#make it have a more linear progression and scale

[physalian]

Villain Power Scaling (It's over 9000!)

@sarah-sandwich ask and you shall receive

Quick! We wrote an insanely, unexpectedly successful one-off fantasy series! How do we top the villain?

A bigger, badder giant space laser

The villain’s secret jealous sister

The same power, but purple now

The True Mastermind you’ve never heard of

JK, they’re not actually dead!

When you choose to continue on a series and have already committed to possibly destroying the legacy of the characters who fought and died to save the world once by undoing it for money, you had better have a damn good story to tell.

So if you decide your new threat is any of the above, you have quite the uphill battle ahead of you, my friend.

What is Power Scaling?

Power scaling is the nature of the ability of the heroes and the villains to grow more competent over the course of the story via new skills, new powers, or more training. Protagonist’s first fight (that they win, at least) will generally be against a baby, tier-one mook and not up against the main antagonist (*cough* Force Awakens *cough*)

As the story progresses, the mook that was so scary and so hard to beat oh so very long ago will become unnamed cannon fodder in the climax of the story. Generally speaking, this is a linear event and the hero and the villain are constantly one-upping each other until they come head to head in the unavoidable final fight.

Sometimes, things run askew. Maybe the hero’s super special power that saved them last time was a fluke, possible only in those specific circumstances, or one-time use.

Maybe they have amnesia, or the being that gave them that power revoked it, or using it cost them too much. Maybe they got seriously injured in the last fight using it and can no longer go near it if they want to not get hospitalized. Maybe the super power was another character that won the final fight for them last time, but died in the process.

It doesn’t have to be linear, but if you’re going to regress your character without creating a “why didn’t you do what you did last time” plot hole, you will need an ironclad excuse.

So, feast your eyes while I summon the Supernatural fandom back from the dead.

What not to do, as told by Supernatural

This show was originally written to last five seasons and five seasons only. No matter how die hard a fan you are or were, you cannot escape this fact, and neither could the writers.

Season one villain: A demon and her demonic minions

Season two villain: Psychic demon children and Papa Demon Yellow-Eyes

Season three villain: OG Demon Lilith, and Dean’s ticking demon-deal clock

Season four villain: OG Demon Lilith and preventing the rise of Satan

Season five villain: Satan and some douchebag Angels

Then you have Ten. More. Seasons. trying to do better than Satan and the douchebag angels to… varying levels of success and stupidity.

The problem: Supernatural tried to be linear with their power scaling, focusing on ramping up the threat level to nonsensical ends while undermining the threat level of all who came before.

The other problem: Sam, Dean, and Cas never stayed dead long enough for any of these threats to matter.

What I mean is this: In making the threat of the season so impossibly strong, by threatening the world over and over again no matter how many times they save it, by never committing to killing your three most important characters, by never letting the world go a little unsaved in the end, you’re left with a story that *says* it’s bigger, badder, bolder, but is really just a rinse and repeat that goes blander and blander each time.

Coming off Satan and the Douchebag Angels to… Cas and Crowley conspiring over the souls of Purgatory and the unseen war in Heaven because they didn’t have the budget for that, without any of the thematic weight of *why* it was angels and demons? Talk about a loss of momentum.

I rewatch a grand total of one episode of season six, “The French Mistake”. I have lost all context for the plot surrounding this episode and it’s virtually independent of the rest of the season because Sam and Dean get transported into the Real World as Jensen and Jared and poke fun at each other for 52 minutes. This episode is timeless.

The show wasn’t a complete disappointment for the remaining ten seasons or it wouldn’t have lasted that long. It had good beats, but they shot their load in Season Five. After five whole years of buildup to this main event it never recovered.

Alternatives to Linear Power Scaling

Anyone who has or even hasn’t seen Dragon Ball should know that series is famous for infinite power scaling. There’s always someone stronger, always some new secret powerup to unlock with the power of Screaming, always some new Super Sayan color that we promise is more powerful this time, for realsies.

That show is so dedicated to the bit that it’s gone full circle to being loved, not despite it, but because it’s so ridiculous.

You did not write Dragon Ball. Do not do this.

Instead of the infamous clashing multicolored power beams, what other ways can you up the ante of this new threat after your heroes have conquered all they thought stood in their way?

Give a damn good reason why this villain, who is no different than the last schmuck, is unbeatable by the macguffin this time.

As stated above, there’s no need to make the villain More Powerful* if your heroes have lost the world-saving abilities that helped them last time.

Exploit the hero’s other weaknesses

More Powerful* is never as exciting as you think it is. Often times, especially in superhero sequels, the villain isn’t necessarily stronger, but the niche power that they do have finds the chink in the hero’s armor that they didn’t have to worry about last time.

Make the hero’s niche skillset completely irrelevant

This time, the threat might not be something they can punch or shoot or smack with a hammer. This time, it’s their reputation at stake, or the villain is un-punchable because they’re simply unreachable, causing havoc the hero is helpless to stop.

Make the issue not the villain at all, but the hero or their team

Maybe the villain is just a schmuck that would be beatable on any other day, but team infighting means that they make utter asses of themselves and the villain doesn’t have to lift a finger to win because they’ve taken themselves out.

This can get very dramatic like in Captain America: Civil War or the Teen Titans epside "Divide and Conquer". Or, to comedic effect in the Spongebob Episode "Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy V" (the one with the International Justice League of Super Acquaintances).

Some would argue that the above options aren’t power scaling at all if it’s not linear, and that’s fair. You’re telling a story though—is your story going to be about the superpowers and how cool they are, or the people who wield them?

3. It’s not actually power scaling, it’s about stakes

Supernatural began to feel so stale because even though we were told the villain this time was bigger, badder, bolder, the stakes were always the same. OSP has talked about this, how threatening to end the world has a foregone conclusion of “never actually gonna happen” because what author is crazy enough to let the world get blown up and all their characters murdered?

Raising the stakes, too, is not linear. Last time it was the world, this time, it’s the life of the love interest, it’s someone’s sanity, it’s a ticking clock on a secret that’s about to go public.

That’s why the first five seasons of Supernatural were so engaging. Were Demons the problem every time? Yes. The Demons were causing the problem, but they were causing five different problems. It was finding and saving their missing dad, then it was uncovering the sinister plan of the psychic demon children, then it was trying to escape Dean’s deal, then it was trying to stop the rise of Satan, then it was trying to stop the apocalypse. It was not five seasons of demons trying to destroy the world.

The more personal the stakes, the more likely your audience will believe the hero could actually lose this time. That’s what will keep them engaged. Dean died at the end of season 3! They lost! There was no escaping that deal. Sure he came back in the pilot of season 4, but the entire 4th and 5th seasons are haunted by Dean’s PTSD and new pessimism about the world given what he’s seen and done in Hell.

4. Threatening the world without destroying a legacy

Covered in this post about timeskips and this post about sequels but it’s too important to not keep repeating.

So. The Star Wars sequels. Rain down your wrath like snow on a hot desert—these movies were a giant mess. The audience sat through six entire movies following the rise, fall, and redemption of one man who died to save his son and the galaxy.

Then, what, twenty years later, absolutely none of it mattered? New space Nazis are out for blood with the same equipment, same weapons, same soldiers, same reach, same motives. Within the theatrical release (because I am not paying money to buy content to do homework to understand a movie made for a layman audience) these movies undermined the legacy of the six that came before it.

It didn’t have to be a new galaxy-ending regime and the same rebels still rebelling for the same reasons—how the heck did they let another empire rise so fast?—it could have started small, inconsequential, and then the actions of the new cast then undermined everything Anakin worked for.

I feel like Mr. Incredible wondering why the world can’t just stay saved for ten minutes.

All of this is salvageable. End the world again if you want. There will always be bad actors out to do bad things, you can’t expect a utopia to last forever. But that bleak reality is for the real world, not fantasy. In fantasy, the sacrifice of beloved characters must matter. Otherwise, what’s the point of their story?

How do you do this?

Make the utopia the old characters died for last up until the new inciting incident, and make sure it’s the new characters’ fault, not just due to the passage of time

Make the villain threaten something other than their legacy

Make that legacy the banner behind which the new cast rallies, determined to make sure it wasn’t in vain

5. Or, burn the world down this time

Some of the best middle beats of a story feature a “did we just lose” moment a la Infinity War. The villain has won, fan favorites are dead, their home is in ashes, and now they’re not only starting from the bottom, they’re doing it with righteous vengeance.

Then the loss of the original character’s legacy *is* the tragedy, instead of a side effect. Then, in a way, they’re still part of the story, a ghost on the sidelines cheering on their successors, and we, the audience, are right beside them.

—

I have a shiny, fresh-off-the-press Insta @chloe_barnes_books now for this blog and my upcoming novel. Go check it out!

#writing advice #writing resources #writing tips #writing tools #writing a book #writing #writeblr #fantasy #sci fi #heroes and villains #power scaling

[ravenrambles6229]

babygirl help im so hyperfixated

#i mean what's one more large scale fic #ninjago #ninjago masters of spinjitzu #no thoughts just cole #jay stays a serpentine #snake jay #ghost cole #cole absolutely stays a ghost because that entire development was galaxy-brained #like hell yeah let him be the master of earth and a ghost at the same time #kai gets to be the token human #idk id probably tone down the romance between jay and nya a lot #also probably not give them a new weapon every season #i would drastically change the plot #make it have a more linear progression and scale #less giving and taking their powers #cole stays a ghost and this is both a blessing and a curse #basically mirio but with a bit harder time and a weakness to water #probably remove the time travel confusion with Lloyd's age #ugh that entire part would need to be rewritten #everyone would get nice arcs that last through every major conflict with clear beginnings and endings #idk if cole would survive my guy supposedly dies young #but also idk if i have the heart to kill him #fuck destiny #if morro could break destiny so can cole #speaking of lloyd is super traumatized by morro's stunt #morro redemption arc would be fun #fucking hell i am SO normal about this #double checking that im not posting this on main

[estherax]

Generating plasm and stacking matchboxes: how to build a better future through collective consciousness.

Alternatively - Steban and Ulixes were building Tatlin's Tower so I have to talk about the symbolism or I will explode!!

While completing the communist vision quest you get an opportunity to build a model of "The Tower of History", depicted on the last page of "A Brief Look at Infra-Materialism": a leaning tower wrapped in a dramatic helix. The scale model you make is a mirror image of Tatlin's Tower - a design for a grand monumental building to the Third International: the government organization advocating for world communism.

The main idea of the monument was to produce a new type of structure, uniting a purely creative form with a utilitarian form. Meaning it would function as an office building while also serving as a symbol of cultural significance. And let me tell you, this bad boy can fit so much symbolism in it.

Tatlin was commissioned to develop a design in 1919, after the 1917 February Revolution - a parallel to Disco Elysium's Insulinde we're witnessing post-Antecentennial Revolution.

