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Parallax was only ever a tacked-on feature I added to the smooth scrolling script. I've always felt that both features would be better off built-in to the engine, and I'm sure there are much more efficient ways of scripting it than my attempt. So, for the record, I won't be offended if someone decides to make my module completely redundant (as, I think, other module writers are doing/have done!).

It's the end of an era! But clearly the right decision, and one that can't have been easy to make. It remains a lovely portfolio of pixel art backgrounds.

I haven't played Contact.EXE yet, but I did play the dev's ARG game from last year's jam and I thought it was excellent (except for one bit that totally stumped me and I had to ask Ari for help). It's a similar idea, you have a distorted recording and a PDF and you have to make sense of some Pacific Northwest-style weirdness:

https://secretfoxfire.itch.io/the-haunted-track

Maybe I just enjoy codes too much, but it felt like giving you a chance to do the kind of raw detective work that adventure games often don't give you the freedom to do.

Also worth looking at is PowerQuest from Powerhoof: https://powerhoof.itch.io/powerquest

It's a name-your-price Unity plugin and I've seen it used in Intergalactic Wizard Force, which certainly feels AGS-y from a player's POV.

I think there's - arguably - some correlation between stupidity and reactionary politics.

Does it bother anyone else that whether or not you're for or against vaccination is tied to your political beliefs?
What if I don't want to get vaccinated but like the idea of socialized healthcare?

Why would you expect things that are of great political significant to be unconnected to people's political beliefs? I would expect people who are in favour of socialised healthcare generally to be in favour of mass vaccination, because both involve state intervention in the interest of public health. Of course, people do hold views that aren't self consistent. But it's weird to think of political opinions as existing in a vacuum.

I upset a few of the people who backed a game I made on Kickstarter, because I promised a DRM-free version. But GOG wouldn't accept it (boo) so the publisher and I were stumped about how to distribute it.

Our final decision was to have an old-fashioned 90s-style serial number at the start of the game if you bought it directly from the publisher. (Not as a realistic barrier against piracy, they just didn't want an open link that anyone could just access without even logging in.) I didn't regard this as DRM, because I thought it predated the entire concept of DRM, it didn't require an internet connection, and it didn't stop you doing any of the things you could do with a game downloaded from GOG. Naturally, some DRM critics disagreed.

So I learned 2 things - don't promise things if you aren't very, very confident you can deliver. And also, the opinions of a tiny minority of gamers about Steam/DRM are valid, but largely inconsequential. Devoting significant resources to pleasing them would be a mistake.

Don't have itch.io, so no Jam for me. 

It's free to create an itch.io account, so the jam is open to everybody. Unless you have a particular issue with itch.io?

OTOH, I don't do Discord, so I might contribute a submission, but there's nothing where I could sign up beforehand.

You can sign up right now by clicking Join Jam on the page. That way you can get notifications when submissions open and close. The Discord is entirely optional!

BUMP!

Since Covid has scuppered our hopes of running an in-person AdventureX in 2021, we're holding another narrative game jam starting on Nov 13th! If you fancy it, sign up here:

https://itch.io/jam/advxjam2021

I love all the abstract stuff. Is anyone here using Blender for 2D animation? I'm very impressed with the new Grease Pencil tools, and with new features like interpolation I could see it working really well for creating point and click animation without having to shell out for something like Toonboom.

I should add that none of these voice actors are so distracting I think it would work to the detriment of the game.

I'm afraid I would probably switch the VO off, so if budget is very tight I would suggest not casting voice actors at all. It can be a huge hassle and if you're working in a second language, proof-reading might be more helpful.

Truth is that natives will always be able to identify if the person speaking is native or not (there might be exceptions though).

I remember Chloe Moretz and Claire Danes both having very convincing English accents.

There are good pragmatic arguments for eating meat, especially in parts of the world where its easier to grow things like grass, that livestock eat but humans can't. And there are compelling environmental arguments for dramatically reducing, but not eliminating, the meat we eat. I haven't heard a strong moral argument for eating meat, though.

Fair enough! RP means Received Pronunciation. It's the (somewhat euphemistic) term for 'proper' English or 'BBC' English. So it is what you're looking for if you're casting an upper class character from 1937. Good luck!

I don't think any of them sound like natural RP English, I'm afraid. V is the best, but it sounds like a parody posh voice to me.

A doesn't sound British, and she reads 127 as "one hundred twenty seven" not "one hundred and twenty seven" which is a giveaway. B is clearly American / American-influenced English.

I would suggest auditioning actually British actors, sorry!

No, it doesn't mean that we should assume rocks feel pleasure and pain. How do we know that a living human feels pain but a dead human doesn't? We have no access to their inner state. It's simply that living humans tend to act as if they experience pain. Just like animals, especially mammals do.

