[1/3] Narrative RPG which proofs its true ending against data mining by arranging for all player-facing decisions to have 2, 4, or 8 options, yielding 1, 2, or 3 bits of binary data. These decisions are arranged so that no matter what path is taken, its choices yield exactly 128 bits worth of data.

Not that kind of blog, I'm afraid.

Plugging away at a second set of random inventory tables for "Eat God" (penguinking.itch.io/eat-god), if anyone has any useful suggestions to offer and/or dumb references they're dying to see included.

PS2-era JRPGs where the dialogue portrait is wearing an expression of exquisitely wrought anguish, and then the character's actual 3D model in the background is just

Reading an "x reader" fic and squinting at the screen like, okay, are we doing a meta thing where the text implicitly problematises its own construction of unmarked identities, or did the author just not notice that the logistics of this sex position require the reader insert to have four arms?

BRB, starting discourse about how viewing art on the Internet is morally bankrupt regardless of its origin because even if it was made by human hands, what you're seeing on your screen is not the ORIGINAL human-made digital file, but a soulless machine-made replica in your browser's Internet cache.

I have a lot of respect for folks who submit their speedrun times to the global leaderboards like clockwork even though they're not remotely competitive. If I found out my PB was in 1387th place, I wouldn't bother to fill out the submission form – they're truly in it for the pure love of the game.

After "film trilogy that dropped a critical plot point exclusively via timed Fortnite event" and "video game series whose story only makes sense if you're aware of the events of a canon pachinko machine", I feel like there are whole frontiers of user-hostile narrative design waiting to be explored.

[1/3] I know it sometimes seems like people who know their history are weirdly invested in complaining about the "generically medieval" thing, but let me put it in fandom terms.

It's often joked that Undertale's code is the product of Toby Fox doing "musician programming", the natural counterpart to "programmer art", but it's worse than that. Undertale is not Toby Fox's first rodeo. It is the work of someone whose understanding of of coding came from romhacking SNES games.

Annoying the enemies-to-lovers 'shippers by interpreting any instance of two characters trying to murder each other over objectively petty shit as "sibling coded".

[1/3] The funny thing is, this isn't even the first time we've had a period where AAA computer games have become so bloated and poorly optimised that you can only install like two of them at a time. The last time around it was big-budget point and click adventure games, if you can believe it.

Going on HRT and it makes me look like YOUR mom, which raises several pressing questions.

If nothing else, openly horny tabletop RPGs are a positive development because the alternative isn't NOT being horny – it's just not admitting that it's a horny thing. If you think nobody was playing "Paranoia" for the D/s vibes in 1988, you're living in a fantasy world.

(For everyone who just had a vivid mental image of a horny mechsplo version of "Paranoia" because of that last post, you're welcome. No need to thank me.)

[1/3] I've had a couple of folks give me a hard time lately about "why does a cis dude know about mechsplo", and it shouldn't surprise you that the answer involves indie tabletop RPGs.

Whatever one's opinion of jiggle physics in video games, you've gotta be at least a little impressed at the developers who go full Gainax in traditional pixel art. Like, that isn't the mere product of pushing some sliders around – they WORKED for that bounce.

A sneak peek of the revised "Random Creeds" table from the forthcoming playtest draft 0.7.0 of "Eat God" (penguinking.itch.io/eat-god). Text version for screen reader users here: penguinking.games/files/eat-go...

Making a TV show where by the end of episode one it's managed to coyly imply that every single recurring character separately has some sort of sexual or romantic history with every single other recurring character, then for the rest of the season none of this ever comes up again.

I enjoy how I can tell from the way that submissions to the 200-word RPG jam drop off to nothing over the weekend, only to promptly pick up again first thing Monday that some of y'all are writing 200 word RPGs on company time.

One of my favourite TV things is when the relationship writing always sucks in the same ways, then a random lesbian couple with none of those problems shows up, and it turns out the dude running the show SPECIFICALLY cannot write het without inserting his terrible hangups, but he's fine if it's gay.

FYI if you're one of the 3 people following this blog who don't already own "Costume Fairy Adventures" and the idea of a TTRPG where your character class randomly changes every 5 minutes sounds fun: it's 20% off as part of DTRPG's "Teach Your Kids To Game" sale. www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/1...

I don't know who needs to hear this. I cannot imagine anyone's life possibly being improved by hearing this. It is inconceivable to me that anyone, anywhere could benefit in any way from hearing this.

Weighing the savings of getting the basic Steam Cube model against the possibility that at some point I might want to install a third game.

It always throws me when people say "teenaged" instead of "teenage" because the former reads as a verb to me. Who teenaged this person? What does the act or process of teenaging a person entail?

There's a thing that could happen in that weird transitional period between old school console RPGs and the modern cinematic style where it wouldn't stop you from revisiting areas created solely for specific action setpieces, but the game had no assets for anything OUTSIDE that setpiece [...] (1/2)

Obviously your fictional characters can wear whatever you want, but if you're trying to make a standards-compliant Girl™ character, the one thing she absolutely cannot have is a normal size hat. It's gotta be either absurdly tiny or the biggest fucking hat you've ever seen; no half-measures allowed.