Tatlin's work was inspired by high revolutionary goals, which are evident in the visual direction of the tower as well, expressing the ideological strive for achieving something that has never been done before, overcoming the odds. The structure "oscillates like a steel snake, constrained and organized by the one general movement of all the parts, to raise itself above the earth. The form wants to overcome the material and the force of gravity..."

The tower has meaning packed even in the materials. For example, the glass structures (marked A, B, C on the architectural rendering) were meant to serve legislative, executive and informative initiatives while rotating around their axes at different speeds. The material signified the purity of initiatives, their liberation from material constraints and their ideal qualities.

But here's the best part. The spirals.

"The spiral is the movement of liberated humanity. The spiral is the ideal expression of liberation: with its base set in the earth, it flees from the ground and becomes a symbol of the suspension of all (...) earthy interests." They are "the most elastic and rapid lines which the world knows" that represent movement and aspiration, continuing the themes of progress and freedom, but they also refer to something else.

In the process of building the matchbox model Rhetoric points out: "It's almost exactly as Nilsen's sketch imagined, a physical manifestation of the dialectical spiral of history."

The shape of the tower is a representation of dialectical development of history, first visualized as a spiral by G. W. F. Hegel. He pictured transformational change as "both linear and circular in order to be short-term responsive, i.e. possibly negating itself, and long-term strategic, i.e. a process of development."

Hegel's dialectics would later be reinterpreted through the prism of materialism by Marx and Engels to create dialectical materialism - the basis for historical materialism.

"Still, this idea, as formulated by Marx and Engels on the basis of Hegels’ philosophy, is far more comprehensive and far richer in content than the current idea of evolution is. A development that repeats, as it were, stages that have already been passed, but repeats them in a different way, on a higher basis, (...) a development, so to speak, that proceeds in spirals, not in a straight line; a development by leaps, catastrophes, and revolutions; (...) the interdependence and the closest and indissoluble connection between all aspects of any phenomenon (history constantly revealing ever new aspects), a connection that provides a uniform, and universal process of motion, one that follows definite laws - these are some of the features of dialectics as a doctrine of development that is richer than the conventional one."

The tower embodies progress in materialist understanding of history while also indicating the connection to ideological plasm, a manifestation of "the proletariat's embrace of historical materialism", necessary to create a better future.

According to Nilsen, the proletariat of a revolutionary state can generate enough plasm to create extra-physical architecture that "disregards the laws of 'bourgeois physics' and instead relies on the revolutionary faith of the people for structural integrity."

This function of plasm implies that The Tower of History can be created only under revolutionary circumstances - without a sufficient amount of plasm even the matchbox model didn't stay up. The exact same sentiment is expressed about Tatlin's Tower: "We maintain that only the full power of the multimillion strong proletarian consciousness could bring into the world the idea of this monument and its forms. The monument must be realized by the muscles of this power, because we have an ideal, living and classical expression the pure and creative form of the international union of the workers of the whole world."

Nilsen called it "the highest expression of Communist principles, a society whose literal foundation is the faith of its people."

Tatlin's Tower was a symbol of faith in the revolutionary future, the global triumph of Marxist socialism. A monument "made of iron, glass and revolution."

It was never built in real life, and neither was The Tower of History in the world of Elysium.

But you can try to see if there's enough plasm between the three of you. And the matchbox tower stays up for a long moment, quivering with an improbable energy. You believe it can say up - and it does.

So you have to believe; whether it's for collective action or generating ideological plasm. Then, together, maybe you'll be able to build as much as 0.0002% of communism.

#i tricked myself into reading leftist theory for disco elysium #never thought i would be reading Lenin to write about videogame worldbuilding #tower related quotes are from ''The monument to the Third International'' by Nikolai Punin #infra-materialism #disco elysium #de #de meta #disco elysium analysis #disco elysium spoilers #disco elysium meta

[tobiasdrake]

Part of the problem that modern Pokemon faces is that Game Freak wants to move in an open-world direction, and that makes sense. Pokemon is definitely a franchise that could sustain an open world style of game design.

But Game Freak doesn't know how to make an open world game. This is the main problem that Scarlet/Violet faced.

Scarlet and Violet is a game where you can go anywhere and tackle anything in any order. In theory. The problem is, everything along the three routes has hard-coded levels in it. They don't level to you. Which means if you do go anywhere and forge your own road as the game's encouraging you to do, you will immediately destroy the game's challenge curve.

You CAN do anything in any order, but if you DO, then everything you do will either be:

1 - You were supposed to come here last. Their level 60 Pokemon shitstomps on your Level 15 Pokemon and now the game isn't any fun. 2 - You were supposed to come here first. Your level 60 Pokemon shitstomps on their Level 15 Pokemon and now the game isn't any fun.

The best way to avoid ruining Scarlet/Violet is to use a guide with recommended levels to linearly follow the intended challenge curve that exists, but that they just don't tell you about for the sake of preserving the game's "non-linear open-endedness". That is exactly the wrong way to design an open-world game.

Meanwhile, Teal Mask is shaping up to have a similar problem to Sword/Shield's DLC. That is, it's designed so you can do it at any point in your progression. You can pop over here and the levels are adjusted based on how much you've done.

The problem is, only levels are adjusted. But levels are only one way that Pokemon scales power. Pokemon forms are equally important.

So you come here early and the game is like, "Oh, you're early game? I gotcha. Your first opponent has a level 10 baby-form Poochyena!"

But you come here late and the game is like, "Oh, you're post-game? I gotcha. Your first opponent has a LEVEL 60... baby-form Poochyena."

And then Poochyena dies in one hit from the Skeledirge you slew the Elite Four with, because it's a baby form Pokemon that can't take a punch no matter how high its level is.

With the DLC in Sword/Shield and it sure is looking like Scarlet/Violet, Game Freak understands that level scaling is important to make their open world accessible. But they don't understand that level scaling isn't enough to keep encounters meant to be faced at low levels from being boring one-shots at high levels.

They're trying so hard to make an open world game, but they can't let go of the design philosophy of a carefully-crafted linear power escalation experience. There is still a specific order that everything is meant to be experienced in. They just aren't telling you what it is anymore.

This is more about the base game and previous game Sword/Shield than the DLC since I've just started Teal Mask. I just wanted to get that off my chest.

#pokemon #pokemon sv #pokemon scarlet and violet #drake plays pokemon scarlet

[canmom]

Music Theory notes (for science bitches) part 3: what if. there were more notes. what if they were friends.

Hello again, welcome back to this series where I try and teach myself music from first principles! I've been making lots of progress on zhonghu in the meantime, but a lot of it is mechanical/technical stuff about like... how you hold the instrument, recognising pitches

In the first part I broke down the basic ideas of tonal music and ways you might go about tuning it in the 12-tone system, particularly its 'equal temperament' variant [12TET]. The second part was a brief survey of the scales and tuning systems used in a selection of music systems around the world, from klezmer to gamelan - many of them compatible with 12TET, but not all.

So, as we said in the first article, a scale might be your 'palette' - the set of notes you use to build music. But a palette is not a picture. And hell, in painting, colour implies structure: relationships of value, saturation, hue, texture and so on which create contrast and therefore meaning.

So let's start trying to understand how notes can sit side by side and create meaning - sequentially in time, or simultaneously as chords! But there are still many foundations to lay. Still, I have a go at composing something at the end of this post! Something very basic, but something.

Anatomy of a chord

I discussed this very briefly in the first post, but a chord is when you play two or more notes at the same time. A lot of types of tonal musical will create a progression of chords over the course of a song, either on a single instrument or by harmonising multiple instruments in an ensemble. Since any or all of the individual notes in a chord can change, there's an enormous variety of possible ways to go from one chord to another.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. First of all I wanna take a look at what a chord actually is. Look, pretty picture! Read on to see what it means ;)

So here is a C Minor chord, consisting of C, D# and G, played by a simulated string quartet:

(In this post there's gonna be sound clips. These are generated using Ableton, but nothing I talk about should be specific to any one DAW [Digital Audio Workstation]. Ardour appears to be the most popular open source DAW, though I've not used it. Audacity is an excellent open source audio editor.)

Above, I've plotted the frequency spectrum of this chord (the Fourier transform) calculated by Audacity. The volume is in decibels, which is a logarithmic scale of energy in a wave. So this is essentially a linear-log plot.

OK, hard to tell what's going on in there right? The left three tall spikes are the fundamental frequencies of C4 (262Hz), D♯4 (310Hz), and G4 (393Hz). Then, we have a series of overtones of each note, layered on top of each other. It's obviously hard to tell which overtone 'belongs to' which note. Some of the voices may in fact share overtones! But we can look at the spectra of the indivudal notes to compare. Here's the C4 on its own. (Oddly, Ableton considered this a C3, not a C4. as far as I can tell the usual convention is that C4 is 261.626Hz, so I think C4 is 'correct'.)

Here, the strongest peaks are all at integer multiples of the fundamental frequency, so they look evenly spaced in linear frequency-space. These are not all C. The first overtone is an octave above (C5), then we have three times the frequency of C4 - which means it's 1.5 times the frequency of C5, i.e. a perfect fifth above it! This makes it a G. So our first two overtones are in fact the octave and the fifth (plus an octave). Then we get another C (C6), then in the next octave we have frequencies pretty close to E6, G6 and A♯6 - respectively, intervals of a major third, a perfect fifth, and minor 7th relative to the root (modulo octaves).

However, there are also some weaker peaks. Notably, in between the first and second octave is a cluster of peaks around 397-404Hz, which is close to G4 - another perfect fifth! However, it's much much weaker than the overtones we discussed previously.

The extra frequencies and phase relationships give the timbre of the note, its particular sound - in this case you could say the sense of 'softness' in the sound compared to, for example, a sine wave, or a perfect triangle wave which would also have harmonics at all integer frequencies.

Perhaps in seeing all these overtones, we can get an intuitive impression of why chords sound 'consonant'. If the frequencies of a given note are already present in the overtones, they will reinforce each other, and (in extremely vague and unscientific terms) the brain gets really tickled by things happening in sync. However, it's not nearly that simple. Even in this case, we can see that frequencies do not have to be present in the overtone spectrum to create a pleasing sense of consonance.

Incidentally, this may help explain why we consider two notes whose frequencies differ by a factor of 2 to be 'equivalent'. The lower note contains all of the frequencies of the higher note as overtones, plus a bunch of extra 'inbetween' frequencies. e.g. if I have a note with fundamental frequency f, and a note with frequency 2f, then f's overtones are 2f, 3f, 4f, 5f, 6f... while 2f's overtones are 2f, 4f, 6f, 8f. There's so much overlap! So if I play a C, you're also hearing a little bit of the next C up from that, the G above that, the C above that and so on.

For comparison, if we have a note with frequency 3f, i.e. going up by a perfect fifth from the second note, the frequencies we get are 3f, 6f, 9f, 12f. Still fully contained in the overtones of the first note, but not quite as many hits.

