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Hosts: Josh, Rutskarn, Campster. Episode edited by Rachel.

Fun fact that has nothing whatsoever to do with the show: If I put a properly escaped HTML line break in the title of this post using <br/> then it will – for reasons I’ll never understand – break the embed code above that shows the audio player and download links.

Yes, I’m supposedly a programmer. No, I have no idea why it does this. Yes, I should probably be curious and worried that this is a symptom of a deeper problem with WordPress / this theme / my brain. No, I’m not going to bother looking into it.

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Shamus Young is an old-school OpenGL programmer, author, and composer. He runs this site and if anything is broken you should probably blame him.

This is just a short trip. The walk takes maybe a minute or so.

“So what’s so bad about Goldshire?”, I ask once we’ve left the church behind. “Is it haunted or something?”

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Shamus Young is an old-school OpenGL programmer, author, and composer. He runs this site and if anything is broken you should probably blame him.

It’s amazing how easy it is to fall into common pitfalls of software engineering, even when you’ve run afoul of them before and you should supposedly know better.

Today’s pitfall is “scope creep”, where a small, sensible change gradually grows into something large, ambitious, and impractical.

I needed to add a byline to the end of each post. This wasn’t required when 99% of the posts on the site were authored by me, and those last 1% were unexpected edge-cases where it was usually pretty obvious who wrote the thing. But these days I’m only writing ~75% of them, and so it’s really important to make it clear who the author is. I know from experience that most people ignore the name at the top of the post. So I added a little bio and a link to the author’s Patreon to the end of the article.

But hey, while I’m here making changes…

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Shamus Young is an old-school OpenGL programmer, author, and composer. He runs this site and if anything is broken you should probably blame him.

This scene is schizophrenic. We start off with a cutscene that shows the Wedding procession, which is unwilling Yuna and unhinged Seymour surrounded by a crowd of unarmed blue nuns.

Who are all these people? Nuns? Bridesmaids? Paparazzi?

Okay, so it’s just a bunch of nuns for us to deal with.

Then we get another view, and suddenly the nuns are gone. Instead, there are legions of knights with rifles, and a bunch of forbidden machina.

Hey, what happened to the nuns? They were standing in this very spot a few seconds ago, and there wasn`t enough room for anyone else.

Okay, so NOT nuns then? Looks like we’re about to assault an army in an entrenched position. This seems like a terrible idea.

The next cut shows our heroes leaping into battle. Bullets are flying everywhere, but nobody seems worried. Tidus is even smiling.

They look still in screenshot, but the party is actually sliding down these cables at terrific speed. They`re going so fast it`s not clear why they don`t pancake when they land on the platform.

I get it now, this is a JRPG where bullets do as much damage as a stiff slap.

Then there are a few standard encounters with robots and guys with rifles. Also there are nutjobs with flamethrowers, even though they weren’t shown in any of the previous cutscenes. I love the idea that Seymour decided he wanted a bunch of dudes with FLAMETHROWERS to defend his wedding ceremony on this narrow platform.

Our heroes make short work of the mooks and reach the platform where Maester Seymour is trying to marry Yuna. Then we get a cutscene where the party is surrounded and captured by dudes with guns.

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Shamus Young is an old-school OpenGL programmer, author, and composer. He runs this site and if anything is broken you should probably blame him.

Hey look it’s not Fallout 4 again.

Actually this episode is the result something Chris and I have been thinking about for a while now. There are a lot of games we’d like to show off or discuss in a bit more detail than you can manage simply by talking about it on the Diecast, but Spoiler Warning as a long-form let’s play series isn’t really the place for them either. So we’ve decided to take the “Twenty Minutes with…” videos that have popped up occasionally (pretty much every time Chris takes over as the player) and spin them off into their own series of Giant Bomb-esque quick looks, with perhaps a general focus on smaller indie titles that we don’t get to cover very often.

This will be purely supplementary to Spoiler Warning; we’re not going to stop our long form LPs any time soon. It also won’t necessarily have to involve the entire cast; just anyone who’s interested and available at the time. You might even see a Twenty Minutes With episode in addition to the Spoiler Warning episodes of a week, provided it doesn’t put too much editing strain on myself or Chris.

For our inaugural installment, I checked out Primordia, an old school-styled point-and-click adventure game about robots in the post-apocalypse, and I dragged Chris along for the ride. It’s pretty cool.

Josh Viel is the primary editor and producer of the Spoiler Warning video series. You can support the show by backing the Patreon.

I’m sitting on a bubble, dear reader–a glossy film of nervous perspiration stretched around two solid hours’ worth of gameplay. It’s taken weeks of trial and error to achieve a bubble this bloated, and I know all too well how little trial or error it’ll take to burst it again. Now’s my chance to really screw things up. In the words of Samwise Gamgee, if I take one more step, it’ll be the farthest I’ve ever been.

