Lochenvar

I wondered if the discount would be on top of other discounts, so I ‘claimed’ the discount on Little Cities, but it doesn’t seem to stack. I don’t think that stops anyone else claiming it though, does it? They’ve done such a poor job of explaining how all this works.

This is free on the Epic Games Store at the moment: https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/p/star-wars-squadrons

That can also be a sign that this happened: Producer - "We need to cut back the number of level\locations in the game. We don't have enough money for what we initially scoped out. Chop out the...ah...jungle level." Writer - "But that's where we first meet the PC's brother, which will pay off in the finale." Producer - "I'm sure you'll make it work." @Scribblor has pretty much covered most of it. The main thing I'd add is that, in my experience, there's still a majority of studios who don't think they need dedicated writers\narrative staff. That's definitely changing, but we're not there yet. It's exactly like when I started as a game designer, in 2001: people didn't see the need to have someone solely dedicated to gameplay. They thought that kind of thing would just emerge from the various systems. That attitude changed, over time, (although not without some resistance...) and I'm sure that the same thing will happen with narrative too. It's difficult though, as a lot of big narrative games are led by people who see themselves as auteurs, but who generally don't have the skill to do what they'd rather be doing, which is making films. So, when even the large games often don't have good narrative, you end up with the attitide that games aren't suited to anything other than emergent narratives. The skills aren't there at the ground level either. I mentor young devs and I see a lot of people coming out of uni with almost no applicable skills - they're often great prose writers, but they don't know the specifics of game writing and narrative design. Not a failing on their part, but on the training they've gone through. Until that changes, you're relying on people like me passing on whatever skills we've managed to cobble together over the years.

They must have fixed it, as the remastered one was in the list when I played it, so I was able to select it

No, I was paying attention to it and I still didn't understand the ending at all. I'd be interested to know if it made more sense in French and was just poorly translated.

It was one of the boss fights, about 3/4 of way through, that killed it for me too. Watched a video of the ending and I’m glad I didn’t bother. Such a great game, when you’re out in space, flitting about between enemies. Why they decided to ruin that with boss fights, horrible sections in cramped tunnels and boss fights in cramped tunnels, I don’t know.

https://boutiquemodern.co.uk They have this pop-up on the site now, so I’m guessing they got bombarded with interested queries

I would say that I had a problem, but that's only classed as a Silver collection on BGG. Gold is 500 games, and the badges go up to Ultimate, with 5000 games. 65 people have that one. I don't know how they have room in the house.

@dumpster, this morning.

I can never see that much, from behind the screen, but my wife says they always react really well. Generally they’re stunned into silence for a bit. I do remember one really tiny girl, a couple of years ago, must have only been about three or four. She was with a group and while the others were getting sweets, she wouldn’t take her eyes off the puppet and I could see her trying to process that this talking thing was right in front of her. That’s why we went with a muppet-type puppet, as most of the kids were very young, so we didn’t want to scare them. Generally it’s the parents who give the best reaction as they’re very grateful that we’ve put so much effort into it. It is a lot of work though, which is why it would be great to find someone to help with the 3D graphics side of it.

Over the last few years, my wife and I have been creating an increasingly elaborate puppet show thing for the kids who come around at Halloween. Last year I ended up teaching myself enough Blender that I could do a projection-mapped background: Merlin 2021.mp4 I was hoping to do something new for this year, but I haven't used Blender at all since, so I'd basically have to learn it all from scratch again. Does anyone fancy collaborating on something?

New game from the Dead by Daylight devs: https://www.eurogamer.net/meet-your-maker-is-the-next-game-from-dead-by-daylight-dev-behaviour-interactive

Den of Geek have done a guide, to get old viewers back up to speed for the finale: https://www.denofgeek.com/tv/neighbours-pre-finale-recap-jane-clive-paul-robinson-toadie-mel-ramsay-street/

Cheers @Garwoofoo, that's really great info. I have seen some lenses on ebay that have magnetic mounts, for easy removal, and I did wonder about getting those. But, I'm like you and have pretty terrible eyesight, so I think it would be better to make sure I'm getting really good lenses. I doubt I'll be passing it around much and, if I did, I'd just have to do without them for the night. I'm used to stumbling around in real life anyway.

The norns is great fun, with a ludicrous amount of scripts written for it. I've mostly been trying out synths and generative stuff on mine, but there's so much else on there too: https://norns.community/