Of course, the difference between each of these spectra is the amplitudes. The spectrum of the lower octave may contain the frequencies of the higher octave, but much quieter than when we play that note, and falling off in a different way.

(Note that a difference of ten decibels is very large: it's a logarithmic scale, so 10 decibels means 10 times the energy. A straight line in this linear-log plot indicates a power-law relationship between frequency and energy, similar to the inverse-square relationship of a triangle wave, where the first overtone has a quarter of the power, the second has a ninth of the power, and so on.)

So, here is the frequency spectrum of the single C note overlaid onto the spectrum of the C minor chord:

Some of the overtones of C line up with the overtones of the other notes (the D# and G), but a great many do not. Each note is contributing a bunch of new overtones to the pile. Still, because all these frequencies relate back to the base note, they feel 'related' - we are drawn to interpret the sounds together as a group rather than individually.

Our ears and aural system respond to these frequencies at a speed faster than thought. With a little effort, you can pick out individual voices in a layered composition - but we don't usually pick up on individual overtones, rather the texture created by all of them together.

I'm not gonna take the Fourier analysis much further, but I wanted to have a look at what happens when you crack open a chord and poke around inside.

However...

In Western music theory terms, we don't really think about all these different frequency spikes, just the fundamental notes. (The rest provides timbre). We give chords names based on the notes of the voices that comprise them. Chord notation can get... quite complicated; there are also multiple ways to write a given chord, so you have a degree of choice, especially once you factor in octave equivalence! Here's a rapid-fire video breakdown:

Because you have all these different notes interacting with each other, you further get multiple interactions of consonance and dissonance happening simultaneously. This means there's a huge amount of nuance. To repeat my rough working model, we can speak of chords being 'stable' (meaning they contain mostly 'consonant' relations like fifths and thirds) or 'unstable' (featuring 'dissonant' relations like semitones or tritones), with the latter setting up 'tension' and the former resolving it.

However, that's so far from being useful. To get a bit closer to composing music, it would likely help to go a bit deeper, build up more foundations and so on.

In this post and subsequent ones, I'm going to be taking things a little slower, trying to understand a bit more explicitly how chords are deployed.

An apology to Western music notation

In my first post in this series, I was a bit dismissive of 'goofy' Western music notation. What I was missing is that the purpose of Western music notation is not to clearly show the mathematical relationships between notes (something that's useful for learning!)... but to act as a reference to use while performing music. So it's optimising for two things: compactness, and legibility of musical constructs like phrasing. Pedagogy is secondary.

Youtuber Tantacrul, lead developer of the MuseScore software, recently made a video running over a brief history of music notation and various proposed alternative notation schemes - some reasonable, others very goofy. Having seen his arguments, he makes a pretty good case for why the current notation system is actually a reasonable compromise... for representing tonal music on the 12TET system, which is what it's designed for.

So with that in mind, let me try and give a better explanation of the why of Western music notation.

In contrast to 'piano roll' style notation where you represent every possible note in an absolute way, here each line of the stave (staff if you're American) represents a scale degree of a diatonic scale. The key signature locates you in a particular scale, and all the notes that aren't on that scale are omitted for compactness (since space is at an absolute premium when you have to turn pages during a performance!). If you're doing something funky and including a note outside the scale, well that's a special case and you give it a special-case symbol.

It's a similar principle to file compression: if things are as-expected, you omit them. If things are surprising, you have to put something there.

However, unlike the 简谱 jiǎnpǔ system which I've been learning in my erhu lessons, it's not a free-floating system which can attach to any scale. Instead, with a given clef, each line and space of the stave has one of three possible notes it could represent. This works, because - as we'll discuss momentarily - the diatonic scales can all be related to each other by shifting certain scale degrees up or down in semitones. So by indicating which scale degrees need to be shifted, you can lock in to any diatonic scale. Naisuu.

This approach, which lightly links positions to specific notes, keeps things reasonably simple for performers to remember. In theory, the system of key signatures helps keep things organised, without requiring significant thought while performing.

That is why have to arbitrarily pick a certain scale to be the 'default'; in this case, history has chosen C major/A minor. From that point, we can construct the rest of the diatonic scales as key signatures using a cute mathematical construct called the 'circle of fifths'.

How key signatures work (that damn circle)

So, let's say you have a diatonic major scale. In piano roll style notation, this looks like (taking C as our base note)...

And on the big sheet of scales, like this:

Now, let's write another diatonic major scale, a fifth up from the first. This is called transposition. For example, we could transpose from C major to G major.

Thanks to octave equivalency, we can wrap these notes back into the same octave as our original scale. (In other words, we've added 7 semitones to every note in our original scale, and then taken each one modulo 12 semitones.) Here, I duplicate the pattern down an octave.

Now, if we look at what notes we have in both scales, over the range of the original major scale.

Well, they're almost exactly the same... but the fourth note (scale degree) is shifted up by one semitone.

In fact, we've seen this set of notes before - it is after all nothing more than a cyclic permutation of the major scale. We've landed on the 'Lydian mode', one of the seven 'modes' of the diatonic major scale we discussed in previous posts. We've just found out that the Lydian mode has the same notes as a major scale starting a fifth higher. In general, whether we think of it as a 'mode' or as a 'different major scale' is a matter of where we start (the base note). I'm going to have more to say about modes in a little bit.

With this trick in mind, we produce a series of major scales starting a fifth higher each time. It just so happens that, since the fifth is 7 semitones, which is coprime with the 12 semitones of 12TET, this procedure will lead us through every single possible starting note in 12TET (up to octave equivalency).

So, each time we go up a fifth, we add a sharp on the fourth degree of the previous scale. This means that every single major scale in 12TET can be identified by a unique set of sharps. Once you have gone up 12 fifths, you end up with the original set of notes.

This leads us to a cute diagram called the "circle of fifths".

Because going up a fifth is octave-equivalent to going down a fourth, we can also look back one step on the circle to find out which note needs to be made sharper. So, from C major to G major, we have to sharpen F - the previous note on the circle from C. From G major to D major, we have to sharpen C. From D major to A major, we have to sharpen G. And so on.

By convention, when we write a key signature to define the particular scale we're using, we write the sharps out in circle-of-fifths order like this. The point of this is to make it easy to tell at a glance what scale you're in... assuming you know the scales already, anyway. This is another place where the aim of the notation scheme is for a compact representation for performers rather than something that makes the logical structure evident to beginners.

Also by convention, key signatures don't include the other octaves of each note. So if F is sharp in your key signature, then every F is sharp, not just the one we've written on the stave.

This makes it less noisy, but it does mean you don't have a convenient visual reminder that the other Fs are also sharp. We could imagine an alternative approach where we include the sharps for every visible note, e.g. if we duplicate every sharp down an octave for C♯ major...

...but maybe it's evident why this would probably be more confusing than helpful!

So, our procedure returns the major scales in order of increasing sharps. Eventually you have added seven sharps, meaning every scale degree of the original starting scale (in this case, C Major) is sharpened.

What would it mean to keep going past this point? Let's hop in after F♯ Major, at the bottom of the Circle of Fifths; next you would go to C♯ Major by sharpening B. So far so good. At this point we have sharps everywhere, so the notes in your scale go... C♯ D♯ E♯ F♯ G♯ A♯ B♯ C♯ ...except that E♯ is the same as F, and B♯ is the same as C, so we could write that as C♯ D♯ F F♯ G♯ A♯ C C♯

But then to get to 'G♯ Major', you would need to sharpen... F♯? That's not on the original C-major scale we started with ! You could say, well, essentially this adds up to two sharps on F, so it's like F♯♯, taking you to G. So now you have...

G♯ A♯ C C♯ D♯ F G G♯

...and the line of the stave that you would normally use for F now represents a G. You could carry on in this way, eventually landing all the way back at the original set of notes in C Major (bold showing the note that just got sharpened in each case):

D♯ F G G♯ A♯ C D D♯ A♯ C D D♯ F G A A♯ F G A A♯ C D E F C D E F G A B C

But that sounds super confusing - how would you even represent the double sharps on the key signature? It would break the convention that each line of the stave can only represent three possible notes. Luckily there's a way out. We can work backwards, going around the circle the other way and flattening notes. This will hit the exact same scales in the opposite order, but we think of their relation to the 'base' scale differently.

So, let's try starting with the major scale and going down a fifth. We could reason about this algebraically to work out that sharpening the fourth while you go up means flattening the seventh when you go down... but I can also just put another animation. I like animations.

So: you flatten the seventh scale degree in order to go down a fifth in major scales. By iterating this process, we can go back around the circle of fifths. For whatever reason, going down this way we use flats instead of sharps in the names of the scale. So instead of A♯ major we call it B♭ major. Same notes in the same order, but we think of it as down a rung from F major.

In terms of modes, this shows that the major scale a fifth down from a given root note has the same set of notes as the "mixolydian mode" on the original root note. ...don't worry, you don't gotta memorise this, there is not a test! Rather, the point of mentioning these modes is to underline that whether you're in a major key, minor key, or one of the various other modes is all relative to the note you start on. We'll see in a moment a way to think about modes other than 'cyclic permutation'.

Let's try the same trick on the minor key.

Looks like this time, to go up we need to sharpen the sixth degree, and to go down we need to flatten the second degree. As algebra demands, this gives us the exact same sequence of sharps and flats as the sequence of major scales we derived above. After all, every major scale has a 'relative minor' which can be achieved by cyclically permuting its notes.

Going up a fifth shares the same notes with the 'Dorian mode' of the original base note, and going down a fifth shares the same notes with the 'Phrygian mode'.

Here's a summary of movement around the circle of fifths. The black background indicates the root note of the new scale.

Another angle on modes

In my first two articles, I discussed the modes of the diatonic scale. Leaping straight for the mathematically simplest definition (hi Kolmogorov), I defined the seven 'church modes' as simply being cyclic permutations of the intervals of the major scale. Which they are... but I'm told that's not really how musicians think of them.

Let's grab the chart of modes again. (Here's the link to the spreadsheet).

We can get to these modes by cyclically permuting the others, but we can also get to them by making a small adjustment of one to a few particular scale degrees. When you listen to a piece of music, you're not really doing cyclic permutations - you're building up a feeling for the pattern of notes based on your lifelong experience of hearing music that's composed in this system. So the modes will feel something like 'major until, owo what's this, the seventh is not where I thought it would be'.

Since the majority of music is composed using major and minor modes, it's useful therefore to look at the 'deltas' relative to these particular modes.

To begin with, what's the difference between major and minor? To go from major to natural minor, you shift the third, sixth and seventh scale degrees down by one semitone.

So those are our two starting points. For the others, I'm going to be consulting the most reliable music theory source (some guy on youtube) to give suggestions of the emotional connotations these can bring. The Greek names are not important, but I am trying to build a toolbox of elements here, so we can try our hand at composition. So!

The "Dorian mode" is like the natural minor, but the sixth is back up a semitone. It's described as a versatile mode which can be mysterious, heroic or playful. I guess that kinda makes sense, it's like in between the major and minor?

