gritfish

Well, cyberpunk has reached its conclusion.

"Are there any games that capture the feeling of loneliness really well?" - Cut to me, screaming "THE WITNESS" over and over again. The Witness is the single loneliest experience I've ever had in a game space. There's no human touch in The Witness. There's chairs, but you can't sit on them. There's apples, but you can't pick them up and take a bite. There's broken branches, but you can't push past them. You are a silent, touchless ghost. You cast a shadow, but you don't have a form. You don't even get to touch the panels. You don't even leave fingerprints. There's not one single living person on the island. Not even you.

Of all the Australian words that get mashed overseas, Emu is perhaps the funniest to me. Australians pronounce it "eem - you". The pronounciation "Eee - moo" sounds like baby-talk to me and it gets me every single time because when I hear it, it's usually on a serious news report or something.

Was there a bet for how many times Jake could say "homunculus"?

I'm pretty infrequent on the forums, but I thought I should still share, cause I'm excited about it - I just released a game on Steam! It's called "Killing Time at Lightspeed" Imagine you're browsing twitter on a spaceship flying away from Earth. Each time you refresh your timeline, another year or more has passed. You get tiny glimpses into the lives of the friends you left behind, and how the world they live in changes. It's pretty much a text adventure, but in a very different format from your usual twine game. There's a trailer here (I can't figure out how to do a youtube embed, sorry...): and you can check out the game on steam here

I just released a game on Steam! It's called "Killing Time at Lightspeed" Imagine you're browsing twitter on a spaceship flying away from Earth. Each time you refresh your timeline, another year or more has passed. You get tiny glimpses into the lives of the friends you left behind, and how the world they live in changes. There's a trailer here: and you can purchase the game on steam here

On the message about phishing etc. appearing and later being removed: It sounds to me exactly like something an automated system would add to outgoing links to sites where the SSL certificate has expired or is otherwise invalid for some reason. I think Nick is right and the robots are to blame. Unfortunately, as it happened in the past, I have no way to prove this.

The photoshop professionals video, for anyone who wanted it

By all means! Invitation goes out to all thumbs to treat the #pdjam as an unofficial "EA presents" jam. Take a public domain story and tell it through the magic of turret sequences!

And the Public Domain Jam is back on again this year. In fact, it's THIS WEEKEND! omg

I'm going to try a last minute entry, but I need help to get this one out. What I need is dreams. Your dreams, thumbs dreams, video game dreams. I'd love to try and get as many dreams from the cast into a text generator as possible, to create the ultimate thumbs dreams, where a pet octopus farts that way, and lesbian dinosaurs have your blood souls. If you remember any great ones from the cast, please put the episode name in this thread. If you can give a rough time code?even better. If you can actually transcribe a dream? Best. Also, if you just have a crazy video game dream you want to share and have mixed up with the game, just post it below! If it's weird and rambling, that's probably better!

http://gritfish.net/wizard/ is pretty much finished I think. itch.io is having a ton of problems with the twitter/url stuff, but it works on its own.

Itch isn't handling the "share on twitter" or "persistent url" stuff for Idle Dreams (From the episode "field of dreams"), so for now, you can access it here: http://gritfish.net/wizard/ If I get some more time tomorrow, I might try and fix up the punctuation, but it generates some pretty good dreams.

ALRIGHT IT'S WORKING: http://gritfish.net/wizard/ There's no styling or anything yet, but each dream is unique, and has its own URL string so you can share it! It's not much of a "game" I guess, but this was actually a really fun experiment in getting procedural generation stuff to work in a small, persistent way.

Does anyone know an episode with a Steve Gaynor dream? He's the only regular thumb not covered.

Holy Cow, "Dreaming of Gillen" was a gold mine! I'm up to about 240 lines of dialogue, and definitely have at least a dream each from Jake, Sean, Danielle, Chris and Nick. Tomorrow's goal: split all the dialogue I've got into: Story starts Paragraph starts Paragraph ends Story ends Bridging pieces So that it'll generate dreams in a semi-predictable pattern. I'm hoping I can put these online in a seeded way so that they can be shared. ThumbsDB was a great resource, but I cannot explain just how good it is to listen to the thumbs explain dreams at half speed using http://otranscribe.com/ (half speed's in chrome only) Also HUGE shout out to bigJKO for letting me use the thumbs sprites from his game to use.

