapter is how oddly it’s structured, such that it never fails to throw me off a bit. It opens in an unnamed Fire Tribe village in a snowy area of Hoshido, which might I mention is the only point in the game we see anything of the Fire Tribe other than Rinkah herself. Considering all the time we spend in multiple routes with the Wind and Ice Tribes, that lack of detail strikes me as peculiar. Kaze then brings Corrin to the Hoshidan palace where Ryoma and Mikoto reveal the truth, then it’s immediately back to the snowy north to rescue Hinoka and Sakura from Faceless before returning to the palace to meet Azura. Was there any reason the Faceless fight couldn’t have happened before Corrin left the village, and the reveal and trip to Shirasagi left for after the chapter map and partially in response to Hinoka’s OOC crying fit?

I also hate maps where high-powered NPCs go around stealing kills. Kaze barely got to see any action this chapter, poor guy.

Chapter 5

Props to this manakete design, which is unlike anything else in the series and manages to work in elements of Anankos and Corrin’s weird outfit. No props to the scripting of the thing, as after this chapter Corrin may as well not even be a mankete except for gameplay purposes (which are minimal anyway unless you need them to tank something). You’d think learning that you can turn into a dragon would leave more of an impact on...anyone really, but nope. I guess it technically becomes relevant again in Kana’s paralogue, but that’s as tangential and ultimately irrelevant as everything else involving the kids.

There’s a lot else going on in this chapter, but I’m sorry to say that neither Mikoto’s death nor the obliteration of a large chunk of Hoshido’s capital lands as powerfully as they were meant to considering Corrin and the audience have spent all of 1.5 chapters with these people. This isn’t anything like Elbert or Greil’s death scene or even remake!Rudolf’s for that matter - at least that one came with a shocking twist that was responded to appropriately. It’s hard to even appreciate these events from the perspectives of the Hoshidan royals because they’re still pretty new characters in the player’s mind, though with the hindsight of Conquest I can maybe sympathize with Takumi here at the beginning of his downward spiral.

Corrin also picks up their legendary sword in a way that feels extremely random. I guess the Yato was inside the statue that got blown up? Weird place to keep a divine peace-bringing relic, that’s all I’m saying.

Branch of Fate

Despite some early warning signs and a few slight missteps, I’m happy to say that this story moment works. It’s a good thing that it does too, as this is the defining moment of FE14 in everything from its marketing to its game design to its core themes. The setup is rushed and tense and allows only Corrin, i.e. the intended player self-insert, full knowledge of the weight of the choice put before them, as none of the other royals are aware that they are all in a way family to the person they’re now abruptly forcing to pick a side. Familial connections (biological or otherwise) may not be a narrative hook that grabs me personally, but nonetheless this scene sticks with you. There is no easy choice, and the consequences of any of them immediately define the direction of the story.

This is not to say that all three of the iterations of Chapter 6 that follow succeed equally well, but that’s for other posts...including the next one, which will kick off Birthright.

Next time: Birthright Chapter 6 - 11

[nealdanderson]

 So yeah, y’know how when Nintendo announced Samus Returns and another Prime game and I said they’d better not disappoint? Well, Samus Returns disappointed and I’d go so far as to say that it’s easily the worst 2D entry in the series. I’ll get the good out of the way first. The mechanics are fluid and easy to control- the parry system in particular is a fresh and welcome addition to vary up the experience. If these mechanics were implemented into a brand new game, rather than a remake of a game that’s already had a great remake(sorry Nintendo, AM2R did beat you to the punch, and did the job much better), it would be the makings of something very good. The inclusion of teleporters sounds good in theory, but seems like a poor excuse compared the flawless interconnectivity of the worlds of Super Metroid. 

If I had to pick one word to describe the overall experience of the game, it would be TEDIOUS. While the metroid encounters in the original Metroid 2 are more than anything, a brief inconvenience(hardly the threatening vibe they should possess), they were just that- brief. The metroid encounters in Samus Returns all take the same amount of time, even after getting used to the same patterns over and over again, and each subsequent stage of its lifecycle is just as boring and drawn out as the last. They aren’t difficult or challenging, but rather an exercise in patience. The gamma metroids were particularly frustrating to deal with, as they’d run away mid fight, forcing you to guess which direction they fled to, prolonging an already joyless experience. The boss fights are a different kind of annoying, as learning their patterns becomes an irritating exercise of trial and error. 

