I have sort of a tangent on this thread that I'm going to ramble on here

https://twitter.com/velocciraptor/status/1619083466464960512

obviously the conditions for a site catering to people who play games are pretty bad but I think there's sort of another issue on the side, which is:

the general attitude of game developers and publishers as a whole towards game journalism is at best "barely veiled hostility"

saw a post earlier where ppl were reacting to an article about symmetra 'portraying autism on the battlefield' and traced back to what seemed like some well-meaning posts from a genderqueer designer on the game and.. I feel like this highlights a core issue with 'Representation' which is that a lot of times when these things are done by individuals who want to do the right thing, or are representing themselves - they put it in, and what happens is that stuff leaves their hands and it becomes part of the Corporate Object

walk in, see that some genuinely sad news about za/um has turned into a parody discourse featuring the two most extreme possible opinions on it, turning around and walking back out of twitter website bad

guess what's out and that I'm immediately going to play:

that hyper detailed beer brewing simulator

store.steampowered.com/app/1569200/Br… genuinely the most fascinating thing about this game to me is that it seems to fully understand that people who are playing it might be interested in actually trying it in real life and _encourages_ that interest, which is... something I rarely see in games

reading the just-released elon musk text messages from the elon v twitter trial and oh look who it is oh nnnnooooOOO

It's happeningggggg

https://twitter.com/igfnews/status/1574775926981804033

And we have an opening date for submissions. Really curious when the close date is

https://twitter.com/igfnews/status/1574776824403578880

so this article very casually mentions that Ubisoft has invested in a company called "Aminoca Brands" and I was like "ok who's that"

https://twitter.com/Toadsanime/status/1455127334739132419

some fun facts about this company:

* They have gotten over _200 million dollars in funding from ubisoft and other companies_

* Their game portfolio consists of a few mediocre f2p mobile games, two "mixed" review steam games, and _6 DIFFERENT TYPES OF CRYPTOCURRENCY_

ohhh yeah I remember this. In 2011 when valve invited the portal 2 ARG winners to the office they left us unattended for awhile and we went on a little 'hallway roam'. The active cabals at the time were TF2, L4D2, & Dota2. But there were a bunch of other abandoned looking rooms.

https://twitter.com/80Level/status/1455233179531374593

And there were just like... piles of posters and art like this stacked in the halls around those rooms, or inside them. No desks inside, usually. Due to the circular shape of the interior hall it gave a weird "abandoned building" feeling to that half of the building.

I wonder if anyone would find valuable a "tips for new igf judges" doc

on one hand that's a pretty small number of people each year on the other hand it would contain valuable tips such as "when the interface says the game is out of steam keys and they've asked the dev for more, it is lying. ask them yourself in the tech support field"

look. "pretty" and "contiguous" were not on the list of requirements don't pay any attention to what those fins are anchored on it's fine

I want to write a thread about the major differences in metroidvania level design between Dread and a lot of other entries in the genre, esp older ones, but I'm sleepy ok so super metroid is a game that, with some exceptions (maridia.....) is really interested in central corridors with branches/leaves off of them

excuse my mspaint here

zoom
w/ 100% collection rate
game's fun My overall take on Metroid Dread is:
* It's def a major improvement on the metroid 2 remake
* The story is surprisingly fun
* The level design seems to be trending in a way that is more friendly to people new to the genre
* The combat is still too difficult for no real reason

Gonna post a short thread on the subject of contract clauses for freelancers that I think you should be skeptical of

Focusing specifically on language I have successfully had removed in the past Some of these may seem kind of paranoid, but the thing to keep in mind is that contracts are legal insurance, and no matter how good the intentions, you need to make sure you're legally safe.

After all, that's what they're doing at your expense in a lot of these.

Okay so I'm gonna do a brief thread on procedural generation in games from a dev PoV. I've wanted to do this for awhile but the concept ballooned infeasibly so I'm just gonna do it completely off-the-cuff instead and we'll see how things turn out. So a lot of times you see procgen talked about in games, it's talked about as if it's a feature. Oh boy! This game has procgen! That'll make people enjoy it!

Well, no. It's okay for marketing, but from a design standpoint, procgen is an enabler. It's used to make things.

you know what, fuck it, I'm going to post a whole thread about how skeevy and gazey as FUCK the third shantae game is because it bothers me every damn time I see ppl rah-rahing that series

https://twitter.com/MallowyGoodness/status/1147221669532119045

So first of all, here's an early-game puzzle. You have to light up an inscription on some ruins. How do you do that? Well,

You make a creature drool so that you can trick a bunch of women into taking off their clothes and bathe in the drool, thinking it's a hot spring

So.. sometime in the last two days, the US government page on changing gender designation on a passport was alterted, replacing all language referring to "Gender Designation" with "Sex Designation" & adding text explicitly specifying "sex change to male or female" across the page For some reason, links to WPATH and the AMA were also removed from a paragraph talking about them

Okay so I -did- in fact interrogate a valve employee at this meetup about the porn games removal. Thread incoming:
* They agree they need to work on communication but sounds like there's internal resistance to hiring specifically for it (this is me reading between the lines) ...got assurances this is something they want to work on but nothing concrete.
* says flagging of games is done by a team of contractors looking for criteria, not specifically targeting VNs or queer stuff. Asked about whether this criteria is public, they seemed uncertain