Leon's Microblog – May 2020

2. Then, importantly, dial that threat way down in the subsequent areas, to allow the world to deepen and be more than just a one-dimensional place of malice, and let it grow enigmatic and sympathetic. This is the biggest source of Ib's appeal for me, and it works well here too.
This game has pretty even-handed difficulty for a horror game, and hones in on what I think of as "Ib's formula": 1. Present the threat of sudden death early to establish the mood of danger and how much caution the player should extend to the world.
https://lyd1a.itch.io/arias-story – Now I'm playing the other Ib-like horror game that's set in an after-hours library, Aria's Story.
Suddenly, a hatch in the back of your computer bursts open, and a cascade of whitespace that five years of .trim() calls have been shaving off pours down your desk, ghostly globs displacing dust.
Spiders' Names For Legs, Clockwise From The Right: • Index Leg • Creeping Leg • Ring Leg • Weaving Leg • Jumping Leg • Spare Leg • Crawling Leg • Thumb
"So how many episodes are there? Is it endless, or are there just eight? Make up your goddamn mind!!!!" – me during my first tweet under my "Mid-00's Anime Goofing" rebrand, instantly exhausting my entire repertoire
"Begin by dealing three cards to each player, and setting aside three other other cards for each player "for next time… and there will be a next time", except for one player, who "is why"."
"We'll create a new world, sheltered from war, wizardry, and the gods. A tiny paradise world, orbiting this cold gray moon. We'll call it "Earth"." *three different end credits text reels appear in the sky behind them* "Well, it seems we're the ending of at least three stories."
"His long-anticipated final novel, "In Carnation", was incomplete at the time of his death, and was published exhumously (he was brought back to life to finish it)."
There. … … *doesn't pin the tweet*
Whoa there, pardner! You've found the tweet account of Leon! 🌻MY WEB GAMES: https://fairysvoice.net/archive/ 💫MY GAME GIF ARCHIVE: https://fairysvoice.net/animatedscreenshots/ 🔡MY TWINE PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE: http://twine2.neocities.org/ 🐳MY TWEETS: Now hold yer horses, you're already here! Relax, and enjoy🦋🌌
I'm just going to say it. The word "food" is disgusting.
*explores a high fantasy universe and unexpectedly discovers a wrecked rusted car on a crumbled slab of asphalt* "Damn… this changes everything… a time traveler chose to drive THIS?!"
If the 00's had no culture, then explain this *sound of ten thousand people saying the words "Flying Spaghetti Monster" as a performative badge of resistance to Intelligent Design, followed by ninety thousand people saying "Flying Spaghetti Monster" because it's epic and random*
"It's easy to say telepaths "read" minds, but in truth, we decrypt minds. Brains are grown, not made, and each brain thinks in a root-gnarled language all to its own. Though we take moments to cross the gap of air, skin and bone, it takes years to breach the hedge of neurons."
The purpose of videogames is to express the subliminal human desire that flowers should make music when they grow
Working on a basic Twine colour palette generator
You've just gotten on the elevator connecting Earth to the Moon, when all of a sudden some kid runs in, presses the button for the "vacuum of space" floor, then runs out before the doors close. You sigh wearily at having been pranked once again as the elevator slowly departs
Savepoint-based games can be analogised to platformers, where you "leap into danger" from savepoint to savepoint, in peril until you hit ground. If you want to make them easier while preserving their mechanical essence, add more platforms, not just make it so you fall 50% slower.
OK look, people's idea of a "Dark Souls Easy Mode" is too limited. The goal of an Easy Mode wouldn't be "you die less", because the threat of death is a big narrative feature. Instead it would be "more savepoints" so you have more unique deaths more often. https://twitter.com/tha_rami/status/1263249626334928896
On one hand I want an Outer Wilds 2, but a sequel would undermine the game's message of accepting your mortality, of accepting that beautiful things will exist after you're gone, that can only exist BECAUSE you are gone. So, I think they should release a sequel 100 years from now
Meanwhile, in Web Programming
function IS_PRIME_NUMBER( NUMBER ) { //ASK THE SMARTEST FUNCTIONS, ONEOF THEM MUST KNOW return getComputedStyle("is "+NUMBER+" prime!?") || document.createProcessingInstruction("is "+NUMBER+" prime?!?") || navigator.requestMediaKeySystemAccess("hey is "+NUMBER+" prime?!??") }
Game difficulty levels named after prose difficulty levels – "skim", "read", "peruse", "study" and "analyse"
The robot from Cave Story descending into Hell (a.k.a. "Sacred Grounds") and teaming up with Curly, but she accidentally leveled up her lightning gun and now it just shoots rubber ducks Cry if you like every time
and that the simplistic, incomplete visions of these unruly narrators is kept in check solely by rapidly passing control of the narrative back and forth between then, so each can't be risked getting too much of a word in.
