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While were on the subject of whether it's nostalgia, I only just played it for the first time like 3 years ago, and it was still thoroughly entertaining, even for someone like me who really isn't that big on turn based rpg's in general.
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Final Fantasy 7 was a fricken weird game. It was all over the place in terms of tone, you could play it for an hour every day and experience something genuinely unique each time you play it. One day you're snowboarding, one day Tifa is slapfighting the shinra lady, the next you're doing that weird rts minigame for the super materia, then you're finishing red 13's quest and seeing his petrified dad in cosmo canyon, then youre breeding and racing chocobo, then youre having a random encounter with a house or like a naked torso swinging on a pendulum, then japanese dracula joins your party, then cloud becomes an invalid from mako poisoning.
 
FF7 was such a wild, wild game and my biggest fear with the remake is that they'll just drop everything that doesn't fit into their hardcore cool-kid modern vision. Like I'm sure the big iconic moments will be done well, but without all the weird nonsense in between then, well, it just won't be ff7.
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lot of old art actually consists of ton of details... and not all details are logical or fit to the overal narrative
= lot of dumb topic -talk is really about how lot of art, media and vaporware... is in large part about how many of details within the media piece itself doesn't fit the overall narrative of the whole piece, but the effect might still be magical in the brain.
This is actually a really cool observation that I hadn't considered before. In a way I think this actually makes things more realistic? Because that's how like, actual memory tends to work, at least for me. I'll remember specific details of, i don't know, how a cutting board was situated on the counter, or the specific order that the jackets in our closet happened to be hung up in, or what some rando in the grocery store is saying on the phone an isle over. Just things that have no reason to be relevant to what I'm happening to be doing, and frankly have no business dedicating space in my head to remember after all these years but my brain still just goes of and decides these random details are important to remember. I can't think of any specific examples from movies or shows at the moment at the moment but I'll be sure to be on the lookout for it.
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Utterly fascinating watching that old dude rambler about something he's so knowledgeable and passionate about. Beautiful video, thank you for sharing it.
 
It got me thinking about like, what it is that gives those older, less precise forms of media the charm they have. And I think it's that they have to be kind of symbolic, in a sense. Like, it might take a ton of skill and creativity to paint a perfectly realistic old man, but it doesn't take any creativity to look at and consume that art, I guess, if that makes sense. It's just an old man. When things are less precise, the painter can't just paint an old man, they have to paint a symbol that the viewer can recognize as an old man, and that transaction takes creativity by both the painter and the viewer to do.
 
It reminds me a little of looking at drawings done by children, sometimes you can tell what they're supposed to be, sometimes you just have no idea at all, but it's still something though. There might be bits and pieces of things you recognize, or you might even have to do some serious leaps of logic and try and put yourself into the place of a kid and think about why they might have drawn what they did in order to put the puzzle together.
 
The idea of technological progress nullifying a medium's ability to evoke the feelings produced by the limitations of older technology doesn't sit well with me though. Stranger Things doesn't feel exactly like an 80's show, and that's fine I think, because it's not an 80's show. We have hd cameras now, we have computer generated special effects, we an extra 3 decades of cinematic history to derive inspiration from, we have modern acting techniques, etc etc etc. It's impossible to completely limit yourself to the filming conditions of any particular decade past, the world has changed too much and so have our brains. No one is ever going to make a proper 80's movie ever again, and that's fine because 30 years from now we'll all be looking back and decrying how all these damn young film kids are trying to ape the style of those pseudo-80's 2016 movies. Certain techniques were in vogue then, and certain techniques are in vogue now and that's what makes everything beautiful, even if we haven't realized why it is yet.
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http://www.dailyhaha.com/_flash/tower_defence_castle.htm
 
That was the only tower defence game I ever spent any significant amount of time on. It might have also been the first. I was only like maybe 12 years old at the time and played it on the first computer I owned. I remember being especially drawn to how you could use different elemental towers, and each variety had a whole host of potential upgrades, including the tower changing visually for each upgrade earned. I thought that was really cool and I have memories of drawing the little circle towers in the margins of my school notebooks. Also for some reason the strongest type of tower you can get is a flower? But it's so expensive that by the time you can buy it the enemies have all gained too much power for it to be of any use, and you're better off just stacking a ton of max-power regular towers around the corners of the path.
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It really is fascinating how your mind can just sort of spin entire concepts and ideas into existence like it's no big deal. And how certain keywords can totally alter that whole idea, like just including the word wizard into something automatically implies certain ideas and rules to help shape the concept. Whether not those rules are followed up on or broken in interesting ways is another issue entirely.
 
