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zen-unknown · 4 years

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Introducing Medieval!Zen (or Witch!Zen i guess?)

She is a nature based witch who increases her lifespan by luring unsuspecting victims into her forest and stealing their souls. however, she has saved up quite a few souls at this point and is more interested in messing with her victims rather than killing them or stealing their souls. she is a few thousand years old, and has another few hundred to go before she needs to gather souls again.

She currently lives in the “cursed woods”, which got it’s reputation after she tormented almost everyone who entered and sometimes even drove them insane with her tricks, some of them never even made it out. She basically made anyone who entered become completely lost, and then messed with them for a solid few weeks before letting them leave. the ones that don’t leave are kept as slaves/servants (this is thanks to a poison she puts in them. the information for this poison is in the fun facts section of this post).

When she get’s bored of the forest she travels to the town outside her forest and works under the guise of a traveling herbalist/apothecary. Her fake identity is famous for being able to cure almost anything with her remedies. When she is doing this, she is also 100% willing to make poison's and potions for the right price. in reality, she doesn’t actually care about what she get’s in return, but she might as well get some money or something out of is. She just wants to see the chaos and trouble that follows. she would also give make the wrong mixture if she was feeling extra cheeky, or if her client is being an ass.

When she’s not being a complete sadist she is more of an observer. She would much rather watch something play out than actively participate. at most she will throw in an oddball to spice things up but she is more interested in seeing peoples reactions to challenging situations. It’s all very interesting and entertaining to her.

Thanks to her long life and general sadistic nature, she is extremely apathetic and takes very little seriously. she’s been around long enough and grown strong enough that it is rare for her to ever be in any real danger. Knowing this, she has no problem pissing people off and poking their buttons. getting them to the point of attacking is sometimes even her goal, for the sake of simply satisfying her curiosity and boredom.

Her powers include:

Growing any plant from any surface she wants, as well as her own body

Controlling a plant’s movements, shape, and size, even if she didn’t grow them

She can communicate basic messages, feelings, or desires to animals, and they act docile around her. it depends on how she treats them whether or not they respond positively to her influence

she is immune to basically all poisons and toxins thanks to working with and being around so many dangerous plants for so long

as a witch, she has decent resistance to common magic. for example, she can’t be charmed or manipulated by magic, and magic based attacks have less of an impact on her. this is also thanks to her age and experience

she can sense if there is something inhuman or magical nearby. this includes creatures, weapons, potions, and naturally magical areas. this means that if something isn’t a human or animal, or if something has been cursed or blessed, she will know. she will also have a general understanding of what it is exactly.

she can steal the soul of any living creature once she weakens them enough, and use their soul to extend her life. the stronger, older, and more magical her victim is, the longer her lifespan is extended. for example, a full grown stag would give her 3 to 4 years at most, while an adult human would give her around 20-30 years. a magical creature, depending on it’s age, species, and power levels, could give her anywhere between 50 to 200 years. So in short, she’s had to collect A LOT of souls to live this long and still have a few hundred to go. if she was to be “killed” she would simply loose one of the souls at random.

Fun Facts:

her favorite flower is Angels Trumpets, or Brugmansia. Despite it’s name a appearance, the seeds are extremely poisonous and if ingested, will cause the victim to experience symptoms that include, but are not limited to: confusion, tremors, migraines, poor coordination, delusions, auditory and visual hallucinations, and insanity. this is what she mainly uses to trap and torment her victims. if she’s feeling really evil, she will plant one of these seeds in her victims body and infuse it with her magic, making them basically her own zombie slaves. (yes this is a real flower, and yes it is my favorite flower irl)

She has an entire garden at her home in the forest full of toxic and poisonous plants. she makes her zombified victims take care of it, and sometimes tests different plants and mixtures on them.

the orange and pink roses in her hair are a flower of her own creation, born from her soul. it can not be grown by anyone but her, and it is in these flowers that she stores stolen souls. they cannot be trimmed or picked by anyone but her, and they can only grow from her body.

if you had to assign her an alignment, it would be neutral evil

She has two names. Zen is her birth name, and is what she typically goes by. Her witch name/title is Karma.

Now, despite all this stuff, she is currently rather passive. she has all the souls and servants she needs and is not acting on her more sadistic tendencies. if she doesn’t find you interesting, she will basically ignore your existence. if you catch her attention, she might pull some pranks and push your buttons, but it would take a lot for her to go full on evil witch mode. just don’t piss her off and you’ll make it out relatively unscathed.

If you couldn’t tell, I had a LOT of fun making this one. I REALLY LOVE THIS TYPE OF THING IF YOU HAVEN’T GUESSED YET. And I’m still working on a backstory so maybe more to come? Idk but I hope you found this interesting if you read the whole thing!

