T w e n t y S i d e d
From The Archives:
Games and the Fear of Death
Why killing you might be the least scary thing a game can do.
The Middle Ages
Would you have survived in the middle ages?
Programming Language for Games
Game developer Jon Blow is making a programming language just for games. Why is he doing this, and what will it mean for game development?
Grand Theft Auto Retrospective
This series began as a cheap little 2D overhead game and grew into the most profitable entertainment product ever made. I have a love / hate relationship with the series.
Project Frontier
A programming project where I set out to make a gigantic and complex world from simple data.
Well, this is a new one. Somehow only the new caption is from the previous comic.
Also there is a type of in the first panel, “though” should be “through”.
Lost an r there chief :)
Yeah, that’s entirely my fault. Sorry. My editor (husband) is working overtime at his real-life job so I’m not having him do read-throughs. This is the exact type of thing he would catch.
I format each week in a dumb way that breeds mistakes. I take last weeks comic, and copy/paste every element into a new post so the formatting remains consistent. The problem then becomes that the post then looks completely finished and I have read it over and over and remember which comic I’m working on. The Patreon gets their comics a week early so I have next weeks fresh in my mind, and I’m working on a page that has last weeks inputted into every slot.
The best solution I think is to create a word doc with all the formatting already done, and in red, so I can copy/paste a blank or gibberish version to fill in. Then of course if somehow my monkey brain misses something the site would get literal gibberish or nothing at all, but the rate of failure would be lower.
Why haven’t I done that yet? You tell me and we’ll both know.
“If you’re such a badass, why don’t you go do it yourself?”
This is why I like running games where the quest-giver is a government or corporate stooge. Then the answer becomes “because I pay you mooks to do the dirty work for me”.
It’s also nice for the situation to be one where players are assumed to have to do the quest.
There was an rpg called capharnaüm a while back which was all based on the 1001 nights, and the PCs were essentially “the chosen one” and more or less recognised as such. In that setting it became quite easy for questgivers to just go “oh, you see… This is a” chosen one” job, now off you go and do your duty”
(with a bit more tact of course!) it was a refreshing change in pace, ah I should go back to that game one day.
It also neatly sidesteps the whole “why can’t I kill them and take their stuff” question. Because they don’t have a chest of gold in the basement, they have a pen to write a check from the government and you can’t exactly steal the checkbook and skip town.
Finally, a use for the forgery skill!