Take the last one for example, "villain is a sorcerer who summons wizards", there are so many implications on the story and content just from that alone. There is a sorcerer who opposes the player. The sorcerer can summon wizards. Wizards are object's that must/can be summoned. The wizards are far enough away that it is necessary for them to be summoned rather than just already being there. There is a significant difference between a sorcerer and a wizard. There will likely be a sort of hierarchy between the sorcerer and the wizards. The sorcerer is unable to accomplish their goal without the aid of the wizards. 
 
One sentence and half the work of crafting some kind of story or adventure is already done for you. Then there is also the reader's preconceived ideas about sorcerers and wizards that can further the thought. i.e. sorcerers are orange, while wizards are blue. etc etc
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I made a post but the images inside turned out to be uncomfortably huge. Please stand by while I resize them to be smaller!
Here we go, attempt #2 . Okay good this is much more manageable
Nice. I was looking for stuff like this to share with the BYOB webcomics thread. Kaz's site is great too, though there are a few comics on there that aren't work safe.

Also, Imgur has auto-resizing urls for large images like that so you don't have to mess around with image sizes before uploading, you can append (from smallest to largest) s, m, l or h right before .jpg in the url for smaller, more browser friendly sizes and thumbnails. Here's an m.jpg version for example
Neato! I didn't know Kaz had a website, but it also never occurred to me to look for one. Thanks, that will keep me occupied for a while. 
 
Also thanks for the hot imgur tip, it's amazing the kind of stuff websites come up with these days.
 
Anyhoo, here's a video y'all might like.
https://vimeo.com/183372429
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I made a post but the images inside turned out to be uncomfortably huge. Please stand by while I resize them to be smaller!
Here we go, attempt #2 . Okay good this is much more manageable 
 





“Little Bastard” by Kaz (Kazimieras G. Prapuolenis), from Raw v2 #3, published by Penguin Books, 1991.
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Ghost Wizards of Soccer. Your a trashy wizard who dukes it out with some other beer swilling loser sorcerer through manipulation of the physical world for fun. Basically it would be a combination of three games, an "athlete farm" sim where you keep your team, marketers, hangers-on etc. on a desolate medieval property and try and keep everything running smoothly (despite the players having constant stupid bickering fights and clownish problems (I hate the cow. Im out of ice. I have to shit.)), a tiny roguelike where you send one of your players down into the Hole Cave outside of your hamlet to find secrets gold and gems and trophies/incapacitate monsters and kidnap them back to your team's compound to possess/brainwash/train, and, finally, the meaty football portion, where you rapidly summon - and possess to control more finely - your goblins and gelatinous cubes and shit to dink around the grassy field and get into fights and maybe poke the ball towards a goal. Every monster is unique in mostly superficial ways, with slight stat variations and temperaments, plus likes and dislikes. Players die CONSTANTLY so you need hundreds of them to make it through a game. There is no time to train them. The game implies that all your monsters have only a tiny fraction of their potential strength but it is impossible to make them achieve this. You will always need to be going into Hole Cave, grabbing shitloads of weak ass monkeys, and dumping them on the field of snakes and pigs. There is even a messily-explode-style self-destruct right on the GUI next to all the other big blocky toggles for various behaviors you want the currently selected player to perform. You can only game over if all of your probes die, it's really easy to avoid, as you can always run and grab a handful of kobolds or an eel or bum. You would collect flowers from the Hole Cave and from other wizard's properties, which you gain access to when you beat them, and you would put the flowers all over your townlet to design it. Dead monsters would remain on the battlefield and bleed into the ground, but after every fight the corpses and gibs are collected by like a bowling ball pin collector and fed to the winner's army.
I kind of like this. You could probably sell DLC that changes the game you're hunting the monsters for. Switch it to baseball, US football, hockey, basketball, things like that.
This is kinda like if lemmings and tomogacthi had a baby but its a baby who loves to fight. It's great. I love it  I'm imagining like a line of baseball dudes strolling up to a space station or something on the moon and just wrecking the place.
 

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Unfortuantely I only have two lungs at the moment, I lost the others in a tragic, filthy accident. I expect theyll grow back eventually though.
 
That one I shared is pretty much the only one to reach that level of detail and well-thought-outness.
 
Anyways, on your recommendation I went poking around that subforum and look what I found:
 
 
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I never have concrete concepts for games like this. I mean I don't release games and I shouldn't be talking about this at all, but I have txt and bmp files full of half-formed descriptions, impressions, style notes, game titles, bits of dialogue etc, having absolutely no thought put into audience or playability or the essential mechanics that determine how the user interfaces with the game by large.
A post by you, written months ago, that describes exactly the extent of the contents of most of my docs!! At the time of writing my original post I really did think that most of these were more in-depth than they were. Most of them are just a paragraph at most. Looking at these now I'm a little disappointed at how small most of them are, usually just a single paragraph at most.
 
