@mogwai_poet@mastodon.social avatar

mogwai_poet

@mogwai_poet@mastodon.social

Sandwich Imagineer at Twinbeard. Made Frog Fractions. May or may not have already made Frog Fractions 2. He/him.

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mogwai_poet, to random
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A friend of mine made this game, and I was already going to check it out, but I got 1000% more interested when I realized the protagonist in the key art was the ferret and not the guy with the sword

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2880750/Leafs_Odyssey/

mogwai_poet, to random
@mogwai_poet@mastodon.social avatar

It's human to want to simplify a complicated situation. It's human to want to believe that people who are more ethical, or more attractive, must be more talented. From where I'm sitting, these are completely disconnected variables. (If there are studies correlating them, I'm unaware of them.) But when an artist people like turns out to be a bad person, it seems like it's easier to decide their art was bad all along than to accept the broader idea that terrible people can make excellent art.

mogwai_poet,
@mogwai_poet@mastodon.social avatar

Conflating everything about a person into a single "I like them" or "I don't like them" variable makes it harder to accept that a talented, attractive person who knows all the right gender words, can still be a bad person. It makes you more likely to, if someone made art you dislike, to look for reasons to believe that they're a bad person too. It makes it difficult to accept that a bad person can still do good things, or that a broadly good person (like you, perhaps) can do bad things.

mogwai_poet,
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It is crucial to recognize your own capacity to do evil, or you'll never recognize when you do it and never learn to do better.

mogwai_poet,
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For the record, though, I never cared for Harry Potter. Just, speaking personally, y'know, never really liked it. Just sayin'.

mogwai_poet,
@mogwai_poet@mastodon.social avatar

@MrBehemo Yeah, and I think it's reasonable to take it a step further and say that a good (qualitatively or morally) work of art can have bad elements, and vice versa.

mogwai_poet,
@mogwai_poet@mastodon.social avatar

@MrBehemo Yeah, and everyone has a similarly personal relationship with the art they love. Whether to try to separate the art from the artist, and if so how to approach it, are deeply personal questions that you can't really answer for anyone but yourself.

mogwai_poet,
@mogwai_poet@mastodon.social avatar

@Cheff @MrBehemo Two things can be true

mogwai_poet, to random
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I've been playing Infinity Island, by Luca Redwood, the You Must Build A Boat guy. It's themed as one of those collect-the-animals F2P games, but it's structured more like a clicker, with a half dozen different currencies that interact via a half dozen different upgrade interfaces. I've been playing for several days but some of the most basic stuff is still mysterious to me, to the point that I feel like it must be on purpose? Like it feels overcomplicated past the point of satire.

mogwai_poet,
@mogwai_poet@mastodon.social avatar

Instead of clicking, the core mechanic is a claw game where you launch the claw into various biomes to collect themed items. Sometimes when you're retrieving an eyepatch from the pirate dimension or whatever, it says "inventory full," which implies there's an inventory interface I haven't found. This is plausible because it took me days to figure out that you can swipe left to get to the screen where you send your collectible animals on adventures like "Fight cavities" or "Learn to ride a bike."

mogwai_poet,
@mogwai_poet@mastodon.social avatar

I'll regularly get messages like "such and such an 'upgrade' added to the 'shop.'" There are half a dozen of these shops, each with a different set of upgrades, but none of them are called "shop" or "upgrades," which I think means I haven't found the upgrade shop yet? Except that if I look at the list of achievements, I have purchased ~90 upgrades. Obviously the move is to revisit the achievement interface after every action to see if the thing I just did is buying an upgrade from the shop.

mogwai_poet,
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I have a quest called "Get a correct answer in Inquizity," which is like a quiz show that one of the shopkeepers runs. It asks you multiple choice questions like "what is the price of a [any of over a thousand collectible items]." After you answer, you get to scroll through a multiple-page list of all the game state multipliers that go into the currently correct answer. I have gotten an answer right but the quest systems claims I haven't, so maybe it knows that I was just guessing?

mogwai_poet,
@mogwai_poet@mastodon.social avatar

To be clear, I love all this confusion and I am convinced that if I understood what was going on the game would cease to be intriguing and would just be boring. I just don't know if the designer did this on purpose! If so, it's a master class in designing ludic mystery. I also find F2P games to be similarly confusingly designed, but I'm not intrigued by those at all, so maybe this is all predicated on me trusting the designer.

mogwai_poet,
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Infinity Island teleological update: some lore just dropped and now I'm reasonably sure that the game's UI mystery was a deliberate design goal

mogwai_poet,
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@gray17 I get the impression that he was only ever on the public-facing internet to promote his games, and vanished as soon as that stopped seeming important

jmac, to Steamdeck
@jmac@masto.nyc avatar

Invited to play some Left 4 Dead with friends last night. Complex nostalgia: I was back in Boston the last time I played it. That was on Xbox 360, and I’m unsurprised to see that it plays great on today.