The "Phrygian mode" is natural minor but you also lower the 2nd - basically put everything as low as you can go within the diatonic modes. It is described as bestowing an ominous, threatening feeling.

The "Lydian mode" is like the major scale, but you shift the fourth up a semitone, landing on the infamous tritone. It is described as... uh well actually the guy doesn't really give a nice soundbitey description of what this mode sounds like, besides 'the brighest' of the seven, this video's kinda more generally about composition, whatever. But generally it's pretty big and upbeat I think.

The "Mixolydian" mode is the major, but with the seventh down a semitone. So it's like... a teeny little bit minor. It's described as goofy and lighthearted.

We've already covered the Aeolian/Natural Minor, so that leaves only the "Locrian". This one's kinda the opposite of the Lydian: just about everything in the major scale is flattened a bit. Even from the minor it flattens two things, and gives you lots of dissonance. This one is described as stereotypically spooky, but not necessarily. "One of the least useful", oof.

Having run along the catalogue, we may notice something interesting. In each case, we always either only sharpen notes, or only flatten notes relative to the major and minor scales. All those little lines are parallel.

Indeed, it turns out that each scale degree has one of two positions it can occupy. We can sort the diatonic modes according to whether those degrees are in the 'sharp' or 'flat' position.

This is I believe the 'brightness' mentioned above, and I suppose it's sort of like 'majorness'. So perhaps we can think of modes as sliding gradually from the ultra-minor to the infra-major? I need to experiment and find out.

What have we learned...?

Scale degrees are a big deal! The focus of all this has been looking at how different collections of notes relate to each other. We sort our notes into little sets and sequences, and we compare the sets by looking at 'equivalent' positions in some other set.

Which actually leads really naturally into the subject of chord progressions.

So, musical structure. A piece of tonal music as a whole has a "palette" which is the scale - but within that, specific sections of that piece of music will pick a smaller subset of the scale, or something related to the scale, to harmonise.

The way this goes is typically like this: you have some instruments that are playing chords, which gives the overall sort of harmonic 'context', and you have a single-voiced melody or lead line, which stands out from the rest, often with more complex rhythms. This latter part is typically what you would hum or sing if you're asked 'how a song goes'. Within that melody, the notes at any given point are chosen to harmonise with the chords being played at the same time.

The way this is often notated is to write the melody line on the stave, and to write the names of chords above the stave. This may indicate that another hand or another instrument should play those chords - or it may just be an indication for someone analysing the piece which chord is providing the notes for a given section.

So, you typically have a sequence of chords for a piece of music. This is known as a chord progression. There are various analytical tools for cracking open chord progressions, and while I can't hope to carry out a full survey, let me see if I can at least figure out my basic waypoints.

Firstly, there are the chords constructed directly from scales - the 'triad' chords, on top of which can be piled yet more bonus intervals like sevenths and ninths. Starting from a scale, and taking any given scale degree as the root note, you can construct a chord by taking every other subsequent note.

So, the major scale interval pattern goes 2 2 1 2 2 2 1. We can add these up two at a time, starting from each position, to get the chords. For each scale degree we therefore get the following intervals relative to the base note of the chord...

I. 0 4 7 - major

ii. 0 3 7 - minor

iii. 0 3 7 - minor

IV. 0 4 7 - major

V. 0 4 7 - major

vi. 0 3 7 - minor

viiᵒ. 0 3 6 - diminished

Now hold on a minute, where'd those fuckin Roman numerals come from? I mentioned this briefly in the first post, but this is Roman numeral analysis, which is used to talk about chord progressions in a scale-independent way.

Here, a capital Roman numeral represents a major triad; a lowercase Roman numeral represents a minor triad; a superscript 'o' represents a dimished triad (minor but you lower the fifth down to the tritone); a superscript '+' represents an augmented triad (major but you boost the fifth up to the major sixth).

So while regular chord notation starts with the pitch of the base note, the Roman numeral notation starts with a scale degree. This way you can recognise the 'same' chord progression in songs that are in quite different keys.

OK, let's do the same for the minor scale... 2 1 2 2 1 2 2. Again, adding them up two at a time...

i. 0 3 7 - minor

iiᵒ. 0 3 6 - diminished

III. 0 4 7 - major

iv. 0 3 7 - minor

v. 0 3 4 - minor

VI. 0 4 7 - major

VII. 0 4 7 - major

Would you look at that, it's a cyclic permutation of the major scale. Shocker.

So, both scales have three major chords, three minor chords and a diminished chord in them. The significance of each of these positions will have to be left to another day though.

What does it mean to progress?

So, you play a chord, and then you play another chord. One or more of the voices in the chord change. Repeat. That's all a chord progression is.

You can think of a chord progression as three (or more) melodies played as once. Only, there is an ambiguity here.

Let's say, idk, I threw together this series of chords, it ended up sounding like it would be something you'd hear in an old JRPG dungeon, though maybe that's just 'cos it's midi lmao...

I emphasise at this point that I have no idea what I'm doing, I'm just pushing notes around until they sound good to me. Maybe I would know how to make them sound better if I knew more music theory! But also at some point you gotta stop theorising and try writing music.

So this chord progression ended up consisting of...

Csus2 - Bm - D♯m - A♯m - Gm - Am - F♯m - Fm - D - Bm

Or, sorted into alphabetical order, I used...

Am, A♯m, Bm, Csus2, D, D♯m, Fm, F♯m, Gm

Is that too many minor chords? idk! Should all of these technically be counted as part of the 'progression' instead of transitional bits that don't count? I also dk! Maybe I'll find out soon.

I did not even try to stick to a scale on this, and accordingly I'm hitting just about every semitone at some point lmao. Since I end on a B minor chord, we might guess that the key ought to be B minor? In that case, we can consult the circle of fifths and determine that F and C would be sharp. This gives the following chords:

Bm, C♯dim, D, Em, F♯m, G, A

As an additional check, the notes in the scale:

B, C♯, D, E, F, G♯, A

Well, uh. I used. Some of those? Would it sound better if I stuck to the 'scale-derived' chords? Know the rules before you break them and all that. Well, we can try it actually. I can map each chord in the original to the corresponding chord in B minor.

This version definitely sounds 'cleaner', but it's also... less tense I feel like. The more dissonant choices in the first one made it 'spicier'. Still, it's interesting to hear the comparison! Maybe I could reintroduce the suspended chord and some other stuff and get a bit of 'best of both worlds'? But honestly I'm pretty happy with the first version. I suppose the real question would be which one would be easier to fit a lead over...

Anyway, for the sake of argument, suppose you wanted to divide this into three melodies. One way to do it would be to slice it into low, central and high parts. These would respectively go...

Since these chords mostly move around in parallel, they all have roughly the same shape. But equally you could pick out three totally different pathways through this. You could have a part that just jumps to the nearest note it can (until the end where there wasn't an obvious place to go so I decided to dive)...

Those successive relationships between notes also exist in this track. Indeed, when two successive chords share a note, it's a whole thing (read: it gets mentioned sometimes in music theory videos). You could draw all sorts of crazy lines through the notes here if you wanted.

Nevertheless, the effects of movements between chords come in part from these relationships between successive notes. This can give the feeling of chords going 'up' or 'down', depending on which parts go up and which parts go down.

I think at this point this post is long enough that trying to get into the nitty gritty of what possible movements can exist between chords would be a bit of a step too far, and also I'm yawning a lot but I want to get the post out the door, so I let's wrap things up here. Next time: we'll continue our chord research and try and figure out how to use that Roman numeral notation. Like, taking a particular Roman numeral chord progression and see what we can build with it.

Hope this has been interesting! I'm super grateful for the warm reception the last two articles got, and while I'm getting much further from the islands of 'stuff I can speak about with confidence', fingers crossed the process of learning is also interesting...

#music theory #music notes #canmom vs music #music #composition

[comicaurora]

Hey, Red, I wanted to ask your insight on one thing about comic writing yet again

How do you write "serialized" media in comparison to traditional writing? Like, people often say that "your first draft will be bad, so you have to get back to it and revise at some point", but, like, for media released periodically, like webcomics, it's much harder to do, unless you write down the entire story beforehand in a lot of detail, and revise *that* instead, and only start drawing after like third or fourth edition of the script.

But, like, I assume that, beyond basic outline, some cool scenes in the middle, and the ending, there is only so much planning you can viably do. How do you handle it? Do you sometimes have to draw a page without knowing yet what will happen five pages later? How do you balance between leaving yourself the freedom to alter things (and also free time not spent on writing a novel before transforming it into a comic) and having a good written story, with themes and foreshadowing and stuff?

It's certainly different than traditional writing, because progress becomes a rolling, iterative thing rather than full draft passes.

What I have is a many-pronged approach that gets more detailed the farther in it goes:

The toolbox. This is a big pile of characters, subplot concepts and plothooks I add to whenever I think of something new and fun. When I'm building out a new arc from scratch, this is what I draw on.

The roadmap. This is a rough plan for the overall shape of the story - I know where the characters start and where they end, and I have a rough idea of waypoints they'll hit along the way. I have one of these for the story as a whole, with each "waypoint" basically being a rough-draft concept for the premise of a single arc. To give an idea of the level of specificity, the "waypoint" for this first arc was literally just "getting the gang together." It was the one thing I needed to have happen. On a smaller scale, individual sub-arcs have more detailed roadmaps of their own, but they mostly fit the format of "characters arrive in location A -> characters fight bossfight B" with the rest fleshed out in between.

The checklist. This is the specific list of "things I need to happen in this specific substory," aka the waypoints on the smaller-scale roadmaps. It gets fleshed out as the actual story gets closer to it and specific character arcs take turns I might not have been able to anticipate. This is close to a timeline, but it's more flexible, as at this stage it's okay to shuffle around the order of things - in fact I almost never make solid linear timelines of events, because sometimes I split the party and things happen at their own pace. In these cases I just set waypoints for when different sub-timelines will intersect - at what point in the conversation will the large flashy thing interrupt, at what stage in the fight will the cavalry arrive, etc. I just need to be sure to hit all the important parts. I'll know a story is ready to turn into a storyboard once I have every important detail nailed down - what specific sticking points will come up in the character conflict, what hidden threat is going to be in the environment they enter so I can set it up correctly, what conclusion will a character come to and how will they want to proceed, etc.

The solid storyboard. This is what I turn into finalized pages, and I work several chapters ahead to make sure I have the rhythm of the story. Once it's down on paper it generally doesn't change much, though specifics of dialogue can be reworked right up to the export. This is linear progress, and it usually happens in very discrete bursts. I don't storyboard something until I know exactly what is happening in this specific scene, where they're going, where it'll end and what it's setting up for later. Sometimes I get stuck on a single panel because I'm not sure which choice a character will make, and then when I come back to it I set down that panel and like five more pages flow out afterwards. Sometimes I'll just reread all my storyboards up to the current endpoint, take a nap, then wake up knowing exactly what to put on the next panel. Sometimes I'll do a reread and tweak the dialogue at several points because the first draft I wrote doesn't sound good to me anymore. This is where I do the bulk of the work that traditional media would do in the second draft.

