I’ve been playing Overlord. Go and read my comic about it or feel my wrath, peasant.
Or don’t. That’s okay too, I guess. I mean, it’s there, and I worked hard on it, and I’d be upset if it didn’t get the attention I feel it deserves. Some people say I don’t react to rejection in a positive, productive manner. Sometimes fire is involved, is all I’m saying.
I’m more of a passive-aggressive supreme undead overtyrant, really.
At the fifty second mark:
I assume that’s a made-up name?
If not, then God help that poor, poor man.
You know what pisses me off? All through the 90’s, games struggled to shoehorn a story into their pixelated adventures. Before they had voice acting, or motion capture, or facial expressions, or any other fancy tools, they were trying to create characters and stories. Now developers have more money than they know what to do with and technology that would have been indistinguishable from magic to a developer in 1994, all they can think to make is “Guy Shooting Zombies”. This demo had less story and less context than Wolfenstein 3D.
This wasn’t scary at all. It wasn’t very fun. It was unintentionally hilarious when I discovered the joys of the zombie rodeo. But to see such lavish visuals yoked to such wanton idiocy fills me with despair.
I would not buy this game were it not for Stolen Pixels. I do plan on picking it up, but only so that I can heap shame on whatever nonsense plot the full version contains. And I cringe at the responses I’m going to get to those strips from the die-hard fans: “u dont get it RE5 not about story its all about the gameplay!!!” As if “good story” is some sort of unobtainable technological goal, some lofty ideal nobody can attain. As if story doesn’t add anything to the richness of a game. As if it’s hard to devise scenarios that simply make sense. The only zombies I’m afraid of are the ones that will mob me for pointing out the wasted potential.
EDIT: I re-did the last couple of paragraphs, as it sounded like I was calling all RE fans idiots. That wasn’t my intention. I just wanted to point out that this is a series, like Final Fantasy, that will draw ankle biters if you take it to task for its shortcomings. It’s cool if you like the game, but I remain firm in my belief that a coherent story would act as a multiplier to whatever entertainment the game has to offer.
I mentioned in my previous post that I need a vector version of my site logo. Someone identified the font I needed, and others suggested Inkscape. I’ve never done any vector drawing before, and my logo is kind of complex. It has a three-part angled gradient, an outline, a reflection, and faux-perspective shadows. I was prepared for a steep learning curve and a lot of work.
Forty minutes after starting Inkscape for the first time:
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Amazing. The entire logo, done, in about the same amount of time it took me to make the original logo, using a program I’d been using for years. As should be evident from my site design, I am not a student of the graphic arts. The fact that I could get so far so quickly says a lot about the quality of the Inkscape interface.
Thanks for all the helpful suggestions.
Good: I’m joining Themis Ad Network
Okay: I need to put together promotional materials for this site so that advertisers will know what they’re getting into.
Bad: I need the logo of the site in vector format, and I saved the original as a not-particularly-high-res PNG.
Worse: I no longer own or even remember the font used in the logo.
Worst: Looks like I’ll need to re-make the logo, more or less from nothing. Using vectors. Which I’ve never done before and I’m not even sure if Paintshop Pro 8 supports.
I know my current “Web 2.0” is horribly dorky, and doesn’t really match the whole “Roleplaying Games” theme. I knew it when I put it up. It’s much too corporate and plastic, but dangit, I like(d) that shiny white iPod plastic look. Right now I’m a fan of the whole “Sideways logo” like I have going on my Twitter Page, although I’m not convinced that would be a good idea for a blog. (Simply because it’s so unconventional.)
So now I’m mulling over what to do. If anyone has any suggestions or pointers on logo design that don’t involve spending money, I’d love to hear them. If any of you web design Jedis can I.D. that font, even better.
And just to be clear: I’m not planning on overhauling the site or anything. Everything else should stay pretty much the same.
EDIT: chabuhi identified the font in the comments below. Apparently I used Bank Gothic Medium. Thanks chabuhi!
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The games I’ve run last a few months. Ten to twenty sessions seems ideal. The last one I ran was fifteen sessions. I know some people have settings and characters that they play for years and years, their tale spooling ever onward as their rulebooks get dog-eared and their character sheets fade with age. As someone who loves inventing new settings and populating them with characters, I don’t want to be stuck in any one place for too long.
Changing systems usually means changing the setting, but a change in setting doesn’t always mean a new set of rulebooks. Anecdotes suggest that some groups are system-hoppers. They leap from one system to another, trying a little bit of everything like kids at a candy buffet. Other groups pick a rulebook and a setting, and then hunker down for a long stretch without possibility of parole. And if you can’t tell which approach I prefer from those descriptions then communication between us is simply not possible.
