#Playtesting be like that

[da-riya]

oooho space station 14 just got a PvE server that lets you play as the crew on a ship in space fights

However my first run I got left behind on the station because I didn't know where the ship was

#og post #space station 14 #Playtesting be like that #Someone was playing as Celestia Ludenberg and she killed a NPC but the Captain killed her and said she shouldn't be revived #I felt kinda bad I like danganronpa too but I guess picking unoriginal names is also against the rules #I know I got told off for being Nitori Kawashiro despite there being a Nitori haircut and I put on a green cap in a blue jumpskirt #Shiro Nitori is totally different and not at all Just Nitori Kawashiro

[junipvelt]

I'm uh working on a visual novel btw

#if anyone wants to playtest it in like a month lmk #centricide #jreg #centricide fanart #not tagging all of them #art tag #q: how did you find the time for this? #a: i've converted my daily 7 hours of youtube watching into mental illness power hour #q: dating sim? #a: no yes #i'm still working on the common route atm but the dating sim parts will probably be shorter than the main plot #that's right there's a plot stay tuned

[sysig]

Ellen McLain’s commentary from my trivia playthrough

#She's so cute <3 #WPP #Portal #Ellen McLain #If you haven't played through the audio commentary I would Absolutely recommend it it is So fun #I clicked out of curiosity - kind of just expecting like a movie's audio commentary y'know? Like a video that highlighted specific scenes #No it's just the whole game again but with trivia pop-ups! I love that!! #It reminded me so much of like trivia track or the pop up fun facts from special editions of movies I would watch as a kid #But you can play through them!! You have to click on them and they spin! I love that!!! #I always love hearing the design and development process - fascinating how the playtesters reacted to this new game! #We take it for granted now but yeah I imagine it would've been very confusing at the time #And I was like ''Well it was such a small team and Ms. McLain was such a large part of it - surely she'll have a few bubbles?'' #She does lol - as soon as I got to her first one (it was a slow burn! They buried the lead with her lol I'm already invested!) I had to go #I saved-quit the game out of sheer excitement and giddiness lol I had to sleep on it before I was ready to come back #It is so cool to hear her natural voice ah <3 And the kinds of direction she was given! Other bubbles also talk about her vocal direction :) #Very cool! I wonder what TTS they used for reference :0 #But to hear her real laugh without the audio processing over and and she still sounds like GLaDOS! I mean of course she does but just jfdksl #That's /her/ laugh! They share a laugh! It's a very similar laugh!! #Not to mention her talking about wanting to play and just fdskalfd they clearly did such a good job with her performance and ahhh #It's too cute it's all too cute sharing a room with GLaDOS while her voice actor talks about making a cake to share with her friends stopppp #I am so enamoured <3 #I also took a bunch of screenshots of GLaDOS still shit-talking while she was being destroyed lol #Actually beat the ending in one try this time :P I ran out of time the last time pfft #But now I've beaten it twice in as many days :D Although I did start it the first time several days ago - but I beat it again quickly! #Has me all the more itching to replay 2 ♪ #WPVG

[florwal]

it’s so hard to get out of the “i need to be recording this gameplay or putting this save/build out to the masses.” mindset, especially when people are being rude in your inbox demanding shit and acting like you owe them something.

anyway my save files have issues and i don’t plan on fixing them for a while because like i’ve said… the amount of bugs and problems the game itself has makes it a super frustrating and stressful thing and i’d rather not spend months of my life nonstop working on something that the game will eventually break again.

#i went A YEAR AND A HALF #not playing the game at all unless it was for youtube or playtesting a lot #i’ve been enjoying just playing the game for myself #also this is only directed towards annoying people in my inbox #obviously i love and appreciate the community i have #and i’m still gonna release builds and stuff #cuz i like doing it #don’t wanna seem ungrateful! #i’m very lucky to have people out there that enjoy things i create #some people are just assholes <3

[txttletale]

one of the best thigns about eidolon playtest is that in the grand tradition of actual play podcasts, it manages to turn several dumb jokes into genuinely touching emotional moments or pivotal plot arcs, including:

a bored immortal named 'ron eui'

a side character having a power that requires her to stay within ten feet of an enormous fortune telling machine at all times

minions: the rise of gru

the party digitizing a dead flamingo

president dracula

#tattletxt #eidolon playtest #trhis is also part of my braoder theroy “eidolon poprock is like if homestuck was actually good”

[beesinspades]

i know astarion's attitude towards sex is all due to his trauma but. listen. there are some aspects of his romance and experiences that can be so relatable as a sex-neutral or sex-averse ace person. in fact him being ace or acespec on top of the trauma makes him even more compelling and tragic to me. it would've been amazing and interesting if he'd been canonically ace and these aspects plus how his asexuality affected his traumatic sexual experiences had been explored as well

