STORMCROW'S PROFILE

This seems p. neat (haven't listened yet).

I'd want to be on there some time except that I hate the sound of my own voice so much that I literally physically flee from anywhere I'm forced to hear it, or if flight is not possible, literally destroy the device emitting the horrible sound of my voice if I can't find a button to turn it off in a manner of seconds.

I might be exaggerating but if so, very, very little.

I know most people don't like the sound of their own voices--except for voice actors, I guess, and obviously politicians lol--but for me it's a next level thing. I cannot even TOLERATE the sound of my own voice. I don't want to say it's physically painful...but it's close.

In the past, when people have told me my voice was pleasing, my reaction wasn't the reaction of someone receiving a compliment so much as it was the reaction of someone deeply concerned that the person they're talking to has suddenly become mentally handicapped or fully psychotic: "ARE YOU F*CKING CRAZY? Do you also enjoy hearing fingernails scrape chalkboards? What about the smell of dogshit, do you like that? WHAT THE F*CK IS WRONG WITH YOU?"

lol.

author=Archeia_Nessiah
m o o d

Interesting read, solid article, gave me a thing or two to think about.

author=LordBlueRouge
The biggest motivator for me, was working on the archive and then realizing there would eventually be a point where I'd no longer have the opportunity to work on the games I wanted to make. Someone loses a job, a family member dies, a fire happens, your laptop and all your equipment gets stolen, etc - So now I just do everything I can with the time that I have because, this might be the only opportunity you will have.

This motivation just got lit under my ass pretty hard, although it wasn't anything as dramatic as the examples you listed. I just had to get a job and I don't have all the spoons I want to work on RM and now I'm afraid because my financial situation is still precarious I will need to seek additional work and then have no energy for creativity. This sucks. It also makes it really hard to do things that I think are good advice like forgiving yourself and practicing self-compassion. I think those are good suggestions honestly but it's hard to take care of myself over actually being productive when I'm motivated by the exact kind of fear Lord Blue Rouge has been talking about it.

Of course, another point I got out of the article was that procrastination is often your body and mind deciding to practice self-compassion regardless of what "you" decided you were going to do in a given day.

I think that this article could be taken further if anyone wanted by exploring the difference between procrastination patterns re: something you don't particularly want to get done ever/something you don't actually care if it ever gets done outside of external pressure/outside requirements (including survival) about versus procrastination patterns surrounding things that you WANT to want to work on.

I looked into it a little bit, and I finally came down on the position that this is sort of SJG's fault for not having a QSR (Quick Start Rules). It's fairly standard in the TTRPG 'industry' to have a free packet called Quick Start Rules that is basically EXACTLY what you described here:

This is merely the "how to play" portion of the content. An abbreviated player's handbook. The game itself, the real game, is densely packed with info, additional gameplay mechanics, and add-on content. I more than highly recommend people buy the game manual(s). This is definitely not enough to run the game or really sink your teeth into it. It's just enough to guide players in the adventures I run in the forums.

Like, that's exactly what a QSR is and if they didn't want to bother putting out a free QSR like most companies do with most RPGs, what you did here is just fine and that's mainly on them.

I will totally admit that cause I have VERY STRONG OPINIONS (tm) on all topics "Game Design And Theory" I went straight to the comments to type out my position, then read through your article to see if it changed it at all.

My Original Position: this mechanic/feature is neither good nor bad in and of itself, and whether it improves a game or detracts from it depends entirely on all of the other factors of the game design. Random off the top of my head examples. If I am playing Borderlands 2 (EVERY game now is kind of sort of an RPG ever since Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and certain contemporaries unleashed RPG mechanics into a wide array of genres but that's a topic for another article) and I get a wicked cool Level 23 gun when I'm Level 21 that is really nothing but a minor annoyance. There are like a hundred other factors baked into the design of Borderlands incentivising (sp?) me to grind levels, and enemies scale toward (if not to) your level anyway. Just let me use my fucking gun NOW. My other example is actually FROM the golden era of RPGs, the action-RPG Soul Blazer from circa 1990-1991. That game does have a level req. on equippable swords. In this case, that is a good thing. I can't equip the Psycho Sword until I'm Level 5. Well, I mean I was well over Level 5 before I even found the Psycho Sword, but even if I wasn't, in Soul Blazer you shouldn't be delving the dungeons that require the Psycho Sword before you're Level 5 anyway, so it's not an annoyance, it's a useful guideline (you must be this tall to ride). But Soul Blazer is the kind of game where I'm guessing you only unlock seven swords max over the course of the entire game, maybe just four, so there's also that.

I suspect almost nobody will claim it isn't boring, since it all either happens automatically as a result of stuff that you were going to do anyway, or requires you to spend time grinding with no goal except gaining more experience. The first of those two scenarios is boring because it happens passively without the player's input, and the second one is boring because the player is stopping their actual progress in the game to repeat content they've already completed.

Sure, but to be clear, we're talking about how you GET XP/Levels/Phlebotinum/Whatever, right? Not how it is USED? Because choosing where to invest your whatever points, one way or another, is a feature of most games I like or will design myself.

The most obvious balance issues come from the developer's inability to accurately predict the player's power. /snip

Scaling enemy levels TO the player's level (see: Oblivion) is a terrible (non)-solution to this problem that is worse than the problem itself.

HOWEVER, scaling enemy levels TOWARDS the player's level (see: Skyrim) is actually a reasonable solution to this problem without messing around with difficulty levels.

One of your jobs, as an RPG designer, is to make the parts of the game that are the most fun be the parts that are most optimal for players to do to get stronger.

Agreed, actually, but quite a stretch from the argument in favor of level requirements that we started at. Like I can barely see there from here.

Generally, you don't want grinding to feel rewarding. Because it's not fun.

What??? I'm sorry but that's just...listen, you want to support the playstyle of the people who grind and the playstyle of people who don't grind (and incidentally, most people I imagine fall in between, like me, and grind a little) which means you should make BOTH playstyles fun AND rewarding.

If you aren't any better at determining what's fun than a typical player, you shouldn't be designing games.

This is an obnoxiously elitist statement that is...also totally right. And that goes for games of ALL kinds, not just JRPGs, not just RPGs, not just VIDEOgames.

(Players) generally won't do the things that are most fun to them ... That's how human brains work.

You're not 100% wrong about everything but this statement is just...I can't. Your thinking is idiotic. I'm done. Peace.

(When I did this kind of thing for money I had a colleague (a superior, technically) who also insisted that people don't play games to have fun. I couldn't talk to him either. The end result was a terrible game.)

Hello again, goodfellows. I'm having trouble with getting the transparent property value to stick to any of my selectors (or at least to do anything), even if I use the !important; thing.

Also, I was wondering, is there any way to make the background or any other selector/element translucent rather than transparent, i.e. directly set the opacity of the background color to something other than 255?

Thanks!