But as a connoisseur of anecdotal input on roleplaying games (and really, what other kind of data is there on stuff like this?) I’m curious how other people do their thing. How often do you jump systems? How often do you wipe the board clean and start a new setting? And how often do you end a campaign arc and begin a new one?
Bonus question: Assuming your campaigns end, what is the survival rate of characters going from the first session to the final one?
Fantasy Magazine has a great interview with the Comic Irregulars, the team behind Darths & Droids.
David Karlov comments that making the comics has given him a new appreciation for Star Wars Episodes I & II. That’s interesting, since the opposite happened to me in making DM of the Rings. I can’t see the movies without thinking of the jokes connected to each scene.
The one question I would have asked them is how in the name of Yoda’s tiny lightsaber do they divide up the work between seven people? Most webcomic teams max out at two. I suppose you can divide this sort of comic into a few distinct jobs:
If these were stand-alone gag strips then I could see how they could all contribute jokes, but D&D is carefully plotted and each strip leads directly to the next. I can’t imagine how you could balance the workload without people getting in each other’s way. It would be like seven guys trying to move a single end table. I think D&D in wholly unique in this regard. I can’t think of another webcomic with such a large team or ambitious plan.
EDIT: Last time I talked about D&D, Henebry left the following comment, which nicely heads off arguments over which comic is “better”:
Both start with the same premise: given that this narrative has played such a seminal role in the consciousness of gamers, how would these narrratives have played out if current tabletop rpgs had given rise to them rather than the other way round? They differ, though, in their responses.
Shamus answers the question with the cynicism of a great satirist. His GM is a self-important fool who has crafted a campaign of unplayable complexity; his players are too engaged in petty rivalries and private obsessions to be interested in the epic story set before them. This produces a wonderful tension between the gorgeous screencaps taken from Peter Jackson's movies (in which the scenery and actions really are epic) and the low-comedy dialogue spoken by the players. We readers are led to expect that these images record what's going on in the imaginations of the GM and players, but this expectation is defeated, again and again. In this way the comic pokes fun at the grandiosity of tabletop rpgs, the notion (endemic among us) that in our raucous sessions we can achieve a narrative scope akin to the great work of Tolkien or Robert E. Howard. And we gamers laugh because we're geeks and we've learned to take joy in laughing at ourselves. That is our great strength, the thing that separates us from the jocks.
By contrast, the Comic Irregulars answer the question with the idealism of true believers in the promise of tabletop rpgs to elevate poorly conceived plotting through occasional flashes of insight. Sure, in Jim (Qui-Gon) and in Pete (R2D2) we get satirical portraits (the gung-ho treasure-seeker and the superstitious min-maxer). But with the others (and even sometimes with Jim and Pete) the outcome is a story with moments of dramatic tension far more interesting than the original movie. Case in point: Sally's Jar-Jar, who (far from Lucas's oafish Stepin Fetchit) exhibits the wild inventiveness of a child's imagination. The Phantom Menace storyline in Darths isn't a preconceived epic crafted by an overambitious GM, but rather something produced organically by a group of people working interactively, and often with surprising but brilliant results. True, the story which emerges is too convoluted to make a good movie â€" but we already knew that, right? :) And the storyline that matters is at least as much the story of Sally and Ben and Jim as it is of Jar-Jar and Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon. As if in response to Shamus' satire on tabletop rpgs in DM of the Rings, the Comic Irregulars demonstrate that the real aim of tabletop gaming is not the simulation of cinematic epic, but rather the collaborative enactment of epic action.
An ongoing series where I work on making a 2D action game from scratch.
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2013.
What makes this borderline indie title so much better than the AAA juggernauts that came before?
A look back at Star Trek, from the Original Series to the Abrams Reboot.
An attempt to make a good looking cityscape with nothing but simple tricks and a few rectangles of light.
This is a horrible narrative that undermines the hobby through crass stereotypes. The hobby is vast, gamers come from all walks of life, and you shouldn't judge ANY group by its worst members.
What did web browsers look like 20 years ago, and what kind of crazy features did they have?
Remember the superhero MMO from 2009? Neither does anyone else. It was dumb. So dumb I was compelled to write this.
Let's count up the ways in which Bethesda has misunderstood and misused the Fallout property.
I'm a very casual fan of the series, but I gave Civilization VI a look to see what was up with this nuclear war simulator.
T w e n t y S i d e d
