The Optimistic Authour

we need to bring back e3. I miss watching project managers with zero media training embarrass themselves in front of their entire industry

When Veilguard comes out, please keep it in the back of your mind every single time you interact with Varric and Lucanis that their writer got laid off with little to no warning and that she is and always will be a Dragon Age legend and one of the reasons why the franchise has stayed afloat for as long as it has

steam sale:

Just found out apparently Terraria has optional integration with RGB keyboards where the key lights will animate thematically to the gameplay and I'm gonna be honest if I saw this shit on my keyboard during the final boss countdown I think I would shit myself

Oh yeah I have a razer keyboard and it does that and its so cool

Terraria has more specific keyboards than Ive seen in any other game they really go above and beyond

Oh yeah I have a

razer keyboard and it does

that and its so cool

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

If you know, you know.

WHYYYYY is this so accurate 🤣😭😭

Hey so it's come to my attention that the Creators of Disco Elysium want you to share the game and not give the company who took over and fired them (illegally)?) any profits off of their ideas and work, and I originally joined tumblr 2 weeks ago when that post was going around about the Steam sale and how you should [Skull and Crossbones flag] it instead.

So.

in light of that.

Check the replies/notes of this post :)

I was informed that posts containing links in them aren't findable in the search so i'll just.... drop a link in a seperate reboot :)

first things first though, copy this key:

q4-EJ9G2DV7MYYI-Vs0KdQ

here's the edited version with the captal YY in the key above!

and also the Google drive link :

Just beat my first playthrough last night! Would highly recommend it. Intricate, unique, clever, and lovingly crafted.

this person gets it

Chasing photorealism is a fools errand, it takes more and more time and resources to achieve smaller and smaller improvements, and it ages poorly because it becomes even more obvious that you failed to achieve the style you were trying for.

One* of the Big Problems with the games industry is a side effect of this. For years games basically got technological leaps "for free", and a lot of the advertising of games was built on this: look how great this game looks! The game we made five years ago didn't look this great.

Which was fine back when you were jumping from a PS1 to PS2, or a Nintendo to Super Nintendo. Your games just looked better "for free" because the resolution was higher and the hardware was so much faster and able to draw more polygons and run more shades, etc.

But as the above post shows, that only goes so far. We're past the point where the tech gives you free upgrades.

Think of it like: Imagine you manage to double the resolution of your console for the next version. Sweet, right?

Well, how amazing that is is gonna depend real heavy on if your console looks like this:

Or this?

You double the resolution of the former, you go from an Atari 2600 to a NES. Big jump!

You double the latter, and... Well it'll look a little better for the fraction of your audience that has really big expensive TVs. Not nearly as revolutionary.

But your industry is stuck in the mindset of "your game has to look better than last year's game!". So what do they do? They don't go for tech improvements, they go for content improvements. More intricate worlds, character models, more game modes, more playable characters, more voiced lines, more textures, more everything.

And yeah some of that is good and fun, but this situation is underlying the budget crisis of modern games.

Games are requiring more and more work to make, because of the need to look better than last year. More work means more cost which means the budgets for AAA go higher and higher (there is a mobile boardgame tie-in with a budget of HALF A BILLION DOLLARS).

And the high budgets mean your publishers are being more conservative, less willing to take risks, and way more likely to go for "sure things" : sequels and reboots and mass appeal ideas.

Because if now costs 200 million dollars to make a game, you better be real sure your game is gonna be a massive hit. Way more sure than when you could release a game for 10 million, you know?

Anyways, tl;dr: the game industry relied on tech advances giving them a free visual quality upgrade that when that automatic upgrade treadmill slowed down, their budgets exploded and now it's crushing the industry.

They’ll never do a Hitman level set in a Furry Convention because gamers would absolutely ruin it but imagine. like the target isn’t a furry he just owns a hotel that happens to have one every year but you can disguise yourself in a fursuit and some guy will ask you “what species is your sona” and 47 would be like “a wolf. i always felt a connection with…hunters.” and then diana would be like “let’s see if you can sniff out some information, furrty-seven” and then he comes to my house and kills me for writing this

ok but imagine being the fursuit artist that he contracts to make his costume tho

He contacts you via an anonymous email and is very exacting and precise in his request. Money is no object, which isn't uncommon in your line of business, you're a professional and more than a few customers have been in the 1% range.

So you ask if he's local so you can meet and take measurements and he says no but he will meet you at (conveniently close local craft store) tomorrow after work (you did not mention where you live)

You're a little shaken but you meet him anyways because daddy needs to pay rent, and he's probably not a serial killer, right?

Right?

