David J Prokopetz

[3/3] (That this would involve a main story path in which roughly seventy player-facing decisions – assuming an average of just under four options per decision – must be made without a single deviation in order to receive the true ending is, of course, an acceptable price to pay.)

[2/3] At the end of the game, the decisions are concatenated in some pre-defined order into a 128-bit integer, which is then used to attempt to decrypt an AES-encrypted archive containing the cutscene script for the true ending. If decryption succeeds, the true ending is received.

[1/3] Narrative RPG which proofs its true ending against data mining by arranging for all player-facing decisions to have 2, 4, or 8 options, yielding 1, 2, or 3 bits of binary data. These decisions are arranged so that no matter what path is taken, its choices yield exactly 128 bits worth of data.

A screenshot of the word "pre-defined" marked with a squiggly red underline to indicate an unrecognised word, with the spellchecker popout open beside it; one of the suggested corrections is "pee-defined".

Not that kind of blog, I'm afraid.

A page excerpted from "Eat God", reading: "Random Inventory II: Modern Mundane. These tables are suitable for scenarios situated in office parks, shopping malls, or the wasteland of contemporary suburbia as depicted in North American popular media." This is followed by a pair of long d66 lookup tables filled with items one might expect to find in such a setting.

Plugging away at a second set of random inventory tables for "Eat God" (penguinking.itch.io/eat-god), if anyone has any useful suggestions to offer and/or dumb references they're dying to see included.

A close-up of the face of a Cabbage Patch Kids doll.

PS2-era JRPGs where the dialogue portrait is wearing an expression of exquisitely wrought anguish, and then the character's actual 3D model in the background is just

Reading an "x reader" fic and squinting at the screen like, okay, are we doing a meta thing where the text implicitly problematises its own construction of unmarked identities, or did the author just not notice that the logistics of this sex position require the reader insert to have four arms?

BRB, starting discourse about how viewing art on the Internet is morally bankrupt regardless of its origin because even if it was made by human hands, what you're seeing on your screen is not the ORIGINAL human-made digital file, but a soulless machine-made replica in your browser's Internet cache.

I have a lot of respect for folks who submit their speedrun times to the global leaderboards like clockwork even though they're not remotely competitive. If I found out my PB was in 1387th place, I wouldn't bother to fill out the submission form – they're truly in it for the pure love of the game.

I want to make a lore-stuffed video game that uses your computer's system clock and geolocation data to ensure that the true ending which reveals what's REALLY going on will unlock only while speedrunning it on stage at GDQ.

Like, forget canon alternate reality games – I want to write a mythos-heavy TV show where the links between individual episodes can only be understood in the context of the patch notes of a licensed mobile fitness app.

After "film trilogy that dropped a critical plot point exclusively via timed Fortnite event" and "video game series whose story only makes sense if you're aware of the events of a canon pachinko machine", I feel like there are whole frontiers of user-hostile narrative design waiting to be explored.

[3/3] If you're actually familiar with the period, the majority of media which purports to be have a "realistic medieval setting" is doing that *all the time*.

[2/3] You know how annoyed you get when someone confidently asserts that [thing in your favourite media A] is a reference to [thing in your other favourite media B], but you know that can't possibly be true because A was published before B?

[1/3] I know it sometimes seems like people who know their history are weirdly invested in complaining about the "generically medieval" thing, but let me put it in fandom terms.

It's often joked that Undertale's code is the product of Toby Fox doing "musician programming", the natural counterpart to "programmer art", but it's worse than that. Undertale is not Toby Fox's first rodeo. It is the work of someone whose understanding of of coding came from romhacking SNES games.

Read parenthetical aside in following post.

Annoying the enemies-to-lovers 'shippers by interpreting any instance of two characters trying to murder each other over objectively petty shit as "sibling coded".

[3/3] (And that's if you were keeping with the times; the desktop PC I owned at the time, which was only a couple of years out of date, had a primary hard drive with a capacity of a whole seven hundred megs!)

This time around it's shooters; I wonder what it will be for round three?

[2/3] Titles like "Riven" (1997) and "Starship Titanic" (1998) ran like shit from the CD, and had full installs in the hundreds of megabytes – and not the low hundreds, either – at a time when the average consumer hard drive weighed in at maybe 2GB.

[1/3] The funny thing is, this isn't even the first time we've had a period where AAA computer games have become so bloated and poorly optimised that you can only install like two of them at a time. The last time around it was big-budget point and click adventure games, if you can believe it.

Going on HRT and it makes me look like YOUR mom, which raises several pressing questions.

You seem to be operating on the assumption that the Venn diagram of "this was written as a horny game" and "people play this as a horny game" is a circle, which may not be a useful interpretive lens in this particular context.

"Fellowship" is a good contemporary one, off the top of my head. It's an off-brand "Lord of the Rings" adaptation where the adversarial GMPC is basically Sauron.

(It makes the fascinating decision to illustrate said basically-Sauron as an evil magical girl, complete with transformation. Fun stuff.)

If nothing else, openly horny tabletop RPGs are a positive development because the alternative isn't NOT being horny – it's just not admitting that it's a horny thing. If you think nobody was playing "Paranoia" for the D/s vibes in 1988, you're living in a fantasy world.

Now, I'm not saying nobody every played "Paranoia" as a D/s thing back in the day, but it WAS the 1980s – that's the sort of thing one didn't admit to!

(For everyone who just had a vivid mental image of a horny mechsplo version of "Paranoia" because of that last post, you're welcome. No need to thank me.)

[3/3] Isabelle Ruebsaat's "Girl Frame" (anxiousmimicrpgs.itch.io/girl-frame) is one of the most interesting developments in the adversarial-GMPC space right now, and it's far from the only one to include mechsplo elements!

[2/3] There's a whole genre of TTRPGs that's structurally centred on the PCs' relationship with an adversarial GMPC – "Paranoia" (1984) arguably being the type codifier – and you can't really talk about what's happening in that genre in 2025 without horny mechsplo shit being in the conversation.

[1/3] I've had a couple of folks give me a hard time lately about "why does a cis dude know about mechsplo", and it shouldn't surprise you that the answer involves indie tabletop RPGs.