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anim-ttrpgs · 1 month

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Hey I know you’ve probably said or before. But what’re some of the playable Supernatural folk in ANIM.

Firstly, just to be clear, A.N.I.M. is the design team, while Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy is the TTRPG currently in its final week of crowdfunding (ends 2:00 PM CST on Friday May 10th)

As for the supernatural folk, even though most PCs in Eureka end up being mundane, there’s quite a lot of options for supernatural characters, which we have talked about before, but we never miss a chance to talk about them again!

This will be a brief overview that will barely even scratch the surface of the depth and nuance we’ve written in to most of these abilities. If you’re interested in learning more, why don’t you just download the fully playable, free prerelease version of the Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy rulebook available on our website and our itch.io page, and go to Chapter 8!

There are ten of what we call “Mage traits.” A “mage” in Eureka is something you could think of as kind of like an X-man. They are otherwise normal people except for one single inexplicable power. Some of these include pyrokinesis, telekinesis, lightning powers, supernatural speed, supernatural beauty, and even the option to play a “psychic detective” who can receive clairvoyant revelations based on clues.

These powers tend to come with few if any downsides, besides the fact that the character can only have at-most one of them. There is also a slight investigation point penalty.

Then, there’s the playable monsters, of which there are five, each of which is fleshed out to the point that they are entirely unique gameplay experiences.

First up is the vampire.

Playing a vampire is a unique challenge because of their rather large list of weaknesses they must contend with in everyday life. The sun, while not instantly lethal like in Hollywood vampire movies, does strip them of all their powers, and they must contend with a compulsion to count large numbers of small objects, an unwillingness to enter private residences uninvited, difficulty crossing bodies of running water, an aversion to garlic, and more! They must of course also drink human blood to keep their Composure up, as they do not gain Composure from eating or sleeping.

These weaknesses are more than made up for by incredible stealth, combat, and mobility options. They can move nearly silently, travel through shadows as if by teleportation, are superhumanly strong, nearly unkillable, can walk effortlessly on sheer surfaces and ceilings, and can “remanifest” into a variety of forms, such as the classic bat, a wolf, an enormous monstrous bat form, and even mist! There’s also a religious angle with them but that is too complicated to get into with just a brief overview.

Next up, the wolfman.

The wolfman is like a Hollywood werewolf. They can transform from a mundane human to an anthropomorphic wolf(however you choose to interpret that) or a very large regular wolf. In either wolf form, they can only be permanently killed by decapitation or by silver weaponry.

My favorite thing about them is the fact that they transform involuntarily on the night of the full moon, or when they hit 0 Composure. In this state, they will rampage uncontrollably, attempting to devour just about anything that moves for a period of time. The fact that it can come out at the worst of times is so awesome it makes me super excited to hear about in future sessions.

Then there is the witch.

The witch is actually a regular human and has no supernatural weaknesses except for the fact that their powerful witchcraft takes more of a toll on their body than the supernatural powers of other playable monsters.

The first thing a witch can do is place a variety of terrible curses on people, a few examples of which include turning them to stone, putting them in a supernatural slumber, or turning them into animals.

The other thing witches can do is cycle throughout all the different Mage traits. They can only have one at a time, but if a Mage trait exists in the rulebook, they can have that trait when they need it, which basically represents their ability to cast a wide variety of different spells in addition to those curses.

My actual favorite thing about the witch though is their ability to enchant certain objects to make them fly, which is not limited to just broomsticks, although broomsticks are of course a classic.

Then there is the fairy.

The fairy was a tough one to translate into Eureka because of the sheer number of different things attributed to fairies in historical folklore. We had to come up with a sort of “generic fairy” that gets the gist of fairies across while leaving room for a player to get way more specific if they are so inclined.

The fairy shares the witch’s ability to place curses on people and cast a variety of different spells, but also can take pieces of people’s identity, such as their names, and/or spirit them away to the fairy world, from which they may never return.

This is offset by the fact that they cannot lie, as well as a few other folkloric fairy weaknesses.

Finally, one of the fan favorites, the thing from beyond.

(Fanart by @umbraldame)

The thing from beyond is kinda like if you wanted to play as something inspired by The Blob and The Thing.

Imagine a color-changing “blanket” of flesh and teeth that can fold itself up into the shape of a human, change colors to mimic the right colors including clothing, and mimic human speech. It wants to be your friend, and eat you, which, to it are not mutually exclusive.

The thing from beyond can do anything a thin blanket of flesh could do when unfolded, such as squeeze under doors or camouflage themselves against surfaces, and also fold themselves up to mimic just about anything, including specific humans. They tend to have a default human persona, but can get very specific with their mimicry if they want, which gets easier the more of that specific person they have ingested. A small sample of blood or hair could give a bonus, but eating the entire person makes mimicking them effortless.

Eating a person also allows them to absorb bits of their memories, which means they can get to know bits of what their meal knows, which is represented in mechanics by them getting bonus investigation points for the duration that they are digesting their latest victim. If the victim knew anything about the current case they are investigating, that means even more investigation points.

Here’s a fan comic about that, if you’d like to see it in action.

And here’s a post about the themes of monstrousness in Eureka if you’re interested.

You can play as all of these things and more in Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy, which is in its final week of kickstarting right now! Crowdfunding closes at 2:00 PM CST on Friday May 10th, so lock in your copy now while you still can!

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If you’re interested in a more updated and improved version of Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy than the free demo you got from our website, subscribe to our Patreon where we frequently roll our new updates for the prerelease version!

You can also support us on Ko-fi, or by checking out our merchandise!

Join our TTRPG Book Club At the time of writng this, Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy is the current game being played in the book club, and anyone who wants to participate in discussion, but can’t afford to make a contribution, will be given the most updated prerelease version for free! Plus it’s just a great place to discuss and play new TTRPGs you might not be able to otherwise!

We hope to see you there, and that you will help our dreams come true and launch our careers as indie TTRPG developers with a bang by getting us to our base goal and blowing those stretch goals out of the water, and fight back against WotC's monopoly on the entire hobby. Wish us luck.

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txttletale · 8 months

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bundletober: live. love. die. remember

hello and welcome to bundletober, where i look through TTRPGs i got in bundles like a year ago and see if they're good or not. i will be doing this with no rhyme or reason but i will be trying to do one a day. i'll note whether or not i've played the game in these reviews but more often than not i'll just be looking at the book and offering my first-level thoughts. if a structure or something develops over the month so be it but for now the plan is just to ramble about the game a bit and give an overall recommendation or lack thereof

first of all, the cover (by finbah neill) is really nice. a good cover, a smart choice of font, a couple of masking layers over it, can really go a long way.

the game is one of my favourite types of game -- a single, razor-sharp concept. this game is about one thing: mechs that have fallen in love with their pilots, reminiscing on the time they spent together. it is specifically about that and nothing in it can be separated from that.

i've talked quite a bit (including in the pages of my own game, most trusted advisors) about how i think the text of a game should act as a co-author, prompting you and providing bits of story you wouldn't have thought of otherwise--and as an alchemist, transmuting narrative or mechanical input from the players at the table into a narrative or narrative output for them to engage with. LLDR is much more of the former than the latter--there is no real alchemy going on here, it's very much a co-author, asking questions and inviting a simple pattern of call-and-response.

so what are its contributions in that capacity? LLDR wants to tell intimate stories, love stories--or rather, it wants you to tell them. the meat of the game is the thirty-item long list of prompts that ask you (playing the mech) to recount stories of times spent with your pilot. some of them are pretty standard as romantic prompts go, but some create a real sense of place and tragedy -- "When you couldn't save someone" and "When you helped them pick fruit" stand out for me as being deliciously emotive while being specific. this game is at its best when it is specific, when it seems like it has a specific vision (like a huge powerful war machine and its pilot picking fruit together) and is inviting you to share that vision with it, into its secret hidden places to feel private feelings with it.

the only real 'mechanic' other than these prompts -- the only thing that the game asks you to do other than tell short stories based on them--is "marking your chassis". the game asks you to use eyeliner or marker pen to track, on your body, how many scenes you've played out. i really like this--it definitely does something to set LLDR apart from other small prompt-based games like it. it's the closest thing to alchemy this game has, and it's an oddly physical and located thing for a TTRPG to ask of you. i really like it.

ultimately, this is a five-page RPG with sparse mechanics. that's not enough space to set the world on fire. i think it falters in a few places where there aren't quite enough distinct ideas to fill out every slot on a table that needs filling. but for what it is, the razor-sharp concept goes a long way towards justifying the spareseness and tonally i think it's melancholy and warm in a way that makes me excited to check out more of creator reizor's games.

live. love. die. remember can be purchased as a digital download from itch.io

#tattletxt #ttrpg #bundletober 2023 #this is my new thing. ive always planned to do this. this has always been a thing.

