STORMCROW'S PROFILE

I think the only thing I haven’t encountered is bestiality, and that may yet get patched into the final release.

Ohhhhhhh random quote generator RMN tagline list, I think we've got a winner here!

Thanks for the feedback. Esp. on the writing.

I think I've been vocal that that's what I care the most about.

I'm sorry you didn't enjoy the demo more full throatedly.

Just so you know, you're making a bit much of the Shadowrun similarities. (Interesting fact, I do believe that the guy who made Iron Gaia went on to work for Shadowrun, was reminded of that when I saw the two mentioned in the space of a paragraph).

In general, the most obvious way to tell the difference between plagiarism and homage is that homage seeks to draw attention to the derivative works that inspired it as a shout out to them. The downside is that sometimes people see homage in elements of the storytelling where none was intended.

Besides the Treaty of Denver and Japan-Occupied-CalFree, nothing in the backstory is inspired by Shadowrun, it's just my (very pessimistic and somewhat idiosyncratic) extrapolation of where this country/continent is going. The fact that magic was a thing and that Indigenous Peoples figured it out first makes the geopolitics of the continental United States look radically different in Shadowrun than it does in Live Free Or Die.

Most importantly, in Shadowrun "America" is no longer a thing and not relevant. The UCAS and the CAS exist but the war for their relevance compared to the global megacorps is lost and over. Shadowrun is about surviving, thriving, and profiting in the cracks between the megas in a fully post-America world. Live Free Or Die is about a last ditch effort to save America and engages with sticky topics like nationalism and American Exceptionalism and the patriotism of dissent. It's a...sizeable difference in my opinion. I'm trying to mix the techno-noir cynicism of classic cyberpunk with political dissent and an in-depth critical dissection of the idea of "MAGA". Shadowrun was about mixing the techno-noir cynicism of classic cyberpunk with elves and dragons.

The American Federation (probably renamed the Christian American Federation in subsequent builds) isn't an expy for the CAS from Shadowrun. It's closer to being an expy of the NSF (as I see you pointed out) but honestly that is not there because it was in a computer game released by Eidos in 1999, it is there because I have been watching the NSF become a real thing for a decade now and it's terrifying. Looking at that kind of news out of the Northwest I've been like... "oh hey, wow, this is just like the NSF from Deus Ex....except that they are definitely not going to wind up being the good guys in the end".

Likewise, Mexico being a dangerously aggressive narcostate is pure extrapolation from observations I've made of Mexico.

The only thing you ascribed to being taken from Shadowrun that I thought was outright silly was the massive coastal flooding reshaping cities like LA and NY. It only makes sense to characterize that as being "from Shadowrun" if you're a climate denier or something. Like, the superstorms are coming, as is the sea level rise, at this point it's just science, not fiction.

Initially, G.K. Chesteron's The Man Who Was Thursday was indeed in there just because it's in Deus Ex. But then I got the copy of it that I'd ordered from Amazon and started actually reading it and now it's in there because it has very fascinating things to say about anarchy and law enforcement. Albeit from the perspective of a very antiquated time period.

The writing is nowhere near as taut or efficient as Gibson, you're right, but that's a hard bar to meet: I firmly believe he's the greatest prose stylist of his generation (our generation?).

In reality these characters would just use the jargon w/o explaining what any of it means. The dialogue would be much brisker but the player would potentially be even more confused. The dialogue between Hawkins and Tseng might look more like this:

Hawkins: That our ride?
Tseng: Yep.
Hawkins: VTOL?
Tseng: Yeah, converted. From an old Chinook twin-rotor.
Hawkins: Armaments?
Tseng: 30mm gatling up front, independently tracking 40mm cannon in back, plus smoke, chaff, and ECCM, usual package.
Hawkins: It's a badass ship.
Tseng: You call a ship "she", not "it" Hawkins. This one, she's named the Fell Purpose.

Gets across the same points in less words (this is a hovercraft, it was a helicopter, Tseng is sentimental about it, it has a 30mm gatling gun in the front and two 40mm cannon in the back, the latter of which are what are used for the ) but is less informative to anyone that knows nothing about military hardware ("VTOL? ECCM?"), and less entertaining to anyone who knows lots about military hardware, like myself.

