STORMCROW'S PROFILE

>look StormCrow

You see not a bird but an American lady who likes other ladies. Oscillates between shy as a mouse and babbling violently, seemingly at random.

I like badasses. I like babes. I like badass babes the best. Okay...actually I like doggoes the very best, but I aspire to make games about badass babes is my point.

I use music from bands and artists in the free games I make: the frustrated filmmaker in me is very enamored of scoring scenes with rock'n'roll soundtracks Scorcese or Tarantino style. In addition to being a time honored tradition in cinema, this has a history in AAA videoogames as well (for a really great use of it, see Bioshock: Infinite). If I was a millionaire, I'd totally license these songs so I could actually use them legally.
Live Free Or Die
"The Tree of Liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."

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[RM2K] [RM2K3] [RMXP] [RMVX] [RMVX ACE] [RMMV] Yoji Ojima, International Man Of Mystery

So the other day I was trying to figure out exactly how Kadokawa/Degica Games/Enterbrain want to be credited because I was throwing together a WIP credits .txt for Malleus Maleficarum and in virtually every area I have to (or at least, should and will) credit them and I didn't want to be writing out something as unwieldy as

Kadokawa Corp/Degica Games/Enterbrain

five times in my credits.

None of this is particularly interesting but it IS context for how I learned what very little I know about Yoji Ojima and I'm wondering if y'all can help me learn more or find this anywhere near as interesting as I do. I will probably mirror this thread on the "official" rpg maker webzone because I think they might know better there.

So, anyway, the Degica Games website attributes RPG Maker MV to the following:

"© 2015 KADOKAWA CORPORATION./YOJI OJIMA"

Yoji Ojima, I thought, where have I seen that name before? It feels weird seeing it listed next to Kadokawa. I didn't realize this until this year but Kadokawa corp is actually pretty huge. I checked out a few new anime series this year I really liked and a couple of them were produced by Kadokawa.

On my own, I managed to work out where I'd seen the name before. He's the creator of the (generally pretty solid) "community basic" plugins that come with the current(ish) version of MV. So this is some guy that worked on the code base for MV, clearly, but did he like...MAKE RPG Maker MV essentially BY HIMSELF? That's what the Copyright Kadokawa/Yoji Ojima seemed to imply. Either that or he Intrigued, I plugged his name into the google machine.

AND GOT A HILARIOUS MEME VIDEO THAT TOTALLY FOOLED ME

Is Yoji Ojima just A programmer who worked on RPG Maker MV? Is he THE ONE GUY that made RPG Maker MV? What was his involvement with earlier engines? ...did this guy make or at least code every single RPG Maker release? Is one man responsible for the entire RPG Maker phenomenon that has defined my life to a certain degree? Seriously, would my entire life have been radically different if not for this ONE JAPANESE MAN whose name I did not learn until I had been using his software for like two decades? Is that what's up?

I burn with curiosity.

* Enterbrain--as far as I can tell--did not have anything to do with MV or VX Ace and honestly might have ceased being the publisher for RPG Maker or even ceased to exist much earlier than that, I think XP might be the last time I can kind of sort of remember seeing the Enterbrain/ASCII logo on RPG Maker stuff.

this one's for the ladies...and pretty weird...and maybe a little gross

In the game I am working on that I have yet to deem ready to add to this website, menstruation is closely linked to a certain kind of magical power. Don't worry, it's nothing as weird and gross as like, weaponizing your menses or whatever. Specifically, it's this: the powers of a witch first begin to manifest at Menarche (not to be confused with this unfortunately named MTG legendary, which is exactly two letters off). It's usually a late Menarche and for the character in question it's very late: she's 15. (And as a rule, the later the Menarche, the more powerful the witch.)

This was part of the meaning of the original title Under A Killing Moon*: in the middle ages, generally speaking a woman's menstrual cycle would be spoken of in the context of her "moons", a euphemism that still sees occasional usage today, along with 'Aunt Flo' and 'Time of the Month'. I just briefly considered the idea of a day/night/lunar procession system where indeed a witch will be at the peak of her powers during her period...but I nixed that idea because I think it's so ridiculous even people that want to take the game seriously would have trouble not laughing at it. Too much effort, too.

I'm trying to think of how a young girl in a late medieval village might be stigmatized or persecuted or come under suspicion...pretty much any good reason for her to go running off into the dark woods at night. It shouldn't be hard. I'm pretty sure that in the middle ages, a majority of people still firmly believed that menstruation to be a punishment levied upon women by God for original sin.