I enjoy buying indie TTRPGs and immediately renaming them because the author decided to go with "game.pdf" or "final.pdf" (or "final1.pdf", which raises questions that ought to have been answered by the word "final"), but I think my favourite turned out to be named "pdf.pdf". Like, tell me nothing.

Hey, folks. If you had a dropped pledge for "Eat God" (www.kickstarter.com/projects/pen...) and were planning on re-upping as a late pledge (or just missed the campaign and want to sneak in late), today's your last day to do so before late pledges for tiers with physical rewards close. Fair warning!

"Why does the metric system still use base 60 time units" look: metricated time has in fact been attempted, and ended up contributing to the fall of the French Republic. Weights and measures are whatever, but turns out folks REALLY don't like it when the government fucks with how long a minute is.

Yes, yes, "they would not fucking say that", but consider: "huge fucking dumbass randomly displays inexplicably deep insight on some pertinent, narrowly defined topic while remaining in every other respect a huge fucking dumbass" is never not funny.

Scrolling down my feed and getting hit with posts whose avatars are, in succession, comic book Ramona Flowers from the 2004 graphic novel, live action Ramona Flowers from the 2010 film, pixel art Ramona Flowers from the tie-in video game, and anime Ramona Flowers from the 2023 cartoon.

I think modern media should revive the pulp fiction twist where what seems to be a period piece with fantastical horror elements is abruptly revealed to have a science-fictional explanation. I want a film about vampire hunters in 15th Century France where the "vampire" turns out to be an evil robot.

I'm not saying I buy the theory that Dess got run over by a car, but if she did, it'd sure add an extra wrinkle to the facts that Cyber World a. is implied to be partly informed by Noelle's Internet search history, and b. has a structural preoccupation with memetic humour about car crashes, huh?

It's astounding how service outfits will game those "rate my service person" things to ensure nobody ever makes quota. I once did tech support for a place whose rating out of 5 was secretly a rating out of 6 – it had a field for "other comments", and filling it in counted for the secret 6th point.

Very funny how Hollow Knight consistently refers to Herrah as "Herrah the Beast" and implies there's something eldritch going on, only for Silksong to reveal that she really is godspawn, but that's not why she's called "the Beast"; the Deepnesters gave her that epithet because they're spider racist.

I sympathise with the frustration at a certain flavour of TTRPG fans claiming it's elitist to learn the rules of the game you're playing, but I have to laugh at analogies like "you wouldn't say it's elitist to watch a TV show you claim to be a fan of"; people in TV show fandoms 100% do say that.

I can't speak for anybody else, but for me, sometimes the whole executive dysfunction thing can get bad enough that I wrap all the way back around to being productive. I once wrote four hundred lines of code while procrastinating on the act of putting on a shirt.

The official Power Rangers ttrpg including rules for getting Tetanus is what radicalized me into a deep believer of "Design with Intention."

What? No, it's not a "mechsplo forcefem" thing – she'd already figured out that she was a girl long before getting into the giant robot. The combat drugs DID however make her gay.

[1/3] More favourite useless wizard archetypes: 1. Wizard who knows exactly four spells, and suffers from the world's worst case of "when all you have is a hammer" syndrome 2. Wizard whose magic has predictable side effects it somehow never occurs to them to account for until after the fact

I know this may come across as unreasonable, but I feel like when I pick up an officially licensed TTRPG adaptation of some piece of media, it shouldn't be a coin toss whether there will be any mechanism for playing as the sorts of characters the game's ostensible source material is actually about.

Small-town murder mystery about a brooding film noir type who monologues about "their town" like they want to have sex with it, as one does, but instead of wanting to fuck the idea of Los Angeles or whatever they're horny and repressed for the concept of a village with a population of 3000 people.

Trials of Autism #137: is this person REALLY being inconsistent, or did I mentally add extra stipulations to something they said because I found it annoyingly imprecise, decide that's what they "must have meant", then forget that those qualifiers weren't present in what they actually said?

I feel dividing music listenership into "people who exclusively listen to streaming services" and "people who exclusively listen to physical media" is overlooking the important transitional category of "people who exclusively listen to shitty overcompressed MP3s they pirated on LimeWire in 2002".

Sometimes you've got to accept that if you don't understand what people are talking about, the conversation isn't for you. Even if someone is kind enough to stop and educate you, you can't reasonably expect to have an opinion worth listening to about a topic you didn't know existed five minutes ago.

I have to confess "your browser's AI can be made to steal your banking info via prompt injection because it runs with full privileges and treats all text as equally authoritative sources of instructions, including the text of pages it's summarising" is more surprising to me than it should have been.

Come on. Cold open your mid-budget indie RPG with ninety minutes of unskippable slice-of-life bullshit where you can't even save your progress because there's some diegetic reason why save points don't exist until after the inciting crisis hits. You know you want to.

People always talk about how weird it is to see random hornyposting from someone you know for Being Famous, but for my money it's much more jarring the other way 'round. You see somebody's name all up in lights and your primary frame of reference is having seen their penis on Bluesky.

Everyone with payment errors on the "Eat God" Kickstarter (www.kickstarter.com/projects/pen...) has now been dropped, so if you wanted to try again as a late pledge (or you missed it the first time and want to sneak in), now's the time. Late pledges for all physical rewards will close in ONE WEEK.