![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
terryclothSly 3: Disappointingly short. Not *actually* short, mind you, at least not for a platformer (they tend to be pretty short), but it turned out that the percentage counter you'd see between levels wasn't 'percentage done' it was 'percentage completion' in the sense that I finished the game at about 52%.
Over the Hedge: So I decided to play another game with a raccoon main character. It has some bad things... the characters are all the same, the default volume settings have the soundtrack drowning out everything else, and some of the voice acting is sloppy (but not painfully bad or anything). Also, the big obvious sign that 'this is an enemy' is the sparkly electric mind control helmet they all wear, while the big obvious sign that 'this enemy is defeated' is the circle of sparkling stars around their head. Damned if I can tell them apart, especially for the smaller ones. It seems to be a decent game, though. Reasonable variety of enemies, some puzzly bits, etc.
4th of July: I got drunk way too early, so by the time it was actually time for fireworks I was (a) still too drunk to drive, and (b) hung over. So, no fireworks for me this year either.
I spent much of the day brooding over the possibility of coming up with an array of twenty elements. Preferably, 20 elements of equal relevance, evenly arranged... elemental decomposition is all about slicing up the space of all things into X 'fundamental' items. X is an arbitrary number you can choose however you want. I already had an excel sheet with breakdowns of 4, 6, 8, and 12 elements (the 12 element one was pretty cool, because they were sort of 'social' elements -- things like freedom and economics).
The first attempt was a hideous failure. I started with two 'poles' of the d20 and spread from there, and ended up with opposite pairs along the lines of 'poison and puzzles'. It made no freaking sense.
The second attempt... well, I think I might be on the right track. A better way to think of a d20 is to think of a cube, where the points of the cube and the edges are all faces. That means that if the 8-element set wasn't so LAME, I'd be able to just extend it... but the 8 element set was pretty lame. However, it does meant that if I can come up with three fundamental axes, I just need to identify elements that go with combinations of them and I'm done.
It makes sense to start with the two classical axes: wet/dry and hot/cold. The first talks about whether the element tends to conform to its surroundings, or whether it holds a shape of its own and shapes its surroundings. The second talks about whether the element accentuates the differences between things and drives them apart, or accentuates the similarities and pulls things together.
Wet+Cold = Water
Wet+Hot = Air
Dry+Cold = Earth
Dry+Hot = Fire
I have no idea what a third axis would be, though.
Also, the cube arrangement misses a couple of the connections that a d20 has, and without accounting for that I won't be able to rotate the cube to swap the edges and faces like I should.
Over the Hedge: So I decided to play another game with a raccoon main character. It has some bad things... the characters are all the same, the default volume settings have the soundtrack drowning out everything else, and some of the voice acting is sloppy (but not painfully bad or anything). Also, the big obvious sign that 'this is an enemy' is the sparkly electric mind control helmet they all wear, while the big obvious sign that 'this enemy is defeated' is the circle of sparkling stars around their head. Damned if I can tell them apart, especially for the smaller ones. It seems to be a decent game, though. Reasonable variety of enemies, some puzzly bits, etc.
4th of July: I got drunk way too early, so by the time it was actually time for fireworks I was (a) still too drunk to drive, and (b) hung over. So, no fireworks for me this year either.
I spent much of the day brooding over the possibility of coming up with an array of twenty elements. Preferably, 20 elements of equal relevance, evenly arranged... elemental decomposition is all about slicing up the space of all things into X 'fundamental' items. X is an arbitrary number you can choose however you want. I already had an excel sheet with breakdowns of 4, 6, 8, and 12 elements (the 12 element one was pretty cool, because they were sort of 'social' elements -- things like freedom and economics).
The first attempt was a hideous failure. I started with two 'poles' of the d20 and spread from there, and ended up with opposite pairs along the lines of 'poison and puzzles'. It made no freaking sense.
The second attempt... well, I think I might be on the right track. A better way to think of a d20 is to think of a cube, where the points of the cube and the edges are all faces. That means that if the 8-element set wasn't so LAME, I'd be able to just extend it... but the 8 element set was pretty lame. However, it does meant that if I can come up with three fundamental axes, I just need to identify elements that go with combinations of them and I'm done.
It makes sense to start with the two classical axes: wet/dry and hot/cold. The first talks about whether the element tends to conform to its surroundings, or whether it holds a shape of its own and shapes its surroundings. The second talks about whether the element accentuates the differences between things and drives them apart, or accentuates the similarities and pulls things together.
Wet+Cold = Water
Wet+Hot = Air
Dry+Cold = Earth
Dry+Hot = Fire
I have no idea what a third axis would be, though.
Also, the cube arrangement misses a couple of the connections that a d20 has, and without accounting for that I won't be able to rotate the cube to swap the edges and faces like I should.