That said, I cringed when I saw just now that I had Hawkins say "nice" three times in the dialogue about the dropship. It was the kind of thing I was specifically trying to avoid. Hawkins is at once a mostly-silent-cypher-protagonist and a meta-commentary on the mostly-silent-cypher-protagonist which is a tough line to walk.

In the game, there are basically two dialogues I felt self-conscious about when I released it, and that was the dialogue about the dropship, and the shaggy dog story where Hawkins reasons out that she's in Hong Kong. Future builds if I can motivate myself to release any will have the talk with Tseng radically altered or removed, and might even start with the infiltration on the Lotus Gardens run.

I'm not going to apologize for most people in the year 2076 not knowing what Star Trek is and not getting Star Trek memes. To me that's just logical (and while we're tallying references, "historical documents" is a Galaxy Quest reference).

A lot of the writing I'm proudest of comes later in the demo, towards the end of the Lotus Gardens run and then the final expository narrative dump (which you're not the first person to point out is hard to read: that at least is an easy fix).

Anyway, Tseng and the Mist Dragons (who are totally based on Shadowrun characters I made in high school lol) are not in fact the main characters and are probably, if I can manage to complete this game (unfortunately, I am in very dire straits financially so I moved on to a project that I can hopefully sell--my artistic vision for LFOD involves a specific soundtrack of copyrighted music that would make selling it problematic), going to wind up being the bad guys (although hopefully it's clear from the demo that this isn't the kind of story that's going to have simple open-and-shut good guys and bad guys).

I am not sure that I have an entirely coherent and logical reason for having you do the "tutorial" part of the game as the bad guys except that it struck me as interesting and experimental. I often experiment with things I haven't seen experimented with in other games, usually having to do with perspective and empathy. The idea was--is--that later on when the Mist Dragons are trying to kill Hadley and company, the player's gonna feel some things.

Sorry to run on so long. Thanks again for your feedback. I appreciate you leaving this unstarred considering this was indeed a demo that I rushed out perhaps before it was as fully baked as I'd have liked.

- Crow

P.S. If you or anyone else would like to draw me a new dropship sprite for free, I'm not saying no. :D

oh, and good use of wisseau

I really wish it was a fully realized game, with all the talents of both developers brought to bear.

For the purposes of last year's Swap In The Middle With Too (Two?) event, the intentions I had for the second half of When You Were Young upon handing it off were...there weren't any intentions. I specifically wrote out in my notes that if the second creator really wanted to, they could go as far as just ditching the entire party I'd created and making up their own. I was definitely not expecting such a direct follow-on to my content. My assumption was the second creator would use the "15 Years Later..." break to dump whatever characters they didn't like and move on with the ones they did, putting them wherever they wanted to in terms of setting, doing whatever they wanted with them in terms of plot, and making up anything that happened in between. I was definitely not expecting such a literal and faithful continuation picking right up from the moment I'd left off!

For the purpose of my creative ambitions, the first half of When You Were Young is indeed a prologue to an experimental RPG called AfterSaga. The 'experiment' here was to take an archetypical JRPG and create just the prologue and the finale/epilogue, leaving out the 60 hours of gameplay in the middle and letting that entire section be merely inferred. AfterSaga is still in development and will revisit Ralph and friends, the ones that are still alive, anyway, two hundred and twelve years after the events of When You Were Young (1st Half). So, for what it's worth, there is an alternative canon ending (no middle, just an ending) to the prologue in the works as a full fledged game. It will be rather dark. I fully intend to enlist Doge to help me with level design (among other things), if he's willing.

Interesting, seems like the creator managed to get the hard parts right (custom graphics, some custom music, solid writing) and then got the easy part wrong (making your database numbers not fucking nonsense).

Well I guess it's actually probably relative to the dev what's hard and what's easy. Good writing is not hard for me but I imagine it's hard in general. Basic functional battle balance seems easy, and I'm always surprised at how many games fail wildly at it.