You had no idea what kind of person to expect, but a 6'2 bald white guy built like a fucken shit-brickhouse with a "FurCon2023" shirt wrapped around his brolic frame was rather on the shorter end of your list. His cargo shorts and pure white sneakers looked like they'd just been picked up off of the shelf and his glasses looked too small for his massive head.

You jump because you don't even notice him until he's tapping you on the shoulder and introducing himself. How did he know it was you?? Alarm bells are going off everywhere but there's cameras all over, he wouldn't try something in public right?? You take his measurements and look at fabrics together.

You ask about his fursona and he very seriously produces a laminated folder with several crudely drawn pictures of a polar bear suit. Well, you guess you shouldn't be mean, they were clearly drawn from references but you could tell this was someone who did not draw often. It didn't even have any accessories, it was just a normal polar bear... But the notes surrounding them were so neat they looked printed! And so in depth! There was one page solely dedicated to the visibility needs, with advanced notes on the camera and display system he wanted in the head. You'd only seen this sort of thing at the national cons, just who the hell was this guy??

You haltingly ask him if he was sure. You tell him this is really advanced stuff and he was looking at at LEAST 10k with all the specific modifications on it. When you first started making suits you would have never been this firm on pricing, lowballing and trying to make up the difference so as not to upset the customer with a hefty price, but you'd learned eventually that undervaluing your work was a waste of your time and effort so even though you couldn't gauge his reaction, you figured being upfront about the price would at least be a test to see how serious the guy was.

He nodded silently and reached into the fanny pack around his waist to produce the cleanest stack of hundreds you'd ever seen in your life, like straight printed from the treasury mint. He places it in your palm and you almost drop it out of shock.

"Will this be enough to get you started? I included some extra to compensate for lost wages as I do need this suit fairly quickly" he says, tone unreadable.

You stammer and try to look professional thumbing through the crisply banded notes and would you look at that, you think this will do just fine!

He nods again, shakes your hand and leaves without another word.

You exit the store, just trying to comprehend what in the hell you'd just gotten yourself into, zoning out so hard that you didn't even realize someone was yelling at you until the word "-fuckin furry faggot" pierced through your thoughts. You were looking at your phone so you didn't notice the band of truck bros creeping up behind you in their suped up pickup truck. There were three or four in the bed of the truck, dangling out over the side in between giant "TRUMP 2024" and "Lets Go Brandon" flags. They have their phones out, recording you and shouting slurs.

You raise double birds at them and turn to walk quickly in the opposite way, hoping you wouldn't see them as you walked home. You'd heard of a couple beatings happening locally and you didn't want to be around if that's what they had in mind.

So when you hear tires screeching and and engine roaring behind you, you break out into a run, hoping to make it to the bus terminal across the parking lot.

But they catch up to you before you'd made it halfway. They all get out and one grabs your phone that you held out to record with. He smashes it on the ground and shoves you into the pavement. Hard.

They all stand over you, jeering and laughing and you try to escape but your limbs won't listen to you. You always figured if something like this happened you'd stand your ground, maybe get in a couple of hits yourself, but in reality you could barely breathe and your chest felt like it was collapsing in on itself, so your attempts to scream for help end up coming out as breathy wheezes. One of them levels a crowbar at you and thats when the screaming starts.

You curl up into a ball to protect your face but the pain never comes. You hear screaming and sneakers skidding across asphalt and oh god, wet crunchy impacts followed by something warm and wet being splattered across your arms and legs.

Its suddenly silent except for the drone of the truck engine but eventually you crack open an eye to get a look around, and for the second time that day you almost lose your lunch.

Its straight up something out of a video game, just absolute carnage surrounds you. All of the tall frat bros are out cold in varying stages of fucked up. You do actually start to hurl a little when you see one with his nose completely sideways like a gory Picasso.

And in the center of the carnage is -no fucking way- your fucking fursuit client, calmly wiping his hands of the blood with some baby wipes from his fannypack.

He looks over at you when he sees you're up and for a second there you see something, a slip in the mask, something angry, something violent. You flinch as you realize it, but oh fuck, this guys like.. killed people before. like, for fucken sure.

He walks towards you and you suddenly feel like a very small animal being stalked by a tiger. You try to stumble away but the mask is back on and he just looks down at you and offers you a babywipe.

"You alright?" He asks plainly.

Turns out the guy is "ex-military" and he hurt himself so he's back in the states and bored out of his mind. His daughter is a furry and wanted him to go with her to FurCon and insisted he get a suit as well. You keep on glancing at all the deep scars running up and down his arms and wondering how the hell you didn't see it before.

He's saying something to you but you only snap out of it when a phone is being placed into your hands. You look up and suddenly you're standing outside your apartment building (did you tell him where you lived???)