#bg3 #bg3 spoilers #astarion #baldur's gate 3 #asexual #bee talks #like i love any ace rep! but so far except in some books i've only ever seen the same kind of ace rep. and it's always really tame #regardless of how he feels about sex (favorable or neutral or averse) a character like astarion being ace would've been groundbreaking afai #btw i've seen it under other posts on the topic so: if you come at me like 'uhm actually' i'm blocking you #this post isn't for you #anyway during my playtest at larian's in april i wrote an essay suggesting the possibility of ace dialogue options for the player character #and ace companions (for future games) #i hope larian listens and gives us ace options + an ace companion in the future #I'm sure they could do something amazing #so fingers crossed

[temporalhiccup]

I'm trying to write about this without getting emotional, but it's pretty hard! Hah!

But it's been officially announced so I can finally talk about it! I'm the Lead Designer (damn) on the official Tomb Raider TTRPG (double damn). Shadows of Truth has a public playtest coming up soon, and I'm excited for folks to see what we've been working on!

It's been a wild ride and a fun time, but this is also the biggest challenge I've had to face as a ttrpg designer. Like many indie folks I've drawn inspiration from the media we love (Apocalypse Keys is proudly Hellboy-inspired, among other things!) while still making it our own unique thing.

Tomb Raider has been completely different, in that I have to do my best to translate some awesome video game history into a ttrpg experience. And I gotta be as true to the source material and experience as possible, while still centering what makes ttrpgs great!

Tomb Raider is also a franchise that's been around for almost 30 years and is a HUGE DEAL. It's hard to describe how much of an impact it's made on action-adventure video games, repeatedly! Lara Croft is easily one of the most iconic characters in video games and the genre, and her Adventures include (several) dinosaurs, wild transhuman demonic Atlantean stuff, and apocalypse-inducing artifacts.

But Lara to me, especially since the 2013 game, has been a truly amazing and conflicted heroine. The last three games that grounded her and made her vulnerable, while still creating intense experiences, really hooked me. I really wanted to honor the journey of Tomb Raider and make a really fun and thrilling ttrpg for folks.

But anyone who knows me, knows that anti-colonial design is in all my games. It's just who I am, and it's not something I consciously did at first. It wasn't even until I started designing ttrpgs, in my 30s, that I realized how important my personal decolonization process was, and a lot of that has helped me discover new aspects of my identity (including being a transmasculine person).

So, I don't need to tell you that a franchise called Tomb Raider has some colonial implications, right?

As development goes on, folks have asked me "How is the game anti-colonial?" or "How are you addressing the colonialism?" I want to start off by saying as a team we conceptualized what that could mean while still being true to the franchise. But since then, as Lead Designer, I've had to make hundreds of decisions that are reflected in countless design and structural choices. I can point to dozens of mechanics and things and describe how this is my personal attempt to present anti-colonial gaming, and I'm grateful for the help our team of consultants and playtesters in guiding me.

It's kind of wild, but in chasing after and reaching for anti-colonial design, I've had to figure out how to implement great tech from other designers, but also come up with lots of new stuff too. There's some really cool Adventure design stuff that is really hard to pull off in a PbtA framework where you play to find out. (Arguably, PbtA itself has a lot of anti-colonial play about it compared to mainstream ttrpgs and it's one of the reasons we used PbtA as a design framework but that's a whole other conversation)

I'm really so grateful for the support from the team! It's hard to feel like I'm good enough and can measure up to Evil Hat's faith in me, but they've been incredibly supportive and open, and it's been stellar. Crystal Dynamics has also been amazing to work with, especially because it was important to me that while we honor how awesome Tomb Raider is, we don't downplay the difficult truths of colonialism and its ongoing effects. And they were so incredibly on board for that! It's so rare for a marginalized person like me to be granted an opportunity like this, and I am determined to give it my all.

We've built a team that's been amazing to collaborate with, and @ostrichmonkey-games has been doing incredible work alongside me. I'm really proud of what we're doing as a team! I can't wait for folks to see it come together.

You can also check out the Polygon (!!!) article about the game, which gives you a sense of some of the cool mechanics at play!

I know it's easy to write off an IP ttrpg based on a really big franchise (and for good reasons, unfortunately). But I really do think we're doing something special here! I hope y'all will give the game a chance and check it out when the public playtest starts up!

#omg ive been working on this forever #this game in its open playtest form is ALREADY BIGGER THAN APOCALYPSE KEYS GOOD GOD #the initial playtests have also been crazy good fun but also like super cathartic for my colonial feelings #am i still allowed to label this as indie ttrpgs #do i want to walk into that conversation #can you believe the tomb raider ttrpg is happening?!