This isn't just because they often have divergent visual styles (overworld vs. combat vs. stat screen) or even operate in different mediums (dialogue vs. rendering) but that they often conflict in what story they want to tell at all (narrative progression vs level ups),
Games with a lot of systems (i.e. most RPGs) feel like a story told by a handful of different narrators – the overworld narrator, the combat narrator, the dialogue tree narrator – each with their own idiosyncratic and often clashing notions of the characters and how they behave.
I'm back from a Japanese dictionary site having made the life-changing, crop-watering discovery that Riku and Sora from Kingdom Hearts have the exact same naming scheme as Aerith and Cloud. I have already muted my replies.
*plays a .midi of one of Chopin's Nocturnes BEFORE 6pm* Embrace chaos
Listen. This is vital. The reason all the scary faces in Horror Twitter threads have brightly visible teeth despite being in gloomy rooms is because they have back-lighting white LEDs hidden behind their lips. You can't expect your own scary face selfies to have the same results.
OK, so, purely rhetorical question here, but why do the Gunnerkrigg Court comic image filenames have eight decimal places
Today I'd like to give thanks to webcomics that, amid a dramatic chapter, unexpectedly dropped an animated GIF page for a strange or exciting moment. Thank you, webcomics, for those moments, and no thanks to 20's mobile comic platforms that make this type of surprise impossible.
DON'T CALL IT BEAST MODE UNLESS YOU'RE ACTUALLY SLOUCHING TOWARD BETHLEHEM
Glider PRO troll level part ///
*typing in Notepad projected onto wall* "So the problem with mechas hugging is they're made of pointy, jagged metal, so the noise would be horrific. But what if… they were explicitly made of alien metal that made wind-chime noises when they frot–" *backspaces and types "hug"*
Standard MTG Player: "Non-rotating formats are bad because if they release bizarre and wacky strong cards, those cards become part of the meta forever and never leave." Non-Rotating MTG Player: "Yeah, that's why it's so great. :)" Non-Rotating MTG Player After The Latest Set:
Giygas/Giegue in both Mother games is uniformly spelled "ギーグ", which the Romaji "Gyiyg" from Mother 2's opening suggests is pronounced as "gig". Which means it's definitely "gigue", the classical music term, right Because you finish the final battle in Mother 1 using SING
Forced by your landlord to spend precisely four hours a day in each of the house's six rooms so that the house "wears evenly"
"And here we are: the surface world! Pipes everywhere, pools of water, distant roaring noises, giant spi– what? Sewer? Yeah, the sewer's part of the surface. The lower part. What'd you expect? The SKY?! Anyway, hope you find your family. Toodles." *slams hinged manhole shut*
Glider PRO troll level continued
Pleased to announce that, inspired by the artistic movement of Mario Maker troll levels, I am now making troll levels for Glider PRO (Macintosh, 1994).
API documentation reveals every function, in addition to its normal arguments, accepts something called "the OmniValue", only one of which exists per program, and which promotes the receiving function to "S Rank"
*swoons in my leather settee, tears of joy welling up in my eyes, calling for my dear child Harlowe to share the brilliant news with quivering voice*
The problem with story-based action indie games like Celeste is that they insist on rewarding players for doing the super-hard optional challenges. They should be more like Undertale, where beating Sans essentially bricks your copy of the game.
Notes on this streamer: I have no association or affinity with this streamer or their personal brand, but chose them as a footage source due to A) not having their cam covering the game feed (surprisingly rare), and B) having a full archive of unedited stream VODs to pull from.
Here's a thread of my favourite Mario Maker troll level moments I've watched from streams. 1. SOURCE: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/537503981?collection=T7t1_BJPsBW8QA&t=3h11m6s
OverClocked ReMix finally changes name to OverClocked Arrangement: "Sorry folks, thought one word meant the other. My b." – Disc Jockey Pretzel
"There's a lot of misinformation about mage-knights in those videogames. For instance, all those glowing rings of spinning runes around our fists? Yeah, you can only see those when there's a lot of steam and smoke."
"Jalter? Oh, I love that character." *shows a picture of Javert*
"I don't just use my brain. You heard of muscle memory? Yeah, I've got my babies remembering all sorts of stuff. Left bicep, past holidays. Right calf, all my primary school classes. Leaving my brain clean and roomy for incoming present-day items, like Javascript library APIs."
"What? This time I'm inconspicuous! Don't you dare fault my disguise th–" *abruptly notices that their shadow is brighter than the surrounding ground instead of darker* "Well, I mean, hey, who hasn't raced out the house in the morning like this?! Boo hoo hoo. I mean, bah ha ha."
"Stepping into a painting is fine – the world it depicts never truly existed, no matter the accuracy of the human painter. Stepping into a photograph is very bad – to enter a gone moment, no matter how recent, is to enter a world that has been destroyed… a realm of the dead."
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