eupraxia

eupraxia, 12 dni temu (edited 12 dni temu)

I crunched like hell in my mid 20s on a live service game that I enjoyed playing, was well loved and consistently played by a few fans, and had a few unique ideas in its niche. I gave up a lot of life for that game to see the light of day, under extremely tight timelines and wavering support from a flakey publisher.

It lasted less than a year in release because of a few mistakes in early access and it inhabited a saturated market that seems near impossible to penetrate now. The console ports that caused the worst months of the crunch never even saw a release.

Me and the rest of the devs would love to just play the game again, but the game’s kinda just rotting somewhere in storage of a publisher that long ago tried to pivot toward NFT/metaverse bullshit, to predictable results. Outside of a few early playtest builds a few people have (and definitely aren’t supposed to) we have basically no way of playing it ourselves, much less letting others play it. We couldn’t even get much approved to show in a portfolio once the studio closed and the assets went to the publisher. It makes me really sad and I’m no longer in game dev / tech at large professionally for that reason. This story is not unique, this is pretty much just how the industry works and devs near-universally feel screwed over by it.

eupraxia, 14 dni temu (edited 14 dni temu)

In the age of early access viral hits, optimization is just something no publisher wants to put resources into before they know the game’s a success or not.

True story, a game I worked on at my last job shipped on Xbox One and PS4, the PS4 version was not even built until a month before shipping.

eupraxia, 6 miesięcy temu

probably the only thing that’ll bring me back to professional game dev. especially cool to see after how brutal of a year it’s been for the industry. hope this works out for them!!

eupraxia, 6 miesięcy temu

I haven’t played the witcher specifically, but I do think it’s worth pointing out that this is the usual experience for women playing mainstream male-led titles with romance arcs. women have been playing and enjoying the witcher for a long while, including its sexual elements. if it’s possible for us it could be possible for you too! I know if I’m replaying Mass Effect I’m actually probably more likely to play as male Shepard (because I can’t be gay with Tali 😫)

ultimately one of the coolest things a game can do imo is encourage you to step into the shoes of character unlike yourself in a situation you’ve never encountered and ask you to make decisions as them. If you’re uncomfortable roleplaying romantic enounters as a woman, there might be some value in trying anyway! you may find the experience to be more similar than you’d expect. I recognize it’s probably more complicated if you have more paternal feelings toward her, but telling her story from her viewpoint does mean including elements that conflict with how she’s seen by Geralt - it’s her story now and it’d be a disservice to only include what’s comfortable from Geralt’s POV.

In any case, sexual content may be in the game and referenced here and there, but if it doesn’t interest you I expect you’ll be able to not see it. correct me if I’m wrong but my understanding is that you could play Geralt as aromantic and asexual if you wanted, yea? I imagine the same would be true here too.

eupraxia, 6 miesięcy temu

like most engines, UE5 is whatever you hack it into being. I hate developing with Unreal but I do have to admit it’s solid in a lot of ways. and has pretty mature content/LOD streaming, one of the biggest issues I saw with Cyberpunk at launch.

eupraxia, 8 miesięcy temu (edited 8 miesięcy temu)

I played a student project game a long time ago that based itself around this kind of mechanic. It was a horror game set entirely in the dark, and the only way of seeing was by echolocation - you’d click to send out a pulse, and you’d get brief ghostly glimmers of your environment. Importantly, you couldn’t directly see anything moving - you’d have to send out another ping if you wanted to see something in motion.

Given that monsters could hear your pings too, it was a wonderful little game of cat-and-mouse deduction trying to figure out where monsters were with as few pings as possible, remembering their patrol paths in the dark, and so on. Really cool and I’d love to see that mechanic in a full game production.

(edit: apparently that full game exists, it’s called Perception, and I’m absolutely giving it a shot!)

eupraxia, 8 miesięcy temu

omg I just wrote a comment about a student project with this mechanic, wishing to see it in a full production and then scrolled down and here you are telling me that game actually exists! Thank you 😁

eupraxia, 8 miesięcy temu

The thing is some games make the line really fuzzy and it’s hard to draw an exact line where it no longer is a game.