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kawaoneechan · 1 year

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Why I don't like Unity

There's three reasons, basically, besides my personal inability to get any custom character assets into Unity, Unreal, or Godot.

Let me tell you below the readmore.

Reason #1: it managed to fucking bluescreen my system just trying to start.

How do you fuck that up? I download an installer and run it. This gives me a launcher. From there, I'm supposed to install the actual product I wanted to begin with. That's bad enough, to be honest. But then the fucking launcher managed to break so badly, I had my first BSOD in several months. With all I do to my poor laptops, I so very rarely got crashes like that it honestly threw me the fuck off.

If the launcher is gonna play like that, forget about installing the actual product.

Reason #2: CPU pegging up the ass.

On my previous laptop, attempting to run basically any Unity-based game would peg the CPU, all cores, until the poor thing ran so hot within mere minutes, it'd commit preventative sudoku. Maybe if I was lucky, I'd get a chance to set all the things to "lowest", and that might let me, I dunno, play long enough to get through the goddamn tutorial?

And I'm not even talking about state-of-the-art 3D games, but simple 2D games with low-resolution pixel art. Why would those run a dual-core at 200% until it fucking kills itself? Makes no sense.

Now, Phil Fortier of Icefall Games is an acquaintance of mine via SCI shenanigans, and when he released Snow Spirit (soon to be rereleased as part of Chronicles of Cascadia), I lamented to him about how his use of Unity would mean I couldn't run any of his stuff. So Phil looked into it and found a Big Fucking Thing to optimize. This basically makes Phil's SCI games the only things made in Unity that I can personally trust won't Do That.

Reason #3: About those 2D games...

I'm gonna dip into my Twitter archives for a bit and repost some stuff for this part.

*wavy flashback effect*

This is Angel Jump, a simple little arcade jumping game that's available on itch.io:

It's delightfully low resolution and has like four seconds of audio all added up. Can't be more than a few MB, depending on which sane development framework they used, right?

33 MB, actually. Because Unity. Let's see how it breaks down:

Unity main exe: 623 KB

Main game assets file: 1.19 MB together

A folder full of support DLLs like terrain and cloth: 7.17 MB, 90% or more of them never called because this is a 2D pixel-art game.

Unity's default resources: 3.41 MB. Mind that of these, only the splash logo is actually used because Angel Jump was made in the free edition.

Mono embedded runtime: 2.61 MB, and each game gets its own copy, much like how Electron apps each have their own copies of Chromium.

And another 17 MB for the Unity Player.

All in all, 33 MB of files for a game like that. Why? Because Unity is a bloated crapsack, I'd conclude from a cursory study like that. Let's compare that to some other games.

This is Elevator Girl, which is not on itch.io.

It has a lot of different animations and three fairly long background music tracks. It's only one file, 18.7 MB. I'm willing to bet most of that is the BGM, but I can't confirm it because it's just the one file.

And just for some historical perspective, the entire Crystal Caves trilogy is 1.31 MB, including some chaff. Commander Keen 4 on its own is 740 KB. Now, Keen and Elevator Girl both have OPL soundtracks, but the latter's is probably streamed.

Noxico is only 1.25 MB to download as a .7z file. Its only optimization that I myself actively apply is that I crunch the PNG files. The rest is text, and since the game uses a .zip file by another name as a game data source... yeah. That's a cheap win.

Now, back to Angel Jump. I went through the game's own resources to see what size it could conceivably have if it was not made in Unity. 54 textures, ten of them actually used. Tiny font stored in a weird way, possibly for distance field trickery which has no business in a 2D pixel game if you ask me. 921 KB of WAV files, high-quality bleepity-bloops, two of them jingles. 4.22 KB of PNG files, crunched like Noxico, for all but the creator's logo and the font. 973 KB for a copy of SDL, and I'd estimate at worst two MB for the main EXE.

The entire Angel Jump game could be no more than 4 MB and a half-dozen files, It's actually 33.2 MB, 92 files.

There's a more general computer programming issue that this reliance on Unity for even the simplest, smallest games seems to spring from: the bigger and better the computers get, the more lazy the developers get. Only have like four MHz, 640 KB of RAM and, what, 720 KB of diskette space, and no guarantee of an HDD? Better make the most of it, developers! But now the pressure's off and there's no more reason to exert any effort into keeping small games actually small.

*sigh*

#unity #rant #twitter

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misscammiedawn · 25 days

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Plurality Weekend

Hey all. This post is for anyone discovering my blog for the first time this weekend. My name is Cammie Dawn and I write a lot about DID and Hypnokink. Both of these things will be quite relevant this weekend.

I'm attending The Plurality Positivity World Conference (info in link) this weekend after our therapist sent us to last year's event and it went well. Unrelated to the event, I'm also a panelist for a talk on hypnokink and plurality tomorrow (Saturday 5/18 at 1pm-3pm CST - info in link)

Networking at the PPWC for my Media, Myself and I essays (one kind person has already reached out to us about them which makes me glow with pride and grateful to know my stuff is getting out there) and providing my links to the panel tomorrow, I imagine I may get a few first time visitors to my blog. I thought I'd do a quick "resources and links" post.

For Media Essays:

Recontextualized Memory and Unprocessed Trauma in Umineko - A visual novel about generational trauma goes over how a young woman goes over and over the events of a tragedy in her childhood and how adult knowledge will recontextualize our adult recollections.

Derealization in Night in the Woods and Metal gear Solid 2 - Describing the sensation of derealization where the brain stops connecting associations between the self and the things one perceives in their surroundings. One example displaying how this impacts a person living with DPDR and the other showing an example of a game attempting to make a player share the experience with the player character.

DID and the healing process in Mr. Robot - A run down of the experiences of discovery, exploration, rejection and healing within DID as displayed in each season of Mr. Robot, along with a disappointed rundown of why the final episode fumbled the ball.

Bruce Banner and the roles of his alters - A breakdown of the formation of The Incredible Hulk’s DID and what roles his many alters play.

Romantic relationships with systems - A look at the marriage between Bruce Banner and Betty Talbot-Ross Banner in Hulk comics and a frank discussion between Betty and one of Bruce’s alters about how relationships function in a system.

Personality Play in Penlight - A review of one of the routes for a hypnokink visual novel called Penlight in which the protagonist hypnotizes a woman to have an alter personality, along with some descriptions of how dangerous play like that works in real life and what the consequences could be.

For Hypnokink Resources (more in our Hypnokink Writings tag):

Hypnosis and Dissociative Disorders - A Rebuttal to a recent claim at a hypnosis convention that we shouldn't practice with those who dissociate as part of a mental illness.

Ethical Personality Play - A discussion about the real psychological damage that can and will happen if you play with personality play in hypnokink without setting safeties and grounding as part of your play.

Unreality and Hypnosis - A small note about how derealization symptoms mingle with hypnokink and why grounding and ensuring "reality remains in the scene" is important.

Anyway. Thank you all. For those who follow me normally, I appreciate you indulging the link spam.