My own experience with this during puberty was so uneventful it might as well not have happened--I grew up with at least one decent parent and not during the middle ages, obviously. Every idea I've come up with so far I've realized pretty quick was just ripping off Carrie by Stephen King one way or another (Carrie goes through menarche around 17 which is incredibly late, and also has no idea what menstruation is because her mother's a batshit fundie bitch, the opening of the movie is her being pelted by tampons by her fellow class mates to the chant of "plug it up!", "plug it up!", "plug it up!", bullying which is sufficient to reduce her to the fetal position and tears in a high school girls locker room when she unexpectedly started menstruating.) I'd like to get something that feels a little more real than that, or at least less familiar.

Another idea I considered but rejected is that the mother died during childbirth and the father doesn't know the first thing about menstruating, but I found this logically leading to the fact that it's practically more likely than not that in the absence of her mother, her father would have begun to sexually assault her. (As gross as this is, this still does happen in modern society at least it was hapening well into the late 20th century, but since we're talking medieval Europe where no one's got any morals or ethics that we would recognize as such, it seems more likely than not.) But idk, that specific effed up family life feels like a cliche to me. Also this is going to be a dark dark dark dark dark dark game. If I'm doing my job even half-right as a game designer and storyteller you'll wind up liking and relating to (sometimes playable) characters that die horribly, tragically, or brutally later on, Game of Thrones style (but less excessive) or cross the moral event horizon to the point hwere you can no longer earnestly root for them (also Game of Thrones style). If I put all that rapey stuff in her backstory, I feel like I'd be courting Darkness Induced Audience Apathy (there's a tvtropes page for that, you're welcome for not linking you, you might have something to do today/tonight).

So yeah any of you ladies or a friend of yours have um...a non-ideal onset to their menstruation? Obviously it's a very personal question so don't answer unless you feel like it.

To any guy that clicked this thread out of morbid curiosity: I'm sorry, I actually get it, like, periods are indeed pretty gross whether you're in a position to have one or not. But you were warned in the thread title :P

the now infamous "Rocketman" thread

"And all this science I don't understand
It's just my job five days a week
A rocket man, a rocket man"
- Stewie Griffin Parodying William Shatner Covering Elton John

To you mind what exactly is the job of a rocketman? The position clearly requires no particular scientific knowledge, so it's totally unlike the job of "astronaut" we have today which requires you to understand quite a bit of "this science". But a rocket man's disavowal of science also seems to hint at a touch of blue-collar anti-intellectualism.

I mean, a rocket man kind of seems to understand at least some of "this science", like he demonstrates a basic understanding that Mars isn't a good place to raise your children because of the instantly fatal subzero temperatures, but he mentions a lack of child care facilities on Mars as being a negative in raising children there before he mentions the atmosphere, which is made of carbon dioxide, and poisonous to humans both child and adult. The last thing to consider is that it's apparently a 9-5 job with a commute (presumably a space commute), which is even more inconsistent with how our present day astronauts live their lives than disavowing scientific understanding.

So as we've established it's not astronaut and that it requires no scientific expertise, most likely no more than a bachelor's at most, what is the job description for 'rocketman'?

in 500 words or less

Does anyone know of any RM games in the superhero genre besides Master of the Wind & Outlaw City?

I'm sorry but I literally cannot think of anything even slightly meaningful to write in the body of this post that isn't already in the subject. : /

Um I...wasn't sure if this should go here or in Videogames?

So...does anyone know of any RM games in the superhero genre besides Master of the Wind & Outlaw City?

Fame & Anonymity In The RM Community

Unsure if this is the right forum, if not mods feel free to move.

This is an "idle thoughts" piece, but it strikes me that we don't know anything about the most well known content creators in our community. I don't think we have any special right to know I just think it's kind of weird.

Demographics don't matter a lot to us because all are interactions are online and 90% of them surround videogames. So not knowing if a user's male, female, American or from New Zealand, Asian or Black, etcetera is the norm. (Now our queerness on the other hand seems to be the one piece of demographic information we have proudly on display.)

