tldsurvival

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woag. i'm sure this character who i've never heard of before in my life would do completely ethical things to me in my Smart Home and that there are not two games entirely based around why this is a bad idea

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I've played multiple horror games.

Barely jump anymore because I'm so used to jumpscares and seeing - for example a vent - I know what's coming (I know you're hiding in there, Jack the Necromorph)

But no game, no in game monster, no jumpscare ever makes my pulse skyrocket like this:

BEHOLD!

THE ROPE BRIDGE IN THE LONG DARK

I hate... HATE having to cross those in survival mode! The creaking, the swaying, the way the character dips sometimes... it makes me so uneasy 😂

Not to mention that one wrong step ends your run

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green skies on my walk home

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Home away from home <3

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The Long Dark: Cover Art

Everytime I would pause when you're playing on the fox mode I always seen a guy reaching out in the middle of the legs, wanted to finally draw that. Enjoy!

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Psychological Afflictions because games keep getting them wrong and I wanted to take a shot at them

Bit more detailed info here: vvv

Mental Health Risk:

- it would be a hidden statistic like Vitamin C or Cabin Fever. Called Resilience or whatever

- reduces slowly over time but there are factors that impact it negatively or positively. Like being near dead bodies and getting attacked (negative) and stayin’ alive or reaching milestones (positive)

- there are specific factors that either make their respective affliction worse or help cure them by increasing resilience

- when it reaches 20% remaining you get the risk affliction. At 0% one of the three psychological afflictions manifests, depending on player history/actions

Depression:

- usually other games just apply a grayscale filter and say “you sad :(“ and call it a day

- this ones theme is Progress Hindered. You can sleep or you sleep too long and also your skill progress gets stunted and reset a bit because screw you.

- 50% chance to get either Insomnia or Hypersomnia. The latter makes the survivor sleep longer by 1-5 hours but doesn’t restore fatigue for those extra hours

- “something or someone to hold onto” I made these with a multiplayer setting in mind. Being social is better to mental health than being isolated

Anxiety:

- it’s basically the risk affliction but with light effects. Supposed to be the easiest to manage

- it has a bar that increases. The higher it gets the higher the frequency of effects.

- they are more to keep the player on edge than affecting the survivor directly. YOU are affected as well, don’t just ignore this. Was that twig snap just a sound or a wolf nearby. Who knows

- also another effect I forgot to put there: Fake suffocation risk. All the visual effects for the suffocation risk affliction including the UI info but as soon as the counter reaches 0 nothing happens. Get trolled lol

PTSD:

- main theme: past trauma (obviously)

- gives Insomnia and problems with struggles

- big thing is Flashbacks: they happen randomly or when fitting triggers are present (let’s use a wolf attack and a Sprain/Break affliction as an example). There are Audio and Visual aspects

- Audio: Sounds Echo or repeat. A wolf sound is heard and fake sounds continue for a while after that. Sometimes there isn’t a wolf anywhere nearby anymore. Or sounds get replaced like a broken stick sound gets replaced with a broken bone sound

- Visual: Usually accompany the audio. It’s a subtle but noticeable overlay at lower opacity. Like a wolf at 50% opacity jumping the survivor, charging or standing (there. MENACINGLY). Or a fake affliction notification but you didn’t actually get the affliction

Ya I think that’s every important thing. Thanks for reading until here

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THE LONG DARK (2017) → Lonely Lighthouse, Desolation Point

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i’ve been playing The Long Dark

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Had The Long Dark on the mind lately and I've been thinking about how the game takes a very simple and honestly uninspired crafting system and weaves it into its other systems to make it interesting.

On the surface, it's a very generic crafting system found in pretty much any survival game. You take a laundry list of ingredients to a work bench, click start, and watch a loading screen until it finishes and you get an item that's about 5% better than what you already have at best. But the actual experience of crafting in the game is very involved because the main resource it calls for is time. Outside of specific challenge modes, TLD is a game about prolonging the inevitable. There's no end point, you're just seeing how long you can survive until you fade into the quiet apocalypse. Time is what every other action in the game buys you, and it's the currency you pay to craft items that you hope may be able to pay that time back. Even just getting the materials is a significant time sink, not only going out and collecting them but also finding a safe place to leave them to cure for a few days. That moosehide satchel isn't just a 5 kilo boost to carry weight (as good as that is) it's the memory of an expedition to hunt down one of the last surviving ice age megafauna that can and will stomp you to death with its hooves followed by days or even weeks of spending every moment you can spare in your busy schedule of not dying putting it together as the resources around you steadily dwindle. It's an incredibly well designed way to get your players emotionally invested in what's ultimately a very mundane system.

I also really appreciate how it interacts with game difficulty and player skill. At low difficulty levels it's pretty ignorable. You'll get plenty of equipment that's about as good just by looting and it's unlikely to wear out on you before something else finishes you off. But as you get into higher difficulties it becomes more necessary to fill the gaps that loot won't fill. Capping out on Interloper where if you want something as basic as a hatchet or knife you'll need to scrounge up a hammer, some scrap metal, and a pile or coal then drag those to one of a handful of forges found only in the ass ends of the map to make one while freezing, starving, and stalked by wildlife every step of the way.

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Somehow it took until I was huddling in a broken ice fishing hut in Ash Canyon while a howling blizzard blew around me to realize that I LEFT MY BEDROLL AT THE TOP OF TIMBERWOLF MOUNTAIN!

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Art by Priya Kakati

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Nighttime Aurora in The Long Dark

Another version of my previous landscape. Figuring out how to do auroras.

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More Long Dark scenery.

Went more simplistic than last time. I think I like that more

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Feedsacks that are secretly "The Long Dark" fanart. @tldsurvival

We like drawing feedsack designs.

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Transparent stills

Day

Night

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sorry to be like this and I'm very much not loving it, but tumblr loses around 30M a year. divided by the cost of yearly subscriptions, it means half a million ish people on premium undoes that loss. I saw stats claiming more than 300M users. That sounds super not right since even the sacred texts don't often cross 1M notes. I know there are around 12M posts a day. Yeah, yeah, we post multiple times a day, but there's a quantity of lurkers out there, and I'm trying to goldilocks a number to do math without having real data to pull from, leave me be.

If there are 12M users, it needs around 4% of users. If there really are 300M (still don't believe this) it would be .16%

You know what portion of Spotify is paid accounts? 40% ish (can't find data from the last year)

But, because we are the worst, and so probably will end up with a sundowning social platform... If someone knows of another platform that has this kind of reblog with added comments that doesn't put your comment first, lmk, cause every alternative someone has suggested aint been it for me. Bluesky and pillowfort aint it. TT is video based. Reddit is.... almost? except that there's a reason we got refugees.