So you're saying that we can never be *certain* about the inner states of others? Sure, I agree. But that's very, very different from saying that our knowledge of their states is *exactly zero*, don't you think?

Perhaps my oblique reference to David Hume made things less clear than I thought! I am saying that we have no knowledge of people's internal states. We make inferences about how they feel based on a variety of impressions they make on our senses. We don't know that other humans feel pain in the way we know we feel pain. And exactly the same is true with animals. Maybe we are talking past each other, and I probably don't know enough about neurobiology to comment. But I suspect that our understanding of how pain works in the brain depends on our experience of how pain is expressed. How much can we learn from a brain that isn't attached to a living thing going 'ouch'?

I think what LameNick and I are getting at is that - yes - we are projecting our experience onto animals. Or, at least, interpreting their behaviour though the lens of our experience. But (and I think David Hume got to this point first) we have exactly the same knowledge of other humans' internal states as we do animals - that is, absolutely none.

Doesn’t this mean that it’s equally reasonable to assume a rock has the same internal states as you as it is that another human does? Wouldn’t it render statements like „I'd be prepared to accept that insects are incapable of thought or feeling, but there does seem to be some kind of emergent intelligence in swarms of insects“ completely irrelevant? Could you make a case for eating plants with this notion in mind?

No, it doesn't mean that we should assume rocks feel pleasure and pain. How do we know that a living human feels pain but a dead human doesn't? We have no access to their inner state. It's simply that living humans tend to act as if they experience pain. Just like animals, especially mammals do. Of course, that means we're likely to misinterpret the behaviour of living things that are dissimilar to us. But I think making a moral distinction between humans and species is completely arbitrary.

I can't make an argument that it is ethical to eat plants, only that it's more obviously unethical to eat animals.

This is a bit similar to the above. You say "a significantly more intelligent alien", but I suspect you are thinking of aliens as just a different kind of humans. If aliens wanted to schmoozle my grom-tron or collapse the wave function of my subatomic particles or do some other super-intelligent alien thing I have no conception or awareness of, I think I wouldn't mind.

No, this is exactly what I mean - an alien with a type of consciousness that's beyond my comprehension, an alien that is to me as I am to bacteria. I still don't want to to be eaten (or schmoozled) on the grounds that I lack some ineffable alien quality. I honestly don't believe you'd be happy about it either.

I think what LameNick and I are getting at is that - yes - we are projecting our experience onto animals. Or, at least, interpreting their behaviour though the lens of our experience. But (and I think David Hume got to this point first) we have exactly the same knowledge of other humans' internal states as we do animals - that is, absolutely none.

I don't exactly elevate octopuses above other invertebrates, what I meant is they show a lot of "circumstantial" evidence for consciousness, despite having completely different brain structure than us. You find something relatable because some observations better fit your template of your behaviors, that still doesn't necessarily mean that those that don't are not sentient. The idea that it is something like to be a fly that feels some sort of anxiety when a hand is approaching to slap it or pain when someone is trying to tear it's leg off seems not that improbable to me.

I tend to agree with LameNick. I'd be prepared to accept that insects are incapable of thought or feeling, but there does seem to be some kind of emergent intelligence in swarms of insects, so I don't feel too thrilled at the (possibly inevitable) prospect of farming them for consumption en masse.

My rule of thumb is that - if an argument would permit a significantly more intelligent alien to eat me, it's a troubling justification for eating something.

I don't eat meat, but I think there are a lot of extremely bad arguments made for and against.

I am persuaded by the moral argument that animals don't want to be eaten, so we shouldn't eat them, whenever possible. The health argument is, for me, the weakest. I'm a vegan, but a vegan diet is not the healthiest diet imaginable. It does not, as people on the internet will claim, detox your body or cure cancer. Health-fad veganism tends towards a semi-religious obsession with bodily purity, and I think it encourages disordered eating. The most broadly persuasive argument, for me, is that we all need to eat a lot less meat for environmental reasons. Plant-based diets are much more sustainable (not without environmental impact, of course) and so everyone who can cut down on meat should, even if they have no thought of becoming vegetarian.

It's tricky, because we prefer to imagine that what's good is good. Eating meat is wrong, so being vegan must be healthier - not necessarily. Battery farming is unethical so it must be worse for the environment - unfortunately, not necessarily. Organic beef farming does not seem to have a smaller environmental impact.

The remodelling looks great. If this is the right place for feedback - I can't get the "This site uses cookies to enhance user experience" popup to go away on Chrome/Windows 10. Clicking OK doesn't do anything.

EDIT: Sorry!