Duke Reivier's Grand Game Emporium

Hello. I am, once again, writing about the To the Moon series. No, don't be alarmed, I'm not here to yell about how bad the games are (though it'd be more accurate to call them interactive stories, and I shall simply call them stories from now on). Just to contemplate on my relationship with them and how it has changed over the years. I will quickly skip over my college years, as there's not much to say about them - back then, I was a big Kan Gao fanboy, and would've gladly indulged in anything he put out. I will briefly write about my first return to the fandom, back in late 2021 - I was immature back then, and the hype of people talking up To the Moon, the disappointment I had playing it, and the frustration when I realized that story's success had put Quintessence: The Blighted Venom's development on a long pause, alongside some bad real life experiences all combined to make me a rather toxic person. It also didn't help that I felt people on the Freeb...

Here's what I have so far: Level 1: Level 2: Level 3: Level 4: Level 5: Level 6: This post will be updated as I make more of these, look out for it! And yes, I do plan to map and label the whole game.

 I found the rare good Youtube video that covers this topic well:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGPUFVgvJ1k . But, to continue my point, all creation, be it of art or of more mundane use, requires discipline, focus, and a good understanding of the medium and the topic at hand. Certain tools may be able to speed up aspects of this, such as RPG Maker providing its own art assets and handling most of the requisite code for an RPG, but they can't make up for the lack of these qualities - see also the many sloppy RPG Maker titles that flood digital storefronts. The only true way to gain them is through practice, and through clarity of mind. Hence, the best way to create things is to start creating them, and to not worry about how good or bad the end result is, and to keep an open mind and develop a clear purpose and direction in your head. Hope this helps!

 There is often a tendency to treat people as though they have one defined set of traits. In reality, people are often a collection of many disparate traits, and exhibit different traits depending on their circumstances. Someone who is nice while conversing to you could very well be rude and abrasive to their children, or furious when provoked or disagreed with. Someone who makes a show of being extremely open minded can in fact be quite narrow minded when introduced to ideas they personally disagree with. The best way to judge character, thus, is not to pass judgement based on how you perceive them, but to attempt to understand their point of view and see how they react based on circumstance. Approaching them directly can also work, provided you don't provoke their hostility and present an open minded stance. Of course, this is not to say that all behavior should be tolerated or bad behavior shouldn't be punished, but it should be accompanied with a genuine attempt to understa...

 There was a time when I used to be insistent on people "getting" stories, or its equally toxic brother, stories needing to conform to some grand standard to be truly "good". It turns out both are wrong. There's neither a "right" way to read a story, nor a "right" way to write one. What people pose as the "right" way is just a technical guide, and while that has value, in terms of providing a basic guideline, taking it too seriously only serves to create unnecessary friction while discussing stories. It is much healthier and fulfilling to be receptive both to different kinds of art, as well as to the width and breath of interpretation.

 Does anyone else think they're bullshit? I mean, what kind of "creative expression" is being defended by copyrighting code anyhow? All code is, is a means of solving logical and technical "puzzles" to get computers to do the things you want them to do. And I bet that if all code was made open source, nothing would be lost. On the contrary, it would improve software development by orders of magnitude. But I suppose it would cut down on coder jobs, and many people do struggle to get good jobs these days. Eh.

 Open mindedness is generally a good thing, but it's also among the most misunderstood principles. The point about open mindedness is not to permit every opinion or to forbid people from expressing "bad" opinions, it's to promote the acceptance of humanity.  So, for example, racist opinions are "bad" not because there's a divine code stating so, but because racists are generally against the acceptance of humanity and want to impose a hierarchy on it. On the flip side, people using "open mindedness" to censor "bad" opinions on, say, fiction, are also applying the principle incorrectly, because they've just decided that the people having different opinions from them are "wrong", thus subconsciously applying a hierarchy to humanity. This is also key to applying it correctly when dealing with tangled issues, like talking about the sexism prevalent in some portions of Islam without coming off as an Islamophobe or talking abou...