I've transcribed two dreams already, and I wanted to share the weird mash up of "that's why skeletons fart that way" and "Alien Isolation is controlled by librarians" I had a game dream, in between while you were looking for something. i felt like i was using my hand to like move myself but like i never remember dreaming so i feel like i don't and then all of a sudden the ai for the aliens was actually controlled by these sort of bookish librarian looking women and then finally this skeleton she reaches out with her bony hand and it envelops my face and like covers my face and eyes in blackness well actually it's not no good reading what I wrote because this is how the game works and then later on, no you really have to go back I don't know if this is good or not, so, good thing we're doing this now in my dream the way i played this game was like they were real people in real life, and then everything goes black and I immediately woke up and went WAHHHH and immediately started writing it down, not like magic or something but like a card, you know, a card game and i was less scared, even though they still looked like xenomorphs it was bizzare and then i farted and i was controlling myself the way i would control a character in a game

yes! thankyou! Also, about 5 minutes into transcribing Danielle's "Alien Isolation is controlled by librarians" dream, I've realised (hopefully) the way most people describe dreams is just a long rambling sentence with a lot of "and"s and "but"s, which is giving some BRILLIANT "Boyd Cooper" generation patterns so far.

Jeez, how did I not know about this jam till today's episode! I need to lurk on the forums more! I really, REALLY want to make a game about fishing called "The Cast of Us". How long is the time limit?

I didn't get stuck to quite the extent that Chris did, but I definitely lost several hours exploring, farming and backtracking, because I didn't realise I could push a block to the left and stand on it to reach a thing.

127 Hours (without internet): The Jake Rodkin Story

You're absolutely right, It was PS1 - weird brain moment.

With everyone on the cast talking about the games that made them realise games were a created medium, and Nick's being Chrono Trigger: Chrono Cross has a lot of the same design choices from the original, but the thing that made me aware of the people and choices behind it (and therefor behind games in general) was one of the endings. In the secret "Developer ending", people on the team talk about all sorts of stuff like how it was like to work on it and the mood of the studio etc. One of the developers, Richard Honeywood, talks about the specific problem of "How do you fit the sheer amount of text for a full rpg with 50 characters onto a SNES cartridge". He then lets you pick a character, and it will change his text to fit the "speech pattern" of that character. It literally lets you play with the dialogue engine of the game! His "speech pattern" system takes one set of text, and allows 50 characters to speak as though it was written specifically for them, taking much less space on the cart. One person's solution to a technical problem shaped the way every piece of text in the game feels. In fact a few other developers use their space in the ending to mention that if Richard hadn't solved the problem, the game would have been drastically different. Also, because it popped up on my twitter while I was listening to the cast, and no one else has posted it yet: Smooth Jazz Waluigis

GGJ in Sydney was AMAZING. We took over a college building, and had games of just about every skill level involved. Local multiplayer was probably the thing most people took to with the theme "What do we do now?" kind of inviting it. I finally got to team up with Paul from See Through Studios (who made the awesome "Particulars") and made a local multiplayer game which is part digital, part printed. Think "Keep talking and nobody explodes" meets "Spaceteam". "Houston, we have a %!@#" http://globalgamejam.org/2015/games/houston-we-have We also got to make Command and Conquer style FMV Cutscenes! - this is currently private, i'll try and get paul to make it visible

Gonna quickly jump in on the DA:I "not respecting my time" thing, as while I am definitely in the "skip the combat and get back to the story" style player with Bioware games especially, I'm good friends with someone who is playing the game on "nightmare" difficulty and exclusively in "strategic mode", and her descriptions of the game are more like a stealth game, mixed with a second-by-second RTS version of XCOM. Most of this is second-hand, but I'll try and explain what a "minor" combat sounds like when she describes it: Playing as a mage is less about "holding the shoot button", and becomes a huge game of positioning and stealth. First, get the mage into position (preferably up high) to surprise the closest units and cast barrier AS your other warrior characters reach melee range, then get out of the way of archers and waiting for the next chance. Switch to your warriors and fire off your special moves. Meanwhile you've been sneaking your rogue around behind those archers and started to pick them off and draw aggro (check on your warriors and chug a potion if necessary). Switch back to the mage, cast an AoE spell on the archers to finish the job, cast barrier again on the warriors, and now bring everyone together in the middle to finish the fight. On normal? That's maybe 15-30 seconds in real-time. Playing her way, on nightmare? This is one person perfectly executing a team-stomp in Dota that takes maybe 5-10 mins to pull off. Difficulty in games that you're playing for the story is a seriously interesting problem: Alien Isolation's "story" is fantastic but man that instant-death thing is annoying but that's what makes it scary and that's what makes the story engaging but i still wish i could play it without the alien. Same thing with Dragon Age and its combat FOR ME. Dragon Age isn't just a giant block of marble. It's several blocks. You can chisel a perfect dragon out of the "story" block, and never really have to chip off much of the "combat" block, the "crafting" block or the "strategy map" block. Honestly, I think that's respecting your time as much possible in a game the scope of DA:I. Could do with a little less elfroot though. Seriously, what's with all the elfroot?