invelica

i kind of want to go to a concept cafe (tl note: concept cafes are maid cafes but if you replaced "maid" with any other word) and cuddle some cute robots today but I could also put that money towards touhou labyrinth on steam

touhou labyrinth is obviously My Game because not only did I play it in CS class in college, I contributed to the first English fanpatch in college and I have stupid ass DRPG numbers brain and like to think about Hieda no Akyuu, and 99% of the reason I've been avoiding it is because it feels like the Gran Turismo 5 of DRPGs to me in that I'd love to play Gran Turismo 5 but I already played six other gran turismos, and shouldn't I be spending that game time broadening my game horizons (PS HOLY SHIT DISTANT FUTURE ARC IN LIVE A LIVE)

(you can reply and say "you know you spent so little this week you can do both right")

hey so I've been playing LIVE A LIVE (it's great) and I have one really, really big question: why is the Prehistory Era fight music Magical Sound Shower because holy shit

ferrari f40 btw

I take pride in doing Weirdposts that summarize a very simple concept (I forgot CCJ was not Not Horny) in as many characters as possible, so here you go

a lot of the most successful game making tools for beginners are genre specific - stuff like Ren'Py (visual novels), Twine (interactive fiction), PuzzleScript (sokoban-likes), RPG maker (c'mon), and so on. even when these tools are subverted towards a different end - e.g. RPG maker horror games - the genre foundation provides a language to work with that's more intuitive to someone just starting out in game development.

from what i've seen, action games genres don't really have equivalent tools - or at least as popular ones? if i'm wrong let me know, but it seems like most of that stuff is still relegated to more generalized tools like game maker. part of this might be that action games are just a little finickier and more granular in nature in a way that resists toolage. and actually, when i think about it, the closest thing to what i'm thinking about might have been like... game maker 8 or klik and play, which there doesn't seem to be a modern equivalent of?

at any rate, i feel like watching the course of amateur game development over the last couple decades the arc has bent away from actiony stuff to more narrative stuff, and at a distance it seems like a good part of that is attributable to what the accessible tools are at the time. of course there's nothing wrong with narrative stuff !! but 2d action stuff can be a rich space for people just starting out, and i suspect closer to what some people want to make when they imagine making games. i'd love to see what a hobbyist scene where making a masocore platformer or a shmup was as easy to jump into as a bitsy game would look like

this is a freeware STG creation tool, created and maintained by a lone Japanese dev since the late '00s, that has been used to create dozens of free and indie STG for PC and, by way of Hanaji Games' home-spun wrapper, Switch: http://blog.livedoor.jp/stgbuilder/ 🇯🇵

Here are some of the more noteworthy recent games made with this engine:

• the Mecha Ritz series (latest version available on PC and Switch)
• GRAND CROSS: ReNOVATION (PC)
• Andro Dunos II (PC only; the console versions were converted to different code by the publisher)
• Dezatopia (PC - Switch)
• the many free works of zakichi, which include Kaikan, Vastynex and the just-released WEXEW MEXEM, among many others
• Rangerdog (PC - Switch)
• Graze Counter (PC; the recent sequel Graze Counter GM runs on Game Maker)

The engine was supposed to have been sunset in favour of a successor many years ago, but that new version's been in dev limbo for years, so people have continued to chip away with the classic version; even so, those attempting commercial dev have largely felt pressured into adopting more "professional" engines (in no small part due to there being no innate support for consoles), so there's a sense that STGBuilder's days are numbered. (EDIT: hold that!)

There is one big STGBuilder project still on the horizon: Devil Blade, a game being made by Vanillaware artist Shigatake in his spare time, which has been in the works for several years and seems like it might finally be done sometime within the next ~ 12 months.

(Incidentally, Devil Blade is the latest game in a series of home-made STG dating back to the mid-'90s that were built using Dezaemon, a modestly popular series of STG-maker software released across Famicom, Super Famicom, Sega Saturn, Nintendo 64 and Playstation—quite a few of STGBuilder's most active users have direct ties to the Dezaemon scene, as it happens.)