[haridraws]

Drawings from Into the Tower

Playable characters 2/4: THE SAILOR

With guest illustration by @anineillustration

Strength • story & mystery Challenging ———⟡——Survivable Quick play ————⟡— More story To play THE SAILOR, turn to page 12.

#Into the Tower #CYOA #solo rpg #solo ttrpg #you guys I cannot tell you how much Anine (guest illustrator) CRUSHED IT on these drawings I am obsessed with them #If you ever need a drawing of a house so full of emotion looking at it makes you want to weep I could not recommend Anine highly enough #so so excited to work together and also their drawings are perfect for 'storyline most likely to make playtesters cry' #in my HEART this character is an any-pronouns butch lesbian but that's headcanon only. the point is gender and pronouns are up to you

[raetreaderarts]

Hi I’m absolutely obsessed with this new goobus I made today! Fi’s name is Widget and wi is a little pop up person. Very webcore-inspired, very silly, I almost got my account banned for a day because Roblox is fatphobic, yk yk

Love the room that wi chills in too, I was heavily inspired by Bliss, y’know like THE Windows XP wallpaper, the iconic background for so many PCs. Stg PC wallpapers are so generic nowadays, it’s like random strings of light and abstract shapes, like don’t get me wrong I love abstraction but this is like, boring abstraction if that makes sense? Corporate abstraction. What was I talking about again? Oh right yeah I love Widget <3

#rem estates #rem estates updates #rem estates widget #weirdcore #webcore #roblox #roblox dev #god I love fi so fucking much you don’t understand #also don’t ask why the music ui is in such a weird place #like I put it somewhere specific in the screen and it looked fine when I playtested it #it’s midnight man I gotta sleep I’ll fix it at some point #my art

[mathysphere]

EDIT: closing this up now! Thank you so much to everybody who volunteered to try out the puzzles. I really appreciate it. 🙏 Feel free to take all the time you need with them!

I'll be doing a similar open-call kinda thing for a second batch of puzzles sometime within the next week, and then will release the full set to everybody...... sometime after that*. 😉 So if you missed this, worry not!

heyo! anybody online right now who'd like to playtest seven vaguely fiber-arts-themed connections games? like connections, the new york times word puzzle game--

if you would like to playtest some, send me a DM and I'll give you the link to the puzzles + a survey to rate them in and give your thoughts-- mostly I'm looking to see which puzzles are the easiest or hardest, and if any puzzles are too nonintuitive and need reworked.

*It'll be this year's pi day puzzle event B)

#chit chat #turning off reblogs so this doesn't go far #if you aren't too familiar with connections #OR not too familiar with cross-stitch #but still feel like playtesting some-- you absolutely may! #would be nice to have an outsider perspective on the difficulty #pi day puzzles

[tasmagor]

Backgrounds I did a few years ago for Meredith Gran's game Perfect Tides! The demo for the sequel, Perfect Tides 2: Station to Station comes out on steam next week...check it out!!

#fun to look at these again after so long...i think most of these are from 2018/19 #gonna post some new bgs from PT2 as the week goes on #hope everyone likes the demo :) i played the playtest of it a few months ago and it was awesome.. #pixel art #perfect tides #meredith gran #pixel #games #point and click #adventure game #yay

[illustrationsbychristina]

gleEIDOLON!

My friends and I recently did a short Eidolon actual play campaign for our Glee podcast (Loser Like Me). @sparkyyoungupstart ran it! I drew all of our characters! Please go give it a listen if you like sharks, shenanigans, and/or shitty teenagers.

Left to right, we’ve got:

Lexi Morganstern and Stellar Stellar (played by Jenna @discord-inc )

Anna King and 9 to 5 (played by me!)

Dolly Luna and Tear You Apart (played AND designed! by @girlnextvore )

Min Holden and The Littlest Things (played by Raena)

#glee #eidolon playtest #eidolon #actual play #illustration #oc #original character #others’ ocs #loser like me podcast #illustrationsbychristina #my art

[ex0rin]

Wyatt Russell in distress for @lowlifesymptoms | Black Mirror: Playtest

#wyatt russell #cara gifs #black mirror #black mirror playtest #black mirror cooper #i made this for me #(and sym obviously) #i just like when he's in distress #i would like to put him in more situations tbh #the boy is very pretty with his blond hair and tears on his cheeks #fuck it: #john walker tag