In order to avoid rewrites - because in serialized media, rewrites are very bad - I frontload as much of that work as I can. I don't start the storyboard until I know all the relevant details of the scene's setup, so I don't end up retconning anything important. If there's a specific hidden enemy in the environment, I want to foreshadow it accurately, so before I draw the area it's in I want to know exactly what it looks like and where it could be hiding. If they're in a facility designed for a specific thing, I want to know exactly what that thing is so the clues and details line up. If I've reached the start of an argument, I want to know what is going to end it before I draw the first panel.

I don't need to know every detail of exactly everything that's going to happen, because the characters work better when I let them make their own choices on a panel-to-panel basis, but I need to know every detail of what they're reacting to and interacting with. In a way it's a lot like running a TTRPG. So there are many times where I draw a page and don't know what's going to happen five pages later - in fact I'd say that's the vast majority of my experience - but I always have a narrowed-down space of things I know will need to happen in the next sixty pages.

#asks #writing stuff #behind the curtain

[imminent-danger-came]

do you find mk's arc in s3 a tad repetitive? i saw this point brought up in a video essay on his series long arc

Naw man.

Progress isn't linear. MK more often than not makes progress in an area and then promptly regresses afterwards (like in ROTSQ MK learned that he was separate from SWK, and that he had to find "his own way to win", which he then completely abandons in the back half of s2. After Minor Scale it's all about becoming as powerful as Monkey King as quick as he can). I like to joke MK is "2 steps forward 4 steps back" the character. He'll say "We're stronger together" in 2x10, but by the time 4x08 rolls around he's wondering if he'll just end up hurting the people he cares about (and then he'll fail to apply this logic to why Wukong would choose to take similar actions, say during s2 or at the end of s3, being delightfully hypocritical).

Then there's where MK actually is development wise at the end of s2 vs s3. By the end of s2 he's lost all of his abilities and given LBD everything she needs to destroy the world, with the only good thing happening being Monkey King's return. Of course he's worried about facing the Lady Bone Demon like he is in s2—in fact, the threat got much worse. Not only is LBD more powerful, but both him and Monkey King are powerless. Their only hope is in an uncontrollable weapon they have to reforge.

In s1 MK is just trying to master his new role as the Monkey Kid (even then wanting to protect his friends and the city, thank you 1x01). In ROTSQ he believes he'll never be as good as Wukong, carrying this belief into s2. As the stakes keep growing, MK feels more and more pressure to live up to the legacy of Monkey King, and in that desperation becomes the perfect pawn in LBD's plans. He assumes he was the wrong choice, the wrong successor, and that Wukong knows that too. After he realizes Wukong left for him in s2, in s3 he then jumps to Wukong ditching him over being a "mere mortal" again. But, MK wants to help. He wants to save his friends. By the end of s3, we've still yet to acknowledge the core issue MK's had since the AHIB special: his self-confidence. His identity and his esteem. MK's never been happy with himself (except for that one time in ROTSQ):

But, after ROTSQ came Wukong leaving in 2x01, LBD's manipulation in 2x05, Macaque's manipulation in 2x07, his ultimate failure in 2x10, being powerless in 3x01, Wukong's lies throughout s3, Wukong and Mei both leaving at the end of 3x10, and then the "to pain scene" in 3x14.

And then in s4 we hammer the nail in the coffin further with 4x07 and 4x08 living up to LBD's words: doing what you think is right leads to pain.

I think the end of TEW will be another ROTSQ situation, where currently MK is okay leaving the world a little bit better than he found it, but it's a philosophy on a shaky foundation. All it'll take is one push to all come crumbling down (and we have SO many things at this point that could be that push—MK's origins/true identity, SWK and Macaque's true falling out, another world ending calamity [no 'ol half marathons here]). Because, at the end of the day, MK may leave the world better than he found it, but he still needs to be okay making mistakes and being MK. He needs to be okay with hurting the people he cares about, because that's what happens as a part of life. He's still so hung up on keeping everything the same. He wants a world where both him and his friends never have to struggle, which will just never happen.

Like, it's ridiculous to me how high of a note the s4 special ended on for everyone in the gang. It's like being on the final episode of a season and seeing that everything's resolved and great, but knowing there's 20 minutes left before the end. You just know it's all going to come crashing down. It's going to get worse before it gets better.

And you know what! I'll say this: being mentally ill is repetitive. And that's what MK is. He has anxiety. He has depression. I mean this seriously and sincerely. MK's running around in circles in his own mind trying to run away from himself (doing so quite literally in 4x07). But he can't man. None of us can.

#people on youtube just say anything #oh how quickly we forget reflection motif! #Never forget! Never forget reflection motif! #was this even a slightly effective rebuttal against that video essay lol #Like yeah I guess maybe MK's arc could be considered repetitive. But he also just regressed. I thought we all liked that about him #lmk #lego monkie kid #lmk MK #lmk analysis #lmk theme: identity #lmk reflection motif #asks

[waywardsalt]

small little thing abt botw/totk and the future of zelda games considering it seems likely that future zelda games might be in the same style as those two and how i feel like botw/totk don't actually feel like zelda games (kind of messy i just typed this out in a kind of informal or whatever way) (this post is long af btw so uhhhh yeah)

im part of the group that claims that botw/totk aren't 'real' zelda games but... i guess they are technically 'real' zelda games, but... they sure as fuck don't feel like it, and because of that, i'm not at all excited with the idea of future loz games being in the same style, especially with the pitfalls these last two games have fallen into having been things that past zelda games did especially well, it feels like things have been sort of flipped on their heads in terms of what's being valued or whatever

like... the best parts of older zelda games were things like the story and the characters and the puzzles and the dungeons and stuff like that... the best parts of botw/totk right now are just the gameplay. people enjoy these new characters, but they dont have the narrative backing that older games do, they don't have the same impactful arcs or roles allowed by a more linear story

the point i want to get at though is how botw/totk honestly don't feel like direct evolutions or steps up from past zelda games but rather just... entirely different game styles (open world games) with the zelda flavoring and worldbuilding and story styling slapped on top.

i mean... i feel like a half-decent example of some other well-known franchises that have jumped on this (honestly kind of thoughtless) open-world bandwagon are mario (mario odyssey) pokemon (sword/shield and scarlet/violet) fire emblem (kind of. with some free-walking segments in 3 houses and engage) and the soulsborne type games (elden ring), these are all other well known and storied game series' that have somewhat made the move to open world, and i think that switch was a bit smoother, kept the core and integrity of the games that came before much better than botw/totk did

elden ring is the easiest to explain- the gameplay loop and core mechanics are the same and build upon past games' you just have more room to run around and get killed in with some little open-world flourishes like material gathering.

fire emblem is... a bit less flexible in terms of changing up the core gameplay, and the addition of open-world segments are added to add bonuses to the strategy gameplay and allow for more support-building oppourtunities and little minigames, and its more or less evolution from echoes' dungeon-crawling bits and the customizable castle in fates. the core gameplay still effectively works the exact same, just with some little class or mechanic tweaks and additions.

mario odyssey, though each world was pretty massive, still had your typical 3d mario platforming, and the new hat stuff fit in pretty well with olderpowerups and gimmicks, and the boss battles feel and work pretty similarly to the way they used it- odyssey does feel like an evolution from past mario games (ps. playing two-player with one person as cappy snaps the game in half. its the secret easy mode lol)

the new pokemon games are pretty much just the same as past pokemon games, theyre just open world and buggy as fuck rip have extra little open-world flourishes that build on what past games set up. the battling works the same as ever and the progression is the same with a number of powerful trainers you have to battle to continue forward.

with botw/totk... the progression is dramatically different in terms of power-scaling, world presentation, item-gathering, puzzle-solving... pretty much everything in the established zelda format. i get that it was pretty much the aim with botw to have a fresh start and throw out a lot of the old standards but it just makes them feel so dramatically alien to past zelda games; theyre completely different experiences in pretty much every single way, and as such they dont feel like what we've (well, people who have started with and spent a lot of time with other loz games) learned to associate with the zelda titles.

with open world games in general it's a bit harder to have a truly impactful narrative akin to those in past zelda games, anyways. i will admit that botw was a good execution of trying out something entirely new, and the narrative and gameplay and world actually complement each other very well, so despite what i've said in the past I can't really fault it's narrative too much since it's a less traditional sort of narrative and effectively does what it aims to do very well.

totk, on the other hand, proves that this style of game does not mesh with the old style of storytelling at ALL. linear games can have proper narratives with coherent stakes, developing characters, twists and reveals and building emotion and mood- and all of that is thrown out the window with totk when they decided to try and have both a more linear story with actual reveals and development and emotion, while also letting you literally spoil it for yourself out the gate.

you can't really have a well-executed story when players are capable of doing things drastically out of order and of jumping into story beats without the prior buildup and straight-up ruining what could be otherwise emotional reveals, and players being capable of doing this is hard-baked in how the game fundamentally works. I honestly feel bad for people who found the fifth sage by accident before anything else.

you can't effectively have a linear story with character growth and plot developments and impactful moments while also allowing it to be experienced out of order and with massive time gaps in between; with this kind of stuff, you can't really have your cake and eat it too. say what you will about the linearity of past zelda games, but i bet you that midna wouldn't be as beloved as a character as she is if it weren't for the linear order of the story and its events. certain parts of storytelling may demand for a linear manner of telling that story.

botw's story works because none of the memories reveal anything groundbreaking taht you don't already know; they are optional and merely give you more information about these characters from link's past and simply inform you about the girl keeping ganon at bay. if you find a late memory first, that's fine- it technically doesnt reveal anything too important to you, it just fills in some gaps for you and your player character. it makes sense within the story itself for the world to be so open and for you to be able to do what you can; the story is not the focus, nor is it even needed to beat the game. the story was made with the gameplay and what you are allowed to do in mind, and as such doesn't include things such as in-depth character development or important plot-twists.

on the other hand, you can easily spoil totk's biggest plot twist in a handful of different ways completely by accident, just by getting curious about the world around you. this can shatter a lot of the mystery or tension in the plot and this can happen completely by accident to someone playing the game organically and blindly. the story itself doesn't take this into account, it reads more like a linear story that would be more suited to a linear style of play, coming across things in order to ramp up the stakes and let things be revealed at the best possible time. (tbh totk's story doesnt seem to take the player into account in general, if the game forcing you to watch basically the same long cutscene four fucking times says anything, jesus christ)

narrative pitfalls aside, botw/totk put heavy emphasis on gameplay, but not in the same way older zelda games did, and as such trade away the unique items and gimmick-y game-specific mechanics for a small toolset handed to you out the gate. what botw/totk do- giving you everything you need from the start and having very little true varation in the gameplay from then on out- make sense and works just fine for an open world game. there is, however, a lack of actual depth to that gameplay that other open world games do have (off the top of my head, the ability to unlock and upgrade abilities and have general character upgrades in fenyx rising as well as the impressive depths of elden ring's combat and character customization system). the most depth botw/totk has to the actual gameplay is just the fourish different weapon types and the ways you use your fourish abilities (saying fourish bc for real ultrahand and fuse are fundamentally the exact same thing). there is also just raising the little defense numbers on your armor and getting more stamina and health, but that does absolutely nothing to the actual gameplay but make link more durable.