But if you look at creators like Yanfly & Aekashics, their stuff is used in a plurality, probably a majority, of all games developed with the RPG Maker engine. They have 100s of Patrons as they rightly deserve. And--and if I'm just being an idiot and missing like an extremely obvious "About Me" page or two, please do tell me--I have no idea who these people are. They basically prebuilt like half of the game I'm developing and I know nothing about them. I couldn't tell you what country YF lives in or what Aekashics' native language is. Hell, I've been using YF scripts since 2008 and I didn't know if YF was a he or a she until he fucking retired (just now), and I'm still not 100% sure I'm using the right pronoun. I get the impression that Aekashics is a guy but I wouldn't bet on it.

I realize that some of the elite among us (i.e. Archeia et al.) have access to these peoples' inner circles and know a lot more of their personal information, because they're friends. But to the general end users of the content they're making, they're essentially anonymous: no race, no nationality, always good English but non-native speakers, unknown native language, unclear gender. It's (to me, at least) a fascinating paradox. I wonder among other things about the decision these creators made to be largely anonymous and what factors informed that. Some of the most famous creators in our midst are also very anonymous.

I am 97% sure there are at least a few other examples of this exact phenomenon besides the two big ones I mentioned, I'm just too lazy to hunt them down right now.

I Am Somewhat Concerned I May Actually Be Addicted To Marijuana

I put this in Welp, Welp! over General Discussion but only barely. I'm not joking around here, I'm serious about this, it's just not the most serious thing to be serious about, if that makes sense, so I decided not to take it overly seriously and welp it.

I realize that the indie gamedev corner of the "nerd community" shares the "greater nerd community's" tendency towards not drinking or doing drugs. That's fine, your choices are valid, all I ask is that you not judge/get judgy. I cannot stand judgmental people.

A few things that anyone at all connected with cannabis culture in North America knows already:

1) Literally no one has ever died of a marijuana overdose, ever. There seems to BE no LD50 for humans.
2) Marijuana is not at all physically addictive.
3) Marijuana has lots of legitimate medical uses, and even when used purely for recreational purposes, is far healthier than other recreational drugs like alcohol.
4) In spite of all of the above, cannabis is still a Schedule 1 drug in the US, the same as HEROIN, because the US is fucking retarded.

Of those points, it's only the one I've put in my bold that I have any doubts about. Those doubts started nearly a year ago when I learned an acquaintance was in Marijuana Anonymous. I had no idea such an organization existed. Still, I rationalized myself, that only means it's habit forming: addictive is different.

I smoke because I have an incurable autoimmune disorder and marijuana is the only truly helpful short term medicine for it, because of its powerful anti-inflammatory properties. I find THC (not CBD, THC) to be the best short acting anti-inflammatory drug and beat out only by prednisone over all, and believe you me, prednisone while perfectly legal and not at all a "fun" drug comes with its own basket of issues.

I also have a bevy of mental issues, some of which I have been told are endemic to the "millennial" generation, which I've always felt slightly too old to belong to: PTSD, Clinical Anxiety Disorder, Clinical Depression with Suicidal Ideation, Bi-Polar Disorder. (Pretty much everything but ADD and frankly I should have just played along with that too for the adderall.)

I am less confident that marijuana consistently helps with any of these conditions than I am that it retards my immune system's aggressive destruction of my body. There are many reasons for this, some of them Catch-22s. If I smoke (or otherwise ingest) enough cannabis to overcome my social anxiety, for instance, I am now so stoned that it's a bad idea for me to be socializing with people. Marijuana has never particularly helped with my depression, and has mainly just transmuted depression from a feeling of malaise and lack of motivation to do anything to feelings of "fuck it" and "I'm going to sleep" which is at best a lateral move. Marijuana helps with PTSD and other more day-to-day stressors, but again, in a way that favors escapism over actually dealing with things (this isn't a problem in and of itself: see videogames). At best, applying marijuana to a negative headspace is very imprecise, like whacking my brain's crazy center with a bludgeon. It might snap me out of it, it might make it much worse, it might have no effect at all, or most commonly it might have a lateral effect: I feel different, but not better.

I have a medical marijuana card in the state I live in now and I purchase my legal, medical cannabis legally for prices so low that they would have seemed literally miraculous back when I was using the drug illegally in my home state. Marijuana is a heavy part of my creative cycle and has been since 2008.

Most marijuana users know there is something called a "t-break" (t standing for tolerance and/or THC) where basically, you stop using the drug for somewhere between a week and a month and it knocks your tolerance down a lot, so you get high more easily and with less product. I have attempted this time and time again this year but not managed to go more than 3-5 days w/o using.