#dawn posting #media myself and i #DID #plurality #hypnokink #hypnokink writings

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vntako · 5 months

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vn in a bottle: her tears were my light

ah i've found something very nice

decided to read some short vns to figure out how to write one and i thought this first one i went for appropriately explicitly defined starts, middles, and endings as part of it's narrative. along with the whole time travel shebang (you play as time) i found this was a bit too appropriate for what i was deciding to write but thought hey this is the universe nudging me gently into finishing the thing.

the story starts with time all alone, and finding space. i love the whole love at first sight schtick, oh and there's an implication of fated lovers thing ("it's like i've met you before" and all that jazz)

space is very cute

i find it difficult to talk about this game without spoiling it bc it's really short and there's not much to say about the exposition apart from space being super cute (the whole thing is around ~30 mins for me, at least less than an hour)

well, to be a bit less vague, i like the story's themes of loneliness. relationships are a complex thing, and memories aren't so reliable sometimes. and people do ultimately change. we misunderstand, we discuss, we compromise. i like that the story reminds us to do our best to try not to leave anyone in our lives lonely.

oh the the fluff between the characters is great, i like a lot

OH forgot to mention the music, it's super good. it fits over the emotional parts so well, especially the true ending song geez. also there are vocal tracks in the extras using eleanor forte and they're really good i need them on like, spotify to put in a playlist (one of them is there, it wasn't my fav but this is pretty nice)

go play this game it's free on itch over here you can play it in your browser no downloads just a bit of loading time

her tears were my light by NomnomNami (itch.io)

spoilers beyond this point

if it gets you to play it you should know you get to kiss the girls

so you have to save space from being killed by this other girl nil, and she has the power to stop you from rewinding so you gotta start at the start every time you try to save space

the whole "doing different things but always leading to the same result" (insanity) plot line is very appealing to me, and this vn has that. space is killed every time you try to reset. you reset anyway. wowza. i love that.

eventually, we find out nil and space are the same, which is implied by their similar appearances and parallels and stuff. i like that, that's cool, so at that point the goal for you is to reconcile the two of em despite them being polar opposites of each other (space is the girlfailure and nil is the girlboss)

it genuinely hurt me resetting out of the nil ending btw, i didn't get a screenshot but jeezums (nil is best girl sorry)

a few resets in you get to have this moment with space

it's great

i don't like that this kiss decides you abandon nil, though. well, you come around eventually.

you get the true beginning by talking things out with nil, making up for what you've done (even if you don't remember), and deciding not to abandon either of them. that's great, i like that a lot. talking is good.

nil is super cute

to talk a bit more, i like how nil gets so desperate to the point that time misunderstands her intentions. i think, that like happens a fair bit in real life. heck if someone forgot about me to go and have fun with someone else i would uh, die. time hears her out eventually and they come to a compromise and it all works out for the three of them. they both forgive each other. and space doesn't die (yay)

the true beginning is basically a poly ending and that makes this vn a 10/10

#her tears were my light #visual novel #vn in a bottle #nomnomnami

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totesmgoats01-published-author · 3 months

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Has anybody heard of or played a game called KBNR?

I was just cleaning out my downloads folder and realized I couldn't remember what "KBNRWIN.RAR" was, so I unzipped it and it was a very short, pixel graphics, semi-monochrome, top-down, indie horror game. The "readme" txt is very sparse, with some links to bandcamp (for the soundtrack) and itch.io (for other stuff by the creator?) both of which were dead ends.

The controls of the game were ONLY arrow keys to move. That's it. There's no "select" or "back" or even "exit game" buttons (the readme said exit was alt+F4). I looked up the name and the only thing I could find mentioning it was a "top 10" style list by "the casual gaymer" mentioning it without much detail.

The gameplay itself is controlling a little purple character, who climbs up some kind of tower or mountain, as you go text boxes pop up then go away after a few seconds. When you get to the top of the mountain/tower your character jumps off (you don't have control over this) and the game closes itself.

I buy a bunch of big itch.io bundles, and I wouldn't be surprised if this was from one of those but can anyone back up the claim that it is? In particular I've bought bundles in support of various charitable causes. These are the specific ones, with the dates they came out:

Games For Gaza Oct 29, 2023

Bundle for Ukraine Mar 09, 2022

Indie bundle for Palestinian Aid Jun 05, 2021

Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality Jun 07, 2020

Searching the bundles for "kbnr" has no results.

Has anybody else seen or played this little game? Am I crazy? Am I haunted? I've seen stories that start pretty similar to this on nexpo and I'm not thrilled about it lol.

#original post #kbnr #kbnr game #indie game #indie games #indie gaming #pc games #internet mysteries #nexpo #has anyone heard of this #what other tags can I use to reach people lol #itchio #itch.io #itchio games #itch.io games #cw sui mention #cw horror

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devsgames · 6 months

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Do you know what's up with the Windows Defender warnings that sometimes pop up on game maker projects and/or exe's? I have had this thing happen where I wanted to show friends my wip-stuff, and their Windows would go through the whole routine of "we have blocked functions, do you want to run this anyway?" The idea that I would upload something to itch.io only for random people worrying that I might be trying to infect their devices with malware puts a damper on wanting to make stuff to share in the first place

This was something that actually came up a few weeks ago in my Discord (I believe @vissadev had to deal with it on one of their projects). I honestly have little experience with it myself - Windows is either cool with my Unity executables or executing them mostly via Steam like most of my users do must certify it better. I imagine embedded web builds would probably not trigger this behaviour, if that's an option.

To get around this apparently you can also submit your applications to Microsoft for scan/review, wherein they look at it and go "oh it's just a game" and then update their registry to stop that from happening. Other antiviruses usually have an option to do that as well. It's probably best saving this process for shipping and just dealing with the warnings while you're still in development or adding exceptions to your antivirus, it might be annoying but submitting builds as you go could be even more annoying. It's not a great system but it's probably better than nothing!

I will say though that you shouldn't let that deter you from sharing your work! Like, it's going to be pretty inevitable that antivirus will false-positive your builds at some point or another, and I think most users when downloading a game are pretty good at recognizing the difference between secret virus or just a dang video game. It's just part of the process and doesn't really reflect poorly on you - it's not like you're actually sending people malware! If it's done through itch it's at least a little more legitimate as opposed to those Discord attacks where people DM randos with a 1kb file saying "please play my game".

Heck, I think especially on itchio where people download hasty little game jam titles labelled "My First Game_v12__FINAL_2.0_026" on a regular basis I think you're probably fine if it's not a shipped game. :)

(Also I just Googled it, apparently this is frequently reported in GameMaker and they have some recommendations to address it as well!)

#If anyone knows if there's some kind of GameMaker-specific setting to get around this plz feel free to reply!#asks #ask

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dymdrimluga · 11 months

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Lovely Monsters

Winter is coming. Even now, in the middle of summer, I am already thinking about how to survive it. And at this time I remember the vampire jam in which I participated. And here is the game that our team made

https://itch.io/jam/vtm/rate/1815268

You can download and play if you have time.

I made backgrounds in this game. I believe that I could have done them better, but I did not have the necessary experience, and I wanted to do them as accurately as possible, so that the important places were recognizable. I used Blender for the base, then I did a lot of finishing with my hands. Next time, if there is a next time, I would like to do everything in a completely different style. Another artist drew characters.

Our team could only coordinate over the Internet. Part of the team was in Poland, far from home. Part of it was in Ukraine. I was in Ukraine at that time, I returned when the Russian invaders were repelled away from Kyiv. The city became generally safe, but the Russians started hitting the energy system with missiles, which caused blackouts lasting many hours. Sometimes there was no electricity for several days, but just in time for the jam, more or less stable schedules were established, and I had to not only remember a program that I had not used for a long time, but also manage to do it in 2-4 hours a day when the electricity was still there, and a little while the laptop slill worked.

The artist who drew the characters also had problems with the electricity. I like the characters, they are very interesting.

Even though I was part of the team, I didn't know exactly what the game was going to be about, so I have experience as both a developer and a player not quite knowing what to expect. In the dialogues, many topics from the history of Ukraine are revealed, some of them are actually very inspiring for further thinking, of course, if you know what they are talking about.

