This probably ends up being one of the most wholesome of the Disgaea games and I dig that a lot actually?

I’ve been binge-watching Housebroken since yesterday morning. I didn’t expect to like it as much as I do. And S02E12 in particular does a hard swing into giving most of the feral main cast anthro portrayals, so I fully expect to see an uptick in fanart of the show after that.

Today thanks to a chat with GPT4 about funny translations in 90s rail shooters, I learned why the phrase “Don’t Come” showed up so often in games of that time.

Konaide (“来ないで”) –

So I only JUST found this Blender plugin that adds Unity-Style / Unreal-Style / Godot-Style right-click + WASD camera movement control and it helps me SOOOOOOOOOO much with my workflow for level design and the like, you have no freaking idea
https://github.com/SpectralVectors/RightMouseNavigation

So anyway I used Ultimate Doom Builder to export my Bubble Menace RAMP 2023 map submission to an obj model, then I imported that model into Blender (using the Legacy OBJ importer, it breaks when I try to import with the newer OBJ exporter and re-save in an yother format), I went through and deleted some parts of the geometry that should really be re-created as separate objects, and then I exported that to .obj and brought it into Godot.

Pretty neat!

Dunno if I’m really gonna commit to expanding this into a full Thing, but I am very amused to see how much nicer this workflow can feel..

I just want to take a moment to point out for anyone who thought Unity apologized for what they did to take another look at the wording.

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/unity-pledges-to-tweak-controversial-runtime-fee-policy-in-the-coming-days

They are sorry that people are confused / in angst over the change.

• They are not apologizing for changing the contract under devs with only 3 months of notice.
• They are not apologizing for trying to hide the other changes to their terms of service and licensing agreements.
• They are not apologizing or their very clear attempt to extort more cash without adding any additional value.
• They are not apologizing for allowing their C level staff push this through when many of their workers pointed out that this would not be received well by literally anyone.
• They really aren’t apologizing for anything they’ve done, they merely express that they thought they would gain more than they’ld lose from this.
• They are not sorry for violating people’s trust.

Like, I get it, if you’ve been working on your game for years now and are just planning to launch in the next 6 months, you might not have any options. But Unity has made it clear they want to establish their own flavor of techno-feudalism. Get Out While You Still Can. Maybe kick up your own “Tea Party” while you’re at it. Yeet that engine into the ocean.

And just like that, in the span of a day, Unity has found a way to completely kill the appeal of small studios and indies using their engines for low priced games.

Honestly, it feels like they did this specifically to try to grab extra cash out of things like Vampire Survivors and any freemium game, because the excuse of “this covers the cost of us distributing the runtime” falls flat when people can download the runtimes from literally any of *several* other hosts. And if Unity tries to block people from getting the runtime elsewhere, then the sleezy cashgrab nature of this would be even more obvious.

Anyway, I kinda hate to see this. I’ve been learning Unity Engine since around 2010, and started putting significantly more time into learning it to mod games like Starbuster and Freedom Planet 2 in the past fourish years. I’ve been hearing plenty of other devs moving to Godot, and GalaxyTrail in particular has been pretty vocal about shifting to Godot. And I had been dabbling in Godot myself a bit and in some ways it’s a lot easier to deal with than Unity.

But yeah like. AAA gaming has been missing the mark for years, and if the game engines are about to go hike up the prices, then fine. Godot, MonoGame, Enigma, Three.js, and Phaser are all literally like _right there_ and work just fine.

Aaaaand on top of that, thanks to the recent explosion of LLMs, translating my WIP game projects from Unity to Godot or MonoGame is a lot easier than it would have been without those tools.

“Finally, Whitten suggested only about about 10% of developers who use Unity will have to pay fees because of the thresholds the company has established.”

yeaaaah. And I bet they got that 10% figure using the same method they were planning on using to track install counts, right? In which case, why would anyone who was building on Unity’s tech trust that number?

I don’t know why all at the same time Unity, Twitter, Reddit, Audacity, and Nintendo have all completely forgotten that the people using their tools are often normal humans and _not_ the megawealthy and _not_ “just AI bots” but my suggestion for anyone who happens to find this article is to stay far faaaaar away from these big companies when they offer tools to build with. They are not your friends. No matter what promise they’re making, as long as the conceptual motivation of “infinite profit” exists, they will always be a threat. Open Source and other freeware might be kinda rough and flawed, but at least they have a better grasp that they’re making things for people.

I saw this ad with the pokemon playing with balloons and it was so cute that I nearly screamed. Check out 1:05

Calling it now:

Dess is the Knight, she is calling out to Kris for help to save herself and Noelle.

Ralsei is Kris’s toy horns, but Asriel did magic on them well before the game started.

Kris is a zombie. They died before the game started due to a “harmless” prank gone wrong.

Asriel and Dess worked together to use magic to bring them back “to life”. In the process, Dess was trapped in the darkness inside of Kris.

Our intrusion as a “soul” is also due to occult practices in-world.

Kris is their own person with their own interests and wishes, but they are seldom free to express it through any means other than being the narrator. Most of their energy is spent through the night with [The Knight’s] activity, and most of their energy during the evening is spent through [The Soul]’s activity.

Kris is tired of being in this in-between alive state. They want the freedom to make their own choices without being suppressed by others. And while their reaction to Spamton suggests their fear of the other option for freedom, they are probably not as negative on that potential outcome as we might assume.

https://poppingspree.dev/bmenace/gzdoom-bubblemenace.zip

( Alternatively, you can play it as a part of RAMP as MAP58: https://ramp2023.teamouse.net/download.php )

This is not exactly the same as the version I’ve submitted to RAMP 2023, but it is very close. This bundle includes a copy of Freedoom2, and the OTEX texture bundle WAD. You should be able to run the game by using bmenace.bat . If you know your way around DOOM modding you’re free to try to load bmenace.wad with a purchased copy of Doom2 instead, or even with Shareware Doom.

Jump and Crouch is required, you may want to bind those to convenient keys before even starting the map.

If you do try it, the main points of feedback I’m interested in are
1: Broad opinions / vibes.
2: Opinions about the timer.
3: Brightness levels. I’ve had people tell me the rooms are too dark so I brighted them up. Now I’m not sure if they’re too bright.
4: Weapons: Overtuned? Under tuned? Would work fine if this were not all being dumped in one map and instead spread across an episode? etc
5: Clear time?
6: At the very very end did you Shoot to end, or Interact to end?
[9:17 AM]
The map itself is fairly tame, but there’s a little bit of blood if you shoot the few non-balloon characters, and the ending of FreeDOOM2 has a little bit of gore in the end card which I did not make a replacement for.
[9:18 AM]
Was hoping I’d have more time to clean it up a bit but tbh I am so freaking tired of trying to fix this every day I want to go do something else for a while or just like. make a completely new map but keep the weapons and enemies. so most feedback I take I’d be using when making later maps. If I make them
[9:18 AM]
I just realized having only the download link is kinda sus so I’ll go record a quick video and toss that up too

I’m trying to reinstall the Unreal Development Kit UDK because I remember using that when I was trying to mod Dungeon Defenders and it had a really neat level design style that started with subtracting space from the existing assumed solid area. I’ve been trying to find other types of subtractive modeling software like that because Blender is not nearly as smooth for doing a similar workflow, but I haven’t found anything yet.

So I tried to reinstall UDK via Steam, and all I get is an empty folder with a readme file telling me to go to an external website. Feels very CreepyPasta