@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.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

mogwai_poet, to random
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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, to random
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Okay, now that you've all had the chance to play Gordy and the Monster Moon, here's my ulterior motive for making it: I want to play more games like it. Can you help me find some?

I've described Gordy as "Zelda-like" but here are some specific things I was trying for, even if I didn't succeed at all of them:

  • New or underutilized setting/theme. Steam didn't even have a "Halloween" tag!
  • I don't want to kill things. Preferably no combat, but at the very least not swords/guns again.
mogwai_poet, to random
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So insert's still a thing, huh? A whole-ass key on the keyboard that just exists to confuse and frustrate people, we're still doing that?

mogwai_poet, to random
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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, 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, to random
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mogwai_poet, to random
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I heard a complaint recently that kids today don't want to get a driver's license. Good for them. Nobody should want to get a driver's license. Driving a car is something to mourn, not something to celebrate or look forward to. The ecological and human safety ramifications are disastrous.

Of course, pushing the moral cost of driving onto your parents or onto the Amazon delivery driver isn't actually improving things. But at least they're starting from the right place.

mogwai_poet, to random
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Techtonica, the game I've been working on at Fire Hose, is out in Early Access today. I like it a lot and I think we did a great job! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1457320/Techtonica/

mogwai_poet, to random
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I did the thing. 25 games to understand me as a human

mogwai_poet, to random
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It's the work week, which means it's time to procrastinate with Gordy and the Monster Moon! It's a bite-sized Zelda-like about a pumpkin astronaut exploring a Halloween moon.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/642020/Gordy_and_the_Monster_Moon/

video/mp4

mogwai_poet, to random
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This parking garage has a sign posted next to the elevator explaining what you can find on "Level 1," which is to say, here is a list of things that are in Berkeley

mogwai_poet, to random
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When Brits want to address a woman respectfully they say "mom." When they want to address a mother they say "mum." When they want to refer to staying quiet they say "moom." It's turtles all the way down the vowel chart

mogwai_poet, to random
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You've seen the study going around saying that only 13% of games released before 2010 are still commercially available. The Video Game History Foundation intends to cite this data to try to change copyright law to favor preservation over corporate interests, and I wish them well.

While we're waiting for hell to freeze over, there is a moral imperative to teach our children to pirate.

mogwai_poet, to random
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The normal flow of game development is to keep the game in a very malleable state, while you figure out what you're making. This is known as the "fun and good" phase of game development. Then as you approach shipping, the code base gets more fixed and brittle and hard to work with as you make optimizations, make things scale as needed, make everything work with multiplayer, &c.

mogwai_poet, to random
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For years, Charles Martinet performed as CG puppet Mario at trade shows. Here he is doing his thing in the CD-ROM version of Mario Teaches Typing, in 1994:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tQWLg4E90M

Charles Martinet is an old man and deserves his retirement but also but if this means we have to listen to Chris Pratt voice video game Mario, heads are going to roll.

mogwai_poet, to random
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Current mood: arguing with my five year old son about how needing to pee works

mogwai_poet, to random
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They told me things might look weird during the eclipse

mogwai_poet, to random
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I got a notification that someone logged into my "Microsoft account" from the Dominican Republic. I tried resetting my password so I could log in and have a look. It said my account was locked due to suspicious activity and asked for my phone number. I still have no idea what account this is; it could be any of a dozen Microsoft services. While I was clicking around trying to figure that out, it asked me to rate my satisfaction on a scale from 1 to 5.

mogwai_poet, to random
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Gordy launch week, by the numbers:

  • About 2300 (free) downloads of the Pico-8 cartridge from my web site.
  • About 350 downloads of the source code.
  • About a dozen messages from people saying how much they enjoyed it -- one from someone who told me how much better the dad in the game is than their own dad 😭
mogwai_poet, to random
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Waiting the followups to all these "why is Mastodon so hard" think pieces, complaining about how hard it is for the average person to get into my bathroom and when they finally did I made them feel unwelcome

mogwai_poet, to random
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@zep Hey, I finally got around to uploading all my (free) Pico-8 games to the BBS but at first I put them all in one post so as not to spam the forum, and that seem to have confused the system that makes the cartridges available. Is there any way I can fix this?

https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?uid=88479&mode=carts

mogwai_poet, to random
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Gordy and the Monster Moon is out! It's $3 on Steam with the launch discount: https://store.steampowered.com/app/642020/Gordy_and_the_Monster_Moon/

On itch, also $3: https://twinbeard.itch.io/gordy-and-the-monster-moon

mogwai_poet, to random
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Here's the trailer for my upcoming game, Gordy and the Monster Moon. It's a bite-sized, Halloween-themed Zelda-like in which you play a pumpkin astronaut going on spooky adventures.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ed_fGfMwiyg

mogwai_poet, to random
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In the early 00s, someone -- I have no idea who it was so I'm gonna blame Cory Doctorow -- read in a brand guideline document somewhere that you're not supposed to pluralize "Lego." They interpreted this to mean that you use "Lego" to refer to both one Lego brick and several Lego bricks. This idea spread like wildfire, because this era was Peak Pedant Worship on the internet. In 2005, a grammar nazi going on an angry rant about something technically incorrect was the coolest person in the world.

mogwai_poet, to random
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Important news, folks:
"The dwarf fortress community finally figured out how to domesticate and farm angels for infinite hellstone and godmetal"

Thread goes into details.

https://dwarvendiaries.tumblr.com/post/708193913921503232/the-trailermadegear

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