@prokopetz / prokopetz.tumblr.com
Finally creating a pinned post of my games. I’ve included all titles I’ve been involved with in some capacity, not just ones where I’m the author; when I’m not the author, I’ll note my role in (parentheses).
This post will be updated over time to reflect changes in the status of these projects, so if you’re looking at a reblog, feel free to click through to the original and see if it differs.
Last updated: 2023-04-25
the differences in peoples lifespans in breath of the wild is so funny. you will meet the rito and they will say something like "long ago… there was a hero.. the appointed knight of princess zelda… but oh that legend is all but lost to time.. but perhaps. perhaps you are a descendant of that legendary hero.." and then you will meet a zora and theyll be like "oh hey link havent seen you in a while whats up"
It's even funner when you realise the reason Zoras suddenly acquired multi-century lifespans in Breath of the Wild is purely because Nintendo wanted to do a traditional high fantasy setting, so naturally they needed a High Elf analogue. They looked at the list of standard High Elf tropes, saw "dwells high in the mountains in soaring towers of silver and starlight", went "right, got it", and picked an aquatic species.
The sticking point with a lot of those guess-your-age questionnaires is that they tend to hugely underestimate how long older technologies can hang on in spaces that have no reason to stay on the consumer treadmill, which means many of the experiences they're name-checking can be a lot more contemporary than they're assuming. Like, have I ever sent or received a fax? Yes, I have – within the past week. Have I ever paid for something with a paper cheque because that's the only form of payment the recipient could accept? Yeah, yesterday.
Sometimes you don't realise how much a particular piece of media has influenced your thinking until your attention is drawn to certain vocabulary you weren't consciously aware you were using.
Like playing Tears of the Kingdom and abruptly noticing what the voice in your head has been calling the weapon fusion mechanics for short.
So, let me see if I've got this straight.
When Overwatch 2 launched last October, it was framed by Blizzard as a PvP-only early access preview of a game which would eventually include a substantial PvE campaign, to be added in a later patch.
Today, Blizzard's representatives admitted not only that the PvE campaign mode has been scrapped, but that the internal decision to do so was made in late 2021 – meaning they'd been knowingly lying about the game's planned feature set for nearly a year at the time of the October 2022 early access launch.
Is that about the size of it?
Sometimes you don't realise how much a particular piece of media has influenced your thinking until your attention is drawn to certain vocabulary you weren't consciously aware you were using.
Like playing Tears of the Kingdom and abruptly noticing what the voice in your head has been calling the weapon fusion mechanics for short.
I have to confess I've always been a little perplexed by monsterfucking artists who are super into the extreme body horror side of the genre, but exclusively draw stuff that's explicitly heterosexual, cisgender, and conformant with traditional gender roles with respect to penetrating-versus-penetrated dynamics. Like, sure, we'll draw a mass of bloody tentacles fucking a congeries of revolving spheres, but only if it's framed to make it 100% clear that the monster doing the penetrating is a boy monster and the monster being penetrated is a girl monster.
I really appreciate how effectively the Break!! Kickstarter is flying in the face of conventional wisdom about small-press tabletop RPG crowdfunding. Everybody "knows" you need a complex reward structure and extravagant value-added stretch goals and fancy merchandisable add-ons that have nothing to do with the game's core experience in order to draw people in, and then there's Break!! with no stretch goals, no add ons, and a reward structure that's literally just "the PDF", "the printed book", and "the printed book with a different, Kickstarter-exclusive cover for the folks who are into the whole patronage thing", and it's doing bigger numbers than fucking Exalted.
(That last bit's not hyperbole, incidentally. Exalted 3rd Edition brought in $685 000 USD from 4400 backers over the course of a thirty-day campaign, while Break!! is currently sitting at $380 000 USD from 6000 backers after two weeks, with two more to go. Accounting for the fact that tabletop RPG Kickstarters often bring in as much as 50% of their total funding in the final 72 hours, there's a reasonable chance this thing could blow Exalted out of the water. This is a small-press game by a two-person team.)
At the time of this posting the campaign is closing in on $450 000 USD with seven days to go. My earlier remarks were admittedly speculative, but at this rate it might actually beat Exalted 3rd Edition.