I appreciate the original Metroid 2 as something a bit different, even if, as a Metroid game, it’s a bit unsatisfying and misguided. The main reason behind the black sheep status of M2 is its removal of two concepts that were integral to Metroid 1- namely nonlinearity and backtracking. M2 abandoned M1′s sprawling maze-like map for something a lot more straightforward in the form of one long central shaft descending through SR388. Because of this one way tunnel, there was a complete lack of backtracking to procure previously inaccessible items. However in the end, M2 was a cohesive experience- the linear map lent itself well to the linear progression and lack of backtracking. 

Samus Returns on the other hand has the same linear map, but has many items you have to come back to later on. These two ideals combat each other in a way that makes backtracking again, incredibly tedious. Every time I got a new ability- wave beam, super missiles...etc. I would go back to see if they could be used to unlock previously unreachable items, but due to a lack of conveyance of the scope of your abilities, I wasted time backtracking for no reason. The incredibly frequent interruption of loading times for teleporting and elevators only added to this feeling of frustration. AM2R smartly approached this problem by sticking the fast warp points at the very end of the game, leading you to explore and collect previous items uninhibited. 

Graphically, Returns feels like a budget title, some environments look really good while others are very bland, and the character models are generally subpar. There’s also no excuse for a 2017 Remake of a 1991 gameboy game to significantly less enemy variety. While the original M2′s music is generally not well liked, it contributed to a more cohesively desoalte and almost horror-like vibe. Returns, desperate to imitate the overplayed aesthetics of Super Metroid(my all time favorite game, don’t get me wrong), reuses tired themes and environments that have no place on SR388.

For an excellent analysis on how each incarnation of Metroid 2 handles things differently to varying degrees of success, please watch this vid by Mark Brown.

https://youtu.be/8WkEoYvlUF0

SPOILERS AHEAD-

SPOILERS AHEAD-

SPOILERS AHEAD-

Also, Ridley...wtf. Beyond Ridley being redesigned to look somehow even more lame and being such a joke of an overused character(a character that should’ve died with Super), its inclusion as a tacked on end boss completely decimates the effectively somber feeling of the original.  Ugh, why.

[thesnhuup]

Stepping Up Our Game: Climate Change Urgency Heats Up

SNHU MFA graduate Elizabeth Rush is a Pulitzer finalist for her book Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore. It’s a carefully observed survey of America’s vulnerable coasts and the looming (already here) impact of climate change and sea levels on our coastal eco-systems and, disproportionally, on our most vulnerable communities. It also reads as part memoir, elegy, and horror story. That last bit for the way it captures a growing dread (and anxiety and depression) that climate change is worse than we knew, here now, and we are losing the battle.

With unprecedented wild fires raging in the Amazon and the Arctic, record heat waves, major cities about to run out of water (Chennai and Cape Town among them), and climate science deniers in positions of political and regulatory power, it’s hard to feel optimistic.

It’s got me to thinking about my personal choices, my spheres of influence (leading a large organization, for example), and what SNHU can do for its part. Here’s the thing – in article after article, there is a theme that success does not require us all to go to extremes in our daily practices. If we all changed our daily practices just X%, we could have real impact. Three examples in the recent news:

If we drove 10% less than we do today, it would be the equivalent of taking 28 coal-fired power plants off line. Ten percent feels doable to me.

One trip from NYC to London produces 0.67 tons of CO2, an amount equivalent to about 10% of the annual CO2 production or impact of someone living in England (and more than a year’s impact for someone living in Ghana – the developed world is terrible for the environment). It raises the question: can I fly less often?

An alarming UN report on the impact of agriculture on the climate (and the shocking amount of food that we waste every year, thus wasting all the water, labor, land, and resources used to produce it) included this observation: “The WRI estimates that if people in the U.S. and other heavy meat-eating countries reduced their consumption of beef (and other meat from ruminants) to about 1.5 burgers per person, per week, it would ‘nearly eliminate the need for additional agricultural expansion (and associated deforestation), even in a world with 10 billion people.’ “

And we’d all be a helluva lot more healthy, by the way.