Only–it’s not a step. I’m leaping onto a glitchy-looking uneven platform to try to figure out how to use a completely novel and almost certainly unstable vehicle while dodging unkillable monsters who can take me down in one second. Which, and I don’t mean to be rude, makes the whole backpacking-through-fantasy-New-Zealand thing seem a bit candyass.

There may be a day when the courage of Cahmel fails! Oh, wow, look at the time waaAAAYAAGGH

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Rutskarn is a writer, author, wordsmith, text producer, article deviser, prose architect, and accredited language-talker. If you enjoy his contributions to this site you could always back his Patreon.

Brace yourself, because this entry is going to be a bit self-indulgent. I know the world has moved on and everyone has long since stopped caring about No Man’s Sky, but I can’t let go. This game is a mixture of the very good with very bad, and that’s a mix that I always find captivating.

This is what I said about No Man’s Sky last week:

In fact, I’m hoping they made enough on this game that they can give it another try. I really do think that they have something special here. Imagine if the first iteration of Minecraft had been really awkward, frustrating, had a terrible building interface, and was constantly limiting and undermining your creative abilities because the developer thought the game should be focused on combat. I wouldn’t want the idea of a cube world to die on the vine. I’d want it to get another chance to become the creative, engaging, meme-spawning classic that was embraced as a hobby by millions worldwide.

I really do think that’s true. I think this is a game with the wrong set of mechanics. This is a game where the gameplay undermines the very features that attracted people to the game in the first place. Which leads to the question: Okay Shamus. If these mechanics don’t work, then what would?

So let’s try to answer that question.

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Shamus Young is an old-school OpenGL programmer, author, and composer. He runs this site and if anything is broken you should probably blame him.

Tagged:no mans sky

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Podcast RSS feed.

Hosts: Josh, Shamus, Campster. Episode edited by Rachel.

REMINDER: The RSS feed has changed as of a couple of weeks ago. The new feed is here: http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?feed=podcast.

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Shamus Young is an old-school OpenGL programmer, author, and composer. He runs this site and if anything is broken you should probably blame him.

Tagged:Brookhaven Experiment, Charnel House, deus ex, for honor, VR

We’re out behind the church. In the graveyard. Norman is looking around like he’s afraid he’s being followed.

So sad that granny has passed on. What should we write on her tombstone? I was thinking her name, followed by `Beloved Mother`. Either that or just a huge skull. Either one.

I nod, “Nice. I like this. Lotta room for more dead people here, though. What say we fill this place up?”

Norman turns to me. “Look. This is a bit tricky, but warlocks are sort of outlawed a bit.”

“Explain that.”

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Shamus Young is an old-school OpenGL programmer, author, and composer. He runs this site and if anything is broken you should probably blame him.

This “being called by people in the videogame” would be WAY too real for me. I’d actually be really uncomfortable with it. Also I hate taking on the phone. One of these boys would call me and I’d be like, “DUDE. Email me!”

Anyway. This was good for a laugh and I’m sorry if I got a bit mean at the end. This was a fun idea. I’m glad Mumbles suggested it, and I’m grateful to Josh for making it happen.

Shamus Young is an old-school OpenGL programmer, author, and composer. He runs this site and if anything is broken you should probably blame him.

With this miniseries, I hope I’m demonstrating how important a game’s rules are. Mechanics direct and shape gameplay on a profound level. The first few games we talked about stretched their rules across the entire world, for GM and players alike, and asked the player characters to be essentially plugged in to an objective framework. The middle games demand only creativity and initiative of the GM and reserve almost all of their rules for players to interestingly determine success and failure. Now we’re onto the latter games, where the rules define how the players tell the story–and the GM doesn’t exist at all.

Mist-Robed Gate (2008)

The elevator pitch for Mist-Robed Gate: instead of dice, you use poker chips and a knife.

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Rutskarn is a writer, author, wordsmith, text producer, article deviser, prose architect, and accredited language-talker. If you enjoy his contributions to this site you could always back his Patreon.

Not-so-fun fact: One of my migraines began during this segment. It hadn’t started to hurt for real yet, but I was getting the strange tingly vision and mystery painIf you ask me if I’m in pain, I’ll say yes, but if you ask me where it hurts I won’t be able to tell you aside from “somewhere in the vicinity of my head”. I can’t describe it. that serves as a warm-up for the Big Show. I was getting stressed and cranky and not thinking clearly. The smart thing to do would have been to bow out and leave the show to the rest of the team, but like I said in the previous sentence: I wasn’t thinking clearly. As a result, I didn’t have much to say about the game and I don’t remember much of this now. And I think I turned mean at the end of it. I guess we’ll find out tomorrow.

Anyway, this was all very silly and makes me feel like I’m a thousand years old.

Shamus Young is an old-school OpenGL programmer, author, and composer. He runs this site and if anything is broken you should probably blame him.