#Creatorverse au #creatorverse aus #zen #zen au #zen aus #Medieval Creatorverse AU #Medievil!Zen #Witch!Zen #my art

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kinsie · 5 years

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Game Impressions from PAX Aus 2019

Wake the fuck up, samurai. We've got a city to burn.

Every year I go to PAX Aus with some close friends to check out the Incredible Future of Games that everyone else already checked out six months ago, along with some cool weird indie shit and some awesome retro stuff. And every year, I write a little diary of what I saw to share my impressions with my friends. This is that diary.

Doom Eternal

Okay, let's get this out of the way. I played Doom Eternal pretty much as soon as I got on the show floor. It may shock you to know that it is, in fact, good.

No pictures of the demo units, sorry, so have this big logo.

The demo started with a little grey-box tutorial map just to teach you what you need to know for the demo level, since it was taken from the middle of the game. It looked very Snapmap-y and had some Doom 2 MIDI music playing. After that we were given about 25 minutes to acquaint ourselves with the lengthy "Mars Core" mission they've been showing since E3. I was at the start of the first arena of the hell bit when I ran out of time. :(

Here are some scattered thoughts from playing:

Your standard running around and double jumping feels much the same as in Doom 2016. The dashing feels great, although I think it might reduce your air control a little afterwards as I had some trouble overshooting a platform in the floating debris bit.

Climbing walls felt a bit weird to me. You have to press E on the wall manually to grab onto it, which feels a bit unintuitive when you're plummeting past it. Also feels a bit odd considering mantling up walls is automatic. You can auto-grab onto walls if you dash into it, but I think it's only for the first bit of the dash? Maybe I'm just bad at videogames.

I think the Combat and Super Shotguns now use different ammo types? I could have swore there were situations where I could select the Combat Shotgun but not the SSG.

The Chainsaw now no longer has even the slightest pretence of being a "real" weapon. It's now just a swing animation when you press the button, like a melee attack, before bringing your weapon back up.

When you have the SSG's Meat Hook attachment, a little meathook icon appears below the crosshair. When you're close enough to an enemy to grapple onto them, the icon floats over them, indicating that it has some kind of auto-aim mechanic to reduce frustration.

There was a monster with swords on its arms that acted an awful lot like the Baron of Hell (might have been the Hell Knight, looking at the Quakecon footage of the same fight) but it looked quite different. Looked fuckin' cool, whatever it was.

The platforming but in the debris section with the giant floating red barrels was actually kind of frustrating. It wasn't always clear where you needed to go, and the climbable bits tended to blend in with the rest of the world. Then again, keep in mind I have a frankly abysmal sense of direction. Thankfully falling into the void just whacks you for a paltry five health and teleports you back onto safe ground.

The locational damage stuff is really fun. Breaking a monster's guns has a satisfying metal "PING" sound to it to inform you that the dude got fucked up and is weaker now, and that you should keep doing it.

When I picked up one of those "?" secrets, the pop-up box told me that they unlocked "collectable dolls" and "cheat codes". The former is vague, but I suspect they'll be like the mini-Doomguys but of more characters. I'd imagine the latter will be like in Rage 2.

Oh, and it looks a million bucks, too. Though you probably didn't need me to tell you that.

All in all, I'm pretty happy with what I saw and it's even more of a pity it's not coming out next month.

Not Indie Games, But Also Not Doom Eternal

The Vive Cosmos felt really comfy - the lack of cabling and the decent display resolution made it feel a lot more natural than the Gen 1 Vives I've previously used. The game they were using to demo (Audica), however, was pretty lame. A rhythm-target shooter that didn't really take advantage of the medium at all.

Bleeding Edge was not inspiring. It was basically the control point mode from TF2 or Overwatch, except every character was a third-person brawler with little emphasis on projectile weapons beyond the occasional special. It felt like someone making a claim at TF2 or Overwatch's throne several years late while bolting a weak character action game on, which is fairly odd considering how innovative and critically acclaimed Ninja Theory's previous game was.

Dreams is fairly fascinating in its potential. The creation tools weren't available in the demo build so I can’t really judge them, instead there was a choice of eight developer-made experiences ranging from Mario-inspired obstacle courses to videogames as art.

I didn't get the chance to actually play MediEvil, but I watched some folks play it and it basically just looks like the PS1 game with more triangles, with all the slightly wonky 32-bit gameplay that entails.

The demo unit for Monkey King: Hero Is Back had some utterly bizarre graphics settings for some reason that made it look like I was playing a JPEG file, with big whopping compression artifacts surrounding each character. Weird!

Not happenin’.

Indie Games

Grabimals is a brilliant local co-op puzzler where players roll around as shapes and link together to solve puzzles like catching a falling water droplet, crossing a gap or casting a shadow that matches an example image. Supposedly it's still a ways off from release, but it's already impressively polished (disregarding one hilarious crash bug we found by accident!)