Even just going off of marijuana for a short time, like three days, can be helpful in this respect. It's not long enough to impact your tolerance but it is long enough for the thc to leave your body, meaning that you can at least fully sober up, and thus the next time you do get high, you'll be much more likely to appreciate it. But even going three days without using is a real challenge for me. I can count the number of mini-breaks I've taken this year on both hands. I've lost count of the number of times I've intended to do

Yesterday I was contemplating a t-break as I so often am. Then I had the thought that Halloween is coming up Thursday, and I'm definitely going to want to get my debauch on Thursday, so this isn't a good week for it, I'll push it back another week, so I smoked last night (I won't say how much I smoked, this is not in the spirit of dudebro braggadocio just that the amount of cannabis I need to effect me is pretty gross). Today I woke up and thought...Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday...perfect for three days to totally sober up and get the THC out of my system before whatever debauchery All Hallows' Eve should bring. And, I thought, I'm very low on flower, so if I smoke up everything I have, then I'll be out, so there will be no temptation to smoke.

And now I am having just-sub-panic levels of anxiety over not having any marijuana* in the house, and seriously considering going to a dispensary tomorrow to get some flower. The idea of having no smokable pot in the house is actually frightening me. I feel like Homer Simpson screaming even louder when the billboard is revealed to say "DIET" and not "DIE".

My forebrain--watchamacallit, ego?--keeps making decisions to stop using, at least temporarily, which are undermined very quickly by my id/subconscious/whatever you want to call it.

That doesn't mean it's addictive, part of my brain shouts, just that it's very, very habit forming and you've formed one hell of a habit. And I have. There are all kinds of activities (like watching anime) that I have done while smoking so many times that it feels weird to do them when not smoking, like I'm missing out on something. Likewise, even if I can't afford to go out on Friday and Saturday nights, part of me still insists that I am young enough that I am still obligated to "party" on those nights, so I wind up staying in and getting wasted. Finally, I seem to have a problem with being sober and lucid in general. On the days when I manage not to smoke pot, my alcohol consumption increases correspondingly so I don't have to face reality. And as alluded to, alcomohol is worse for me on pretty much every level than marijuana which I guess I'm admitting here isn't that great for me either. Marijuana fuels other habits that are bad for me too. Oversleeping and a pattern of extreme binge-eating later night (after unintentionally fasting all day) are the biggest ones.

So if I decide with my conscious mind not to put a chemical in my blood for three measly days and my subconscious mind and body insist that I'm doing it anyway and can't go three lousy days without it, if that is not addiction...then what's the difference?

w/o any moralizing, plz, how concerned about this do you, as internet strangers (and in some cases internet buddies)think should I be? And...advise, if you like?

Um, everyone is allowed to have an opinion but like...if you are a heavy pot smoker or were a heavy pot smoker and cut down, you're more likely to have an informed opinion (duh?).

* I do have concentrates and edibles but neither of those is something you use when you just want to smoke a joint or a bowl, and for me they tend to both fall victim to my high tolerance and contribute substantially to racking up my tolerance.

[Any Engine] What's your build/playtest loop like for you, mentally?

Like are you constantly playtesting, noticing, and fixing minute errors, or do you just blast through a large area at a time even knowing it's missing features or events or has bugs, and then take on testing it all at once, or (more likely) somewhere in between?

I am towards the first extreme I described, but trying to be more like the second.

But why INDIA?

I'm aware this is a very global/international website. That said, this topic is being created from a distinctly American perspective. In spite of that, I just want to acknowledge that I know not everyone's experiences are the same all over the world.

ANYWAY:

India is the seventh largest country in the world by area, and the second most populous with a population of 1.324 BILLION-with-a-B people as of the 2016 Census (which obviously means there are millions more Indians born since then).

I just had a relatively wonderful experience with McAfee customer service. I was pleasantly surprised. As it almost always is, my call was transferred to an Indian operator/customer service rep at a phone bank I'd bet my left ovary was in India. In this case, my representative was conscientious and competent and the problem, a simple refund, was easy to unsnarl. This kind of miracle happens about once a year, whereas I find myself talking to customer service and get to experience first hand what it's like to spend an hour or two in hell.