[hellishfig]

playing dnd in a post-apocalyptic nyc setting is so fun

being able to roll sleight of hand to steal a joint from the pocket of one of my party members? incredible

a different party member using the tiny hut spell and having a chocolate fountain in there and my pc wanting to have some chocolate and suddenly realizing they were turned into a cat person by radiation three years ago and are likely allergic to chocolate and moping in the corner for ages? so fucking funny

doing a flashback scene where my pc and their partner go their separate ways shortly after the world ended and then later in the session finding their partner who has been enchanted to not remember my pc and quoting the flashback scene to make my pc roll with advantage against their partner to break the spell and the partner rolling a nat 1 and the dm saying “there’s no spell in the world powerful enough to make them forget you”? UN-FUCKING-PARALLELED

dnd is a good game

#the second point is funny bc i don’t rly like chocolate irl #but cat does! she likes several things i don’t! #exploring oneself through fiction my beloved #also we fully finished this arc lmao #this has been in my drafts for a WHILE #but it was fun #i think my character’s arc ended satisfyingly #so i made a new character! she’s a witch! using the worlds beyond number playtest! #i’m so hype #but we need to play again at some point. it’s been too long #dungeons and dragons #dnd #personal #pointless posting #ok to rb

[pixelated-mechanisms-chaos]

This is more so a personal update with my relationship of taking breaks than a game update, but I'll talk about downtime, too

I've been trying to work on the game whenever i can, no matter how i feel, and looking back at it, that was utterly idiotic. There's this little nagging thing in my head that just goes "work work work! The game doesn't make itself! You're already taking too long! It could've been done already!" Which i think is a mix of anxiety and unnecessary self pressure. I actually HAVE been getting better with taking breaks, tho! Like yesterday, i spent the whole day just watching the owl house and DEAR GOD was that refreshing?? Monday i spent HOURS trying to figure out how to make a fucking flashlight for a potential horror segment but i ultimately got nowhere which was SO draining. I now also have an internship to balance with the game and therapy, which has been a guilt battle on its own, but i think I've been handling that alright? Especially considering that i told myself this is just a fun project, which is something i forget on the daily. (Thanks, arlo, for being so patient with my mind n makin' me keep goin'. Also, thanks to kofi, honestly, i don't think they know how much the 2 little things meant to me :"] )

For anyone still reading this, i sadly don't have a biiiiig game sneak peak as a treat but i found out the lightning plugin i use (shora) can do this thing and if you wanna see sneak peaks and shit posts of the game that don't get posted on Tumblr, maybe check my Discord?

#the mechanisms #the mechanisms games #the mechs #@pixelated mechanisms chaos #game making #the mechanisms fandom #progress #downtime #shitpost #personal update #theres really no obligation to read these but i appreciate if ya do♡ #ive been coding but dialog has me stuck #honestly- like- i like brian- metal boy- walking heater metal bear- BUT I CANT FUCKING WRITE HIM GOOD- thank god one of my playtesters can- #thank budddddd i do definitely owe you one id say but if you never see this then it doesn't count hehe >:]/silly

[slasheru]

HEY GUYS WE'RE WINDING DOWN THE YEAR AND I HAVE SOMETHING NICE TO SAY

Six months ago I finished the first prototype of a little game called Slasher U: Act 1, and I was wondering if I should share it with the big fuckin' scary world while I finished the rest of it, or just keep tinkering until it was done and launch it into the world when it was perfect (aka the Normal Way to Launch Games).

You can probably guess which option I went with. :V

I am SO, SO GLAD I decided not to, like, toil in obscurity with this thing. So much of game dev is done behind closed doors and then lobbing a whole pot of spaghetti to the wall hoping it sticks. I CANNOT EXPRESS HOW MUCH I APPRECIATE YOU GUYS GIVING FEEDBACK ON MY SPAGHETTI as I lovingly stick it onto the wall.

I'm just so excited you guys are as excited about my dumb blorbos and game design and actual, like, game that exists, as I am. I launched this thing into the world in the last week of April with almost zero fanfare with the most Back to the Future "You know that new sound you've been looking for?!?!? WELL LISTEN TO THIS!!!" energy I have ever mustered. I think I just figured if I made my dream, perfect, everything-I-wanted dating sim (WIP, obvi, lol), then SURELY SOMEONE ELSE OUT THERE would want it too.

So, yeah. Thank you for the best six months of game dev I've ever ever ever enjoyed. :DDDDDDDD I can't wait to stick the landing on Act 2 too. NO PRESSURE RIGHT?? lmao

#slasher u #slasherversary #seriously though i can't thank you guys enough #being a solo dev is a lot less stressful and scary when you have the student disembody here lmao #AND THANK YOU FOR LIKING ACT 1 #i had genuinely no idea if it was good or not b/c i was the only person who had played it #and i couldn't get anyone to playtest it before launch lmfao #AND NOW LOOK #:)))))