How do you feel about Time loops, dear reader? Does the monotony of the same day over and over and over bore you to tears? Or does the hope to fix your mistakes blind you to the truth that the loop is whispering?
START AGAIN: a prologue has multiple endings, and is based on a series of short comics.
Providing a swift kick in the chest and eyes full of tears, you follow Siffrin in this story in the second person, and meet friends to help you on your quest.
Defeat monsters as you learn about the loop that has trapped you in it’s claws!
With an art style taken straight out of middle-aged engravings, this game is a fun twist on the recipe-style order games that litter both the mobile market and early 2000’s PC games.
In it you can create your own recipes, help the town, and interact with the customers going through your shop.
The game offers customization of your shop and an art style that immerses you entirely in your role as town alchemist.
There are a few ways to create the ultimate evil for your DnD (or other media) game!
The Standard
Choose from the prototypes of any popular mass media for the skeleton to build your villain off of!
The common tropes in media range from Evil boss to Mass-murdering maniac. The general tropes for a simple villain include a sad backstory, a tendency for murder, and a longing to take over the world by violent means.
The way to impart your generic villain’s actions is to really expand on the scope of their evil deeds. Don’t just mention the widespread destruction, but show it and its aftereffects. Have the village that your players were going to head to be torn apart, have the most trusted villagers mention their hatred of the Big Bad, and how the villain affected them and their livelihoods.
The Foil
Examine your player characters and their motivations. Pick what drives them, and craft a villain that wants something similar, but does it in a completely different way than your player characters.
You can craft a foil from characters the player(s) already know, and they don’t even have to start as antagonists. With the foil, you can also grow their powers/abilities/fear-factor along with the players, to help with scaling their end-game “badness” level.
Worldly type
This is a villain built out of the world you have created. What would mess up the world you have created? What ideology would cause the collapse of the society you have? What is the worst case magical/supernatural/scientific scenario?
Say your world has a heavy dependency on a particular resource: the villain can hoard it, or they could seek to destroy all of it.
Hypnotizing with it’s elegant minimalism, the spray of numbers and times across the screen a soothing balm to the organized mind. It’s the base form of a puzzle game, meant to challenge you and engage you, driving you to do better than yourself, to improve times, and techniques, and flourish in one of the most classic forms of transportation: the Train on the Rail Road.
The Game engages with that base videogame urge to watch numbers go up, to streamline your new ability to the best of your power.
Upgrade your trains and railways, solve the puzzles given, and even build your own Railways. Edit and Automate your maps to create the smoothest ride anyone’s ever seen in Rail Route: Train Dispatcher Simulator.
Basic World building: Major locations and the breadcrumbs that will lead your players there.
Some starter quest for your players to introduce them to the world or situations you want them to face. This will also serve as a way to help your players figure out the beginnings of where they want to take their characters.
Your Players
Ready by session One:
Character sheets– These can be done as a group (as a “session 0”), or individually with the DM
Backstory– Informed by the world, they can intersect with those of other characters. It might be good to remind your players that the backstory is essentially a “Prologue” to the campaign.
Your Vibes
Ready by session One:
Prospective playlist for encounters: the specifics of which will be up to you. Some DMs like background music, others prefer the actual sounds that could feasibly be on the journey. For music, Video game OSTs can provide what you need. For Sounds, there are YouTube videos with things like 10 hours of ship noises, or failing that, you can look at customizable ambience sites.
Playlists helps your crew get in the mood, and can help with immersion in the story, depending on how you play it.
“Gris is a hopeful young girl lost in her own world, dealing with a painful experience in her life. Her journey through sorrow is manifested in her dress, which grants new abilities to better navigate her faded reality.” (from the Steam Page)
Art, Music, and its deeply emotional storyline are GRIS’s selling points! The game is Simple to play, and also Short (around 4 hours total playtime). It has especially Ethereal artwork for a combined puzzle-platformer, with Tight color palettes that expand as the game continues.
