Velociraptors: The Dinosaur of a thousand uses!

Oh boy oh gosh, you lucky duck! You just found... The best blog in the entire world. Honestly I wish I was joking, but it's true, this one's objectively the best. I'd apologize to any enterprising blog owners out there, but it's okay, cause now you can look through it and bask in it's splendiferousness!

[rxttingcorpse]

[kuroimarzipan]

HEAT EM UP, BREAK THE LAW

[technofeudalism]

i think the near-extinction of people making fun, deep and/or unique interactive text-based browser games, projects and stories is catastrophic to the internet. i'm talking pre-itch.io era, nothing against it.

there are a lot of fun ones listed here and here but for the most part, they were made years ago and are now a dying breed. i get why. there's no money in it. factoring in the cost of web hosting and servers, it probably costs money. it's just sad that it's a dying art form.

anyway, here's some of my favorite browser-based interactive projects and games, if you're into that kind of thing. 90% of them are on the lists that i linked above.

A Better World - create an alternate history timeline

Alter Ego - abandonware birth-to-death life simulator game

Seedship - text-based game about colonizing a new planet

Sandboxels or ThisIsSand - free-falling sand physics games

Little Alchemy 2 - combine various elements to make new ones

Infinite Craft - kind of the same as Little Alchemy

ZenGM - simulate sports

Tamajoji - browser-based tamagotchi

IFDB - interactive fiction database (text adventure games)

Written Realms - more text adventure games with a user interface

The Cafe & Diner - mystery game

The New Campaign Trail - US presidential campaign game

Money Simulator - simulate financial decisions

Genesis - text-based adventure/fantasy game

Level 13 - text-based science fiction adventure game

Miniconomy - player driven economy game

Checkbox Olympics - games involving clicking checkboxes

BrantSteele.net - game show and Hunger Games simulators

Murder Games - fight to the death simulator by Orteil

Cookie Clicker - different but felt weird not including it. by Orteil.

if you're ever thinking about making a niche project that only a select number of individuals will be nerdy enough to enjoy, keep in mind i've been playing some of these games off and on for 20~ years (Alter Ego, for example). quite literally a lifetime of replayability.

[technofeudalism]

since this post blew up, i've been wanting to do an addition with all of the recommendations from the comments and tags. but there's a lot of them. some people might be crazy enough to sit down and seriously put them all in one post with descriptions. those people are honestly sick in the head.

anyway, here's all of the recommendations from the reblogs. not all of them are text-based, but it's a great mixture of styles. also don't forget the links in the second paragraph of the OP which will take you to FMHY where there are a bunch more games listed.

Games

A Dark Room - text-based science fiction role-playing game.

corru.observer - science fiction adventure web game.

Improbable Island - old-school text adventure game.

Candy Box 2 - incremental clicker game that evolves into RPG.

Arcanum - open source wizard clicker game.

sandspiel, Powder Game, Powder Game 2, The Powder Toy - more sand physics games.

Orb.Farm - fishtank simulator.

Façade - experimental game with a real-time interactive narrative where you try to fix a failing marriage.

The Catacombs of Solaris - trippy art game.

Yume Nikki Online - online version of the surreal classic plus fangames.

The Barncle Goose Experiment - combine element/alchemy game based on antique theories of abiogenesis.

Fallen London - free-to-play text-based open world RPG.

Nested - very unique text-based universe expanding game. described as possibly @orteil42's favorite thing he's ever made.

The Process of Elimination - interactive web novel (by @hypertextdog)

Discworld MUD - multiplayer, text-based, online game (a MUD, or text MMORPG) based on the Discworld books.

Horse Master - surreal text game about training a horse.

EYEZMAZE - flash (RIP) or HTML5-based puzzle games.

You Are Jeff Bezos - text game. spend Jeff Bezos' fortune.

The Password Game - challenging puzzle game where you have to meet password requirements (by neal)

Universal Paperclips - incremental paperclip making game.

Half-Earth - planetary disaster planning game where you try to save the world using socialism.