i mean, sure, health in past loz games just makes link more durable, too, but thats how health upgrades in any other game work.

the gameplay switch makes sense, considering the switch from a linear puzzle-adventure concentric game to a more sandbox-esque open-world game, but it does not mesh with the former loz formula at all, so while the shift in style makes sense, it makes me think that you can't have a previous-style loz experience in an open-world sandboxish sort of game. especially with how in totk you can very easily bypass most of the fire temple just using the mechanics handed to you at the start. you can't have the same type of zelda dungeons in a game where you are allowed to do it 'wrong' and the game itself does not allow for the same kinds of puzzles.

i am of the opinion that so long as future zelda games work the same way botw/totk did, we will not get old-school zelda-style dungeons again.

the loss of a variety of items used for specific puzzles and environment switches is the loss of a varied dungeon experience and the loss of the same kind of world and character progression as past zelda games.

you are handed everything you'll ever need at the start of botw/totk. the only thing that will meaningfully change is how much damage you do. there are no alternate strategies opened up by new items that can double as weapons, no new traversal options or routes opened up by things such as grappling hooks or clawshots or whips or specific wands. even the battle system is drastically different, instead of being enemies that take specific amounts of hits to die while you can obtain progressively stronger swords, enemies are just damage sponges and you can get all kind of weapons that just do different numerical amounts of damage.

the bosses themselves- big staples and draws of zelda games- also work extremely differently. instead of having to leverage specific items to expose weak spots or having to fight in a specific manner to do damage, you are just asked to... do damage. even in totk's bosses, where sage abilities are most certainly helpful, the only boss i found to truly require a sage ability was the lighting temple's boss; the others i either hardly used the sage at all (i didn't use yunobo at all in the second phase of the fire temple boss and hardly had a need for tulin with the wind temple boss [esp considering i was using a 3-shot lynel bow to make the poor fucker a cakewalk]) or found that alternative solutions felt better, like resorting to splash fruit on repeat water temple fights instead of wrestling with having to activate and use sidon's ability. the sages are honestly fairly poor replacements for dungeon specific items.

this kind of causes botw/totk to play more like a poor man's dark souls or just like any other open world rpgish game. i don't play botw/totk for the experience of a zelda game, i play it because it's an open world game that i can walk around in for five minute before switching to something else because i liked something in that other game better.

the combat in botw/totk isnt designed in such a way that makes it feel good. mineru's mech is fucking dismal, but since it's just either shooting with a bow or attacking with one of three types of melee weapon with some timing for a dodge, it can get stale fast. it doesn't necessarily even feel good, since there's not enough variety for it to get really engaging. (this is def an uneven comparison, but elden ring's combat feels considerable better with the different dodges you can do and the amount of attack options you have with just one weapon, not to mention the amount of control you have over your general fighting style.) combat in botw/totk at hour 1 is the exact same as combat in botw/totk at hour 100, the only different being the amount of damage you do or how much of a beating you can take.

it just... the styles of botw/totk can't allow them to feel the same as older zelda games. the shift in style was clearly a good move to draw in series newbies and shake things up, but it comes at the caveat of making them feel distant from their predecessors and uncomfortably similar to other games like them. it's hard to avoid comparisons with elden ring when on the surface they are very similar games, one just feels more true to its core identity

this all is said without mentioning the way in which botw/totk lore feels almost dismissive of past series staples and seems intent on not looking back while also taking every fucking attempt to nudge you and say 'hey, remember that zelda game' and honestly all that shit does is make me want to play a different zelda game.

botw/totk seem altogether very desperate to distance themselves from past zelda games while also being unable to really tear itself from what came before and it just culminates in me spotting linebeck island on the map and going 'damn i miss linebeck' and turning the fucking game off to play phantom hourglass instead. say what you will about phantom hourglass, but it certainly handles its story progression and character development infinitely better than the game that lets you accidentally shatter the impact of the story by deciding to check out that cool temple in the distance of the depths

#quick note abt the examples from early on i got the verdict on soulsborne games from my friend who has actually played more than elden ring #and pokemon was kinda a guess the most recently mainline pokemon game i have is sun/moon #totk has made me really think about what i like in video games and why lmao. #it has also made me appreciate botw a lot more. i prefer the emptier hyrule of botw it just feels extra cluttered in totk #i like how in botw its a lot more natural and more fun to honestly run around in with there being no falling debris or scary holes #salty talks #totk salt #being annoying abt totk again hiiiii. id like to talk abt stuff i liked in other loz games but its hard to start without some kind prompt #im not entirely sure how i could really explain how i feel totk's story failed and why without going in circles for a while #its just. the gameplay and the intended story experience clash like fucking crazy plus the story relies too much on the player #to do a lot of emotional heavy lifting #like. if you want to start a convo with me abt this go for it but this is what i have to say for rn #loz #legend of zelda #totk #botw #totk criticism #i do really appreciate botw now im not gonna lie. its still not amazing in my eyes but i appreciate it for what it is #also i cannot believe totk made linebeck island worse fuck you #like. in botw theres a goddamn chest with 50 rupees and thats a good subtle nod to what's being referenced #in totk theres just two bokoblins and nothing else and i dont care if it wouldve been lazy to just have the chest there again #you explicitly namedropped linebeck might as well make good on it. its more fun to continue having little nods like that #i understand when people say that saying botw isnt a 'real zelda game' is bad criticism but tbh its not really a criticism its just an #observation. it comes with its ups and downs and for me it makes me enjoy these games less and makes me feel a bit alienated #if that makes sense. idk. its late and if i continue with that thought im going to lose it for sure #ig just. im upset abt how totk handled its story and im upset at the idea of... this being the future of these games yknow #it feels like a selfish sentiment but idk #long post #bitching abt totk

[queenofzan]

it's just like. progressivism is not on a linear scale, you know? star trek could be progressive in its depiction of a racially integrated workplace and still extremely white supremacist. star trek could be progressive in its depiction of women in star fleet, including in command positions, and also regressive in its worldbuilding about orions. doing well in one specific area that they were thinking about doesn't mean they were fundamentally revolutionary in their conception of what the future could/should look like.

star trek had more than one excellent episode about the regressive pointlessness of racism. it also did such a bad job giving uhura things to do that she had to be talked into staying in the role by literal mlk jr. even at the time she knew she was being sidelined. by producers and directors and roddenberries who explicitly told anti-racist stories! and had ham-fisted lines about female crewmembers being crew first and foremost!

and then there's the extremely common example of something being progressive on one little issue and conservative or even regressive on other things, which is hardly limited to star trek, because values are on a broad spectrum, and i can hardly expect someone who agrees non-consensual surgeries on intersex infants are awful to also be a staunch intersectional feminist who won't have any trouble getting my wife's pronouns right.

and as much as roddenberry had some really wildly progressive takes for his time, he was also like. a white man. and the premise of star trek is really, really colonialist and white supremacist, even when the people making it thought they were being anti-racist, because they were so grounded in colonialism and white supremacy that they couldn't see it.

#gene roddenberry also seems to have thought that finding nichelle nichols hot made him some sort of progressive #when it just meant he was a person who could see nichelle nichols #and wasn't racist enough to pretend she isn't hot #i love star trek but even the later revisions to make the premise and its mission less colonialist it's... #often still pretty colonialist! and arguably more imperialist! #the consistent racism and sidelining of characters of color and STILL-CURRENT BROWNFACE is like. not good! #please remember that they literally still do brownface for klingons.

[felassan]

In this post on the Insider Gaming article and this post on the Reddit screenshot etc leaks (spoiler warning for DA:D at links), I mentioned comments made by possible playtesters/similar folks on Reset Era from October 2022. since I referenced them and many people don't use that site, I thought I'd belatedly collect them here for reference. under a cut in case of DA:D spoilers -

first, the usual set of disclaimers that should be kept in mind with all leaks: might not be real, unable to verify at present, sometimes leakers think they’re right about things but are unintentionally incorrect or got some wires crossed, games change a fair bit between development phases and final release, take with grain of salt etc.

User: "Important to remember that this doesn’t mean the game is anywhere close to release. Still plenty to do and plenty that will be changed between now and release." Possible playtester or person who has otherwise seen or heard about the game (hereafter notating these users as "PP" for brevity): "At the very least I like the gameplay direction they are taking is better than the previous games, and they have a clear direction of where they want this game to go. Although I have always preferred actions rpgs, and am looking forward to the inspiration they took for combat." - PP2: "Folks should be excited but also expect a smaller scale game, plenty of people on the team have 'complained' that it doesn't feel AAA in scope." [...] "I would say just dont go in expecting something other WRPG are producing in terms of game size...if that makes sense lol" - User: "Totally fine, it sounds like it's gonna be a better version of Dragon Age 2, with fleshed out city + surroundings" PP1: "This is not a good description of DAD." - User: "For the love of the Maker, bring back the Darkspawn." PP1: "They did." - User: "I haven't been paying attention. Are they bringing back tactics, or are they leaning more towards the awesome button?" PP2: "They're leaning toward God of War/ Mass Effect over the shoulder combat." - User: "is it open world or splitted in several areas?" PP1: "Only saw certain linear zones, but whether it is all DAO/2 style zones or mixed open and linear zones like DAI is up in the air. I would prefer the latter with less grinding required to progress like everyone else of course." - User: "That's a bit disapointing, but as long as they have a coherent direction, it's still better than the last 2 game's attempt at spliting the baby in twain" PP1: "GOW 2018 style melee, so not mash button for success but timing, combos, mixing up skills, and playing on your build/skill strengths." - User: "ok but I need Knight Enchanter mage or gish equivalent" PP1: "I think with each class you choose at the beginning you can end up with three subclasses." - User: "Was what you played still party-based?" PP1: "Party commands were disabled, so how much control you have is also an unknown." -

User: "Does one [class] include a magical archer, something beyond the Tempest specialization in scope?" PP1: "Well my base class was a warrior type so there was no access to ranger or mage types, but the warrior does have a magic subclass." - User: "Oh wild lol. I thought this kind of stuff is usually under lots of NDA or something similar" PP1: "It is, helps that no one has leaked screenshots or footage." - User: "I figure you can’t say exactly when it happened, but given your mention of party commands being disabled, it guess it happened after the report of last year about the game shifting to a full SP experience, correct? It seems the action-based gameplay that was lightly teased by some devs before remained even when the game shifted to SP, given your impressions." PP1: "Yes, any part I have seen of the game was after that. This part is speculation, if they have open zones like DAI they can still pull off a live service similar to the last three AC games and it would have no effect on people strictly coming to the game for the story. I would even go as far as saying this might be positively received if they only have cosmetic BPs and mtx." - User: "I think dlcs of various forms, from story to outfits/weapon will still happen; even before, when the game was mentioned to be a live service one, they used DAO as something that already fit that definition. The game won’t go beyond that scope in terms of ‘live service’ though, given how much they’re starting DreadWolf is a full SP experience. Interestingly, from the blog update and the lead developer afterwards, ME seems to follow the same path." PP1: "Yeah I think dlc in terms of story expansions are a lock. If they ever want to tread the live service waters again, there is a great template for them to follow." - User: "the neon colored logo has me thinking this might go a very different direction than typical fantasy" PP1: "Not really." - PP1: "The second one [DAII] was quite literally hold a button to attack since the game was easy. The new one is not at all like that." - User: "Or if Dreadwolf even has a party-based system?" PP1: "Yes"

[source <- DA:D spoiler warning for link]

Notes: Posts from October 2022. Some of the stuff said is corroborated by the Reddit leak (e.g. no control of party members at timepoint when game was played, the part of the game that was made available to test being a linear zone). in some places PPs are speculating. and ofc screenshots/a bit of footage has now leaked on Reddit the other day.

