With the unfortunate closure of Cohost, the internet is once again looking a large and unknown land where it is very difficult to find your way. However there is some amongst us trying to fight that and bring back the classic 88x31 personal link buttons.
We went through an era of forgetting about linking to personal websites, because everyone was all on Twitter or the like. There was no buttons - heck no RSS either - Twitter took that too. It's so bad honestly - I went looking for new button images to use and some webcomics that I know did have buttons to use no longer do.
So for some of the links on this new page, I have taken it upon myself to make buttons for sites that don't have them. I will of course update them with official buttons if I have the opportunity. As an aside, the buttons on that page are all randomly ordered within their respective categories. (Javascript allowing.) My hope with that is to avoid it feeling like any one page has any more importance than the others.
When it comes to Cohost, I don't really have anything I think I can say that anyone else hasn't already said. I found its longform blogging much more flexible than the state of much of the internet. Its lack of "numbers" also, while not always effective, was at least an honourable endeavour.
The place wasn't without its bullshit drama and discourse, but it contained familiar faces that I enjoyed seeing around. I'm not fond of this internet where we're all shoved into the same places using the same formats, even as I myself am not immune to pushing people to join X or Y service with me.
I dearly want the smaller personal internet back. We can't all be on websites with the same millions of others. Not only do these singular websites slowly take away the things that make things feel homely and welcoming, we simply don't all have the same needs or wants out of those websites. Having personal websites can help that.
I may in the future backport some worthwhile posts from there to here, or at least the game-dev ones. But for now I wanted to get the links page going.
... I ought to work out the best way to add comments too.
The RSS feed is working again.
I don't really have anything more to say about it other than god am so tired of the modern internet.
Being a creative is a curse, I swear, sometimes.
I was talking with a friend about Witness to Unity, and struggling with some mechanical and structural thoughts I had for it. Specifically around its calendar/day-night system.
I started thinking about it again after watching a little of Metaphor's demo gameplay, and I saw it had a five day calendar system. If I was going to extend WTU's gameplay loop to try and balance out some pacing issues I was worrying about, maybe I didn't have to even have seven days in a week! However this gets into other tricky factors about WTU, and that is by its nature of a world-hopping story.
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christ.
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For a long time now I've wanted to write a big post about the direction Witness to Unity has taken since I previously properly discussed it, sometime in 2016. The problem with this is oh god that's such a long time. So much has changed in its design and code direction. I don't know if I even have it in me to write a proper rundown for each element, so maybe I'll just bullet-point it.
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As much as I think I could create a persona/demon fusion system for this Two Halves Persona concept, the problem in the end is a matter of scope. Even after limiting the number of personas and tiers per arcana to manegable levels, I still had 100 personas to create — that’s art assets, coding their skills/builds, and then balancing them.
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The thing about damage calculation is you kinda have to feel it out by vibes. You want increasing stats by certain amounts to feel like a noticeable difference in your damage output, whether that's +1 or +10, or anything else. But to achieve this, it feels like you need to write damage formula and then shape everything else around it and hope for the best.
Which is a problem if you reach a point or come back to it later and the vibes are off.
I'm presently struggling with looking at Witness To Unity's damage formula and thinking... this thing seems a mess. I'm multiplying or dividing the stats a lot just to get things into the "shape" I want, and maybe that's bad? I'm not sure how to explain this, so I'll start with how the stats and all currently work.
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So since Witness to Unity uses a “side-view battle system”, it means I need to have animations mirror depending on where they’re coming from. Unfortunately, RPG Maker XP does not even have under the hood ability to understand this, because it was front-view by default. (VXAce meanwhile added some unused variables for scripters to make use of that made this sort of thing easier.)
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