The heartening thought I had reading these articles is that I can work on all three of those items and more. I can figure out how to drive less (electric bike, here we come!), to take fewer plane trips, and to move to a more plant-based diet (my family physician will be pleased).

Climate change can feel so overwhelming that one simply stops reading, blocks it out, and trades depression or denial for actual action – a form of surrender. One can also go to the other extreme, translating urgency into only wearing rope sandals, vacationing only in places to which one can walk (anyone know of a great vacation rental in Goffstown?), and eating turnips in winter. The point of the aforementioned articles is that rather than get extreme, if we all could simply be more thoughtful and reasonable, we could actually stabilize things and give the planet some hope. And it’s getting easier. We are seeing more hybrids and now electrical vehicles (EV) on the market, the cost of solar is coming down and is more of a success story nationally than people often recognize, there is now a genuine market for “green” products and they are getting better.

We have an old house in Maine and by adding solar, we reduced our monthly electric bill to just $29 and that’s for the connection to the grid. My hybrid vehicle allows me to do up to 18 miles per day on a charge, which means that on most days I don’t have to use fuel. I love to cook and now I compost – it’s not that hard and the garden loves it. There’s nothing righteous in any of that effort – it’s hardly effort at all – and I need to do so much more. So I’m going to set some goals for myself:

I fly a lot – both for work and for pleasure – and I am going to try to reduce that by at least 25 percent. I’ve counted my domestic and international flights last year and a rough count (recognizing that a single trip often includes multiple flights and connections) suggests something like 60 flights (a number of them exceeding ten hours in length). I can do better.

I’m going for the plant-based diet thing. I do love a good burger and if the UN says I can have one now and then, I won’t feel guilty for partaking.

Our next car will be an EV and we’ll move to solar panels on our house in Manchester. This fall for the latter.

There are a lot of small things that are pretty easy – turns out that it’s easy to wash out a plastic sandwich bag and reuse it, to get a Dunks reusable cup for my iced coffee, to pass on using a plastic straw (I have my metal one when I remember), and to replace the lawn with more interesting and native landscaping (that bees would welcome).

I’ll keep working on my list and I know I won’t be nearly as good at this as some of my friends and family members. I’ll still insist on an occasional family vacation to someplace strange and far away and an In-and-Out burger when in California, but my goal is not absolutism, my goal is to cut back on my carbon footprint, to do my part. As SNHU’s president, I want our organization to also do its part.

Which is why I am going to challenge SNHU’s leadership team to develop an analysis of what it would take to make SNHU carbon neutral within five years. We’ve already made a lot of progress. We have for years had a large renewable energy purchasing plan. We are starting to switch our fleet to EV. We are taking down old, inefficient buildings. I want us to look at our facilities, but also to look at our travel and explore linking our national locations with higher-end video conferencing. We once explored a massive solar array for campus and the cost and technology at the time were not great – let’s revisit that idea. I’m sure there are small, everyday things for which we could do better and we should, but I think there are some really big wins available to us.

I’ve asked Mary Dukakis, our Vice President for Facilities and Operational Services, and Steve Johnson, our Dean of The School of Arts and Sciences, to co-chair a Task Force to outline the road map for what it would take to be fully carbon neutral by 2025. There is also a Sustainability Planning Group, being supported by the Sandbox team, that is working on developing a sustainability plan for the University, beyond carbon neutrality. In other words, we are upping the ante. I will make available to them whatever resources they need and I suspect they will have many volunteers to join in the work.