I wonder how all this is perceived by players from other countries? We were a little disappointed because this is a global game jam, albeit on a specific topic, and while games on local Ukrainian jams always get attention and comments, here we got almost nothing. I have to admit, our local jams really attract more attention, and have a slightly better organization and a more cohesive community. I am very sorry that because of the language barrier, few people from other countries can play the best games from our jams. And it's sad to imagine how much I lose, since I don't know many foreign languages.

I still like comics more than visual novels. But regardless, I would like to participate in the next vampire jam, if it ever happens, and if everyone on our team wants to participate in it in the future. Not because I'm expecting any prizes (prizes in jams usually make me laugh), or even attention, I just really like to draw something on the theme of vampires of the World of Darkness. I just hope that I will still have internet, at least my iPad (a very good thing during blackouts!), and be able to pay the rent)))

#lovely monsters #VtM jam #VtM jam 2022 #VtM #Vampire #game

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daemonhxckergrrl · 9 months

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outta curiousity What OS(s) do u use when gaming? Have you ever used nvidia or nouveau drivers on a non debian based distro (or at least not ubuntu derived)? I'm looking to ditch Steam and ubuntu-distros in my gaming set up but am stuck keelhauling a gtx 970 till playing gloomhaven in 4k finally kills it.

Currently running Pop!OS cause their hybrid tiling WM/popShell is the most satisfying easy and efficent to use Window Manager i've ever touched imo and the well rounded support for nvidia cards and their issues has paid off.

I've tried Arch before on a laptop with hybrid intel graphics which was a bitch but works alright still and am considering the pacman,xfce route but fear/dislike the unreliability of rolling releases on my main gaming device. Any advice or thoughts on OSs and WM's for gaming on linux?

970 gang !!!!!!

i daily drive void on my desktop :3 and so far it seems to be handling gaming as good or even better than mint did on the same system.

i understand the unreliability fear of rolling release, but something big like arch is well-tested and mainstream software should have few issues. and bc your system gets updated more often, you don't have the issue of "oh i need a newer version of this package than my repos provide, guess i'm compiling from source" and then that breaks bc it requires a bunch of newer core packages than your system has.

that said, something like nixos could be an option as it provides all those fresh packages but it's easy to roll back an update, and once you get a known good configuration you just need that one config file to reproduce it on a fresh install.

i use nvidia's drivers bc apparently nouveau still sucks for gaming, especially proton/wine, and i don't wanna take the risk testing it on my main rig.

hybrid tiling sounds interesting ! is it like a smart snapping sort of thing ? idk much about it, or other wms that aren't from a strict dynamic or automatic tiling background (i use i3 and quite like it - fullscreen is handled well for games and while some don't like being forced into windowed mode and resized, windowed-mode games can run floating or full-size tiled).

my setup is native linux steam, native linux itch.io, and then all non-native games are run in Bottles, a wineprefix manager. i have prefixes for windows itch.io, epic games, and then a few different one for 'standalone' games i've downloaded. including a wineprefix dedicated to modded bethesda games using mod organiser 2.

sooo ig, you can go the void route if you're okay w/ a distro that has a fairly small main repo, or arch (or artix) if you want a bigger repo and perhaps more mainstream support, or nixos if you're interested in trying something different - though i haven't tried to game on that yet. and then i would recommend sticking to nvidia's proprietary driver, native game managers (repo or flatpak doesn't matter) and bottles for running via WINE. soda is one of many wine runners shipped w/ bottles based on valve's wine w/ all their proton patches applied and it works great for most things.

i hope this long answer helps at least a little !! and good luck gaming <3 <3

#open-source-anarch3y #DATA_REQUESTS

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elftwink · 7 months

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lots of discussion on the dash as of late about trying to get people to switch from dnd to other systems (filled with ppl saying correct and true things. this is not a criticism), but relatively little recommending specific games or systems. well be the change you want to see in the world is what they say, so to anyone looking to branch out but not sure where to start, i would like to recommend my all time favourite ttrpg:

SPACE TRAIN SPACE HEIST

here's the little itch.io blurb (or the important part anyway): "A high-octane, single session, GM-less, Forged In The Dark, goof of a game for 3-5 players about space robbing a space train."

the number one reason i recommend this one is that it's very easy to learn no matter what system you're used to or if you have ever played tabletop at all. the rules are quick and very clear, it only uses one type of dice (a d6, the one basically everyone has at least in some board game or another). i have played this game with people who have only ever played dnd, and i have played it at a board game night with 0 ttrpg players. the game recommends 3-5 players but ive played up to seven and with some effort i think you could also play with only two.

another reason: it's gmless, and it has ZERO prep (besides maybe reading the rules, but i read them for the first time while learning to play with a group, so its not THAT important). to me this is one of the major sticking points of trying to make a dnd group: deciding who is the dm and then relying on that person to prepare a session. while i love dming, sometimes you just also want to be a player for a bit. well now we're all players!

(there is a facilitator role that's explained at the back of the rulebook, if you want, and if your players are a bit nervous to play totally gmless. but tbh, i will say i often SAY i will facilitate and then change nothing about how i would play besides reminding people of the rules and making sure everyone gets a chance to speak, both things that by the end of the game other players are usually doing of their own volition to help each other along. often, especially with otherwise experienced players, it's a little intimidating to go without a gm because of convention, not because they aren't capable of doing it. they always are!)

the mechanics and theme encourage you to be as ridiculous as possible (with playbooks like space wizard, where you can cast any spell but only once before you forget it forever, or egghead, where you're completely useless on purpose except for one specific and critically heist related expertise; train cars filled with escher staircases; and npcs who are extradimensional dragons or intergalactic popstars. or who run a junkyard. yeah on the train in space), and when i play i try to emphasize that the only win condition is that the players have fun and the story be interesting and funny. while i don't want to just Explain All the Rules (i want you to download the pdf from the game designers that does that), i will tell you about what i think is the best one:

when you make an action roll, you roll a number of d6s based on a few conditions. the first and most important of those conditions is "describe what you do in cinematic detail". to me this is actually what makes this game so fucking great. one of the parts i always find difficult to handle with games like dnd is preventing slog. you know, when youve been in combat for awhile and at each turn the player is like "Well. im gonna use my greatsword." then they roll and they go "oh cool i hit" (<- completely deadpan voice and expression) and you the dm says "ok you did x amount of damage" and they go cool. turn over. BORING. now there's lots you can do as the dm to prevent this, but they rely on you the dm trying to prevent this. or coming together as a table and trying to find ways to prevent it together.

in space train space heist, in order to even roll in the first place, you are required to get descriptive!!! you can't say "well i hit him with a fireball" (a thing you can absolutely do in space train space heist, btw, as long as you're playing a space wizard), you have to go more like "i move my hands in a circular motion and start chanting an incantation and from my palms comes a great BLAST of fire that shoots across the room and i want to explode the security robot into a gazillion pieces" now THATS cinematic detail!!! and all that extra detail has the added bonus of making it that much easier for other players to work in where their character is, what they're doing, and what the group needs to do next. it makes it so much easier to get into the roleplay, and imo is such a beautiful way to work it into the mechanics, and it's SO much easier to involve players who are otherwise really nervous or uncertain about roleplaying

obviously it's very different mechanically and thematically from dungeons and dragons. to me this is part of why i think dnd players should give it a try; often dnd players branch out only to very similar games, and while i do think you should chase your bliss (and i have nothing against games like say pathfinder. would love to play it someday myself lol), i think space train space heist can show you just how wide and varied ttrpgs actually can be. and although i myself still continue to play dnd 5e and probably will for the forseeable future, i think my experiences playing space train space heist have exponentially improved how i handle dnd games and how i think about making it fun for everyone.

the game is $5 USD. if you aren't able to afford that, no worries because there are currently around 69 thousand community copies available for you. and if you bought the ttrpgs for trans rights itch.io bundle awhile ago you already own it! pleaseeee give it a go all you need is 2 friends, a few six-sided dice, and to get a little silly with it

