Any genre of game can have a disabled protagonist if you aren't a coward / willing to put the work in, but I'm currently batting around the concept of specifically point-and-click puzzle adventure games with a highly disabled protagonist.

Often, the pace of such games tends sedate and contemplative. Your character is seldom in a hurry; they are mostly faced by trying to figure out how to accomplish a particular task, and if a deadline is imposed, it's an extra thing to juggle.

This could be an interesting presumption to incorporate from a watsonian lens, through the viewpoint of a protagonist who may have limited mobility, pain and/or fatigue that make hurrying punitively inaccessible. It'd let the player familiarize themselves with early puzzles if the first thing they have to figure out how to do is say, get their player character out of bed in an environment where they don't have their usual fallbacks.

(also if this is also a walking adventure, it'd let you dodge accusations of the insurmountable waist-high fence- your intrepid hero MIGHT be able to climb over those bricks if they didn't have two bad hips and a walker to worry about!)

Very rough sketch of Whitney (my interpretation of him), not lore accurate since he's not balls deep or beating the shit out of you--or both

thoughts on sound design and Divinity in ultrakill

november brought a devastation into my life, but i (almost) finished nanorwimo, got my first christmas bonus ever, preordered a physical copy of bg3 to pay in rates, and will be seeing Hozier in concert tonight

this weekend is good. the rest? to be determined. but this weekend is good

I feel like Candela Obscura and my subsequent review of what I know of Blades in the Dark has really solidified why I don't really like PbtA, and it's because the mixed success mechanic is frustrating at times but it works for a game centered around high-risk missions with really clear objectives. Like, it makes sense to me that in a high pressure situation, a true success with little to no negative consequences is rare, and most things come at a cost. The problem is that I think the original PbtA game was set in the apocalypse and that makes sense, but the core rule structure was then adopted for games about monster high or whatever and this level of tension feels misplaced.

It also doesn't have a good downtime nor stakes-judging mechanic the way BitD and Illuminated Worlds do, which really means that the failures can intrude onto the casual roleplay part; this was a source of frustration for me in TAZ: Amnesty, where the mechanics did feel reasonable for the actual investigations but sometimes the characters would absolutely fail regular interactions during comparably low-stress events. Which again might make sense in an apocalyptic scenario when there isn't ever a true time of safety, but doesn't apply for the reskins.

aromantics need to take over every industry NOW

And what if I redesigned the monk class according to actual wuxia themes and tropes, what then. I simply think monks are cool and can absolutely be redeemed as a class once you take the Orientalism out of it and be a little more thoughtful about what fantasy martial arts are actually like in East Asian stories.

do you guys ever think about how the hebra region is literally hanging off of hyrule by a thread

like what if we just sliced off those two bits of land at the ends of the tanagar canyon like it was a piece of cake. that would be so crazy. and also the fact that the entirety of hyrule is also geographically isolated by another huge canyon, the implication that there is far more land beyond the canyon is so insane to me. the world of botw could be so much bigger were it not for the limitations of technology.

oooooh pokemon company want to put all their energy into z-a sooooo bad. You will not release a half assed johto or unova game you want soooo badly to make a good game that everyone enjoys.

lrb (out of ops tags so they dont have to deal with me) like of course i think there is a massive case of ludonarrative dissonance at work in inquisition (and most rpgs) where the player is given free reign p much to kill whoever they want without facing much judgement for it and im not going into why the game won't let you criticise c*llen. but with blackwalls case i do think the controversy comes from the fact that a) he lied to his men about it, which automatically paints him as untrustworthy b) he then refused to face justice for this crime and stole the identity of another man, reinforcing point a and finally c) he took money to kill a guy in secret instead of facing him in honourable combat like a good soldier. mercenary work is very often judged negatively esp when compared to soldiers because its a matter of fighting for honour vs coin. of course the end result is the same but if concepts of honour and the duty soldiers owe to their liege lord are done away with (what mercenaries can represent) the entire feudal society is at threat. so like its obviously hypocritical that people are horrified by what blackwall does but its because society needs to demonise this behaviour. also on top of doing something for money (rather than duty and honour) blackwall is also not a member of the aristocracy and a foreigner to boot which makes the act of killing an innocent noble orlesian family even more transgressive.

beat dragon quest iv on the DS as well as its postgame final final boss and its like. hard to recommend not because its dated or poorly aged or anything, moreso its just kinda. Slow like it takes about 18 hours to get to a point you can properly play with the party building stuff. and also the strongest part is the character dialogue which u need to download a ROM patch to put into the game lol. but if u are into a silly simple rpg that also originated a lot of ideas and themes games today still utilise its worth playing imo

Similar to how the Minecraft cave spider is slightly smaller than the average spider model, I think glow squids should have a smaller model than the normal squid

reading the imperium maledictum corebook and whatever this system is like to actually play i do think that the patron and influence systems are neat.

[collapses] why is figuring out Ironbound so overwhelming!!!

i'm just so cynical about the way books, extra especially books published in the "young adult fiction" and even just straightup adult fiction categories, are largely being written to be marketed right now. i feel even more intensely annoyed by the racket that is YA-focused publishing since the books being put out by the industry tend to be commodities or generators of commodity potential; written with the expressed purpose of ginning up a fandom, which will in turn mill more money because fandom consumers are more likely to buy extraneous product associated with a title, like a fandom-franchise.

and, yes, i'm completely aware that the murderbot diaries series is published by tor, and tor is definitely part of the problem, but the fact that the murderbot diaries is very much about commodification, it feels absolutely suited (??) to be published with them. and it’s also not just tor, obviously this is a widespread and long-standing problem in publishing in general, but then (with tor) there are books like sarah rees brennan's in other lands books, a series i did try to read! many times! before giving up due to the sheer lack of coherence and cohesion in the first book alone. it's untethered, the inciting incident and conflict are so difficult to even identify, and the protagonist is not what i would call a likeable character (and btw, unless your protagonist is someone like humbert humbert or patrick bateman, characters whose unlikeability has a purpose within that story to make the reader uncomfortable, i'm sorry but why aren't you writing your protagonists to be so unlikeable?! is this part of the marketing scheme, too? are there meetings in board rooms taking place where editors and marketing agents tell authors to make their characters unlikeable when it really is not warranted? i am genuinely so lost by this trend... and it is a trend! believe me, it is a trend)

anyway my point is that some of these authors, i feel like, would be better off self-publishing. what is tor or any other publisher bringing to some of these works? why are so many publishers giving YA a pass to be like this? because it doesn't feel like they're doing the jobs of a publishing houses, except to market things and take a % of an author's paycheck for it. where is the editing? (english language, at least) YA-category books, by and large, feel more lacking in substance than they did a decade ago. like, are young adults not owed something better than this…? and the solution should not be “well maybe young adults should just read adult fiction” because 🤷🏻 shocker, this is a problem with a good chunk of adult fiction, too. i just… i hate you marketing i hate you marketability i hate you publishing agents i hate you publishing industry grrrrgrrrgr biting biting biting gnashing smashing kill