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On 2/4/2024 at 3:11 PM, cr47t said:

googled around, and i get overwhelmed with the various unrelated results and how densely packed some of the actual posts are, when they aren't preaching universality of hero's journey (debunked) or of enneagram (not into that kind of thing, personal preference) or just of general three acts (easily debunkable once we can actually get a definition down)

but more important than that, i should address the "starting fresh" part of the original post - it was made after about 6 months of going nowhere with an attempt to overhaul a creative idea for a story from a previous version, but i didn't know what i was trying to accomplish. now, in february 2023 (and some time before then, but i;m mentioning it now), i've gone back to those original 7 chapters, realized there wasn't that much wrong with it that i couldn't tailor to my needs/wants i was just feeling insecure. now i've progressed with those seven chapters (now 8 chapters) to a point where i'm content with the original vision that i had put aside before this post and now have gone back to, and i'm making progress with that.

which means i dont know what to do with this thread. maybe leave it be and when i've got a problem with the revitalized story, post about that in a new thread?? i don't know, just wanted to mention where i've gone with it since the OP and how the OP is kind of obsolete now. sorry if this was going somewhere, but if i keep moping about "what ifs" i will never be finished, and i want to have something i can share with others once it's time to publish.

I'm setting myself a reminder to reply to this later. I've now seen it and I acknowledge it. Once I have the time, I'll do you a proper response that is unlike my usual lazy/busy ways. Sorry for making you wait.

On 12/27/2023 at 8:12 PM, cr47t said:

Do you know where I can find the lattermost? (the basics)

oh, just google around. Plenty of authors have a blog post or two about the subject. Once you feel ready to deep dive, just read a book on the subject.

I'm really sorry, I wish I could help you more than that, but it's been too long. I'm not sure where to start either. Especially with TNM who is usually more into character analysis, so you get the theory but in the context of the analysis of a specific dragon ball character and maybe that's not desirable (especially since it's been such a long while that he actually changed his type of content since I last check). In your stead, I'd just pick any video that seems interesting on HelloFutureMe's channel. They are usually self contained and thus, you can't really go in the wrong order.

Of course, you should definitely read up on the basics of character arc theory before delving deeper into the topic.

have you read character arc theory? Because it sounds like you haven't really researched how to make characters and you'd really benefit from it. There are many books covering your use case. Some youtubers like TotallyNotMark and HelloFutureMe have covered some of the theories that go into world building and character building, although I must warn you are almost guaranteed to want to throw away all your previous work and start again from scratch once you understand the mechanisms and techniques properly; at least, that's what I ended up doing.

An interesting thing you could do too is read up on philosophy like Spinosa and Nietzsche, which can be used to make various and interesting characters.

Hi,

Last year, I made a joke card that I thought was impossible to win with. I admit that I used a cheap technicality to absolve myself from my bet last time, but this time, there's really a $25 USD prize on the table for anyone who can prove that they can build a deck that can win with the cards.

The cards: https://imgur.com/a/4WYHMcF

They all have an instant duel victory effect and all you need to win this bet is to do all of the following:

• Win a duel with the effect of "Impossible Gambit"
• Win a duel with the effect of "Impossible Collection"
• Win a duel with the effect of "Impossible Marathon"
• Win a best-of-5 match with the effect of "Impossible Victory"

Your opponent can be a friend, in which case your match/duels must be filmed without interruptions and editing, or it can myself/a representative of my choosing. In any case, the decks must respect the TCG Traditional Banlist (To make it even more impossible for you to win). Alternatively, if you can convince me you have a very reliable and consistent strategy for winning, no duel is necessary (You will still need to build a complete deck list).

The deadline is January 1st. I hope nobody wins. Please, don't even try; this is a JOKE.

On 7/12/2023 at 5:30 PM, cr47t said:

how did you just not think of easy-ins like cyber stein, waking the dragon, etc i mean there's not even a "must be fusion'd with the above materials" clause or anything

The card cannot be used in a duel according to the card itself. It doesn't matter if it's easy to summon or not.