A lot of them aren't even game ideas? Just little tableaus describing images and feelings. here I'll post a few of the more interesting ones.
 
 
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⦁ Explore a glass palace in a rainforest. All the furnishings are made of glass, including the butlers and maids.
 
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⦁ There is a wizard who lives inside your brain who collects and stores information that you don't need at the moment
 
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⦁ Turn based action game with damage numbers. Final boss attacks your teammate, the infinitey symbol pops up over their head as your teammate disintegrates.
 
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⦁ Walk boldly into the Sunshine Palace to challenge the Sunshine Lord to a duel
 
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⦁ Inspiration song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-JhdS2ntvw : You're exploring an old abandonded monastery that has since been overrun with vines and other flora. It has multiple chapels, some boring rooms where the monks would sleep. It's a bright and sunny day outside so the sun shines through the stained glass and around the vines creating shadowy patterns on the ground. Yet it's also raining and you can hear the pitter-patter of rain on the stone ceiling as you explore.
 
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⦁ You fight a towering clay knight, resembling the roman statues of old in form and proportion. As you damage it, the powdery exterior breaks away to reveal a rolling and tumbling black mass within. Its tentacles reach out to taste the air but is burned by the light of the sun, and it pulls back in. As you damage it, the exterior shell breaks away piece by piece, eventually crumbling apart completely nd leaves the writhing tangle to burn and tumble as it desperately attempts to make itself small to hide from the bright rays, however it finds a crevice in the ground and frantically snakes its way down into the earth to feed on the weak and join with its brothers.
 
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⦁ Using sharpened bones to duel with the Queen of Bone and Flesh
 
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You are a boy whose dog has been kidnapped by Aliens. You have to go rescue your dog, you use a baseball bat as a weapon and can buy & purchase upgrades at ice-cream trucks.
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⦁ Instead of Goblins, there's Groblins. The smaller ones are called Grublins. The big ones are called Groblions. There's also Grimps, Grogres, and Grorcs. These all spawned from the ancient Griants.
 
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A first person dungeon crawler that takes place within a Matrix-like virtual environment. You hunt down and eliminate viruses and hackers and other rogue agents. Graphical style would be surreal and allow for a range of wildly different environments. Maybe the dungeons themselves are procedeurally generated? 
 
Quote
villain is a sorcerer who summons wizards
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Oh they're mostly just things similar to whatever I happened to be playing at the time. I'll see if I can dig up a good one to attach.
 
Like if I happened to be playing combat heavy action games, I'd write ones focused on combat mechanics for example.
 
This one here is perhaps the most thought-out in terms of actual gameplay design. Looking back most of them are just general ideas for story and themes and a very basic outline of what the game would be like.
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Also I guess I'd better talk about myself a little instead of just ranting about the website you've all been using for years.
 
I like to create things, I like to draw things and to imagine things. I spend a lot of time crafting stories and characters in my head and then proceed to never actually do anything with them. I used to write big ol text documents outlining imaginary video games that I wanted to be real. I don't think I ever completed a single one of those write-ups. I still have fun going back and reading them though. Some of my ideas have stuck around for longer though and if I can actually ever make myself learn how to start and finish a project I'll at least have a deep well of old ideas to dig from. 
 
I listen to music pretty much all the time, and have a desire to create music but I have no idea how to even consider starting to learn how to do that.
 
Uhh, I don't know what else about me would be relevant to saltworld. Oh well!
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Hey everybody !
 
I'm no good at introducing myself, but I've been lurking on here for a while, mostly keeping my eyes on the big ol' dump topic you guys have going on here since that seems to be where the only action happens on here these days. I had no idea of any of the kind of stuff you guys post about on here, all the old weird sorta forgotten about videogame/tv/whatever relics you guys share I mean. But since discovering this little corner of the internet I've learned that sort of stuff is actually super cool. I spent about a year or so slowly working my way through the entire dump topic and everything inside when I had time and felt like it.
 
What I think is even more cool than all that stuff though is how you people are all super genuine about it all, and how intensely y'all think and write about all these weird little topics. This "saltworld" is just like a happy little haven atop a tall rock resisting the bashing and crashing tides of the ironic and detached modern internet culture. I tend to mostly stick to pretty basic social media like facebook, twitter, etc, and this site is pretty much 100% different from any of those.
 
Anyways I probably wont post incredibly often, but it recently occurred to me that just sitting on the sidelines reading you guys discussing all this stuff, without even having a registered account is kinda weird and a little voyeuristic, and that thought made continuing to lurk feel uncomfortable for me, so I decided to register to remove any secrecy of me reading everything on here.
 
I think that's about it, I'm GoldFishBoy, I just picked that name because I have a bag of goldfish crackers on my desk.