ChooseYourStory - community-driven website centered on CYOA style story games.

PhD Simulator - random event based text game. make your choice each month and see if you can graduate on time.

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup - open source roguelike.

Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead - turn-based survival roguelike set in the modern day.

Nethack - open source roguelike originally released in 1987.

FarmRPG - simple, mobile-friendly, text-based farming RPG.

Kingdom of Loathing - browser-based community MMORPG.

PokeRogue - browser-based Pokemon roguelike

Tools

Text Game Builder - works in your browser, with just a little bit of Python (by @grumpygandalf)

Twine - great (free!) tool for making text-based games quickly.

Ink - scripting language for interactive fiction (also free)

Flashpoint Archive - a community effort to preserve games and animations from the web.

PICO-8 - fantasy console for making, sharing and playing tiny games and other computer programs.

Non-Games

Library of Babel - interactive illustration which attempts to simulate what it might be like to browse The Library of Babel.

Superbad - technically not a game, sprawling website full of secrets.

17776 - serialized speculative fiction multimedia narrative about football in the far-future. beautiful, creative, legendary. created by Jon Bois, a legend and one of my favorite writers of all time.

Choice of Games - text-based, choose-your-own-adventure games (interactive fiction). some free-to-play, others can be bought like an ebook.

The Deep Sea - scroll to the bottom of the ocean. encounter the humble squid and his friends (by neal)

Space Elevator - like The Deep Sea, but up instead of down. you can equip your avatar with a scarf (by neal)

Internet Artifacts - an interactive history of the early internet (by neal)

If The Moon Were Only One Pixel - scroll through an accurately scaled model of the universe.

r/incremental_games - reddit community for incremental games.

r/WebGames - reddit community for web games in general.

thank you to everyone who contributed and the creators. please be sure to show them some love where possible.

[monchursouls]

Reblogging the update too

[myrfing]

OUR SMALLEST FIGHTERS BUT WHAT DOES SIZE SAY ABOUT CAPACITY FOR VIOLENCE? ALFRED VS. CUTIE

WHO WOULD WIN IN A FIGHT?

ALFRED

CUTIE

Voting ended onFeb 10, 2025

CHALLENGER STATS:

ALFRED AGE: 13 WEIGHT: NOT MUCH BRUTAL TRAITS: - old as fuck - really muscular for his breed for some reason - barely tolerates being handle WEAKNESS: too stupid to catch crickets so we have to feed him dried mealworms @kuroimarzipan's CHAMPION

CUTIE A.K.A. POWERFUL BABY PLANT-EATER AGE: 1 WEIGHT: 2kg/4.4lbs BRUTAL TRAITS: - Bold puncher when she can hide in the cover of a box or chair - The Wiggler if you try to hold her - Has such a cute soft pathetic meow when you do something she doesn’t like that it’ll kill you WEAKNESS: Such a scaredy cat. Scared of every stranger and transportation box ever even with treats @they-call-me-hippie's CHAMPION

[dramatic-dolphin]

who let biologists play dnd

[kushblazer666]

australia is so fucked up. like they have their own version of the costco dog and soda but you have to go to like the fucking. home depot parking lot or whatever and this is what you get

from the bunnings' sausage sizzle

[mephorash]

@0x-hazel explain this. why is it on white bread

[0x-hazel]

why not? what else would it be on?

[mephorash]

Hot dog bun - Wikipedia

[0x-hazel]

mm. disagree.

okay being serious we have those here just. a bunnings snag is not that high quality? it's a charity or community group fundraiser organised by volunteers (using bunnings permission and equipment) and so you wanna keep the profits high

[darkenedyeastextract]

Also serving it on a flat surface with the slice unfolded? What is this some Haute Cuisine?! It should be already folded and handed to me by a powerful 6'4" and 100kg white guy who's like a priest or something.

[neonir]

Can we PLEASE all note that a sausage sandwich (Blessed by grace, raw beef sausage) is by NO FUCKING MEANS a Costco Hotdog?