I don't know where he got his dark magician card but I want it XD

On 4/24/2022 at 1:01 PM, MetalSonic said:

Gale Dogra twice and fuse with Fusion Gate and King of the Swamps?

Sorry I'm so late. So basically that strategy wouldn't work because Fusion Gate requires the materials to be in your hand or on the field. The joke card's text also says you can't use the card in a duel, so it's basically unusable even though it has a powerful effect.

On 2/15/2022 at 11:41 PM, Mr Spaz said:

Why not add Elemental HERO Shining Flare Wingman as a material for the same reason?

I wasn't aware of Wingman's existence at the time, but I wouldn't have included him anyways because of spacing due to his name being too long and the joke being funny with 3 monsters already.

1. Attribute Summoners
2. Attribute Reptiles
4. Barrier Statues
5. Mirror Force
6. Gravekeepers
7. Divine Beasts
8. Zera
9. Koala
10. Attribute Spirits excluding the dark and light one

Unseen Abomination
"Dark Flare Knight" + "Dragon Master Knight" + "Rare Fish"
You win the Match.

Edit: please move this to the joke section. I accidentally posted this here.

If I know someone is sensible about rape, death and other such sensible things, I warn them if I know they're about to read a manga with such things. I know some fragile people so I don't mind if it spoils the story for the sake of their sanity. For example, I've revealed more than once that

After the first question, the web app just loads indefinitely and never gives another question back. I tried redoing the test, but selecting another response and it does the same thing. It's not my internet; I've tried at different time intervals and still nothing. Only one question then loading and loading for eternity
Anyways those kind of tests are generally wrong and very surface level in their analysis so I don't think I'm missing much. Still my curiosity won't be quenched now!

Edit: Tried again today, I managed to get pretty far by clicking "skip", but reached the same issue eventually where it would load indefinitely.

So, last Monday I started a little game project as an excuse to experiment with my ConsolePaint library for .Net, but also as an exercise for a much more ambitious project later (which will be fully retro). For this occasion, I thought I'd replicate one of my favourite games of the NES; Tetris, but with a twist; the user should be able to create his own difficulty by directly modifying drop delays, game execution speed and the rate at which the game becomes faster (and thus, more challenging).

There are a couple of challenges in doing a game in the console terminal:

• Printing characters to the console window is slow.
• Refreshing the screen is even slower and just printing the characters on new lines wouldn't entirely sell the illusion of a piece moving.
• You can only use characters when using the terminal, so no graphics (duh!)
• In this case, the "user interface" needs to be user friendly enough so that anyone can play and alter the game variables without having to remember the command names.
• There needs to be some kind of sound for tetrises and background music.

I couldn't really solve the first problem since .Net doesn't have any way to hijack the console screen buffer like in C++ with windows.h, so I ended up trying to minimize as much as possible calls to Write and WriteLine by only writing and rewriting in precise areas of the screen by repositioning the cursor. Because some areas of the screen are only drawn once or occasionally, it saved some execution time. This did more to solve the second problem than the first one actually, since it entirely got rid of the slow refresh problem you'd get with the Clear method.

First shot shows the areas where the characters are only printed once on the screen. Second shot shows areas which are only reprinted when the information needs to be updated.

So the thing with Tetris is that the game is basically just squares on a screen. You don't need to be particularly fancy with the graphic design and people know this (except maybe the folks who made Tetris Effect haha). However, I still wanted to use the most out of the character set to make it as pleasant to the eye as possible. This is where the lack of graphics really hurts because the .Net console only supports 16 colours and a limited set of characters. I did notice also that the pieces in classic nes Tetris actually don't always use the same palette and appearance, so I at least wanted to include alternating colours and use fun characters as alternative tetromino blocks. However, after I started showing pictures on a few discord groups and to friends, all were unanimous that the special characters HAD to go and at least half of them found the colours jarring and too much to process. That made me sad because I really liked the fun character set and I sincerely thought the colours made the experience better. But I aim to please everyone, including I. So what I ended up doing is making those things optional; they can be turned on and off in the game settings.

