💾 Archived View for ythraverse.xyz › gemlog › entries › 240811.gmi captured on 2024-08-31 at 11:34:09. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2024-08-18)
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In what's turning into a weekly ritual of sorts, it's time for another gemlog post! Someday I hope to have more interesting things to post than random musings and ramblings, but in what is becoming a tired refrain, work keeps me busy and fatigued, so progress on all things creative is much slower than I'd like.
Usual complaints aside, on to the random musings and ramblings.
First, some personal journaling things. I was hoping for a fairly relaxing and uneventful week, but life had other ideas in store. As always, I'll keep the details somewhat vague, since I do post these publicly and I want to preserve some anonymity, while nonetheless still being able to write about personal life events when I feel like it.
There was a bit of a medical emergency as my dad exhibited some symptoms that looked potentially pre-heart attack, which I learned Wednesday after work when I got a phone call from him. I drove up to the town where my parents live (which is only about a half hour away from me) to keep him and my mom company at the hospital. It really went to show how poor the general quality of healthcare is, since the hospital kept him there all day without really doing much, just keeping him waiting in a room on an uncomfortable exam bed while they did other things most of the day. If one were feeling charitable, I suppose one could spectulate that they were badly understaffed. Regardless, it didn't make for a very good Wednesday evening, but the good news ("good" news) is the cause of his symptoms turned out to be nothing life-threatening, but rather blood clots in the lungs, which they were eventually able to dissolve, and now he'll be on blood thinners for the next six months. Not ideal, but much better than imminent heart failure.
Then Thursday and Friday ended up having lots of work drama, which I won't get into the details of, other than to say that, setting aside one positive development (at least there's one), work conditions have continued to deteriorate throughout the year. It is an odd character trait of mine that I handle crisis situations rather well, but the daily grind of working an unpleasant job really wears me down more than it seems like it does for many people. Though that thankfully leads me to two positive developments:
1. I'm going on vacation in a week. Sorely needed. I hope I get in lots of relaxation and fulfilling, productive progress on personal creative projects, get caught up on chores, errands, and exercise, and in general get nice and recharged for a while.
2. A former coworker of mine who has been interested in scouting me for a position at his new company, and has for months been saying that a position would open up, recently contacted me again to say that said position should be posting soon. Given that this position would likely entail an enormous raise over what I currently make, and that my current job has really been a drag even more than usual for a while now, I can't help but hope that the new position does post and that I'm able to land the job. Plus I like this former coworker and it would be cool to work with him again (though having said that, recent drama aside, I do generally like my current crop of coworkers as well, at least in my own team). But I also feel that it's dangerous to get my hopes up since that often means setting oneself up for disappointment. Regardless, I'm going to kind of feel like I'm waiting "in abeyance" until I know for sure whether this opportunity panned out or not, so no matter the outcome, I'm going to be glad once it's finally resolved.
Last post, I mentioned seeing if I could set up some kind of solo campaign that I could create using a simplified version of my home-grown fantasy tabletop RPG system VanVan and regularly post adventures to my capsule. I made significant strides toward that goal this week, though I ended up not simplifying the rules so much as just taking a subset of the available options, and then I sketched out a campaign, had AI generate some art
(aside: this is of course a polarizing decision in and of itself -- and I'm actually a reasonably capable artist myself so, strictly speaking, I don't *have* to have AI generate art for me -- but the time savings are absolutely *enormous*, and with good prompts, doing multiple iterations and selecting the best results, and using said artistic abilities to do some cleanup edits where appropriate, the art generated by AI is actually quite good, so personally I have no issue with people using AI-generated art to enhance their projects as long as it's done responsibly),
and drew a "world map" for the campaign area (which actually only encompasses a region some 100 miles across, so "world" map does not quite capture the scale accurately) plus a dungeon map for the first adventure. All in all, great progress for one work week.
As one might grasp from this description, this project will be a bit more involved than a mere choose-your-own-adventure with "light" game elements, as the game elements are in fact quite full, and will entail having the player conduct full-scale tactical battles using provided battle maps and character/monster tokens, with simple "algorithms" to describe how the monsters should behave -- at least, if the player wants the full experience.