It’s as fun as ever, with very minor mechanical nits. The aspects that felt most dated were philosophical.

First, the easiest skill level is called "Easy”, and beyond it being Rather Hard Actually, a modern game would pick a less dismissive description for it. 🧵

mogwai_poet,
@mogwai_poet@mastodon.social avatar

@jmac My sense of it is that games didn't change and the culture didn't change -- you did. The vast majority of video games are still built around violence as the default (or only) form of interaction. We had our moment (e.g. Spec Ops The Line) where we floated the idea that violence isn't something to celebrate and in my experience players are sick of the conversation now.

mogwai_poet, to random
@mogwai_poet@mastodon.social avatar

You may have seen the Balatro Discourse, which consists of people looking at a screenshot of code that it straightforward and getting angry that it's not more complicated.

I'd just like to posit here that a straightforward solution is an excellent default and you should have a really solid argument for the advantages of a complicated solution before you choose it.

mogwai_poet,
@mogwai_poet@mastodon.social avatar

@jmac Extremely plausible

mogwai_poet,
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@Nifflas Yeah, if I saw this code in a project I was working on I would definitely look for a possible refactor. But there isn't an obviously correct fix just looking at that screen shot.

And that code, as it is? Pretty readable. Pretty obvious what it does and how to make changes.

TomF, to random
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

Computers like the ZX Spectrum had each 8x8 block have 1 bit per pixel, and that 1 bit selects between two colours chosen by an 8-bit attribute. For the Spectrum the attribute had 3 bits for colour 0, 3 bits for colour 1, 1 bit to make them bright, and a completely pointless "flash" attribute.

But what if you had twice as many bits?

Well, you'd have four colours per pixel to choose from, and a 16-bit attribute chunk. So 16/4 = 4 bits per colour. Same as the Speecy. Buuuut....

mogwai_poet,
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@TomF Imagine, with just a few tweaks, it could've had the CGA 16 color palette

mogwai_poet, to random
@mogwai_poet@mastodon.social avatar

One of the touted advantages of the internet was that it made available the global range of options. No longer are you limited to talking to the person next to you on the bus, etc.

Now global everything is the norm, and the exciting thing would be the ability to filter for locally sourced stuff. Like, if I go to a hotel concierge and ask for some good local podcasts, he's probably going to say "Um, This American Life? Joe Rogan?" No, dude. I mean podcasts recorded in this neighborhood.

Nifflas, to random
@Nifflas@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

Looking for a lot of words that expresses that something is cool. Like, "Awesome", "Groovy", "Cowabunga". It doesn't matter how made-up or weird, or obscure. I'm gonna need like a hundred of them!

Feel free to suggest any, together with a number indicating the coolness (1 = ok, 3 = Great!, 5 = THAT'S AWESOME, 10 = INFINITY COOL)

mogwai_poet,
@mogwai_poet@mastodon.social avatar

@Nifflas I love this kind of task. A couple weeks ago I did some paid(!) game design consulting work where I just helped brainstorm categories. Just, like, as wide a variety of categories as I could think of.

Harmony Joy Bus Ride
Peachy
Shiny
Bang up
Bang up to the elephant
Corker
Smashing
Fab
Gnarly
Gnar-gnar
Radical
Hellacious
In the pocket
Five-by-five
Beastly
Crushing it
Fetch
Groovy
Legit
Monstrous
Sick
Nanty Narking
Bravo Zulu
High-technical
Five star
Hundo-p
Top marks
Double plus good

jmac, to random
@jmac@masto.nyc avatar

With kindness and sincerity, this video made me feel great empathy towards my nation's food service workers, and also gave me a rising sense of anxiety edging into the threshold of an outright terror of a flavor I have never tasted before. "Easy.”
https://mastodon.social/@hotdogsladies/112254463591200744

mogwai_poet,
@mogwai_poet@mastodon.social avatar

@icecreamjonsey @jmac l knew a guy who would nod while explaining math. I don't think it was deliberate, I think it was a subconscious thing he picked up as a way to get the listener to nod in response, presumably because nodding signals understanding and therefore a successful explanation. Later I found out that the whole math department at UCSD did that.

mogwai_poet, to random
@mogwai_poet@mastodon.social avatar

Why is it important for corn to be tall?

mogwai_poet, to random
@mogwai_poet@mastodon.social avatar

They told me things might look weird during the eclipse

mogwai_poet,
@mogwai_poet@mastodon.social avatar

I didn't take any photos but here's my ascii art of the totality: o

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