The above screenshot shows a game where the special characters are disabled with colour enabled, this one below is the reverse. These options are not mutually exclusive by the way; you can have grey bland tetrominos or colourful tetrominos using the fun characters.

"The fool did not see that he was not Tetris ready. He was severely disappointed!"

Now, there remains the case of the GUI. If I was going to write code for something which wouldn't make people flee, it would take a while. Remember earlier when I wrote that I was looking for an excuse to use my ConsolePaint library? Well, I put it to good use. All these rectangles on the screen were "drawn" by it, I just called the right methods and it wasn't even something I had to worry about. The library can draw all sorts of different borders too and initially I tried a more varied design until I ended up with what we have now. I also used that library to draw a picture on the screen so that the main menu didn't look too empty. What I did first was to draw some quick pixel "art". The colours of the image were converted to the 16 colour palette of the .Net console and then the pixels were converted to characters. Although in this case, the conversion was probably not needed. The image I drew:

The result:

You may be surprised to see that I named my Tetris clone "Retro Tetro Pro". That's actually because the name Tetris is trademarked. Maybe I'm being overly cautious, but I want no trouble for a game which only a few number of people are going to play.

I'm not going to talk to much about the user friendliness of the GUI, I think navigating the menus with the arrow keys and pressing enter is a pretty obvious design choice. However it may or may not surprise you to learn that I didn't use a switch statement or if statement for handling user choices in the menu. That would have been too long and tedious! Instead I chose to put some actions in an array and the arrow keys actually increase or decrease an index which is used to call those actions. I wish I had thought of that before. Strictly speaking of design though, the only thing I consciously thought about for more than one second is how to give an obvious visual cue that a value is being increased or decreased. I chose to print a green upward triangle when the user is increasing a value and red downward triangle when the user is decreasing the value. You can see more of the GUI and the effects the options have on the game in this little demonstration video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuE_L0-kAlI

Those who went ahead and watched the video will notice that the game only plays a sound when its in the menu... That's actually a reflection of the how bad it is to use sounds in .Net. There was nothing I could do to really play music or fun sounds without it being a huge pain in the neck. I tried several solutions and ways to circumvent the problem, but the tools .Net comes with are insufficient for a pleasant experience. I figure if I have enough time and motivation in the future that I'll have to use a custom sound library with .Net bindings; Beeps are too annoying and trial-and-error based to be practical and the SoundPlayer is incredibly frustrating; it has its own little thread and it does its own little thing, so no way to directly interact with it or do "complex" algorithms like having a playlist of music or playing consecutive sounds. It plays the tune until its over or until the process is dead and sometimes its stop method inexplicably doesn't work. Also there's no way to tell when the SoundPlayer is done... not mentioning several limitations like being limited to playing wav files out of anything. At this point, I was a bit tired of working on this project and anyways, to me, one of the rare people on earth who does not enjoy music due to a medical condition, it was the least of my priorities.

Thus, I felt it was a job well done and decided to release the game to a slightly wider audience with the bugged music player (I ended up removing the music altogether in the new version because the obsolete wav files made the download too large). I haven't gotten a lot of feedback yet because well... it's a Tetris clone. Everyone and their grandmother has both played and made it before. So I can't tell you if it was a success from the point of view of others. But I can tell you I'm satisfied with what I came up with despite the fact that I wasn't able to solve every issue I had. I learned a lot of things by putting myself to the challenge of making it work in the terminal window and it was a pretty interesting experience which I don't regret.

Thank you for reading this post. And if you try Tetro Retro Pro, thank you once more, it makes me incredibly happy that it will not all be merely for showing off and experimenting.
You can download the game here. Arrow keys to move and z to rotate.