#good idea generator #if enough people were interested i would literally make a discord server for the express purpose of running it for yall tbh #if even one person tries this game bc of this post i have succeeded i believe so strongly once you play then you will Realize #every time i play this everyone says the exact same thing: omg wow that was so fun and i understood it so fast!!#dont take my word for it though: just look at literally any review on the itch page!!! please its sooo good i love space train space heist

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unlimitedtrees · 11 months

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so the game i made, 'UNITRES Dreams', is open source on github now

https://github.com/UnlimitedTrees/UNITRES-Dreams

hello. earlier i made my game 'UNITRES Dreams' open source on github. i want to talk about it. click the little 'read more' thingy to read da rest of this post. i had a lot of things i wanted to say about it and why i think open sourcing games is kind of awesome Lol !!!

also , By The Way, play da on newgrounds ehehehehe ~! or u can download it on itch.io too if you want

so. let me start off by saying that, although i was planning on releasing the source code for unitres for a long while, i was Not prepared to release it now. in fact, it kind of happened on accident.

in case you didnt know, earlier on twitter i was talking about how i wished there was a good way to release my archive of old builds for the game. i have a google drive full of old builds but i also i dont like using google drive. i sent a link to the drive in a reply to someones tweet, but there is one big thing i forgot: the game's project file is also in that drive.

anyways, instead of just deleting the reply or removing the file from the drive, i decided to just release the source code on github now, since i might as well. a part of me feels like i shouldnt have released it so suddenly... but also a part of me feels relieved.

you see, the unitres dreams source code is Bad. tons of messy code with almost no comments... a bunch of hackish solutions to tons of problems... everything is just incomprehensible unless youre me. considering ive been the only person working on the game for years, i understand most of the code and never needed to make comments (especially since making comments in construct 2 is Annoying).

my original plan for releasing the source code was to go back and clean everything up; improving tons of messy systems and adding comments explaining how everything worked. i also was planning on adding new content for a new update to the game aswell.. such as an options menu and maybe new levels and characters or something. i have Tried going back a few times to clean some little things up and work on a keybinding system... but i havent had the time to focus on it and do what ive wanted to do with it.

so, yeah. im kind of glad the source code is just Out now. it probably wouldve taken me Years just to do what i planned... and i think its best to just get it out now instead of just waiting years for something that might never happen, even if the source code right now is incredibly insane and unusable.

which leads me to something most people might be wondering: Why even release the source code in the first place? honestly, i doubt a lot of people will get use out of it, especially with the bad code and it being made in an old, dead engine that you cant even Buy anymore. but despite this... i think its good to release the source code for your games for a few reasons...

for one, its good for archival reasons. ive had a huge anxiety over losing all the source code for my games... its happened to me before and it really hurts. not only can you not use it in the future, but you lose a lot of work youve done, and for me ive lost a ton of games which were important to my journey as a game dev. nowadays, i try to hold onto all of my projects and have saved them to multiple computers and hard drives, but releasing them on stuff like github and google drive at least makes me feel a little better.. and hopefully with the unitres source code being public and the google drive for the old builds being out, it means that i wont have to worry about losing either of them.

another big reason is that, even if no one uses the source code for anything like mods or whatever, i think games having their source code out is good for learning game dev and understanding how games are made, even if the code is a big mess. even if i did get to go with my plan of cleaning up the source code... i feel like thatd be kind of dishonest, cus Most games Never have perfect code when theyre made. its good if you use the most messy code in existence just to get the game done... you can't always spend forever perfecting something, and at the end of the day the game eventually has to come out at some point. even big triple A projects will have weird code in some places... thats just a fact of life. i think having the source code out lets people see the kinds of crazy stuff that goes into a game, and maybe seeing my crazy code will influence others to do things a lot better in their own things. that's what i think, anyways.

and hey, even if My game never gets any sort of modding community, that doesnt mean Your game wont. there are a lot of communities out there who make some crazy things with mods.. and things such as open source games or decompilations can lead to some incredible stuff. with decompilations, youve got things such as mario 64 or the retro engine sonic games being ported to pretty much Everything, and then youve got open source games like Doom and friday night funkin which are being pretty much kept alive Because theyre open source and have a huge modding community. even if a game never gets as much interest as those.. it doesnt mean it never will, and having a game be open source can help a community grow so much more.

anyways umm yea. i think making games open source is awesome. there is a little part of me that feels weird about making unitres dreams specifically open source and the possibility that people might make fangames and mods out of it, as its something thats really personal to me (especially since the main character is named after me), but if people do make fangames and stuff with it i dont think ill mind, especially since a lot of my early work was fan games and unitres dreams takes a lot of inspiration from the media i love. all that i ask is that people include the original credits from the game in their thing, especially if you reuse any of the music from the original soundtrack.

i think, at the end of the day, my goal with this is to inspire more people to open source their games. a lot of good things can come out of it. that's all i have to say i think. play unitres dreams on newgrounds dot com ehehehe !!

#UNITRES #UNITRES Dreams #gamedev #game dev #indiedev #indie dev #indie developer #indie game development #game development #indie game dev #TreesThinks

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txttletale · 8 months

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bundletober #9: last year

had a busy day, so this is a very late entry to bundletober, the world-renowned monthly event where i talk about a ttrpg i got in a bundle every day of october. nearly a third of the way through! last year is a short game, but a stylish one, from emmy verte.

oh noooo oh noooo tagline type. its a game about remebering............

okay as funny as that typo it doesn't detract from the fact that this game is overall really stylishly presented. the typography and layout on this game are fucking immaculate. just drink in this art deco cool:

god damn. last year is a game about remembering your time at a mysterious, eerie hotel with danger lurking in the lobby, and it looks it.

this is a game for 2 players, which means it needs to have a very tightly themed set of roles, a perfect interplay--2 player games really need to make use of that limitation, and i think last year pulls through in that regard, with the 'pause' and 'motion' playbooks. they match perfectly--they could be used to play out a romance or an intimate rivalry, but they're perfectly symmetrical in a way that seems really fun to play around with. the pause's move "Ask 'when can I find you again?' You cannot know where" and the motion's move "Ask 'where can I find you again?' You cannot know when" are a great example of this great synergy.

last year uses a token-based diceless framework that'll be familiar to anyone who knows about dream askew. this can be a tricky framework to make use of, because by nature of its get-a-token-spend-a-token rhythm, it's easy for things to sine wave around a status quo. it's not inevitable, but you have to design your moves or game carefully to prevent narrative stagnation when you use this framework--last year does this beautifully with a big clock that you can fill in by taking a duet move, remember. when segments of the clock are filled, you answer questions--revelations that tell you the events of the titular 'last year'. each one deals with 'the danger' that approaches in some way, and when you've played out either two or four (depending on how long you want to play for) the game ends.

in an interesting move, the game tells you not to play out defeating the danger. it guarantees that you avoid it, asks you a few questions to think about for the aftermath, but it deliberately leaves the danger shrouded in shadow. it's a choice i appreciate that i think speaks to the ethos of this game--mysterious, shifting, nebulous, deceptive.

last year is available for purchaes as a digital download through itch.io

#tattletxt #bundletober 2023 #ttrpg

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misscammiedawn · 8 months

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Penlight - Spoiler Analysis/Review Post 1 (Nozomi Route)

Download Penlight (Pay what you like) from Itch.io here

My other Penlight reviews: Quick Review - Sayori (Part 1 - Doll) - Sayori (Part 2 - Alter)

Turq's reviews: Hiroko Robot - Hiroko Tickling - Nozomi Zombie

So I had reviewed the game Penlight before and wanted to give some more praise on its narrative choices and themes. I felt the best way to do that was to break down the routes I enjoyed and what I learned from them.

Before I begin I wanted to say much of the discussion here breeds in from @spiralturquoise and I going back and forth on this game for weeks. Turq is writing a post as well and though we share many viewpoints we come from different angles. We are also aware that we have our own biases and headcanons which we may present as fact, Nozomi being AroAce for example. This post represents a read of the game and we actively encourage people to have their own reads and share them so we may read them.

