ultranos: kino and hermes on a coffee break (i need a coffee break)
I keep putting off posting because I don't think I have anything substansial to let people know I'm still alive.

Anyway. My life has once again gone crazy and I'm just trying to keep up.

1.) Two PC game recs:

1a.) Transistor is really, really pretty. And it's fun and fairly clever. Reviews on the internet complain that the story is a little opaque, but really, it's because they did some interesting narrative tricks instead of laying it all out for you in a linear fashion. You figure it out by putting together what ephemera you find along with the (unreliable, biased) narrator is saying. It's made by Supergiant Games, the same people who made Bastion. And they got Darren Korb to do music again, so the soundtrack is excellent.

1b.) I accidentally 9 hours on Sunday playing Endless Space, which I guess is best described as Master of Orion-meets-Civ. 4X space game that's actually playable and doesn't feel overwhelming with micromanagement in real-time (it's turn-based). I hear the DLC expansion kind of sucks, though.

2.) I somehow got myself roped into staffing and being a plotwriter for a woods-LARP. As a corollary to that, I've found myself with the task of writing an entire critical mechanic system over the summer. Why I do this to myself, I'll never know.

3.) Trying to get my contract extended at work. This may or may not happen, depending on a grant. The probability of getting said grant might increase if I can manage to get a paper submitted. Which is where most of my energy is going. What's not going to that is going to the back-up plan, which is "find a new job". This plan is annoying. (On that note, anyone looking to hire a mechanical engineer with too much EE for her own good, who actually likes fluid dynamics, and has spent more time than one would think doing signal processing for biological systems?)
ultranos: kino and hermes on a coffee break (i need a coffee break)
As I mentioned earlier, I do have a game design blog on Blogger at Sufficiently Advanced Handwaving. I've started updating it again, and I'm going to try to do it with more regularity. (Which will be something of a trick, considering how often I update this thing.)

There's an RSS feed account on Dreamwidth now, at [syndicated profile] sah_game_design_feed. (Damn you, character limits! *shakes fist*) I just made it, so it might take some time for data to propagate.
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ultranos: kino standing, staring ahead (contemplative)
Current project is designing an entirely ground-up tabletop system and setting. I'm considering doing a productions journal-type thing, similar to the Atlus Production Diaries. Current mental debate is on a new journal (DW or Blogspot), repurposing my old blogspot Suffciently Advanced Handwaving for it, a filter on here, or Tumblr. I'm leaning towards the repurposing.

Hive mind: any thoughts? Would any of you even be interested in it?
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ultranos: kino standing, staring ahead (contemplative)
Hey all. I'm still not very good at this whole updating thing but whatever.

1. Finished first solo playthrough of Borderlands 2. Now have True Vault Hunter Mode open for Zer0. Next on the list is get through TVHM with him and to play through some more with Maya.

2. The above got put on hold when Mystery Hunt came up. And the team I was on (the one named [the entire text of Atlas Shrugged], because there was no character limit on the form and we're like that) actually won this year! Which is awesome! And now means we have to write next year's Hunt.

Here's to me avoiding leadership responsibilities.

3. Handed off the tabletop ruleset I'm writing based on Persona to DMark. He's now editing it (thank god), and helping me rebalance things I knew were broken but couldn't see how to fix because I'd been staring at it too long.

I'm going to need to figure out what to do with the damn thing once it's done. There's a tabletop a friend's running that's going to use it, but my goal is to make this fairly self-contained and playable by people who are not me and do not know me. It's, well, it's probably getting close to publishable. I'm just not sure if I should put my RL name on it, since it is copyrighted material. Fair Use might cover it (it is remixed), and I don't want to make money off it.

In any case, I'm considering uploading all the documents onto a website I theoretically maintain (although I haven't touched it since 2009). I'm unsure yet, and especially unsure about the name problem.

In some ways, it might be good to have it under my RL name, if I ever want to seriously pursue my parents' suggestion of somehow using my hobby of writing games to get into some career. I'm just a bit torn by it. I'd probably be less torn if it was 100% original.

Which is possibly another reason to go write the AtLA-inspired elemental-mages-and-weaponsmasters-wuxia system I've been tossing around since 2010.
ultranos: ibuki maya sitting at laptop in shorts and a t-shirt, eating a cookie, with prompt \\ "Rocks fall; everybody dies." (this would be much simpler)
I might have said a month ago that I got suckered into signing up for NaNoWriMo. Yeah, uh, about that. That happened...not so much. Mostly because about 2.5 weeks ago, another friend came up to me and asked for help on getting a tabletop system a mutual friend wrote to work with what he wanted. And so I basically wrote a tabletop system instead of a novel this month. (It's in draft form. Once I finish the GM guide, it's going to need to be playtested. And I'm still not sure I'm entirely happy with the high-level progression. This is why people write splatbooks, isn't it?)

This really only could happen to me.

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ultranos: kino standing, staring ahead (Default)
ultranos

Memoranda from the Usual Suspects

Media List:

Currently Watching:
-- She-Ra(in theory)

Currently Playing:)
--Fire Emblem: Awakening (3DS)
--Astral Chain (Switch)
--itch.io bundle (PC)

Currently Reading:
Fiction
-The Silence of Bones, June Hur

Nonfiction
-none

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"So she's good cop, he's bad cop, you're morally-questionable cop, and I'm set-things-on-fire cop."

"Sounds about right."

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"WARNING: When attempting to be clever, make sure you not actually just being stupid."

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"Did you remember to sacrifice the goat before burning the ISO to the DVD-R?"

"Crap! Um, I've got a charred piece of meat here."

"That's called a steak. That's dinner. What about the sacrifices?"

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"I escape through quantum-tunneling. What do I need to roll for that?"

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"Why is it called a 'Monkeylord'?"

"Because it looks like a spider."

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"I have a moral objection to this problem. It implies microwaving a steak."

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"Did you eat the crazy cookies this morning?"

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"The GPU goes 4 by 4, hurrah, hurrah."

September 2020

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