"This is a secure line, if anything happens to you or you have questions, I'll answer immediately." He says, pale blue eyes drilling into your skull with their intensity.

The tears start bubbling up in your eyes before you can stop them and you just lean forward, bumping your head into his chest and choking out a thank you as you clutch the phone to your chest like an amulet.

As you figured, his body is make out of steel and he stiffens at the contact, unsure of what to do.

He just lets you cry it out for a bit before eventually placing a heavy hand on your shoulder, pulling you off but he keeps the hand gentle.

He's not looking at you this time but he clears his throat and murmurs a quick "Take care" before turning around and disappearing into the night. You unlock your door and collapse into bed.

"What the fuck" you murmur to yourself as you pull out your tablet, and you start to sketch...

I dunno what I expected to find when I logged into tumblr today. Certainly not Hitman furry con fanfic. But I did. And it was glorious.

Today in obscure Doctor Who jokes:

Somebody on Twitter pointed out that the Big Finish companion Hex is canonically from the year 2021, so when he occasionally abbreviates the word "suspicious" to "sus," it's probably an Among Us reference.

The punchline is that this character was actually introduced back in 2004. It was made-up future slang that they happened to get right.

“British writer invents time travel and uses it on One Joke”

sometimes i become sexually attracted to difficult video game bosses. I mean if im gonna get fucked this much i might as well start moaning

the eroticism of the instakill grab attack is a core tenet of any fromsoft game's design philosophy

Plus if you get horny it blocks out the production of anger/despair in your body thus preventing gamer toxins from accumulating in the liver

nvm I am so fucking mad

in Disco Elysium I was expecting there to be some kind of “addiction mechanic” that would add a long-term downside to taking drugs, and was surprised not only by the absence of any such mechanic but also that the benefits of drugs greatly outweighed the cost. anyways fast forward to the late game and I was downing three bottles of pyrholidon and smoking an entire pack of cigarettes before attempting any check, and it was only then I realized there was in fact an addiction mechanic

honestly, i think this is why i like the way the game handles substances so much. when i was looking up playthroughs of disco elysium i stumbled across one subreddit thread where someone asked “gameplay wise, is there any point to staying sober?” and just looked at it. like, yeah. yeah, exactly. we know that harry often does drugs specifically so that he can take on a superhuman caseload - as he puts it to kim, to be a “really good detective”. it was so chilling to see a player asking the same exact question that harry would probably be asking himself. without an external punishment mechanic, without being heavy handed about it, and in a way that (as OP pointed out) is so natural as to be almost unnoticeable, it manages to put the player exactly in his shoes as a recovering (or not recovering) addict. it’s a really well-designed mechanic

“Things are harder without this substance, so there’s no reason for me to abstain” being a purely Player-Driven interaction is a phenomenal addiction mechanic. Absolutely fucking gorgeous.

When the player character dialogue options in a game all suck:

Some actually good game industry news

There was a previous unionization that happened with QAs which got people excited, and this time it's across the board!

Highly encourage checking out able gamers! They work to create ways to make gaming accessible to everyone just like in this video

It's a rough world out there for people who were teenagers during the exact slice of gaming history where indie video games had become feasible to develop and distribute globally, but the definition of "indie" didn't yet encompass corporate studios and million-dollar budgets. They'll tell you their favourite game when they were a kid was, like, a point-and-click visual novel whose protagonist dreams they're a vast formless sea monster that learns about the concept of colours after finding a discarded helium balloon, or a hypertext fiction/precision platformer hybrid exploring gender as a mechanism of social control, and you think they're either being pretentious or deliberately fucking with you, but no, that's just what the indie gaming scene was like for a couple of years there. The sea monster thing got a front-page feature on the same site that made Bloons Tower Defense a household name – it was literally played by millions of people.

I see other people have asked, but what's the second one?

Aren't "indie" and "million dollar company" mutually exclusive?

Not particularly. A game that spends three or four years in production with a full-time development team of, say, four people can easily rack up a development budget in the high six figures – those people have gotta eat, and multiple living wages times multiple years add up in a real hurry. There's a vast stretch of territory between "one person burning their brain out doing uncompensated game dev in whatever free time their day job leaves them" and "major corporate studio", and drawing our lines so that "indie game" means the former and absolutely nothing else can have a lot of weird implications.

can i be so honest for a second. with the initial disclaimer of 'undertale is also just a really good game', i cant take anyone seriously who asks why undertale got more popular than like, any triple A game or game that requires a console/beefy computer. undertale was 10$ and could be played easily on my 6 year old apple laptop that used to emit sparks. it was accessible to the most powerful audiences: broke people and teenagers