Hamster Scramble is a really fun take on Puzzle Bobble, with platforming elements, team play and the ability to jump over to your opponent's screen and fuck their plans up directly. It's an absolute blast and didn't feel like it was almost a year away from release.

Fork Knights is a platform fighter with an emphasis on one-hit kills. The character designs are cute, but I can't really say the gameplay itself struck me, to be honest.

Baron is an eight-player single-screen local multiplayer dogfighter. Fairly simple mechanically, but pretty fun all things considered.

Broken Roads had some lovely hand-painted art assets and some interesting ideas like a literal moral compass, but the demo build showcased was waaaaay too early to be shown off to the public. Of the eight or so areas present in the demo, only two had any characters, interactivity or really anything other than wandering around set up, and the combat side of things was extremely rough and sequestered off to a side area as a "well, if you insist..." kind of deal.

Misadventure In Little Lon is a true-crime adventure game for mobile with a unique mechanic - each "scene" is integrated into the real world via AR, with characters (that resemble Poser models more than a little bit) speaking to you directly. Not sure if it holds up over an entire game, but it's attention-garnering at least.

Speaking of true crime, The Black Window tasks players with using an Oujia board to question Australia's first female serial killer, with responses taken from court records and letters from the time. The well-acted performances of the actual individual in question's words lends it an impressive atmosphere, which the booth added to with a big wooden oujia board type thing you could "type" on. Sort of.

ACID KNIFE is real, real early, but the aesthetic is awesome and the pixel art is great. Hopefully it grows and expands into something special.

The Vigilante Proclivities of the Longspur is an oldschool Lucasarts-inspired point-and-click adventure with a custom demo scene set at an oddly-familiar videogame convention. Pretty promising so far, but could do with a good bit of polish - I'm pretty sure there was only one sound effect in the entire demo, and dialogue was often lacking in punctuation.

I didn't get to play Hot Brass but I watched over shoulders and talked with the developers, and it looked pretty cool. It's basically a take on SWAT 4's rarely-imitated brand of tactical copwork, but with a Hotline Miami-style top-down perspective, but with all the characters abstracted down to simple board game like tokens - a circle with a coloured outline denoting attitude towards the player, with a weapon icon if armed.

Blood Metal... Blood Metal is not good. It is extensively not good. Development seems to have only started in July, so one can still hope that the bad AI, unsatisfying gunplay, buggy collision detection and complete lack of damage feedback (outside of some ridiculous, sight-obscuring gouts of blood) get fixed over time. The 80s action movie aesthetic and low-poly artstyle forces it to be compared to Maximum Action, which is at least a fun kind of jank...

This Starry Void is a real-time, tile-based 3D dungeon crawler set in an abandoned spacecraft. It seems pretty cool so far, but it could probably use some UI/UX tweaks. The attempts at a "graphic novel inspired" visual style for the environments could probably benefit from looking at how Void Bastards did things, as well.

Lethal Lawns and Beam Team are fucking arcade games with massive cabinets. In 2019. Granted, they're also on computers and coming to consoles and stuff as well, but still! They're both pretty simple games, and therefore best played in cabinet form.

Unpacking is a "zen puzzle game" by the developers of Assault Android Cactus about the second-worst part of moving house, unloading an unseen character's packing and getting a glimpse into their lives as a result. I wasn’t able to play it due to an unexpectedly-crowded booth, but the pixel art is quite lovely.

Feather is a chill game about being a bird and flying around an island trying to find its secrets. I tried the Switch port, which played alright but obviously (and understandably) toted a lower framerate than the demo PC.

Topple Pop is a cute puzzle game that blends together elements of Tetris, Puyo Puyo and that one joke game that was Tetris but with a proper physics engine. Looks cute, with a fun gimmick!

Shooty Skies Overdrive is an VR spinoff of the popular mobile shmup, and basically similar to that one shmup minigame in Valve's The Lab. Weave your plane, which is attached to one of your hands, through incoming bullets and enemies like a toy! The 3D effect on the incoming projectiles looks great, but they can tend to get in the way of the action sometimes.

Dead Static Drive has been at like the last three PAXes and it looks better every time I see it. I hope it comes out this decade.

Snow Mercy is a third-person shooter/strategy thing where you hunt down icecubes to spend on an army of snowmen to crush your opponent's base before they crush yours. Not a common genre combo, reminds me of C&C Renegade a bit.

The Adventure Pals has graphics straight out of mid-2000s Newgrounds and level design out of pretty much any european platformer, but it didn't seem too bad from my brief prodding at it. The player character is perhaps a bit too small for my elderly eyes in Switch portable mode, but that's about as far as my gripes go.

#gaming #paxaus2019

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