My posts are going to be plot overviews with analysis. Turq had a fantastic bit of commentary on my first post and I wanted to keep the conversation running.

This post is from the perspective of someone who either has already played and enjoyed the game or someone who isn't going to be convinced to play without having been spoiled first.

If you're on the fence, play the game, come back. It's a few hours commitment and so worth your time.

The post will be here when you get back <3

So as of the latest public release this is the route map:

It sort of looks like the map of Dracula's Castle.

Also this post and any future posts will only feature content from the public release. Nozomi Reversal route is actually polished as of writing for Patreon members with a better script and CG for the ending. This is using version 0.1602.1.

As you can see the game is pretty broad. The map is color-coded between the Brown (Nozomi), Blue (Sayori), Pink (Hiroko), Purple (Consequences) and Salmon (Villain) routes.

Ignore the green, those are just to highlight the latest changes to the map from prior versions.

So I thought I'd handle my Spoiler posts the same way. Brown, Blue, Pink, Purple and then... I think I'll skip Salmon. I have no real desire to play the villain routes.

Though I was happy to see this in the Q&A segment of the Discord:

I am glad this game continues to deny any attempt at vindicating unethical choices.

Anyway. With that preamble. Let's get started with Nozomi's paths...

To begin the Nozomi route Kyou will mention that he has been studying hypnosis and this will trigger Nozomi meeting with him at a cafe after school to ask about his experiences.

She admits that she has been into hypnosis for several years, fluctuating between shame and pride in her interest, admitting that she had not intended to practice in real life until she found herself volunteering for the hypnosis show during the previous cultural festival, an impulsive action that was driven by her repressed desires, she notes that she did not plan on volunteering until her hand was already in the air.

Nozomi regrets that she did not get a chance to bond with the senior who ran last year's show and is now admitting it to Kyou.

From the offset the power dynamics are skewed. Nozomi views Kyou as a stalker and knows he has no friends to practice with. But she is also quick to keep things even by admitting her fetish, overtly admitting she "gets off" on the topic, noting how giving this information to Kyou is a risk.

In showing too much of her hand, Kyou, who does not himself have a hypnosis fetish, despite his study, gets a window into her fantasies.

Nozomi enjoys hypnosis and is excited by it.

Nozomi fantasizes about giving up complete control.

But she is aware that such scenarios only exist within the realm of fantasy and she understands hypnosis enough to know that such a thing could never happen and because she knows this. Because she has found someone who knows how hypnosis works. Because she regrets not being able to make a connection with the last person she could connect about hypnosis with, she tells him she wants him to hypnotize him.

What comes next is the first hypnosis scene, which takes place in Kyou's home.

Every route of the game follows the same timeline for the most part. Most of them keep to a week or two time frame where some others stretch out over months. But the facts of the timeline are always true. Many of these facts will come into play later on but it's important to note them because the writing around these "canon events" is tight.

Kyou's father works until late and will always have a business trip to excuse his absence for weekends. I believe I have only seen him show up one time in the entire visual novel, referenced in text as Kyou speaks about his previous night.

So with an empty home Nozomi comes over and sets down the ground rules.

Sessions are to be discussed in full before approaching hypnosis. All sessions are to be recorded. All suggestions are going to be tidied up at the end.

Kyou performs a quick down-up with a simple number amnesia suggestion (albeit there is a blank choice for a future route where you break her consent at this time) before Nozomi realizes that she needs to go home for dinner and heads out leaving Kyou feeling that the scene had no adequate deescalation and he's left to feel things were left off without a conclusion or understanding with where he and Nozomi stand in their freshly ignited entanglement.

I want to get into the canon events a little more later on, but there is a level of beautiful dramatic irony that DeMille tends to take when it comes to how she approaches similarities in the routes and consistency of the characters or timeline, particularly in how Kyou's choices impact the characters. Hiroko is the most notable example as her tennis scholarship can be at risk even if the surrounding events of the week cause her to worry. Her emotional state mingles in with how she plays tennis, after all.

I explain this as each character is well written on their timelines and depending on how early or late you play Nozomi's route in your exploration, you may find that Nozomi's evening actions are more flexible than the other girls. With Hiro and Sayori there are external factors at play with their tennis, study club and cram school commitments. With Nozomi the amount of time she gives or refuses to give, with very few exceptions, is her choice alone. She also denies Kyou justifications, though they tend to mostly be around her not wanting to explain herself to friends and family. Sometimes we know from other routes why she is unavailable, sometimes we do not. It helps put the player in Kyou's perspective. Not knowing if they can trust if Nozomi is getting her fill and abandoning Kyou or if the pair are doing a poor job of planning their scenes to include deescalation, debrief and aftercare.

Kyou's confusion grows the next day when Nozomi refuses to associate with him at school the next day. A theme which grows larger in two of the routes. Feeling like he is a shameful secret, much like Nozomi's interest in hypnosis, Kyou is forced to wait until Nozomi returns for more sessions, completely in the dark as to where he stands.

When he asks for clarification on this topic Nozomi makes it very clear.

She has no intention of dating anyone.

From here you are given the option of either respecting her boundaries or pretending to. Pretending to locks you in to a bad ending from the Delusion route.

Agreeing will begin the divergence in the tree to chose from 3 options. From here on I'll be focused less on plot outlines and more on plot analysis as it is at this point the themes of the game begin paying off.

Trance: Kyou introduces a reinduction trigger and the pair explore the kink with increasing levels of thrill seeking. We get to see the risks of abandoning safe framework, the hurt that comes from compartmentalizing your kink and social lives.

Reversal: Nozomi is offered the penlight and becomes the dominant. We get to see how the girls must have felt under the penlight's sway and experience Kyou being unambiguously mistreated without the fallback of "it was his own fault"

Zombie: A massive abreaction happens and the focus of the story falls upon safety and mitigating damage in hypnosis scenes.

So let's do them one at a time.

Trance:

One of the biggest themes of this game is that hypnosis is a collaborative action that takes place with communication, trust and caution. As I had mentioned in the initial review post any of the endings which are considered "good" involve the penlight being broken as it represents a "one way" process of hypnosis, whether it be overriding agency, skipping communication/feedback or removing safety.

It's my personal view that the penlight represents the toxic elements of a hypnotic relationship and compress the timeline of damage from years into a single week. It's one of the few things that Turq and I diverge in from our reads. It's also why I think Turq's review of the Nozo-Trance route is going to be the definitive one, in the same way I intend my analysis on the Sayori-Alter route to be definitive when I get around to writing it. My history with the toxic elements of hypnosis all revolve around a lack of safety in hypnosis itself, after all and that is the lens I approach things from.

The reason I say that is because the Trance route is firmly based in the relationship aspects of hypnosis and how trust, communication and collaboration need to be established.

Nozomi continues to treat Kyou as a trance dispenser in this route, disappearing when their scenes are concluded. She also intends for hypnosis to only work when they are in Kyou's home as a way to ensure it is secret from the world and no one can know the things that she is interested in.

This leads to the route being divided between scenes at Kyou's home where the pair slowly erode their safeties to introduce more and more exciting ideas into their mix and school scenes where Kyou is ignored by an increasingly standoffish Nozomi who refuses to acknowledge Kyou's existence outside of sceneplay.

Kyou even says it himself in narrative "I might be the one hypnotizing her, but it's really me following her suggestions around here."

When Kyou stands up for himself and says that he didn't even know if he needed to prepare for Nozomi's arrival her reply is nonchalant.

At the start of the route Nozomi was eager to be fully communicative of all things and yet as her comfort with this arrangement has continued she has assumed more and more that Kyou would be willing to go along with anything she wanted. The divide between them grows more as Kyou finds that his day-to-day life hasn't really shifted as much as he would hope.

So... if "good communication and mundane hypnosis" is part of the condition for a good ending, what is a condition for a bad ending?

Outside of the obvious outcomes such as being expelled or punished, a decent number of endings have Kyou given the responsibility of caring for another human being who no longer has agency.

The game is always clear that when collaboration breaks down but the hypnotic relationship remains then one party is having to do all of the work and it is not a good thing. There is no ending in the game where Kyou is willing to or enjoys having a mindless and controlled partner.