Available on PC, Appstore, Switch, it has 38:1 positive to Negative reviews on Steam, which I think is pretty impressive.
A gorgeous take on the “walking game” genre, Season’s main themes are “Travel” and “Preservation”.
A stylized game rendered in nostalgic colors, it looks like a fairytale painting. Explore a dying world and collect what remains of a world of life and wonder.
From the offical site:
Document, photograph, draw, and record life. Through a solitary bicycle journey, form your own memories, your own vision of the world around you. Your goal? Protect these treasures from being forgotten. Your quest will lead you to discover a new world; unknown, yet familiar. You will be immersed in different societies that will make you discover the mysteries of the world of Season; a surreal version of the mid-twentieth century, where thousands of years have passed without any progress. Find out what caused the last collapse and what might cause the next one…
By Scavengers studio, due to be released this year on PC and Playstation.
Capitalizing on the Animal Crossing craze, this adorable game adds a haunting twist!
The lovely artwork is paired with a Real-time environment and missions to go on! There is more to do as more time passes, and game play starts at a half hour and builds to over 2 hours a day.
Cozy Grove is an easier and more character based alternative to animal crossing, and has mechanics reminiscent of Stardew Valley.
Decoration can influences your surroundings, and Item collecting is a relatively large part of gameplay. It’s Good for casual gamers , as it’s mechanics, by design, space out playtime.
With a ratio of 3 Positive reviews for every one negative on Steam, the game garners an 80% on MetaCritic. Most of the Negative reviews don’t care for the segmented, real time play style, rather than anything technical.
The art is light and whimsical, adding to the relaxing nature of the game, while the writing keeps you intrigued with each character’s story .
The game is available in 14 different languages. and on switch as well as PC!
3D platformer which acts as the debut platform for the Publisher Playtonic Friends, “Demon Turf” has a combination of 2D and 3D art. So far, some of the quirks include self-placed checkpoints and momentum-based battle.
It’s cute artstyle and unique designs show promise!
Demon Turf is planned to be released in 2021, a platformer for all ages!
In part 2, we’ll be using Excel, and the updated version of MS paint (Paint 3d)
Paint 3D
Open up paint 3d! You want to go to the Canvas tab, and switch the sizing from pixels to percent. Type in 30 for the width. Or you can put in the exact pixel size for your card. Pokemon cards are 718 x 1000 pixels.
Step 1
Next, click back to the brushes, select your color and use the bucket (fill) tool on your canvas!
Step 2
To help figure out what you want, and where, it’s helpful to outline with rectangles! Go to 2D shapes, Pick the rectangle option, drag a corner to grow to the size you want. Then, adjust your line thickness and color to your preference! If the rectangle is a whole shape, you can change it to an outline by changing the fill option to none.
Step 3
Instead of repeatedly clicking on the 2D shapes, you can use the clone tool. Click the left-most option, and drag the new shape to modify it as you wish!
Step 4
Next, play around with the text options! Make sure to click on the letter “T” in the option bar before clicking where you want to place the text.
Step 5
Adding the Image: Go to the Sticker tab, and click add sticker. This uses the images on your device, so you’d have to download the applicable images.
Alternatively, you can also copy + paste an image from online using your keyboard shortcuts.
Step 6
Save to your computer!
Step 7
Excel
Open up a new tap, and put in what text you want first! Make sure you have some space between the text. make sure there are two rows before the first line.
Step 1
Next, use the numbered and lettered rows and columns to adjust the sizes en-mass. Make A and C skinny- this will be the space between the edge of the card and the text.
Step 2
Select A2:C8, and use the bucket tool to fill the whole block in! This will be your base color!
Step 3
Next, select your text, and use the square button (it’s between the U and the bucket tool), and select the thick, outlined border.
Step 4
Select your card, and copy and paste it as much as you’d like! Then, select the lettered columns that correspond with the space-filling areas. Adjust the size of one, and it will affect the other highlighted columns.
Step 5
Repeat for the horizonal rows, including the text and description boxes.