Most of our employees and a majority of our students have kids. Many have grandkids (all Pat and I have on that front so far is a malamute and while we love Sam, could someone talk to our kids…). We’d all sacrifice anything, do anything, for the safety and welfare of our kids and grandkids. If we don’t get climate change addressed — and quickly – our kids and grandkids will live not only in an unfriendly world, but one that might not sustain life. Chunks of the planet are rapidly getting there now, faster than earlier models predicted. It’s a terrifying vision. We can despair or we can do something. We will do something.

https://ift.tt/2UrDYIo from President's Corner https://ift.tt/34kjExf via IFTTT

[365footballorg-blog]

Atlanta City Guide: Everything you need to know for 2018 MLS All-Star

July 23, 20187:26PM EDT

We’re less than a week away from this 2018 MLS All-Star Game presented by Target, and people in Atlanta are already mad at me. There’s no way to get this perfect. What’s beautiful about Atlanta – and one of the many reasons it’s the greatest city in the world – is that inside the sprawl are handfuls of sub-cities, each littered with their own distinctive neighborhoods. And yet a culture persists in all of them that is in someway uniquely, and indisputably, Atlanta.

My Atlanta experience is different than the next Atlantan’s, and that person’s will be different from the next; however, I still feel capable of guiding you through your short stay, hosted by Atlanta United. There will inevitably be disagreements. But if having a discussion about where to go, what to do and what to eat doesn’t devolve into an argument about which is the fourth-best barbecue restaurant in Atlanta (it’s Heirloom), then have we even had a discussion about Atlanta? The good news is, even the fourth-best of things in Atlanta are amazing. You can’t go wrong. I’m just here to give you some ideas.

Where to Eat

Home grown GA | http://www.homegrownga.com/

Let’s start with the basics. After afternoons of attempting to chase down Zlatan to get even the grainiest of pictures of him on your Insta-story (that’s why you’re here, right?) and taking in everything else this week has to offer, you’re going to be hungry. Since there are no other MLS teams in the South [Yet. We see you, Nashville!—ed.], I’m going to assume that if you’re using this guide, y’all ain’t from around here. Fortunately, there are plenty of places to get authentic Southern food or great food with a Southern twist.

Breakfast

If you’re a breakfast/brunch/insane-amounts-of-calories-early-in-the-day person, it’s hard to go wrong going to places like Homegrown in Reynoldstown for their signature comfy chicken biscuit, Ria’s Bluebird in Grant Park for pancakes, The Flying Biscuit Cafe in Candler Park for (duh) the biscuits, and, if you’re on the Westside, the West Egg Cafe. If you get the option to put pimento cheese on anything, do it. If you’re unsure of what that is, you’re just going to have to trust me.

Lunch and Dinner

For lunch and dinner, there are no shortage of incredible options that, in addition to being delicious, will keep you from bankrupting yourself before the end of the trip. More high-end places exist, but if you’re looking for those ,you’re asking the wrong 20-something writer.

My first recommendation is to go to the massive and extremely popular adaptive reuse project known as Ponce City Market, look at Ponce City Market, watch people who don’t know any better go into Ponce City Market, and then as soon as you can, go across the street to the tiny white building known as Eats for an incredible “Meat-and-3” plate from an Atlanta institution. I recommend you get the jerk chicken for the meat and demand that one of your three sides be collard greens.  

If the intro had you wondering what my top three best barbeque restaurants in Atlanta are, I’ll settle this debate quickly: B’s Cracklin is third, Community Q is first and somewhere in the middle is Fox Bros. All three are phenomenal though.

If you’re looking for a burger and fries, the standard in Atlanta is at Holeman & Finch Public House. Famously, the restaurant sells just 24 of their double cheeseburgers each lunch and dinner. If you don’t want to work that hard for a burger, you can head to their always open Ponce City Market location if you really want to, or you can just find the nearest Grindhouse for a cheaper and equally delicious option. For some of the best fried chicken in America, find a spot at Busy Bee Cafe, The Colonnade or the famous Mary Mac’s Tea Room.

If you can’t decide what you want and you’re looking for multiple options all in one place, Krog Street Market and Sweet Auburn Curb Market have you covered. For ethnic cuisine, head to the legendary Buford Highway and take in any of the 1.3-mile road’s diverse restaurants, especially Pho Dai Loi 2 for incredible Vietnamese.

Late Night

If you’re up late, leave where you’re staying and walk either a half mile to the left or a half mile to right. Either way you’re going to run into a Waffle House. If you’ve never had the pleasure of a late-night trip to Waffle House, you won’t truly be able to appreciate the South until you do. Other options include the Cookout on Moreland Avenue (entirely better in every way than the one on Ponce De Leon), Midway Pub in East Atlanta Village or Delia’s Chicken Sausage Stand.