#dragon age: dreadwolf #dragon age 4 #the dread wolf rises #da4 #dragon age #dragon age: dreadwolf spoilers #bioware #mass effect #long post #longpost #video games

[mwolf0epsilon]

The Umbaran Pathogen - Day 11: Paralyzed

Summary: At first, Dogma had done his best to fight off the influence of the thing that was trying to get in his head. The strange whispered promises of an utopic new era for clone-kind. One where they wouldn't have to be afraid of misstepping ever again. But unfortunately his body simply wasn't strong enough to keep it up anymore, and neither was his resolve when it came to his twin's gentle but clearly insane words.

Warning: Vomiting (kinda, it's more like spitting up silk but 10 times grosser), mind control, and overall mention of parasitic takeover (Dogma is having an awful time).

Prev / Next

[In which the events on Umbara are worsened by an unknown pathogen taking hold of both the 501st and 212th. These series of drabbles will follow a non-linear timeline based on the AI-less Whumptober prompt list for 2023.]

THIS STORY IS ALSO ON AO3

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At first, Dogma had done his best to fight off the influence of the thing that was trying to get in his head. The strange whispered promises of an utopic new era for clone-kind. One where they wouldn't have to be afraid of misstepping ever again. But unfortunately his body simply wasn't strong enough to keep it up anymore, and neither was his resolve when it came to his twin's gentle but clearly insane words.

The sergeant had known from the start that whatever had caused his twin's rash, should not have gone ignored for as long as the latter had permitted. Had even tried to ask the medics for help with his own rash, despite the thing in the back of his neck clearly not wanting him to bring attention to the matter.

The foggy memory, the inexplicable feelings of calm and contentedness at the thought of just letting things progress...

Those had all been the attempts the horrid creature had employed to lure him into a false sense of security. A trick which had apparently worked on Tup and made him into... Someone Dogma could barely recognize anymore...

After all, the Tup he knew and loved would never be doing this. Looming over his feverish form in the middle of the Umbara wilderness, spitting up thick yellowish gunk into his bare hands and spreading it over Dogma's blighted skin. Staring with that loving smile of his, pupils blown wide enough that his eyes looked as dark as the void itself, a trail of that same yellow ooze going down his chin as he reached for Dogma's face. Stroking it with reverent delight and leaving repugnant hand-prints in his wake.

Were he not completely paralyzed by both pain and whatever poison the parasite was injecting into him now, the sergeant would have recoiled in absolute disgust.

"It's ok M'ika... It'll stop hurting soon." Tup murmured gently, leaning down even further to brush his nose against Dogma's painfully itchy neck. The fragile raw skin breaking from the contact, revealing more of those blackened scales he'd found on every open wound that cropped up on his battered and sickly body. "You're going to be so strong."

His twin pulled away slightly, but kept his head bowed as he prepared to spit up more of that gross crap directly onto his shivering body. The smell was sickening. The sensation even more so. And Dogma couldn't help but to openly weep as Tup continued to envelop him in this cocoon of sorts. Swaddling him tightly in layers of unidentified fluids that shouldn't even be coming out of a human, much less his closest brother.

Something told him that once he was fully encapsulated, he wouldn't be emerging the same. That he'd be something new and horrifying and entirely not himself.

The thing in his neck practically sang with joy (and all sorts of other emotions he didn't particularly want to unpack) whenever it was around Tup specifically. It recognizing his twin's own parasite as its leader. Trying to make Dogma yield to it in the same way it did. And maybe once he underwent whatever metamorphosis awaited him, he might. Especially considering how it sent pulse after pulse of elation as he was cocooned. Gleeful at how close to full take-over it likely was.

There was only ever so much Dogma could have fought back before this sickness finally overwhelmed him... He was only mortal after all.

"Don't cry... Shhh, I'm right here vod'ika." Tup brushed his tears away with his disgustingly slimy fingers. "You're evolving M'ika. You're becoming so much more than we were ever allowed to be... And once you come out as your new self, you'll be able to help me spread this gift with everyone else."

More and more of the sticky substance was added to the growing and hardening shell Tup was constructing around him. Despite the grossness, it seemed to at least sooth the uncomfortable itch and pain that had been plaguing him for a while. Numbing him completely to it. Pushing away the agony that had caused him to collapse in the first place. The agony he'd had to grin and bare with for the last couple of days.

The cream the medics had given him hadn't even done that. Offered him any sort of relief. But then he should have expected that. They hadn't been particularly fussed with his concerns...

At least Tup was being kinder. Gentler. Even in the state he was now in. In spite of everything, his ori'vod still loved him.

And maybe this was just his brain finally giving up the ghost and letting the parasite win, but he couldn't help but smile as Tup continued to murmur and comfort him. Soothing away the terror, the pain, the need to worry about what might happen next if he and Tup spread this to everyone else. What that might mean for the GAR and the Republic itself.

All of it faded away into the back of his mind. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad if they both went insane together.

At the very least they'd both be happy.

#Eps Writes #star wars #the clone wars #whumptober #Umbaran Pathogen AU #clone trooper dogma #clone trooper tup

[max1461]

I've sometimes said "when it comes to fiction, I'm not that interested in narratives", but I think perhaps that's not really true. Maybe I should have said, and maybe what would be a more useful analytical frame, is "when it comes to fiction, I'm not that interested in narratives about human characters". I think that I am interested in, and consistently enjoy, narratives whose characters are institutions. It's why I love stories based on the "fall of Roman democracy" trope—these stories are particularly fun because they have one human character (Caesar) and one non-human character (the Senate). It's why I love Cold War stories (two non-human characters: the US and the USSR). And it's why I enjoy Lovecraft so much. Lovecraft's real monster is not Cthulhu but the cult of Cthulhu, and it's precisely the survival of this cult through the centuries which terrifies Lovecraft so much (and which, conversely, I find so appealing—but Lovecraft's near mirror-image aesthetic sensibilities to my own are something I've written about elsewhere).

Anyway, this all comes on the heels of me feeling deeply dissatisfied with the kinds of stories other people seem to like. I have trouble with litfic and its ilk, because litfic, at least at the present moment, seems kind of myopically focused on portraying the complexities of human characters and human relationships. And I think that's a fine goal, but it doesn't tend to interest me that much. I'm just not that compelled by human stories most of the time, one way or another. And then in contrast to litfic you have specfic, which tends to focus on big ideas. Sci-fi and whatnot. And to my eye these big ideas are not typically best explored in narrative form. Narrative is linear, and big high-concept sci-fi hooks are non-linear, they permeate the entire world of a story all at once. This makes presenting them in the most compelling way challenging to do in narrative form. They can work in short stories, but I just don't think long-form narrative is the ideal way to explore them. What is the ideal way? I don't know, something like a Randall Monroe "What If" article, or maybe a mockumentary. Or a worldbuilding wiki. I hear this is what Greg Egan does, and then he also write books. Anyway, the point is that the traditional objects of narrative are often either not that interesting to me personally, or feel worse off for being presented in narrative form. And this leaves me somewhat disillusioned with narratives generally.

The thing is though, there are examples of narratives that I like, narratives that really make me feel something, and I kept trying to figure out what they had in common. And then it hit me—I like narratives about institutions, and to my eye institutions are the perfect objects for narrative. Institutions can be characters, because institutions are generally agents: they have goals, and take actions in the world to achieve those goals. This opens the door for narrative conflict. Institutions progress linearly through time and accrete experiences which change and transform them, much like human characters do. This makes narrative presentation an ideal form for talking about institutions. Institutions exist at human scales, or near-human scales, in all of space, time, and complexity. This makes them far easier to narrativize than sociological or alternative-science conceits. And, perhaps most importantly, unlike human characters, the inner workings of institutions are accessible to us. The way they function can be laid bare, or near-bare, for an audience in a way that a human mind cannot. And yet institutions, by virtue of being made up of people, still retain a level of dynamism and uncertainty in their behavior that makes narratives exciting.

And I realized that basically every story I've really liked has had an institution as at least on prominent character. I think this is why I like conspiracy stories so much—the villain is, invariably, an institution. Anyway, we need more of this. We need more stories that are, in some sense, about institutions more than about people or about ideas. You know, sometimes, when I want to read a story, I don't want to read about foibles of democracy in general—that's too big. And I don't want to read about the rise of Caesar—that's just some guy. I want to read about the fall of the Roman Senate. Now that's the kind of shit that I dig.

#navel gazing

[idrellegames]

Hi! I was wondering whether you have any tips for planning/writing a branching narrative? I'm very much a rookie when it comes to IF (with An Idea that's still in the early stages of getting fleshed out) but it's a pretty daunting undertaking and Wayfarer for all it's complexity is SO cohesive

I have a few posts under my coding in twine tag that may be helpful!:

6 things to consider before you start making your game

General advice for beginners

More general advice for beginners (story progression, choice-based non-linearity, etc)

Managing story branches, combining story passages for small-scale choices, and using writing/editing software (coding in this post is specific to Twine/SugarCube)

Good luck!

#coding in twine #interactive fiction #answered

[arwenkenobi48]

So I got some last minute resolutions/goals for 2024 (and beyond) that I just wanna shovel out real quick

Idk if you’d classify people pleasing and codependency as the same thing (or at least in the same kinda scale) but I’ve been reflecting on just how much I need to change that and I’m now determined more than ever to do so. Starting emotional regulation therapy in just a few days from now and I’m going to use the skills I learn there wisely. Heck, the few sessions of normal therapy I’ve been having are already making a positive impact. It’s slow, but it’s definitely happening and I can feel that beginning to form within me.