I mean, in fairness they led with "cat people with tails and possible non-human skin tones"
Tough to beat
Tough, but not impossible:
This one's officially in the final 72 hour stretch, for those who are keen on making numbers go up.
It begins.
If anyone needs a final reminder, there are, at the time of this posting, fewer than eight hours left to go – this is literally your last chance.
If one pixel-art precision puzzle platformer starring a red-haired woman who can air-dash wasn't enough, might I suggest.
@minor-locrian replied:
it's funny how many of these are metroidvanias when celeste wasn't one at all. the main thing i can imagine celeste concepts contributing to a metroidvania is the idea of a diverse moveset derived from minimal controls through increasingly precise timings, which would actually be really cool to see explored
Part of it is that this isn't really anything new to the metroidvanias as a genre. Metroidvanias have always had a great deal of precision puzzle platformer in their DNA; Super Metroid, often cited as as one of the prototypes of the genre, explicitly uses movement tech which is only tutorialised long after it's initially acquired as part of its progression schema, which is why it's so open to sequence breaking – using advanced movement tech before the game actually teaches it to you on subsequent runs is part of the intended experience.
It's less that this sort of thing has historically been absent from the genre, and more that it's been downplayed in recent years due to the popularity of more combat-heavy "soulsvania" subgenre. The present shift in emphasis toward the precision puzzle platformer side of the equation in current and forthcoming titles is largely a return to form – though it will be interesting to see how far the pendulum swings. We may well end up with a generation of metroidvanias with an even stonger puzzle-platforming focus than the classics.
(The other part of it, of course, is that every indie game designer wants to do a metroidvania as their first major project. It's one of the classic blunders. Maddy Thorson got her inaugural metroidvania out of her system fifteen years ago with An Untitled Story, so Celeste was free to explore other genres!)
If one pixel-art precision puzzle platformer starring a red-haired woman who can air-dash wasn't enough, might I suggest.
It's true that sometimes everything happens too much, but I think there's value in acknowledging that sometimes everything happens a reasonable amount and you're just being a dick about it. You've gotta recognise that you're being petty in order to properly lean into it!
"Your feelings are always valid" no, sometimes the dumb monkey who lives in my brainstem is straight up being an asshole. It's important that I know this – one cannot truly love one's dumb monkey without accepting its nature.
It's true that sometimes everything happens too much, but I think there's value in acknowledging that sometimes everything happens a reasonable amount and you're just being a dick about it. You've gotta recognise that you're being petty in order to properly lean into it!
I really appreciate how effectively the Break!! Kickstarter is flying in the face of conventional wisdom about small-press tabletop RPG crowdfunding. Everybody "knows" you need a complex reward structure and extravagant value-added stretch goals and fancy merchandisable add-ons that have nothing to do with the game's core experience in order to draw people in, and then there's Break!! with no stretch goals, no add ons, and a reward structure that's literally just "the PDF", "the printed book", and "the printed book with a different, Kickstarter-exclusive cover for the folks who are into the whole patronage thing", and it's doing bigger numbers than fucking Exalted.
(That last bit's not hyperbole, incidentally. Exalted 3rd Edition brought in $685 000 USD from 4400 backers over the course of a thirty-day campaign, while Break!! is currently sitting at $380 000 USD from 6000 backers after two weeks, with two more to go. Accounting for the fact that tabletop RPG Kickstarters often bring in as much as 50% of their total funding in the final 72 hours, there's a reasonable chance this thing could blow Exalted out of the water. This is a small-press game by a two-person team.)
At the time of this posting the campaign is closing in on $450 000 USD with seven days to go. My earlier remarks were admittedly speculative, but at this rate it might actually beat Exalted 3rd Edition.
I mean, in fairness they led with "cat people with tails and possible non-human skin tones"
Tough to beat
Tough, but not impossible:
This one's officially in the final 72 hour stretch, for those who are keen on making numbers go up.
It begins.
Is there anything about Break!! that has stood out to you as "oh this helps explain their success" or is this just a simple case of "its an appealing, well made product, and people are buying it"
(With reference to this post here.)
