Carl Muckenhoupt @CarlMuckenhoupt@mastodon.social

Game idea: an idler themed around doing very large git pulls

The mental transition from "That's a terrible hack, I don't want to do it that way" to "Actually it turns out that's a lot less hacky than the straightforward way"

When cats carcinize, it will happen at first through boxes. A cat knows that boxes are safe, protective. Someday a cat will figure out how to carry a box on its back and be safe wherever it goes. That will be the start of hermit cats.

In that version, you would choose whether to save Doug or Carley before you got to know the characters. The idea was to make you feel guilty whenever you interacted with the character you *didn't* save. But we ultimately dropped that.

- First Telltale game to end with choice stats! They're remarkably even, with one exception: about 3/4 of players saved Carley. I saved Doug, because I've met the real Doug that the character is based on, and he's a good guy.

- The attack on the drug store starts with a fade to white. I'm pretty sure this is a relic of an earlier design where the game starts in media res, when the attack is already underway. The bulk of the game would have been a flashback, starting at the point when Larry knocks Lee down, and the fade to white would be the point where the flashback ends.

- For all that this game is the turning point that turned the studio from traditional puzzle-based adventure games to narrative-focused games, it still has a lot of puzzle content.

- The first instances of the "struggle" mechanic: a button mash followed by a separate button press for the "death blow". Far more satisfying than the button mashes without death blow in Jurassic Park. Also, the first instance of a struggle that's impossible to win.

- At the end of the zombie cop scene, there's a hotspot that triggers an action when you get the reticle near it, rather than when you click on it. Every hotspot in every episode has a flag for this mechanic and I think this is the only place where it's used.

- Approaching Clem's house, I wondered "How did we handle his limping walk anim on the porch stairs?" The answer: A camera cut. He's just suddenly on the porch. Cheats ftw!

And yet, I think it's probably the case that this is the first time I've played the entire episode through from start to finish, rather than skipping directly to whatever scene I was debugging.

- Lee falls down a lot in this episode, justified by an injured leg.

- The cop in the rear view mirror is a full reversed copy of him sitting in the hood of the car behind an alpha mask.

Telltale Retrospective notes, Walking Dead 101:

- I think this is the first game in this Retrospective that I mostly remember. I spent a lot of time on this project -- Steam used to list it as my top game by hours played, and they weren't really hours spent playing the game, they were hours spend developing it. (It has since been eclipsed by Cookie Clicker.)

As such, there really weren't a lot of surprises this time around.

"Since the 1840s, Kier's salt wells were becoming fouled with petroleum. At first, Kier simply dumped the useless oil into the nearby Pennsylvania Main Line Canal..."
(from the Wikipedia article on kerosene)

My Telltale Retrospective has finally reached the game that changed Telltale forever: The Walking Dead. Streaming right now.
https://www.twitch.tv/muckenhoupt

I should use <code> tags more in my blog posts.

Playing an adventure game involving a time machine where you enter a four-digit year and it just transports you near to something historically significant that happened that year. And it's giving me ideas: a system where time machines are just somehow attracted to major historical events -- except there's one specific time and place that keeps drawing time machines to it, but no one knows of anything important that happened there...

Second run results: After a while, I checked on how it was running, and found it wasn't. It had just reset itself at some point. No power outage, so it seems like the problem is probably in the electronics rather than some more easily-repaired component.

So now I'm in mourning for an appliance. She gave thirty years of service, boys, and met her sorry end. I'm left trying to figure out two things: How do I dispose of it, and do I even want a replacement?

Disappointment! I brought out my vintage early-90s bread machine (as I do every once in a while), hoping to get fresh bread in the morning, only to wake up to uncooked and even undermixed dough. I'm running it again right now in the hope that the cause was the electricity being interrupted in the middle of the night and not, say, a faulty heating element.

Representation issues in superhero movies are weird. If, say, every lawyer you see on TV is white, it sends the harmful and false message "non-white people can't be lawyers". But "non-white people can't be superheroes" isn't strictly false. It's just misleadingly overspecific.

Sentences that make me lose faith in your documentation: "Post method is secure because data is not visible in URL bar"

Thinking about the bit in Jules Feiffer's Little Murders where a cop explains a crime wave as a massive conspiracy to discredit the police

- A serious UI failing: At one point, instead of a yes/no question, the game asks us to pick one of two names. I go to the case log. When I return, the answers in the UI are now yes/no.

- A less serious but more amusing UI failing: All the "Retry" buttons say "Wiederholen". Presumably this has something to do with the fact that I'm playing an edition published for the German market, but I still don't understand how it happened in just one of seven episodes.

- School authorities letting police search student lockers without a warrant portrayed as a good thing

- Game asks "Should we recognize the name Harrison Bedford from a previous case?" -- no fair asking me about things that aren't in the current case log! (Although it's likely this would be less of an issue if I were playing this straight through instead of one episode per week.)