Also, I’m getting closer and closer to reaching my spot on the gender clinic waiting list. I’ll most likely reach it around my 25th birthday. I’m 23 and a half now, going to be 24 this time in the next six months. Honestly, I didn’t think I’d make it this far, but here I am nonetheless. But I digress. The point is, I know that transitioning medically is gonna be a helluva process but it’ll be worth it. That, combined with the progress I’m sure I’ll make in therapy, will guide me through the next stage of my rebirth, my metamorphosis into the man I know I can be. So I’m going to keep striving for that too.

And finally, once I’ve made a little more progress with my healing journey, I intend to start looking for love in an irl relationship. Ofc I know it’s going to be a long time before I’m ready to reach that point, but contrary to what I thought earlier this year, I think it is definitely possible to achieve and that’s another thing I have to keep me going. For now though, I need to concentrate on healing.

Honestly, I think I’ve got a much better understanding of just how much work that entails and the depths of how my life experiences have shaped me. I can see a lot more clearly just how to work on myself and why, how to shed the maladaptive coping mechanisms I needed to survive when I was younger and how I can improve myself. I know that healing isn’t a linear journey and there are many days when it’s far from easy, but I’ll get through it, even on the days when I feel like I won’t.

Ultimately, I think the most important resolution I can make at this point in time is to be there for myself. Through thick and thin, rain or shine. It’s hard, but I can do it and I have faith that I will. I will get where I need to be. Sure, my life’s taking a different path than what you’d expect from a guy in his early 20s, but that’s ok. If my path gets me where I need to be, then I’ll keep going forward. Here’s to a bright future and a new year that brings positive growth and new beginnings.

Year of the Dragon, here I come!

#arwen speaks #healing journey #mental health #new years resolution #healing #therapy #self healing #learning self love #love #optimism

[ghooostbaby]

watching everything everywhere all at once made me have so many thoughts about what it is about the connections between hua cheng and he xuan that hit me so hard. it’s this sidestepping of the importance of origins and fate. it moved me so much when it was revealed that joy just wanted her mom to be with her, to share with her the horror at the “everything”, infinity, meaninglessness. and in an inversion of that, evelyn wanted to push her daughter away from her and the nothing, void, meaninglessness of her own life, so she wouldn’t be like her. their origins from each other pulls them together in the future. and i guess they healed together, like a cycle coming back around. so much of this is because of the way evelyn fights for her daughter, and learns from her husband the tools she needs to fight - laughter, kindness...

so what if that doesn’t happen? what if those bonds just fade away, the parent doesn’t fight for their child. i think of hua cheng, unconnected to his family of origin, with his mother gone, the family he has doesn’t seem to be his people at all. the things he attaches to are outside of them - remnants of his mother who is long since gone by the time he is only ten years old, and xie lian, a complete stranger who shows him compassion. the notion of hereditary cycles and healing that is such a popular trope just falls away when it comes to him (and most people who have survived child abuse). the family you come from has nothing to do with you, there is no healing to be found there. there is no possibility of return, or desire to. (and what a queer act it is to figure yourself into a lineage, generational connection, or any deep family-like bond with someone who is not a blood relation.)

(side note this is a reason why i really resent when people insist on making jiang cheng and wei wuxian of mdzs reconcile, when the fact that wei wuxian never reconciles with the family he grew up with but DOES find healing, purpose, and love in the end with other people, particularly a group of people he had seemed completely incompatible with at the start, is one of very few stories that offers a possibility of healing for people who cannot return to their original family.)

i was reading this book studying the concept of what ‘home’ is by interviewing refugees, specifically refugees from cyprus who had been settled in the UK for decades, how they enacted the work of creating a new home in a new place after having left the original home ... and it struck me how the ocean is this non-place in between from the original home and the new home to be created when people migrate from one to the other. and to occupy the ocean as a home is to reject ‘home’ and stay in the liminal in-between space most people only come to in order to move through. which of course reminds me of he xuan, and ghosts in general, occupying the liminal space of death that most people arrive at only move on to the other side.

i get more and more interested in ghosts all the time. and how in tgcf they’re really this archetype of profound hope, desire, passion, sincerity, and goodness, contradictorily, while the gods are cynical, self-serving, small-minded, tiresome, mundane.

the pathways he xuan and hua cheng as ghosts take is so interesting for what they abandon, the way they abandon their origins and even themselves (or their original selves). they don’t move forward in a trajectory toward a resolution or return that makes sense on a scale of linear progress that is (supposedly) typical human pattern. they move into endless transformation and expansion, into other forms, other beings, becoming a something else, an other and an other and an other ... they follow a twisting path that goes nowhere in particular, as long as it follows their own desire deeper and deeper into itself, wherever that leads, whatever that is.

(gotta write something about he xuan and hua cheng’s malleable, transforming, non-stable, non-fixed bodies soon too!!)

he xuan and hua cheng are very different as well, and don’t fit perfectly, as much as they are parallel and connected by the coincidence of how they end up as similar beings. that’s what interesting to me about their connection - it’s not fated, it’s not a return. it’s something else. their bond is not something that makes sense of their past or fixes anything, it’s a complete chance that they end up in the same place at the same time, with complementary goals and skills.

unlike hua cheng, he xuan has this rootedness in his family and a sense of who he is in his connection to them, but he loses them and becomes a ghost and the way he adapts to the circumstances of the centuries, his desire and determination to stay and live and fight has him transforming and shifting away from the person he was in the past. huaxuan don’t seemed meant for each other in the sort of way that hualian has this beautiful symmetry, the way most romances have this demand for symmetry and balance, ordering something sensible and meaningful out of heartbreaks of the past that are returned to and answered for by this romance of the present/future.

it’s like the shore that meets the ocean is just land that happens to be there. at the end of a journey from a home that is no longer safe, the traveller finds a place to make a new home that is just a place that happens to be available for them that they might not necessarily like or want, it may not have poetic connections to their original home that soothe them that it will all make sense, it’s just a place that’s there that they will have to make a home out of. and i really have come across so few stories when an original home, or a foundational relationship are truly truly lost and gone forever, and it’s still ok, miraculously. and huaxuan is that story in my mind. it just seems miraculous to me to create a home out of anything, anywhere, by your choice to make it one.

#huaxuan #tgcf #everything everywhere all at once #hua cheng #he xuan

[entropy-game-dev]

Alpha testing, v0.09a & patchnotes

We’re so so close to the 10th alpha build of the game, and things have changed so much! But for now, let’s get into the playtest for v0.09!

My friend who has done the second-most amount of testing is great, I love how he plays! He gets so into the game, like, play-freaking out when enemies attack him, reading all the descriptions I’ve written, and dreading what nasty things each enemy might be planning to do.

Especially, I like that he goes and checks out the things he mentioned in previous versions - I totally forgot I addressed some of his comments like letting the cancel button automatically choose the “negative” option in a dialog - and he made sure to try them and was pleasantly surprised when he found that I had implemented his suggestions!

His playthrough was more focused on testing the overall game balance and progression, as I had changed the stat gain curve at the suggestion of my friend. I completely forgot I had hastily implemented a logarithmic curve, giving greater stat growths at earlier levels, levelling off towards the later levels. I did this in order to make early levels feel “good”, but forgot that I had finely tuned my stats in a linear fashion, so one got quite powerful too quickly.

This had implications regarding experimentation of party and moves - getting powerful enough, you didn’t really need to change things up for the most part. Now that I have changed things back to linear stat growth, battles were quite a bit more challenging, but not unfair, which I am happy with. I might need to up the damage of moves overall, however.

The thing is, my tutorials are still not properly working, and it’s a big thing I’ll be working on this week. So my friend went too deep into the first dungeon, not knowing that a) robots can be recruited, and b) lower floors are more dangerous. Therefore, he’d only be fighting a couple of battles before retreating to the ship, and didn’t collect many parts or units until I mentioned that to him over text. These are all things that should be popping up contextually, and will be something to work on this week.

There are also a couple of more minor game streamlining issues that will make the early game less of a slog, and it’s small things like these that are really only apparent when you watch others play your game. It’ll also mean the game will be nicer to stream and watch (?) maybe...

Anyways, thanks for reading my rambling, and the patchnotes for this version can be found below the cut as always!

v0.09a Features:

Added new tutorial when robot is destroyed

Now you gain 1 data per new thing interacted with

Fixed fuel cost for first trip to first area

Added back generic attack sfx for hitting players

Mouseovering minimap tiles say what feature they are

Field menu mouse controls...!!

Added miss text when you miss

Add up and down arrow animation to affinities on the unit stat page when they change

Added general data when not researching a project that gives a bonus to collected data when researching

Added new notifications at 25, 50, 75, and 100% research project completion

Scan now compares atk to def and the result of the scan is based on the difference

Allies can be moved around by routines now

Added routine summary text

Polish:

Made levelling up gain stats at a linear rate

Time synch now isn't castable on self

Upped data dropped for enemies

Encounter rate slightly lowered

Made faction enemies spawn at higher rates

Multiple steps in the same liquid won't display the same message

Re-added atk and hit text to the routines menu

Sector travel message doesn't fire if you don't have the research

Shader turned off at game over message

Removed debug text from tutorials

Made affinity labels hang around for a bit longer

Stopped text from having dynamic appearance speeds on the little label that appears during battle and exploration

Burst stat message applies once per person

Reduced and inverted AI scaling on moves that use HP

Charmed enemies have better AI

Scan reveals recruit info first, instead of stats

Made HP only appear once scanned

Stat panel only reveals stats if scanned

Put research results reminder on the collection screen

Astronaut now starts in slot 2, assistant in slot 4, because psychology of equipping parts

Removed red grid in columns 1 and 5 when in corridor

Aligned sector travel message in nav interface

Fixed timing of animations related to reflecting and conducting, added some extra metadata variables

Actually made damage do 1 minimum

HP value fades in with enemy

removed some debug message calls

Revamped room determining algorithm

Stopped input before field viewport is visible

Standardised element icons between fonts

Bugs:

Overfilled has the right icon

Minimap good/bad colours don't show anymore

Minimap refreshes after teleporting

Move label objects now despawn properly

Element burst now chooses an effect correctly

Tutorials for picking up parts now work

SFX of attacks now play

Stopped crash when enemy moves downward

Combining AI priorities fixed

Effects now appear on top of the enemies

Log chooser now doesn't choose empty log to view, crashing the game

Defend animation now showing on enemeies

Status effects now apply their elemental advantage properly

Stopped inspect option during core recruitment leting you see the ones in the inventory

Move enemy script won't move enemies randomly if a position is specified

Missing an enemy doesn't softlock the game now

Fixed affinity calculation bug

Stopped frame-perfect input to get into the equips window before the inventory has refiltered itself

Death affinity now always applies death through % buffs/debuffs

Row-wide random attacks on the party now display properly

Fixed stun/null affinity display on equip

Text colours fixed on element burst

#indiedev #gamedev #gaming #pixel art #scifi #space #gamemaker #programming #rpg #robot #devblog #game #videogame