Virtually every single large American corporation outsources its customer service to India or at least the Indian subcontinent. They do this in spite of the fact that Indian non-native English speakers are the people least suited to the task of providing customer service and/or tech support for American English speakers for the following reasons:

  • In general, their thick accents make basic communication of anything very difficult.
  • In particular, these interactions often involve repeating and confirming long strings of alphanumeric characters. This requires precision that customer service's accent strongly tends to muddy. It's also possible that they even hear the American pronunciation of numbers and letters differently, making it a two way problem. They resort to some bastardized version of the NATO phonetic code word alphabet for this, but an Indian customer service representative saying "R as in Roger" or "P as in Peter" is harder to understand than an English speaker from most everywhere else just saying "R" or "P" so this is a non-solution.
  • While their English is usually very good, their understanding of American idiomatic English is very poor because they live in a mostly-non-English-speaking country. And most native English speakers rely heavily on their idioms. What this means is that any figure of speech or expression you use frequently in day to day conversation (for instance, I frequently use the phrase "Nah, you're good" to mean "Don't worry about it, it is not a problem, you did not do anything wrong in this instance, please proceed with whatever we were doing") will inevitably sail right over the head of an Indian customer service representative. To communicate effectively, you will need to train yourself to speak in a way that no one speaks.
  • Finally, if you live on the East coast of the US, the time difference between India is fully 9 hours. If you live further west like I do, the time gap is EVEN bigger. Sure, maybe it's 2:30 in the afternoon for you and you just woke up from a nice afternoon nap and are ready to tackle the challenge of "LET'S GET MY ROUTER WORKING" or whatever, but over there it's 1:57 AM and the person you're talking to is 11 hour shift and just wants you to leave them alone so they can drag themselves home and feed their 16 kids. White American xenophobic racist thinking on my part had me thinking that these Indian phone bank operators are just crabby people by nature, but then I thought about the time difference thing and how fucked that is.


So what you have here is a cohort (fancy anthropological/sociological term for "group of people") that has almost entirely filled a position/role which they are are probably some of the least suited people on Earth to fill.

Why?

Here is what I can come up with:

  • There are way too many people in India and far too few jobs.
  • Ergo, your average Indian citizen can and will take any job they are offered.
  • India's enormous overpopulation leads to widespread poverty...
  • Ergo, Indians will work for very cheap, much cheaper than Americans...
  • International megacorporations are absolute heartless bastards.


("Americans are unwilling to work customer service phone banks" is not on the list because once or twice a year I do get a non-outsourced native English speaker (they also usually do a shitty job for their own reasons) and there are a few entire companies I can think of that don't outsource to India that I know of.)

Is there anything more to it than the bullet points listed, or am I just being naive? Is there any kind of explanation beyond "American companies are cheap and don't care about their customers so they outsource customer service to India where they can pay Indian phone workers the lowest amount possible because again, they don't care about the customer experience"? Or am I looking for a way to overthink this that really, really, really all there is to it?

In any case, this is a terrible system--poor people being paid exploitative wages to do something they are uniquely unsuited to do in service of customers that their employers don't give half a shit about--and I hate participating in it. And that's from my end, as a relatively privileged American (I am really, really, really fucking poor right now, easily the poorest I've ever been, but I have a feeling that American poverty doesn't stack up to Indian poverty). I'd imagine on the Indian end of the phone lines, it's even worse.

[Poll] Genre, Format, and Your Preferences

Often I find myself curious about what people on RMN think about something so I want to start a topic or poll, but it seems like just a hair under a dozen people actually log on here even daily, and out of that small pool not all of them are going to respond to my poll. I think this is why sometimes I end up oversharing my own opinions or giving up on a thread prematurely as "dead in the water".

Anyway, my question is pretty simple: do you prefer science fiction or fantasy media when reading, when watching, and when playing? Whatever your preferences are, let me know why you think that is. Um, hopefully you can choose as many as are applicable (as long as they don't conflict)? That's what I'm going for but idk how RMN polls work.

[RMMV] This Should Be Really Simple....

Yanfly plugin YEP_X_ChangeBattleEquip adds the option for a character to change their equipment in battle. Cool. It even lets you set a cooldown time on how long you have to wait before you change equipment again. Even better. But, changing your equipment doesn't use your turn. So, for instance, Tseng can switch from his SMG to his katana and then act immediately with his katana. I simply want switching weapons to use a turn.

Relevant plugins:
Yanfly Battle Engine Core
Yanfly Equip Core
Yanfly BattleSys ATB

I'm having trouble even executing a decent workaround for this because the Equip command is just that, it's a battle command, not a skill, which shuts down all of the ideas that immediately came to mind for a workaround (if it was tied to a skill, I could have that skill put an invisible 1-turn "stun" on the user).
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