{"id":30046,"date":"2015-12-25T17:17:46","date_gmt":"2015-12-25T22:17:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=30046"},"modified":"2015-12-25T17:17:46","modified_gmt":"2015-12-25T22:17:46","slug":"the-long-dark-spoiler-warning-christmas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=30046","title":{"rendered":"The Long Dark Spoiler Warning Christmas"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Merry Christmas, everyone! I hope you&#8217;re enjoying the holiday. The Spoiler Warning cast got together on Christmas Eve-Eve, because we wanted to help you celebrate. <\/p>\n<p>Traditionally, Christmas is a time we associate with:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Being with family and friends\n<li>Good food.\n<li>Bright cheerful decorations.\n<li>Gathering around a fire.\n<li>Exchanging gifts.\n<\/ol>\n<p>So we figure the best way to celebrate this time with friends and and family is to ignore them and instead watch this video about a game where&#8230;<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>You are totally alone, without the hint or hope of meeting another human soul. Your only company is a vast wilderness full of wild beasts, who are trying to eat you.\n<li>You are hungry. You can&#8217;t even imagine how hungry. Like, if you&#8217;re really lucky your Christmas dinner might be a jug of ice cold toilet water.\n<li>It is dark. So dark you can&#8217;t even see how utterly alone you are.\n<li>You are cold. So cold you can&#8217;t even feel your exhausted dead limbs as you tumble into a sleeping bag on the hard floor and hope you can get just an hour or two of sleep without freezing to death.\n<li>You are plunged into the most desperate poverty, and your only &#8220;Christmas gifts&#8221; will be the meager trinkets you can scavenge from the silent corpses you encounter in your wanderings.\n<\/ol>\n<p>So from all of us, to all of you, enjoy The Long Dark, you doomed, isolated wastrel:<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><table class='nomargin' cellspacing='0' width='100%' cellpadding='0' align='center' border='0'><tr><td><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/GlhM3M5Jbko\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen class=\"embed\"><\/iframe><br\/><small><a href='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=GlhM3M5Jbko'>Link (YouTube)<\/a><\/small><\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s interesting how highly immersive games drag the player into simulationist thinking. &#8220;If I&#8217;m freezing, why can&#8217;t I burn this furniture to keep warm?&#8221; <em>Ha ha, those dumb game developers don&#8217;t realize furniture is made of wood. What goofs!<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Of course, the real reason you can&#8217;t just burn every object made of wood is that it creates a never-ending chain of escalating feature creep:<\/p>\n<p>Player: Hey, how come I can&#8217;t break down this dresser for wood?<\/p>\n<p><em>Dev: Okay, I&#8217;ve added a new button to the interface when you open a container. As long as the container is empty, you can break it down into wood.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Player: How come this tiny footlocker and this huge wardrobe both give me the same tiny amount of wood? How come I can tear this metal safe apart for wood?<\/p>\n<p><em>Dev: okay, I&#8217;ve added a bunch of data to the game to keep track of what containers are made of and how much wood (if any) they contain.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Player: Frustrating that the game doesn&#8217;t tell me how much wood I&#8217;ll get before I hit the &#8220;turn into firewood&#8221; option. And am I really tearing this dresser apart instantly? With my bare hands?<\/p>\n<p><em>Dev: The &#8220;firewood&#8221; button has now been replaced with a &#8220;disassemble&#8221; dialog. It will tell you what the yield will be, and how long it will take. If you have a tool, it will take half the time.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Player: What about this bed? This couch? This end-table? Why can&#8217;t I burn them?<\/p>\n<p><em>Dev: I&#8217;ve added an interface to every possible burnable furniture item in the game.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Player: Why does burning a bed remove the whole thing? Why would I burn the mattress?!?! I just want to burn the frame, but I don&#8217;t want to give up my ability to sleep in this house.<\/p>\n<p><em>Dev: Fine. I added alternate mattress model to the game. When you burn a bed, the game will swap out the bed model for the bare mattress.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Player: (Slightly disappointed.) Kind of odd how all beds magically drop the same ratty single-sized mattress, regardless of the size and quality of the original bed. But I guess this will do. It still seems sort of dumb that I can&#8217;t burn floorboards.<\/p>\n<p><em>Dev: You want to burn the FLOOR?!?<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Player: It&#8217;s clear this floor is sitting on top of stone. My character is just minutes from freezing to death. Of course they would pull up a few floorboards to survive.<\/p>\n<p><em>Dev: Okay, fine. I&#8217;ve added a DIALOG BOX to the FLOOR that will allow you to burn it. I&#8217;ve had to turn furniture from static models into physics meshes so they won&#8217;t float in the air when the floor vanishes out from under them. I re-built all the structures so that the floor is now a different model from everything else. I re-worked the lighting model because the new movable floorboards were causing all sorts of shadow glitches. I&#8217;ve divided the floor of every building into sections because some parts of the floor (like the part under immovable counters, stoves, and fireplaces) can&#8217;t be removed. I&#8217;ve added new collision meshes for the sub-floor. Re-worked all the footstep sound logic to account for the fact that walking surfaces can now vanish or change properties.<\/em> <\/p>\n<p>Player: These wood cabinets in the kitchen&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><em>Dev: I&#8217;ve discontinued work on The Long Dark. Please buy my next game, &#8220;House and Furniture Deconstructing Simulator 2016&#8221;.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Merry Christmas, everyone! I hope you&#8217;re enjoying the holiday. The Spoiler Warning cast got together on Christmas Eve-Eve, because we wanted to help you celebrate. Traditionally, Christmas is a time we associate with: Being with family and friends Good food. Bright cheerful decorations. Gathering around a fire. Exchanging gifts. So we figure the best way [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[188],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30046","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spoilerwarning"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30046","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30046"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30046\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30046"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30046"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}