That's important to note because with the understanding of Kyou's comfort there we know that collaboration and a relationship (not dating, just a relationship) is what he desires and in this route he is not receiving that because Nozomi stonewalls him.

What's worse is that she's not even put any thought into the fact Kyou may feel this way.

But hey. It's not like he's a mind reader or anything...

Oh by the way the suggestions have subtext to them. We'll get to that a bit more with the Nozo-Reversal route.

From here Nozomi has Kyou say her trigger phrase (and almost crashes into the floor because there's no safety in place for how she flops) and Kyou has her come clean.

Nozomi is finding it increasingly more arousing how little control she feels she has when she is in Kyou's home and much of her fantasies involving hypnosis revolve around a complete helplessness.

The fact that the penlight is overriding her caution, repression and agency is something that she finds actively enticing and even the act of being forced to confess her "shameful" kink is alluring to her.

This squicks Kyou out enough that you are forced to make a decision on if you even wish to pursue a relationship with her. A sign that even the person enabling her fetish isn't fully accepting of it. A bad ending will occur if Kyou decides not to continue, but to continue he now finds himself on the slope and catering to her desires.

The problem is, they're not communicating.

Nozomi told him all of this under hypnotic compulsion. She is no closer to reconciling the shame from her sexuality but now she has revealed the depths of it to Kyou and he has taken it as instructions. In exchange Nozomi will try to include Kyou in her life more.

Kyou then goes online and begins reading ReadOnlyMind stories and learning what he thinks a hypnofetishist would enjoy and has come away from the encounter believing that Nozomi actively desires having her agency removed. The lack of communication allowed him to know what Nozomi desires and he has mistaken it for what she wants.

Further up the slope and with some dangerous new ideas of what their fun and games should be, Kyou visits Nozomi's home on Saturday and discovers that his post hypnotic suggestions still work on her outside of Kyou's home.

In every route Kyou is a believer of the "essential lie" of hypnosis. "No one can do anything under hypnosis that they didn't want to do."

That will come up a lot. The Delusion path is a thorough takedown of the idea in general.

Here it informs Kyou that Nozomi is eager to surrender her agency and removes another layer of safety. The rule that the suggestions only impacted at Kyou's home has eroded.

The pair commit to some kinky shenanigans and Nozomi's mother almost catches them doing some hypnotic rope play that is well handled in CG art and I shall not deprive you the enjoyment of seeking it yourself (the game is "pay what you want" on itch) but stands to show two things.

Kyou is having more fun like this and Nozomi is becoming increasingly comfortable with her desires and allowing for more risk taking.

Also there's a choice between spanking and tickling and I firmly believe that this is the most overtly erotic scene in the entire game. Kyou keeps testing her limits and whether it be via the penlight or Nozomi being free to explore her kink without any shame, she keeps on matching his challenge at every turn, seemingly enjoying every second of it, even when they court the danger of discovery.

Kyou even notes a few times that she never breaks scene at any point for her own comfort or security.

...I will save my personal commentary on hypnotee agency until Sayori's review... But I have thoughts.

At the end of the day in which Nozomi insists Kyou needs to head home, Kyou suspects he is being brushed off again because Nozomi had her fill from the scene and no longer wishes to be around him. She says that she has no more time for the weekend and will see him on Monday.

Kyou decides to press back and hypnotically forces her to come to him the next morning. They even stay up online to discuss their next scene.

Unfortunately Sunday is, in every single route of the game, Hiroko's tennis tournament and Nozomi must dedicate her day to being with her bestie and throwing her a karaoke party afterwards.

But her compulsion commands her to go to Kyou and so she does, abandoning her friend.

The next morning they have a roleplay scene that is increasingly high stakes and Kyou continues to press his advantages, unaware of the sheer power of the penlight. She even gets Nozomi to her underwear with very little effort.

Though the scene requires a little bit of management afterwards, Nozomi forgetting that her clothes are her own, it was an enjoyable experience for them both.

But then her phone pings and she is informed that she is missing Hiroko's game. She insists she has to leave and Kyou, not understanding the importance of this event, pushes back and assumes that she is once again ditching him because the scene is over and she does not want to deal with Kyou outside of their play.

There will eventually be a route where you get to hypnotically command her to stay but for now Kyou accepts that she has to leave.

Having let down her best friend, Nozomi withdraws and goes back to the former arrangement, scolding Kyou via text message for attempting to pester her during school and says that she needs to take some time to focus on study, leaving Kyou feeling abandoned again.

Something they both fail to do as they fail their mock exams hard and this leaves Nozomi feeling yet more shaken and wanting to retreat from kink.

However she believes that if they just "get it out of their systems" they'll be free from their obsessions. Leaning further into the slope that the pair are on.

The safety and sanity have long since vanished off of the horizon in their risk profile and consent has been on a broken foundation since the start.

What follows is a scene where they bring their kink into school hours. Creating an open trigger (with no safeties) that will reenact the tickling/spanking trigger from the weekend.

It goes poorly. Regardless of the effect Nozomi will feel it continuously for the full lunch hour and it gets worse with every iteration of the trigger.

That night the pair attempt to mitigate the damage and once again the thrill of the high is placed above the detriments it is having on their social lives.

So Kyou decides to escalate instead of deescalate.

This is not a good idea.

The scene escalates until Nozomi is on her knees wearing nothing but her underwear and unable to speak above a whisper, exclusively referring to Kyou as "Sir". The further into the scene the pair get the more Kyou shapes himself to become the type of hypnotist he believes Nozomi dreams of.

At this point you are given your final options for the endings:

Make me a cheese omelet - Become my girlfriend - Become mindless for me.

Nozomi actively resists the penlight and tries to physically restrain Kyou to prevent him snapping his finger or pressing her forehead to force her to be his girlfriend. This is the one boundary that you had to accept at the start of the route to allow things to get to this point. You literally cannot reach this moment without Kyou agreeing to respect that boundary and breaking it is a guaranteed bad ending. Either Kyou steals Nozomi away from her friendgroup and the pair will sink into their kink exploration with no allowances for their school, career prospects or external friends to interfere or Nozomi will succeed in stopping Kyou from robbing her of her agency and leave him for breaking her one rule.

The "mindless" ending is... dark. I'd rather not go over it as it doesn't make additional points other than having Kyou finally understand his penlight robs people of agency, which he does not learn in this route until the very end.

The omelet ending is a sweet and tender scene between the pair which has an ethical jumping off point.

The next day Nozomi slips and refers to Kyou as "Sir" during school hours and her friends instantly get on her case about it.

I should note here that Sayori knows Nozomi's fetish in every route. These little bits of characterization that remain constant through all of the routes really add flavor to certain interactions.

The true growth comes when Nozomi, seeing Sayori interrogating Kyou and thinking the worst of him, comes in and offers to invite her friends to Kyou's house to tell them everything.

Once there she discovers all the programming tied to being at Kyou's home kicks back in to both party's surprise. Kyou agrees to remove all suggestions so they can talk.

The subject of the penlight is raised and they finally realize that it is a bit special...

Kyou puts it eloquently here:

The penlight is destroyed leading to the golden ending of the route. Nozomi, realizing how much damage the pair had done in their chase of thrills, cuts off from hypnokink to focus on her studies.

After a timeskip she meets up with Kyou after exams and says she has been watching hypnosis videos again recently and asks if they can start exploring again without the penlight.

She accepts that she still does not want to date but she may end up treating Kyou as a trance dispenser again if she approaches without an arrangement and Kyou says he doesn't want to push her. The pair communicate and agree that they just want to explore out of friendship and interest.

Nozomi kisses Kyou on the cheek and it is clear an establishment of trust has been made and the pair will find something more healthy this time.

Now... I'm the type of person who enjoys watching "analysis" videos that just tell the plot beat for beat and I would need so many more hours to even attempt that for the entire game so I'll be more swift with the other two, especially as a lot of similar ground is covered. I'll likely do a more full breakdown of Alter route for Sayori but let's get through the other two a bit faster...

