#warhammer in the 80s was waiting a month for White Dwarf to arrive at the news agent just so you could flip through for the two to four full colour pages of 'eavy metal pages and if you where lucky a few pages of color mini adverts.
See, the problem was by the time the minis were in White Dwarf, many were already out of production, were unlikely to be in the one game store within travel distance and mail order involved postal orders and order forms.
For example, these two models where part of a limited release scenario pack. So even though I got to see the minis, I had no way of getting them.
Well, gosh darn, lookie what took literally decades to get. The metals are in my collection.
From White Dwarf on the left, my actual mini from the 1980s- though repainted. :)
Here is an example of the color adverts for minis. These command groups actually have three or four variants of each model, and they would come randomly assorted so you had to spend a while digging through racks to get the cool ones.
Collecting a full page of minis from the 80s can be a real challenge. This range, for example, can sell on ebay for between 15 and 45 australian dollars each.
Two pound fifty for six. Yes. Six minis for under three quid.
Yeaaah those days are long gone. I have been collecting the minis from my first White Dwarf issue for yeaaaars. This little chap is my take on the mercenary simkin (2nd row)
Hope you enjoyed the history lesson. X
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A video game that simulates #ADHD. The mission objective changes at random every few minutes and whenever you walk into a new room, your inventory shuffles one item and sometimes it becomes invisible for a few minutes.
You auto steer into table corners.
Whenever you get more than one sidequest there is a chance you go into overwhelm and your controller will pretend it is unplugged.
The corners of the level starts filling up with laundry.
You put down an item and it vanishes when you look away.
You have timed missions but during loading screens that can dramatically shorten by an hour or five.
In Life Is Strange Before The Storm, one truth Rachel Amber tells Chloe during "two truths and a lie" that she is a Leo.
The brilliant thing is later if you pay attention, her birthday is the day after Leo ends. But her starchart has her on a cusp.
This is brilliant.
The series has a few moments of absolutely brilliant subtle clues in it that add layers of meaning, but you have to be sharp to spot them.
But if you miss those, there are still blatant clues around the place that give some level of depth.
The main mysteries of the game aren't hard at all, probably to a fault, but on replay there are far more little ones.
A technique I highly recommend to #gamedev artists is to look at actual shipped game assets.
There are various ways to get hold of them, such as programs like Ninja Ripper, Utiny ripper or via archives.
And I must stress this is for learning purposes ONLY. NEVER use them.
Being able to look at models from a wide range of titles, see how they are rigged, how their Uvs are layed out, the triangle count and modularity... it all helps you understand the ACTUAL end result you are aiming for.
I think it is really important that students bridge the gap between where they are at, and what the end products are at.
You may think "oh, the models in X game are super high end, high tech stuff" but when you actually crack it open and examine it in your DCC...
There is no future for humanity in a world where all human endeavour is stolen and boiled down to something that replaces humans.
What do humans do in a world where humans are not employed to create?
Is that a world you want to live in?
If you take away the creative process of human artists into pool, the zeitgeist becomes entirely manufactured from an ever decreasing pool of looping cannibalism.
Pop literally eating itself.
Endless product without exploration. Product feeding on product.
No art movements, no re-evaluations of our place and relationship to the world.
Draw calls are responsible for a good 50 percent of the chugging issues I have helped games with.
A draw call is "okay now draw me an apple, and come back when you are done for the next instruction."
Then you ask for another apple. Then when they return you ask for another...
So the GPU is running back and forth to the CPU when it could just do that once and "draw me a pile of apples".
Rendering an apple, in this example, takes a tiny amount of what a core on the GPU can render. So by welding all the apples into one bigger mesh, it can be done faster in one draw call than all the fucking around to draw them one by one.