Duke Reivier's Grand Game Emporium

 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...

 Since I am halfway through Final Fantasy Tactics, I feel compelled to write about its class system, and compare it to how its predecessor, Tactics Ogre, handled the mechanic. Obviously, I should clarify that I've clearly not reached the "end" of the former's class tree, and my opinion could change in light of new revelations. But, having seen a fair share of this game's classes, and how they work in practice. I feel qualified enough to write this piece. Final Fantasy Tactics Classes, In A Nutshell The basic mechanics behind the class system are deeply layered, yet simultaneously oddly simple. Each character, barring certain special characters, starts out either in a basic fighter class (Squire) or a basic healer class (Chemist). Progression from these starting points is obtained in one of two ways: In the first, the player expends skillpoints to unlock skills from the class' skillset. Skills, broadly speaking, come in four types: a. Active skills, skills that...

 Those who are aware of Suikoden 2's plot need little introduction to Jowy, and little convincing that he is a charlatan of the highest degree. His "career" is marked by little that isn't deception or underhanded murder, and he ends up pointlessly dragging out a destructive war that ends with his kingdom being decisively defeated by a stronger opposing force, led by the hero himself. Yet, strangely, I found the scene where he got redeemed and forgiven of all his sins oddly striking and appealing. So I decided to do a little soul searching and figure out exactly what about this scene impressed me so greatly. The idea of anybody being capable of redemption is of course nothing new. Many religions have stories talking about how even the most vile of people were saved by, of course, turning a new leaf and enthusiastically adopting the tenets of the religion narrating the story. The idea presented in these is fairly straightforward, both in explanation and appeal - redempt...

 Yesterday, I was talking about the classic Fallout games' openings with a friend of mine, and we both arrived at an uncannily accurate observation: most RPGs in general, no matter the developer or the culture it came from, have terrible, or at best mediocre openings that don't exactly put their best feet forward, compromising either on the gameplay with really long expository or story centric scenes, or on the story with an uninspired early dungeon featuring really weak enemies. Why is that? Well, I posed the question to a few places, and came across what I think is a comprehensive answer: 1. I credit my friend for bringing this point up, but essentially RPGs find themselves needing to come up with good reasons for their characters to be adventuring the world instead of going on with their regular lives at home, like regular people. This imposes certain narrative limitations, as there's a very limited width of explanations that satisfactorily meet this need, and often RPG ...