Reversal:

One of the main reasons I wanted to do Trance route in full and show off how the entirety of a route plays out is that the knowledge of how other routes play out help so very much with the retelling and expanding on the themes.

If Nozomi takes possession of the penlight then Kyou will become her plaything for the duration of the route. Her behavior is not altered, however. Her risk profile is, however.

In the Trance route Nozomi wants to put strict safety and restrictions on early play because she is afraid of being discovered and does not fully trust Kyou to play with her mind. She does not hold the same reservations in reverse, however. So what happens when someone who ditches scenes without deescalation is running the scene?

A constant "Bad" condition on any route is an open trigger/suggestion that bleeds outside of play spaces. We say a lot of that with the restrictions of Kyou's hypnosis only supposed to work within Kyou's home in the trance route and how things get worse when that restriction is tested and broken. In other routes one of the absolute worst situations is the impact of a suggestion exiting the scene and stretching out into the world.

God I should have started with Sayori...

As a sidenote, Hiroko's route actually has some mildly positive impact (at least not inherently BAD) of play stretching out beyond scenes. But Hiroko's routes are a little more light hearted than the serious lectures on communication, safety and abreactions that Sayori and Nozomi's routes deal with.

So Nozomi's first command is to perceive her as invisible and she runs off to her evening plans without closing out the suggestion.

As I said earlier, the suggestions are symbolic at times.

One of the most interesting things about this route is that we get to see what the girls experience with their time going under for the penlight. Most of the inductions involve Kyou starring at the penlight for a few text boxes and then waking up with no clue as to what happened.

Kyou also likes asking his hypnotee their opinion on topics and finds that they're always accommodating and accepting of his playstyle. Nozomi was remarkably good about all of the events that transpired in the Trance route after all...

Sorry, Kyou...

The penlight makes it so enjoyable to go into hypnosis that you cannot really advocate for yourself. Hypnotee Agency is not a thing in most of these routes and the Reversal route makes this clear. There is only one actual choice you can make in the entire route and it's only there because Nozomi tells Kyou to make it.

Incidentally the bad ending of the route (newly added as of this update) is unlocked by making the insignificant choice of "pat head" or "striptease".

Turq and I have a mild disagreement on this moment. I believe that when Nozomi sees that Kyou is willing to and incapable of stopping himself from getting naked for her she is so turned on (sexually or otherwise) by her level of control that she is pushed over the edge of morality. Turq's read is that she dehumanizes Kyou in that moment and loses empathy for him that leads to the good ending.

Odd that the sex-repulsed asexual has the read that she was turned on.

Anyway...

Nozomi continues to ignore Kyou at school and come to his house at night to brainwash him and selfishly steals him away for Hiroko's tennis match, asserting that she is going to take him with her for the celebration.

Funny. In Trance route Kyou subvert's Nozomi's agency to have her skip the tennis match, in Reversal route Nozomi subvert's Kyou's to force him to attend.

In this route she doesn't mind associating with Kyou with her friend group because she is in control and doesn't feel like the association will out her or be a mark of shame for her being a "freak" (her word, not mine).

She puts Kyou through a mortifying scene and bullies her friends around to get her way with making it happen, the power of the penlight having brought up some bullyish tendancies within her. She wants to check in that Kyou is okay but as before he is only allowed to agree.

During school she continues her unempathetic behavior and starts a big fight with her friends when they attempt to talk to Kyou and she continuously talks over him and at one point she even commands him not to say a word.

Nozomi's behavior is fairly toxic at the end of the fight, going as far as to pull a guilt tripping "I'm horrible" as a way to distance Sayori.

The controlling behavior and lack of communication, trust and safety bleeds out once again as she commands Kyou to tell her the truth about if she is a horrible controlling monster and he does.

He tells her she has not been fair. That she stopped cleaning up her suggestions the moment she took over. She took Kyou's stated limit (not wanting to sing karaoke) and instantly overrode it. She forces Kyou to hang out with her friends but does not extend him empathy or kindness. She just treats him as a toy.

Like. Literally. He tells her outright.

This causes Nozomi to get defensive and demand that if Kyou was so upset then why did he chose to continue obeying. We are then lead to the good end or bad depending on the earlier scene.

In the good end Nozomi breaks the penlight realizing what she has done and in the bad she becomes Miss Akemi and makes full use of the penlight.

The deprogramming scene that follows is actually remarkably tender and sweet with all the tenderness of someone's first hypnosis scene, checking back and forth if the other is okay, Nozomi knows she has gone too far and is so careful in this sequence.

To add in to how tender and connected the hypnosis scene is, this time there is no brutal cut between penlight and waking. We are in Kyou's perspective the whole time as his eyes slip closed and he follows Nozomi's voice through the experience. We get to see Kyou reacting to Nozomi's words and experiencing the delightful relaxation and trust he has in Nozomi during these moments. He wonders if he is actually hypnotized while agreeing in thought to go with it.

Eyes open and close for fractionation and each time the artwork fades in and out, Nozomi's expression becoming more serious and/or concerned as it continues.

Questions of if it's working become certainty and Kyou even notes "I can't resist" not because his agency is overridden but because he tests his eyes and knows he cannot open them and that's okay.

"I just want to listen."

This is by far the longest hypnosis sequence in the game and it is essential that this be the case as it is the thesis statement of the game being played out. We are not witnessing the trust and tenderness of a well communicated and safe hypnosis scene, we are experiencing it.

The ending even has Nozomi accept the consequences of her behavior and make-up with her friends, admit her fetish which is one of the hardest things to achieve in any given run and Kyou is earnestly and honestly part of their friendgroup. Nozomi notes that she may wish to buy a pocketwatch in the future.

In terms of "good end" this is one of my favorite because Kyou gets to be friends with everyone, Nozomi comes to terms with her repressed desires and we get one of the most pure displays of hypnosis in the entire experience.

I am curious about other people's feelings on this one.

I'm running on fumes for the remainder so maybe I'll cover "Zombie" route later.

All I will say is that it is a route that is begun by Kyou having Nozomi imagine herself as a zombie, likely thinking of the Chinese Zombie trope of arms stretched outright and looking dehumanized. Nozomi takes it literally and tries to bite Kyou's flesh off.

This entire route is punctuated by abreactions and hypnotic safety. We are reminded of our fuck-up throughout the route by a giant bruise on Nozomi's character model (and lack of glasses for much of it) and it is the only route where all three of the main girls get involved with the experimentation around hypnosis right from the get-go.

With everyone clearly communicating and trying to accommodate for safety we still, in the mock stage hypnosis scene, get an abreaction despite every suggestion being very well laid out. It's almost weird how well packaged they are in this route and highlights how sloppy the suggestions are in the rest of the game.

The idea being that no amount of safety is going to cover everything. When we play with hypnosis we cannot possibly know every single thing about every single person we play with and mistakes can and will happen and we have to both own that and minimize the amount of harm we do by being tidy but also by talking out suggestions first and not springing them on people.

No matter how careful we are there will always be mistakes and it is better to deal with those mistakes before the scene than during it.

It's actually a remarkably good fable and makes a stunning point. I think that erasing all the barriers (Nozomi's shame of being discovered, Hiroko assuming the worst of Kyou, Sayori being involved enough to be the sane one in the room who has researched enough to know what is true and not attached like Kyou and Nozomi enough to not let things slide) and showing Kyou make sensible suggestions is the best way to approach this.

Even in the best possible timeline where there are no external factors and everyone is on their best behavior you can still mess up.

...and boy howdy we are going to mess up a lot in the rest of the game.

Next time I'm going to trauma dump on you all and type more than is necessary about Sayori's routes and reveal why my Penlight tag is "Sayori is best girl".

But for now... I have typed a lot and I do not wish to type any longer.

Eagerly awaiting Turq's post.

#camden posting #dawn posting #sayori is best girl #penlight #visual novel #hypnokink #I need a blended tag for when a post isn't solely authored in a specific headspace #media essays

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