But there will also be a significant choose-your-own-adventure element as well, which means lots and lots of interlinked Gemini documents. Doing all this manually by hand sounds like a right pain, so my next major action item will be coming up with some kind of data format and script where I can write out the adventure flow and then run the script to automatically generate a set of properly linked Gemini documents. In total, the remaining todo list before I can start actually posting this content is:
1. Create the Gemini-generating script;
2. Write a document explaining how the basic rules of VanVan work;
3. Playtest and tweak the first adventure.
On the upside, unlike R-Knight, VanVan has been extensively playtested by a lot of people (a lot by the standards of a personal project that is, which is to say over a dozen) and already proven itself to be fun, so I don't need to worry that I'm going to end up with something that's not even fun to play after all this work.
Very volatile week. Stocks dumped hard on Monday, apparently thanks in part to the unwinding of the yen carry trade, then bounced around for the whole week and have reclaimed much of their losses. I bought the dip and then sold into the rally, so my own losses were very minimal. Now I'm starting to rotate into bonds because I find the thesis that the Federal Reserve is going to start cutting interest rates over the next few quarters, which should be good for bond prices, to be pretty compelling. But being the very cautious sort I am, the vast majority of my portfolio remains in cash collecting a safe 5% with my broker. As for whether the worst of the market sell-off is over or there's further downside ahead, no one knows, but it won't matter to me either way.
I don't know whether this will become a regular feature of my capsule or just be a one-off thing, but after linking the soundtrack to Dragon's Crown last post, I decided to write more about the game. Developed by Vanillaware in 2013 and released on the PS Vita and PS3, I got it for my Vita. Dragon's Crown is a very D&D-esque side-scrolling fantasy beat-em-up in the vein of Chronicles of Mystara or Golden Axe. Its similarities with the latter give me nostalgia for my childhood when I would play Golden Axe with my brother, but Dragon's Crown is frankly a much better game.
There are six characters to choose from: the Fighter, Dwarf, Amazon, Elf, Wizard, and Sorceress, each with their own moveset and gameplay styles. You can play solo or with up to three friends, who can be either human or AI-controlled. As a beat-em-up, the game is very action-heavy and can get quite chaotic when playing with a full party of four; there are also some light roleplaying elements. I love multiplayer co-op games like this and wish there were more of them.
There's also a narrator (who I believe you have different voices to choose from for) who describes things as though he (or she) were a Dungeon Master which also contributes to the feeling that you're playing a D&D campaign, which is pretty cool.
The stages are wide and varied, from forests to sewers and caves to ruins and ancient fortresses -- the usual gamut of fantasy RPG locations. The monsters are likewise varied and incorporate most of the classics, inspired more by Western RPGs (as mentioned, the game is very transparently D&D-inspired) than their Japanese counterparts. The boss fights are especially spectacular and the bosses are often gigantic, with foes such as giant chimeras, medusae, cyclopes, archdemons, "gazers" (renamed beholders), and of course dragons. The music is excellent (hence why I linked it in my previous post), and the game has a hand-painted artstyle that is both beautiful and highly distinctive.
Though speaking of the artstyle, I would perhaps be remiss if I didn't mention that the game attracted some controversy when it came out owing to what might clinically be described as cartoonishly exaggerated secondary sexual characteristics on some of the character designs (primarily the sorceress and amazon) and in some of the event art. Now, I'm not one of those neo-Puritans who needs to get out smelling salts and a fainting couch in the face of "sexualized" character designs -- I'm more likely to appreciate having something attractive to look at while I play -- but I'll acknowledge that taken too far it can be in poor taste (and after a certain point there's a boomerang effect where it stops being attractive and just becomes trashy anyway), and watching the amazon and sorceress' sprite animations I can see why some people would raise an eyebrow. The sorceress in particular is the "bounciest" character I've ever seen in a videogame; in some of her animations it's so over the top as to mostly just be cartoonishly absurd in a slapstick way. I believe even the sprite animator himself later said he might have gone a little overboard with some of the animations. All of which is to say, YMMV and if a cartoonishly well-endowed sorceress bouncing all over the screen sounds like a turn-off to you, you'll probably want to stay away from this one.
Nonetheless, it's been probably a decade since I've played this game and lately I find myself wanting to dig it out again. I think it might be available on the PS5's online marketplace, and so far I've gotten so little use out of my PS5 that it's been a pretty wasted purchase, so maybe on my vacation I'll see if the game is available and if so, buy it (again) and give it a whirl.
There's plenty of footage of the game on Youtube. For example, here's a playthrough using the elf:
Dragon's Crown Elf Playthrough
Well, that's a wrap for today. One more week to my vacation. I can do it...!