Early Pluribus? Plearlybus?? It’s Plurbin’ Time

Emergency christmas treat shopping time 😅

Did some 20s/40s intervals on a bike and then followed up with 40 mins LISS cardio work today!

I’ve found myself rewatching older shows recently and a big part of the reason is, like… they look good! Costumes are rich and detailed, sets look lived in, lighting is good… There’s a lot of survivorship bias there, but I do think a lot of modern corner cutting just looks less appealing!

This is part of the emergent beauty of the gamedev west marches game I’m running! Of course it goes the other way as well- wily players who want to befriend but the dice are heavily in their disfavour…

Yeah reaction rolls, morale, and “combat as a fail state” axiom of OSR play encourages you to play wily heroes who outsmart or bargain with enemies. Ran an OSR game at a con, and they explored the dungeon by befriending every monster faction in it (except the ooze, which they could easily outrun).

Solstice tarot!

lmFao!!!

More “make my new level 1 DCC west marches character more interesting” stuff: optional “you’re from this other town” choices! Gonna be about 6-8 of these… maybe with 1-2 “you’re from the main city, but with this twist” And definitely one “someone you care deeply about is from one of these spots”

Alright, time to caramelize some onions for some dinner burgers!

iCloud, Mega, and as a torrent. Archivists have uploaded the 60 Minutes episode Bari Weiss spiked.

I’ll confess, despite being covid cautious, I’ve always looked more skeptically on claims that it damages the immune system, because… we would see clear upticks in all diseases across the population if so! … Like this. So.

I’ve been in game dev for 26 years and I can’t remember any other time where a specific tech was being insistently and persistently pushed on devs as a group in the public sphere. Why would it? Cui bono? Why would any given dev have an interest in other devs using tech they don’t have a stake in?

Wow, how awful. My condolences to his friends and family.

ok i DO feel better | patreon.com/lubchansky

I woke up at 7am On my vacation To go to the gym for training at 8. Good session today! Still need to work on my recovery though, probably time for some circuit training mid week.

Saw this clip, immediately bought it. Simple and delightful!

Labubu is French for "The bubu"

Taking some time today to put together some charts of “make my level 0 character more interesting” for the Gamedev West Marches game! Looking at ways of giving additional motivations, hooking into local NPCs or events, etc.

Generally speaking it is clear to me that the vast majority of people prefer first order personal convenience over basically any magnitude of second order diffuse harm, in every industry I’ve seen And that’s kind of a foundational cultural flaw that I don’t really know how to reckon with!

Holiday motto

As the holidays approach I'm reminded of this evergreen banger

An excellent point

Bigger christmas cookies.

I should probably eat something besides christmas cookies for dinner, but why?

Started in on 1000xRESIST!

BUTT: SORE

Shot

After sleeping, some more still rattling in my brain: * Excavation of Hob's Barrow (2022) using FOLK horror in games. That's rare! * Caves of Qud, pushing systemic design to the absolute limit. Dwarf Fortress, but as RPG. * Pacific Drive: I don't drive, I hate cars, but that car? Now my best friend.

@blacktabbygames.com Slay the Princess. It reinforced a lot of things I was starting to push towards in my game writing and pushed beyond many, in commitment to the repeated encounters as meta games between the player and game anticipating psychology. Narrative design as a kind of chess

Pentiment, for narrative. Specifically, the font choice to convey class/education (it's so hard to convey things like that without VO!) and the choices that let you dictate Andreas' background, which add dialogue flavour later on. Very smart stuff!

I know it won’t matter because democrats are useless and even if they take back power they’ll just have some limpdick reconciliation message, but this is literally going to kill people and RFK Jr should spend the remainder of his life in a cell in a just world, just as Musk should.

yeah sadly this to me is where all the muddiness is. With games like EXP33 and Arc Raiders not being forthcoming about where it was used, the witch-hunty nature, the lack of ability to know before you buy, the mud of 'AI' for GenAI v. ML etc... Sentiment is clear w/ perfect info. We won't have it.

That… seems pretty worth paying attention to.

Shadows of Doubt, Expelled! (technically Overboard!, but that's 2021), and Pacific Drive.

Balatro. Even old, very threaded ground can be reframed into something novel and stupidly addicting.

HmmmMMmmMmm... Against the Storm and Blue Prince were both very interesting for similar reasons - showing that the roguelike/light loop is not actually deeply married to combat caves of qud is and remains deeply interesting for the possibilities of procgen alongside authored content

There was an interesting depth of non combat social interaction in Solium Infernum that sidetracked me into 4 days of writing up how it mapped to a bunch of shit we were designing instead of building character art pipelines. That game slapped and I wished it had done better.

Most of mine have been named, but I really liked The Seance of Blake Manor for mystery UI. Especially contrasted with Blue Prince (which I also loved) which requires a lot of out of game record-keeping.

Anthology of the Killer -- let the subtext be the text, and then collect more and more subtext under that

Europa Universalis 5 is really interesting because it's a game that uses the capabilities of modern PCs in a way that isn't typical of the types of games that wouldn't run on a 10 year old PC. Ray tracing is cool but simulating every single living individual from 1337-1837 is something else.

Hm, I can think of a lot of narrative or design things that inspired, but struggling to think of the engineering side... Oh, Doom Dark ages using RTX ray-tracing for accurate collisions and sound is pretty wild and makes me think about now possibilities. (Also the game is just hyper optimized)

Alan Wake 2 really reminded me that you really just need to Go For It

Second pick: The Thaumaturge is a game set in a version of 1900s Poland that happens to have magic, but the political intricacies and struggles of our world are looped in with characters’ needs and dilemmas. It refuses to sanitize its own history for accessibility (in the audience sense).

Closer the Distance is doing something that feels in conversation with the directions Versu had been going in, in terms of a combination of simulation and human writing.

1000xRESIST made me realize i was holding myself back re: the stories i wanted to see & create. a game in which almost every major character is a WOC can exist, deserves to exist, & should exist. + it's one of the best written games ever. deeply honored to help craft sunset visitor's next game. 💖

its not out yet (just a demo), but I think a lot about the way the art is done in “Am I Nima”. like the way the perspective is stretched gives it this very uncomfortable feeling (which I have seen some 3D games do but it often feels more dizzying instead, if I make any sense lol)

2. Bloober and their work on SH: 2 and then immediately after Cronos: The New Dawn. Both titles showed IMO a team confident in its core ideas but also swinging a bit for the fences. With Cronos, taking big risks in today’s market with difficulty, etc. I was impressed and inspired by both games.