Speaking of late night . . . 

Where to Drink

The best way to attack Atlanta at night is to go by neighborhood. For a more low-key night, head to East Atlanta Village or Poncey-Highland (which includes the famous Clermont Lounge). For a solid mix of college kids, hipsters and clubs check out Old Fourth Ward. Decatur has plenty of options. Midtown is extremely LGBTQ+ friendly. Head to Buckhead to waste all of your money. Little Five Points and Virginia Highlands each have their own popular hangouts. Like with food, it’s hard to go wrong going out anywhere in Atlanta. Everyone is welcome everywhere.

Additionally, you can take some time to take in some of the South’s best breweries such as Monday Night Brewing, Torched Hop, Sweetwater, Orpheus and Second Self to name a few.

Now if you’re trying to drink a little earlier and catch a match . . . 

Where to Soccer

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Brewhouse Cafe in Little Five Points, one of Atlanta United’s official pub partners, is the most popular soccer bar in town. Midway Pub and Elder Tree in East Atlanta Village both have plenty of scarves on the walls. As an added bonus, Elder Tree houses one of the best and most dangerously seductive drinks in Atlanta with its EAV Sweet Tea.

Meehan’s is an excellent stop if you’re downtown and if you happen to be a Liverpool supporter. Fado Irish Pub locations in Midtown and Buckhead will always have a game on.

If you’re hoping to get into a game rather than watch, check out our now world-famous 5-a-side pitch at the Five Points MARTA Station. You can also bring a ball to the gorgeous Piedmont Park fields and join a game there.

What Else to See and Do

Posing in front of the Innovation Mural on the Beltline. | Courtesy of Atlanta United

Go to Sweet Auburn and visit Martin Luther King Jr.’s house and the King Center. Go see some of the best street art in the world – use the handy map provided by StreetArtMap.org, and checklist these ATLUTD-themed specials:

Go catch a concert at The Masquerade, or Aisle 5, or The Tabernacle or one of the many other brilliant venues. Look at all the used chicken wings on the ground and wonder how they got there and why there are so many of them.

Go to Centennial Olympic Park, remember that Atlanta once hosted the Olympics, and then shell out some money to visit some of the more touristy yet still awesome attractions around the park, like the Georgia Aquarium and other museums that happen to be just down the road from Mercedes-Benz Stadium. Take a short trip up I-75 and climb Kennesaw Mountain for one of the best views in the state.

Walk The BeltLine. Go to Jackson Street Bridge at sunset for the customary picture of Atlanta’s skyline. Go to church organ karaoke at Sister Louisa’s. Go to metal karaoke at Dark Horse. Go see a bad movie at The Plaza Theatre. Get a Frosted Orange at The Varsity.

Go the Atlanta Botanical Gardens. Drive and stay in your car to catch a movie at Starlight Six Drive-In Theater. Get a popsicle from King of Pops. Go find the Dungeon Family House.

Ask a random stranger on the street what to do, they’ll tell you 50 more things. You won’t get bored here, I promise.

How to Get Around

Courtesy of ATLUTD.com

Traffic can be a slog – build in time. Note you can take MARTA straight to the Benz [My ATLUTD season-ticket-holding brother-in-law confirms it’s the best route on gameday.—ed.] And if you’re up for a bike, you can always Ride the Stripes thanks to Atlanta United and Relay Bike Share.

How to Prepare

Know the culturally appropriate response to “Knuck if You Buck” if it comes on. Listen to as much OutKast and Pastor Troy as possible. It’s spelled “y’all” not “ya’ll”. We reserve the right to banish you to Florida if you say “Hotlanta”. Be prepared for Atlanta United fans to be welcoming, hospitable and completely smug about our incredible team and culture. Grits are just ground corn.

That pretty much covers it. Welcome to Atlanta.

Series: 

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Atlanta City Guide: Everything you need to know for 2018 MLS All-Star was originally published on 365 Football

[dreamharvestgames]

Dev Blog - March 2017

Justin - Creative Director

What a month it's been. It's almost all become a bit of a blur due to the number of different things I've been jumping around doing... I guess that's indie dev for you!