Certainly, the slick presentation is a big part of it – that's what you get when 50% of your game's two-person development team is a really good graphic artist. It's also pressing a lot of specific buttons, though.
On the mechanical side, it's within spitting distance of being tabletop Legend of Zelda, which is something that hasn't had a really good tabletop adaptation that actually cares about the particulars of the Zeldalike gameplay loop. (Not that it hasn't been tried – Fellowship makes a good effort, off the top of my head, but its approach to the source material is a little too esoteric for the average group.) The timing of the campaign doesn't hurt there, either, being in its final week just as the release of Tears of the Kingdom is stoking renewed interest in doing Zelda-style campaigns at the tabletop.
On the aesthetic side, it's really hitting that 1990s/early 2000s anime nostalgia that's been badly under-served in tabletop gaming ever since Guardians of Order self-destructed, while sprinkling in just enough influence from modern YA animation to capture the interest of folks who aren't drawn to nostalgia bait. A lot of contemporary games that draw inspiration from contemporary YA animation seem to feel the need to prove that they're Not Just For Kids™ by, like, saying "fuck" a lot and such, to the extent that just playing that kind of source material 100% straight like Break!! does feels mildly unconventional.
Of course, apart from all that, there's the fact that it's been in public development for a solid decade, which has given it a great deal of lead time in terms of building word of mouth – that's a big part of it, too!
To be clear, I didn't work on Break!!, I just think the way its crowdfunding campaign is playing out is very entertaining.
Tears of the Kingdom is the first time the Zelda series has produced a direct, it's-the-same-Link-we-swear-you-guys sequel since 2007's Phantom Hourglass, so this is probably many contemporary fans' first turn on this particular merry-go-round.
Allow me to assure you: there is no great mystery, and there is no master plan. Every worldbuilding inconsistency and every bit of timeline weirdness between Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom is purely a product of the fact that the Zelda franchise's writers have the creative impulse control of a pack of squirrels, and don't give a single solitary fuck about continuity.
When you accept that this is true, and you see how cavalierly they're willing to treat continuity even between two games which are ostensibly direct sequels starring the same cast of characters and set just a few years apart, you may begin to understand why the timeline of the series as a whole looks the way that it does.
@inverted-trashcan replied:
i get your point. I promise you I do. But where the HELL did all the shieka tech go. The guardians i can see being all scrapped (impressive they all got got), the towers could sink back into the ground…but please god just give me ONE BOOK telling me the divine beasts left hyrule as a final will of the champions! or something! HOW DO YOU LOSE FOUR GIANT ROBOT ANIMALS?!
I mean, we can fanwank whatever justification we want, but the real answer is that it didn't "go" anywhere. It retroactively never existed.
In Breath of the Wild's continuity, the Ancients are all-but-explicitly stated to be the ancestors of the modern Sheikah people, so it makes sense that all the Ancient tech that's lying around is Sheikah-made.
In Tears of the Kingdom's continuity, the writers decided they had a better idea, and now the Ancients are – and, critically, always have been – an Ancient Aliens/UFOlogy-inspired culture called the Zonai.
Obviously, the surviving Ancient tech can't possibly be Sheikah-made if the Ancients were the Zonai. Any suggestion to the contrary is clearly the product of your over-active imagination.
Tears of the Kingdom is the first time the Zelda series has produced a direct, it's-the-same-Link-we-swear-you-guys sequel since 2007's Phantom Hourglass, so this is probably many contemporary fans' first turn on this particular merry-go-round.
Allow me to assure you: there is no great mystery, and there is no master plan. Every worldbuilding inconsistency and every bit of timeline weirdness between Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom is purely a product of the fact that the Zelda franchise's writers have the creative impulse control of a pack of squirrels, and don't give a single solitary fuck about continuity.
When you accept that this is true, and you see how cavalierly they're willing to treat continuity even between two games which are ostensibly direct sequels starring the same cast of characters and set just a few years apart, you may begin to understand why the timeline of the series as a whole looks the way that it does.
Fundamental types of OCs who are literally just standing there:
Everyone in the notes who claims they only do 2 and 7 is a damn liar.
8. The one where you know without evidence the artist routinely draws this character crying Studio Ghibli style