Pyre does have a whole RPG wizard basketball thing going on that I enjoyed, but wasn’t the reason I recommend the game. The more engaging part of the game was the visual novel stapled to it, which was affected by wizard basketball in cool and interesting ways, but inside each scene it’s largely non-interactive.

Disco Elysium also has some RPG mechanics going on, and there’s a city block for you to wander around, but the vast majority of the game is dialogue. It could largely be written as a more complicated choose-your-own-adventure book, but it’s so much stronger as a game.

Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood is almost entirely dialogue and telling people’s fortunes, with only brief moments of creating new tarot cards to break up the dialogue. Despite this, the fortune-telling aspect of the game has made it one of the most interesting games I’ve played in a bit.

There’s any number of “walking simulators” that this debate comes up around and I counter that with the fact that Outer Wilds built off the back of that formula to create something unquestionably a game, but built off of gameplay loops largely based around traversal and finding new bits of lore to unlock progression.

These were all successfully marketed to gamers as video games. My hot take is that they’re all games, but with a form of gameplay that some may find too simple for their liking and that’s ok. And the semantic debate over what’s a game and what isn’t is just feels vibes based sometimes.

eupraxia, 10 miesięcy temu

Especially considering a lot of the creative talent behind Valve’s acclaimed single player catalog are no longer at the company. Valve is a different company now and so their games will be different too.

eupraxia, rok temu

I’ve attempted to do public-facing technical support for a game and dear Christ you’re spot on. I love people for wanting to engage with something I’ve spent a substantial part of my life putting together and trying to make it run okay, and am sympathetic to people feeling frustrated when technical issues prevent them from fully enjoying an early access game. Early on when the community was small I had a great time shitposting with the players, but once we hit release the environment turned toxic pretty much overnight as the community suddenly grew.

But like, none of them know how hard we crunched to get even a playable version of the game out, nevermind one that’s playable on the lowest of netbook specs. None of em know how complicated the system is that’s breaking preventing them from logging in, that that’s not actually my area of expertise and that I’m just feeding them information from the matchmaking team who are all freaking the fuck out because this is the first time we’ve tested this shit at scale. None of them know that we were getting squeezed by our publisher, who wanted us to do a progression wipe that we didn’t want ourselves, but like they control if the game gets shipped at all so… not really a choice there. And we can’t admit any of this because accusations of incompetence come out pretty early, tend to stick around, and leave devs very little room to make bad decisions (which happens a lot!)

And like, being trans now on top of that? Hell no, I’m never touching a public server again if I can help it. Slurs and mistrust were already flying before, I can’t throw myself in front of that bus again. I’m gonna miss it because I cared a lot about connecting with people playing the game and for a while found a lot of joy in responding to bugs and fixing individual system issues and integrating into the community. And there were some amazing people who were great to talk to that I really missed when I left. But the inherent abuse that comes with that gets so overwhelming and it drained my desire to even work on games at all for quite a while.

eupraxia, rok temu

Outer Wilds, to my estranged family. I think they could use a new religion and that game’s probably a better place to start.

eupraxia, rok temu (edited rok temu)

Personally, it’s nbd when people slip up - especially people who’ve known me for a very long time pre-transition. Oftentimes they correct themselves, and I usually feel worse that they feel bad about it. It’s pretty easy to tell when it’s intentional or not, and I reserve my ire for people who clearly mean disrespect.

Though, I should say, that’s now - early on in transition, it was certainly a bit harder to take. It reminded me of very fresh family abandonment and abuse over my identity. That’s not on the people who accidentally called me by the wrong pronoun, but it certainly could put me in a pretty bad place and I’m sure I wasn’t the friendliest in those moments. The more that trans folks are supported by their friends and family, the more secure they feel and the less likely they are to react strongly to being accidentally misgendered, imo.

eupraxia, rok temu

Well said. We’d be so much better off if people generally had a better understanding of ©PTSD. Everyone has a responsibility for how they act, but maladaptation is a hell of a thing and takes lots of time to address, especially when people know these triggers and weaponize them because they want to see you hurt.