Anyway, my month started off with getting a phone call from a certain someone asking us to pitch our game in front of an investment board with the possibility of securing some of the much-needed funding we've been desperately trying to get for the past 12 months+. With this in mind, we went into "oh shit what are we going to do" mode.

We had to prepare a 20-minute presentation that went into details about the game but more importantly our potential sales figures, monetization model and other business stuff. Luckily, I'm a bit obsessive about all of this so I'd actually already prepared all our numbers months before, though this was a good opportunity to update everything based on how other similar games had been performing over the past 6 months or so.

One of the big issues with the investment board was only two out of ten members were actually from the games industry so we had to work extra hard to explain things that I'm sure most of us understand quite well, such as what a Real-Time Strategy (RTS) game is, or what games as a service is.

It was a grueling 20-minute presentation with another 20 minutes of questions from the board.

To take a bit of weight and embarrassment off my shoulders I roped Milcho into coming with me... and he hates public speaking, which I thought was great. I'd be able to take a breather during the presentation and Milcho could take my place shitting in his pants.

All in all, we think it went well and the feedback has been good, though whether we get the money or not is not 100% confirmed yet, at least not officially.

Since the pitch, it's been all hands back on the demo build for Reboot Develop and it's been another great time getting back to my roots of sound design and writing music. One of the most complex sounds I've had to make for the project has been the Transmission Tower level objective for the Skyline level and it's been quite complex getting each of its sounds integrated and triggering exactly how I wanted, but my god it's sounding and looking awesome; though there's still a few tweaks I'd like to make to the sounds and transitions between elements.

I've also been working on new UI sounds in unison for the work that's currently being done on the player feedback systems. Player feedback is super critical and we'd like to be in a position during Reboot Develop where we don’t need to give any help or instructions to people sitting down to test and play the game. It's an ongoing struggle but we'll get there eventually.

Anyway, I've spoken for too long so will let the others take over from now.

Sven - CTO / Lead Programmer

So what have I've been doing since the last update? A lot of different things, what comes to mind right now is:

backend server systems

the game server

replacing some old effects with Unity's new "Post Processing Stack"

a new menu system

some fixes to some old systems

helping with preparing the presentation

Can't really write about everything here as it would end up in a big wall of text that almost no one is interested in (if you are, sorry for not writing about everything). So, I'll just pick two topics, which have been part of my focus this month.

Menu system

Never really took the time to work on a menu system with the 'new' Unity UI system (it has been out for something like 3 years, so it's hard to still call it new). But, it was interesting to play around with it and figure out how to best make transitions between different menu screens (hint: good starting point is here - https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/HOWTO-UIScreenTransition.html). As we're currently working on the design of some of the screens - what I've did won't be in the game for some time.

One thing that came out of this was a nice system for Options/Settings where we now have a system which is easy to use, so adding a new option to the menu and using it became really easy as:

This also takes care of loading/saving the values. Getting the values and getting notified about changes is also really easy:

Maybe I'll polish the code a bit more and make it open source, could be useful for others. The whole thing is a bit more complicated than it seems as it involves code generation (using CodeDOM) which has the big advantage that I can generate all the methods to get the values etc. this makes it easy to use and makes sure you can't really do anything wrong when using it.

Graphics and Post Processing

A few words on Unity's new "Post Processing Stack". If you're a developer who is thinking about upgrading to the "Cinematic Image Effects", which is now considered to be legacy, be aware that some stuff still isn't in there e.g. the included Fog doesn't support height fog yet, also it completely takes control over the fog settings, so once you add the "Post Processing Stack" to your project you won't be able to use the fog settings in the lighting settings. Bloom is missing the "High Quality" mode too.

In our case, we had to mix the old effects and the new stack so we don't use some features, like the height fog. Overall it seems nice and should be the way to go forward. For me the most important thing is that everything is now integrated into one 'effect' and it's no longer a collection of separate effects. This alone should make it possible to gain a bit of performance, simply because some steps can be reused for multiple effects. I'm not worried about the missing stuff as I assume all that will be added at some point and if it isn't the whole thing is open source so you can add whatever you want yourself.

