BougieBirdie

Well as long as Bill says it’s cool, I guess I don’t have to form my own opinion

In this economy!?

I just shared this with my wife because she’s an artist and hates AI as much as I do.

Apparently she made an account last night.

“Red tape” is a pretty common idiom here. It’s similar to bureaucracy, but it’s more like the useless stuff you have to deal with in order to do something.

Say you want to update your driver’s license and you need to bring in some ID and fill out a form. That’s regular bureaucracy.

If you want to feed the homeless so you have to get a permit for an event, prove your volunteers have food-handling training, fill out forms for your volunteers, notify the police that there will be a public gathering, schedule an inspection of the facility, etc, that’s red tape.

Another way to look at it might be that Bureaucracy describes the system in which offices communicate with each other, and Red Tape are the tasks/forms/whatever you have to complete in order to get what you want approved.

Well of course, it’s an unwritten rule

Ah, well you can definitely build for Android with it then. I haven’t personally, but so far every other platform I’ve built for has just been a few clicks and away you go

I highly recommend Godot for a new developer. I made the switch from Unity and it’s just been a pleasure to work with. I’m actually unlearned a bunch of patterns I had to use with Unity because Godot makes things even easier to access .

I don’t know if it’s got any kind of support for retro systems though

I think nostalgia plays a pretty big factor in retro games. Like, yes, I agree that enshittification marches onwards and the state of the industry today is pretty lame.

Every time I’ve gone back to a retro game I find myself vaguely disappointed. Quality of life has come a long way, and development is iterative so it makes sense that games made twenty years ago are lacking some features that make life easier for the player. Things like fast travel in metroidvanias, or inventory and quest management, or just trying to remember what it was I was supposed to do next in an RPG are often quite lacking. Or at the least, they’re not up to today’s standards.

Survivorship bias plays a pretty big role here too. We remember the good games that stand out from the rest of them, and we forget about the crap. There was shovelware back then too, maybe not to the degree of the modern app stores with F2P games loaded with microtransactions and dark patterns, but they were there too.

Anyway, long story long, the trick in whatever generation you play seems to be to find games that respect your time as a player. I’d also recommend checking out indie games, they’re made with love, and you can find all kinds of retro-styled where you can tell the devs were passionate about games of the era.

Here’s a short list of games I’ve enjoyed that give me that retro SNES feeling:

• Bzzzzzt - Just delightful
• Gravity Circuit - Megaman, but the platforming actually feels good and fast
• Nuclear Blaze - This one has a unique offering where have to put out fires while platforming
• Skull Girls - okay, this one’s a bit older too, but in another comment you said you like Street Fighter so this might be up your alley

The previous ‘family sharing’ feature allowed for you to share your games with someone else, provided you were not playing any games at the moment.

This new family sharing seems to allow you to share your library even if you’re playing another game.

@ChihuahuaOfDoom@lemmy.world I completely agree with this take. You don’t need to get the secret ending or unlock everything or anything like that, but the sequel builds on mechanics from the first one. You can do more stuff in the second game, and I’d also say that it’s a bit more difficult too.

IMO I prefer the basic ending to the true ending of Hotline Miami 1.

The factory must grow!

I discovered comic mono a couple months ago and I’ve never looked back. It’s the perfect font

%.2f will format your number rounded to two decimal places. So if you had 1 / 3 it would come out as 0.33 instead of 0.333333

% is the placeholder for the value

.2 tells it ‘two spaces after the decimal’

f tells it that the placeholder is a float

Taking a photo of a man threatening you at gunpoint seems like a good way to get shot

Well hang on, with all the furries that use and contribute to Arch I’m not sure it would pass certification as not using animal byproducts

That’s a good point, I never really considered that. The argument does hold some weight for the live-service model, but to my knowledge that’s not really how that game operates.

But there’s plenty of support besides financial too. I’d agree that as a developer I do care most about being paid for my work, especially if I’m going to work on a AAA game. But for my own projects, I mostly care that people play my games and enjoy them, even if that means piracy or streaming.

I dunno, sometimes “supporting the devs” these days just means not sending them death threats. But I also think that if we look at financial support as the only way to support a game then we risk dehumanizing the people who work on our toys.

I feel you, it’s tough knowing that there’s great games out there and feeling like you can’t play them. It’s even tougher when the people around you are playing them too, especially when they’re telling you how great they are.

I think your partner has the right idea with supporting indie developers, generally speaking the money stays closer to the creator, so it feels like you’re more directly supporting them. But you’ve also got to be careful because individuals can be just as vile as organizations, there’s been times that I bought a game, thought it was great, and then found out after the fact that the creator is outspokenly transphobic or something like that.

I want to mention Hogwarts Legacy as a specific example. It’s a game I don’t want to support because JK will profit from it, and she supports the erasure of people like me. I have a friend who played the game, and from his account the game itself is pretty hip. The character creator is supposedly pretty inclusive. He raised the point that JK had very little to do with the development of the game, and the development team seems to really care. Does that mean we shouldn’t support them because an evil individual profits from it? It certainly added some nuance to the situation that I hadn’t considered.

I think the best way to stay hopeful is to play games that you really enjoy. For me, it helped to educate myself on this list of dark patterns in gaming, and to find games that don’t include these features. To me that says that the creators want you to enjoy their experience to the utmost, because generally speaking the more dark patterns are in the game, the more the game is designed to profit off of you. You should be the one to profit from the game IMO.

Blasphemous is a disgusting game, I bet you’re going to love it. There’s a sequel out now. It might be time for me to fire up the original again.