Games: Living with your mistakes - and not wanting to

I got into a tower defence game recently.

In it, you can do really well if the enemy doesn't get to your base even once. However, even if they do, it's not game over. But you do miss out on an extra reward.

And it's interesting, because I realised the inner conflict involved - do you just start over as soon as one has touched your based? Given all the effort you put in AND it doesn't mean you lose outright?

So what drives you to repeat play? Wanting to get through without having to live with having made that choice. To get through absolutely clear of any enemy getting to your base. PLUS, as with alot of games, it just seems possible if you do a few things different.

'Game' Sycophancy - Absolutely Drab-ulous!

I was looking at shots for silent hill: downpour over here at gamer grills (wait - grrlz!)

After not utterly acknowledging the moniker, I've probably lost half my audience already - but moving on all the same, the pictures just struck me as a prime example of the, from this perspective, rising trend.

I mean look at the oh so dark and terrible backgrounds - what are they there for?

To make the protagonist look good.

And are the protagonists a little grungy and messy? Yeah...and why is that the case? To make them look good in a sort of cutting edge, "I'm a little dirty therefore I must do stuff" way.

Then you just flat out have the neatly composed model shots (which may be more a result of the imaginative rigidities of working with 3D models, granted)

What would be a bit more scary, perhaps? Perhaps someone who looks maybe like they deserve, for some reason or another, to die. And you play as that person. How do you console that in play - you don't have a perfect mary sue looking character - not a prime alpha, so surely by our very inner nature we assign them red shirt status. Yet your playing them, so this assignment doesn't work out? Or does it? Or doesn't it? An inner termoil that isn't in the game, it's inside your heart, inside your head.

Or you can play characters who look simply fabulous, darlink!

Grunt Box

I'm working on a preset shoutbox system for driftwurld, to help give a sense of other players being 'out there' in it. So far you clash your stats against theirs, but don't talk as yet.

But I want it preset shouts and preset replies. For a start it avoids security concerns of clensing incoming data. But more importantly I just am disinterested in yet another gutter talk chat environment! Where the cultural habit of spewing out the most half baked, lowest denominator thoughts is seen as a must. I mean, may as well have a system where you can only communicate in pre set grunts! That's what it comes down to, so why not just be honest about the arrangement instead of trying to dress up the grunts with text that vaguely resembles words?

I'm going to have a chat room latter where you can type what you want. But in the meantime a shoutbox system is what I'm going for.

Skyrim, fear and...you?

Another elder scrolls? Start in a prison again, perhaps, much?

The movie actually made me think of a mechanic where you actually benefit from running in fear sometimes. Like for running away and escaping, you get some XP (but can only get X amount this way - once you kill something (or perhaps do something else, like, wow, help people live instead of murdering stuff) then X recharges. So when your running away, the time spent running isn't a long, drawn out act of losing (I mean normally, if you ever run it's because your afraid of losing something, right?). Thus playing out a characters fear in the game becomes part of gameplay - and with fear comes a little story.

Or atleast the guys who made the trailer thought it was trailor worthy stuff.

Will it again be one of those things that's just in the trailer and in game you'll either find yourself just always fighting forward, or doing a death jog from some revival thingie? Prolly.

Quick tip: Fast Unity particle explosions

I searched around for this and found some other people not sure what to do if you want to use particles as an explosion, but it takes ages for the particles to fully form.

If you set the max size to 1 and the minimum size to .9, they'll already be pretty much fully formed as soon as you call the particles. Looks really nice too! :)