Here is a Diecast with 50% extra diecasting! You’re welcome! All this time, and we STILL somehow didn’t manage to answer any listener questions. I just want to make it clear that we’re not aloof, we’re incompetent. Big difference.
Hosts: Paul, Shamus. Episode edited by Issac.
Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #272: Control, Fortnite, Classic WoW”
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “#54 The More Things Change…”
And here it is. The end of the tale. Note that during this series, I’ve been reposting everything verbatim, typos and all. For these last entries I’ve fixed a few errors and messed around with the formatting. I haven’t changed the events, cut any text, or altered any of the dialog. I just wanted to make the text a little more readable and combine everything so the finale wasn’t spread out over too many entries.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “#53 Finale Part 2”
My programming posts are always popular, which is strange because it seems like they shouldn’t work at all. I don’t know where I got the idea to write about the fussy details of programming in casual, non-technical terms. It seems like non-programmers would be bored by all the stuff that has no bearing on their lives, and programmers would be irritated by all the entry-level explanations for things they already understand. But for whatever reason, both kinds of people show up for these articles.
Whichever group you belong to, buckle up. I expect some of this to get pretty controversial by the standards of programming flame wars, and I think I’m going to need to be more technical than usual.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Game Programming Vexations Part 1: Five Years Later”
Here we have yet another musical platformer that I shouldn’t have bought but couldn’t help myself. This didn’t work out the last time I tried it. I’m sure it will fail the next time I try it. Evidently I can’t learn from my mistakes.
In the past I’ve said that I’m rubbish at 2D platformers. That’s basically true, but I don’t think that’s what keeps me from enjoying the genre. I’m rubbish at fighting games, but I still enjoy mashing the buttons and listening to the absurd sounds the combatants make when they pummel each other. Also, the cutscenes are usually… really something. I’m not so hot at driving games, but I can still enjoy them on the lower difficulty settings.
No, this problem goes deeper than being “good” at something.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Steam Backlog: Neon Beats”
So, I’ve made quite a few space ships in this series, but none of them have received as much criticism as the background starfield.We’re not counting the tubes, okay? Okay. So that’s what I’m going to be working on today. It’s not going to turn out great, but it will be much better than it was. I mean, you can see the result in the splash image, so you can go straight to the comments if you see anything you don’t like.
The background effect was built without referenceMy first mistake? Hardly. but I had something in mind about big crosses and circles around startlingly bright stars. I think it probably came from some of the illustrations in the GURPS space source booksor the TMNT Guide to the Universe, but it was vague, and I’m lazy. So instead of improving the background until it objectively looked good, I just kept lowering my standard of what I was expecting while I was working until I thought “yeah, that looks good enough” and moved on to the spaceship making part. This is why reference is so important, at least for me. Maybe some people have enough internal artistic sense to force themselves to create a refrerence-free success, but I’m not that person. Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Procgen Background”
I’ve been playing Rage 2 this week. Did the world forget that game exists? I haven’t heard anyone mention it in months. I guess Campster covered it last month, so that counts as a bit of relevance. Still, this game came and went so fast.
It’s so forgettable I forgot to talk about it on my own podcast, even though I’m in the middle of a playthrough!
Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #271: EGS Hypocrisy, Broken Games, WoW Classic”
I called 2018 "The Year of Good News". Here is a list of the games I thought were interesting or worth talking about that year.
A programming project where I set out to make a gigantic and complex world from simple data.
Just how big IS No Man's Sky? What if you made a map of all of its landmass? How big would it be?
A music lesson for people who know nothing about music, from someone who barely knows anything about music.
What lessons can we learn from the abrupt demise of this once-impressive games studio?
A long-form analysis on one of the greatest horror games ever made.
Dear people of the internet: Please stop doing these horrible idiotic things when you talk to each other.
Some advice to game developers on how to stop ruining good stories with bad cutscenes.
Both a celebration and an evisceration of tabletop roleplaying games, by twisting the Lord of the Rings films into a D&D game.
The plot of this game isn't just dumb, it's actively hostile to the player. This game hates you and thinks you are stupid.
T w e n t y S i d e d