Milcho - Lead Designer / Programmer

Salutations, lots has happened since last time so let's quickly go through it.

Reboot Develop

Reboot Develop is happening next month and we have so much to go through to get a stable build ready. We’ve spent the last two-week crushing bugs and making improvements, like adding unit paths on placement for example:

Upgrades

Currently, we don't have many upgrades designed for our abilities. I've designed at least one upgrade for each ability that we're planning to get in for the develop build. One of them will be on our Artillery building, which will let you launch units across the board.

But that's it from me for today. I hope you got your monthly fix of enlightenment.

Until the end of time, Milcho.

Loic - Art Director / Designer

Following last month’s work on the final look of units, we now have all our in-game playable assets that went from mock-up modelling to their final form, with textures and animations.

I polished some concepts for each of them:

I started concept work on a new environment, the Red Lights District, which you can have a glimpse here:

An additional lead on a Zen Garden environment, where I focused on optimising the number of assets to produce to obtain a harmonious moody enviro at reasonable costs.

I then helped to brainstorm on the UI discussion, focusing on our card system to convey clearly all the information about playable elements, while taking as less space as possible and aiming for a slicker sci-fi look than traditional cards.

We are still finding ideas to compress information in a smarter way, and these cards should soon be very comfortable to read, giving precise information so the player can really understand, by themselves, how the game works, but never overwhelmed or distracted by icons or numbers.

Finally, the next goal is to polish our main environment further, the City Scape, so we can have a benchmark of what the game will look like.

Here is a WIP progression screenshot:

Kelvin - VFX Artist

It's been a really busy month! I've only been able to work part-part-time for Failure, because I'm doing another full-time role elsewhere, so I haven't had much time to check everything off my list. But with the little time I did have, I could create the Transmission Tower's capture FX, the Artillery projectile, and some work in progress Nanite elements.

The Transmission Tower's capture FX was a challenge. We already had an existing FX, but with the addition of Loic's tower animations and Justin's sound design, it really pushed the vision even more. After seeing all the pieces together, we knew we wanted to add even more to the FX, it had to be more epic! While playing Justin's sounds in the background, I was pushing forward with the FX until we got something that felt like it was hitting the field very hard. I'm happy to see where it is right now. We have some adjustments to make to sound and code now that I've adjusted the FX, but I can't wait to see it. I'm also really excited to see Artillery's projectiles flying around the map. The battlefield was really missing something like that, and I can't wait to see what it'll add to the game.

Amelie – UX Designer & Writer

Hello, everyone, I'm the team newbie I guess. So my name is Amélie and I do both writing and UX research, I've been doing UX for about 12 years now, only working in games for the last four or so, and that's when I started developing my skills as a creative writer as well.

For the moment, I'm honestly just really trying to catch up with the number of things the team has done so far and familiarising with the gameplay mechanics and the flow, asking many questions and doing my best to see where the player experience can be optimised. I've written some UX reviews which the team has already implemented or planned to include those recommendations for the next build.

This month I've helped reorganize the information on the Script cards and defining when and how does the player need to access each piece on information about his script, I'm currently working on a wireframe for the Deck builder and very soon I will be doing the lobby. (Read More about the UI Stuff here) 

I love how the team is super welcoming to fresh ideas and suggestions and how everybody is so driven to deliver the best possible game experience, we're all looking forward to this next build and I'll be meeting the guys too in Kings Landing as I go with another very small indie team to present another indie game called Fractal Space, (http://store.steampowered.com/app/435410/), how exciting!

There I hope we can meet a lot of potential players and have them test the game. There is no better UX research than field research, guerrilla style: just have a player sit there and look at what he struggles to understand and how fast he alone adjusts to this new environment. Testing the game in Dubrovnik will give us plenty of material to iterate on the next version of the UI and to validate the stuff we worked hard to do well.

There is plenty more UI and UX improvements that we will be doing before travelling there so this and test preparation should keep me fairly busy, but I look forward to quieter times when I'll be able to dive into the NeuroNet universe and start writing missions and dialogues and find a good voice to fit the fascinating narrative that awaits you!