Who’s up for some Undertale?

I’m starting to learn why Gabe Newell is worth $9 billion USD: Steam sales. A few times a month, Valve will send you an email that some game on your wish list has temporarily dropped in price by 75%. Even if you had no intentions of buying the game in the short term, some part of your brain screams “but what they never drop the price again?!” and tries to yank your finger to the “add to cart” button. I’m trying to build up a resistance to it, but in the meantime one of those snap sales led me to finally purchase Undertale. It’s one of those metatextual games that tries to get you to think about what exactly you’re doing within a game. Just take the about page:

In this RPG, you don’t have to kill anyone.

Each enemy can be “defeated” nonviolently.

Dance with a slime. Pet a dog. Whisper your favorite secret to a knight.

Or, ignore this choice and rain destruction upon your foes.

If the first words you’re told about a game are “you can do X! Or maybe not,” you know that there’s something special about X. And, indeed, there’s multiple endings that can be reached, depending on how your treat other people in the game. These first lines also call attention to the core loop of the typical video game, which usually involves slaughtering other people. Or if you’re playing an RPG, you instead spend a lot of time pick-pocketing the dead or breaking other peoples’ pottery for your personal gain. By placing that front-and-center, Undertale is also pointing out how video games force us to be terrible people thanks to lazy design.

Tune into my Twitch channel sometime in the next eighteen hours, and you’ll see me attempt this game for the first time. While there’s no active fundraiser at the moment, I don’t think there’s harm in reminding you of the links where you can donate to us or Skepticon to help pay off our legal bills.

Fundraiser Update: Past, Future, and Present

To my utter shock, I was no less than two minutes past the official starting point for today’s stream of Stardew Valley! That was the main reason I never announced the stream, in fact, I was too tempted by starting it on time to tab away and write up a blog post. For the next two weeks the video is available on my Twitch page, and after that will pop up on my YouTube archive.

As for the guide on streaming…. ugh. It turns out I have so many tasks to do that I forgot about a rather major one, so after today’s stream I couldn’t resume work on the guide. I’ve got a fair amount of it already in the can, but I don’t want to release anything half-baked. My workload should lessen up mid-week, which will allow me to resume work on it.

I really hate to delay that, especially given how generous everyone has been. We’ve raised an astounding $3,006.94 during this round for FtB! I was pretty convinced we’d never crack $2,200, but you’ve soundly proven me wrong. Thank you so much for helping pay off this network’s legal bills, it helps all of us sleep better at night. You better believe that I’m going to repay the generosity with the best guide to streaming I can muster.

But, in the meantime, I’ve got to crank up the volume and get coding.

Fundraiser: Among Us in Fifteen Minutes

Yeesh, I always forget how long it takes to encode video. All complaints aside, FtB’s Discord has started running a usually-weekly game of Among Us among the commenters and bloggers. For the fundraiser, I asked if we could record one of our games, and the group agreed! Lyrandar, Zankou, and myself recorded our streams, and Zankou did the heavy lifting of stitching it all together.

Follow this link, and in about fifteen minutes you’ll get to watch the results. If you like it, or just like what we do around here, think about forking over some funds to us or Skepticon to help pay off our legal bills. This is just one of many events we’re putting on, too! Check’m all out.

Fundraiser Update: Catching Up

I knew this fundraiser would be trouble for me, as it coincided with a probable work crunch. I’d actually been counting on a bit of trouble, in fact, as I figured the deadline pressure would help lift me over my COVID-19 lethargy.

It didn’t pan out that way. Quite the contrary, in fact; after ticking off my absolutely-must-do-or-else items, I crashed. That coincided with yesterday, which was supposed to be my catch-up day for fundraiser tasks. So as I’m typing this, around when I was supposed to go live with some Stardew Valley gaming, I’ve still got some graphic design work to finish off and splits to write before I can go live. The good news is that it won’t be delayed more than two hours, very little of my gaming setup has changed since last time so I’m not reinventing the wheel.

My post advertising the Among Us game kept getting kicked in favour of those absolutely-must-do-or-else items, too. At this point I’m probably better off writing something an hour before it premieres and linking to the resulting video. But it too doesn’t require much work on my end: the recording was all done a week ago, and Zankou over on the FtB Discord delivered an edited version of it to me, so I just have to slap the aforementioned graphic design on the start and end of it and fire it off to my YouTube channel. If I can’t get that finished today, something’s gone horribly wrong.

My big worry is that streaming guide. I’ve already got forty-plus slides for it, practised one of the live demos I’d planned, and know what I’m going to do for the other, but there’s still a tonne of recording and prep work to be done. If everything falls into place perfectly I could still get it out the door today, but I doubt my luck is that good. Tomorrow works better, in fact, as my plan was always to split Stardew Valley across two days. Four hours of gaming in one day is just…. woof, so this fundraiser has always been a two-day affair for me.

So sorry for the delays, but I don’t intend to roll back my plans for the fundraiser. It’s the least I could do to pay back your generosity.