Like, we have costco. We have costco hotdogs. They're fine. They're HOTDOGS. saying they're the same as a bunnings snag is like saying a ham sandwich is the same as a burger pattie.

Different breeds of meat friends.

"But the point about the bun still stands!"

No it doesn't. Scuentists have spent lifetimes analysing the ideal bread to sausage ratio. Any bun. And bun at all exceeds this ratio and is not nearly meaty enough for the Australian Pallet.

[abyssal-plains]

[pankendev]

i hate these motherfuckers so much. our sewer system used to be infested with them. they;d crawl out of my fucking toilet at night looking for warmth, standing up from the bowl waving their shitass little arms at me. they don’t have eyes but you can feel them staring back at you, asking for hugs or god knows what with that pathetic whine that permeates their entire way of existence. uppies! uppies! i’m not giving you uppies you wet toilet freak

[barrebabyofthescrewedupclick]

That’s not true and it isn’t right to lie about what an Olm would do or where it would live. When I saw the Olms I felt they had a quiet dignity, and I felt that they were blessed to live in such a beautiful cave even though they are unable to see it. I don’t see the point in using your platform to give people the wrong ideas about Olms.

[neonir]

😌

[shencomix]

What would you do

What would you do if you showed up for a date with me, and instead of a guy like I said in my dating profile, I was a small injured deer?

And you asked me why I didn't say I was a small injured deer in my profile, and I said I was worried you would hate me for being so small and injured?

And then I got a salad and slowly nibbled on it, flapping my ears while you told me about warhammer 40 thousand. And then when it came time to split the bill, I told you I had no money because I'm a creature of a forest, but that I would pay you for my portion in song?

And so I sat up on my hind legs, and sang the most beautiful sonata you've ever heard in your life. I sang of the valleys and the rivers. In the first part of the song, you could hear my voice waver from the pain of my injury. But then it crescendoed with fire and determination, as if in the middle of that very song I decided that I must keep living no matter what happens, and that you must keep living too?

Then, when you came back to your senses from being entranced by the beauty of the song, there were tears streaming down your face? I was nowhere to be seen, leaving behind only a single autumn leaf on the table? You looked down at your hands, and in your hands was a small note with your childhood dream you had long forgotten on it, written by your own hand?

What would you do?

Would you be mad?

[neonir]

I would put on a hunting cap, pull fourth a rifle from a warchest that I had never known before.

I would hunt you down to the ends of the earth and beyond. I would fight through the innocence of the woods and the cruelty of the wilds and nothing on this earth or the next could stop me from hunting you down, holding the barrel of my gun to your ephemerally beautiful form and DEMANDING you pay the $5.99 to pay for that shitty little salad.

When you try to lie, and say you have no physical riches, I will pull out my hunting knife, cutting open that "Bag of wishes made to trees" you had hung around your neck, spilling fourth millions of smackaroos.

MY smackaroos. The smackaroos you stole from my dying father while he was entranced by your song.

Maybe some might have fallen for your tricks, Shen, the impossibly beautiful and representitive of all of our vulnerabilities Deer...

But I'd know that calling card anywhere.

As I hold up the autumn leaf, a tear rolls from my eyes, I grab, with one rough fist $6.

I then explain that I can venmo you the remaining 1c, but ask if you care or if we should just call it even on account of the dad thing.

[neonir]

Caves of Qud might just be the only game of all time.

[whereserpentswalk]

Stop worldbuilding like you're a school that rejects humanities in favor of stem. I'm tired of seeing people stress over researching plate tectonics and mineral deposits but put no care into how realistic or interesting their cultures, economies and politics are. Who cares about the realism of your landmass if you just put a giant empire of catholic coded white people on your most Europe part of it and made their culture no deeper than "good guys" with no government structure beyond your rightful heir taking the throne and no internal varation on their culture.

Like, please inject more realism and life into your cultures. Your politics. Your religion. It matters very little that you have a realistic map with the mountains and rivers in the right places. It matters a lot more that your evil empire should probably be more complicated than an evil race that is evil by nature.

[neonir]

Counterpoint: Hyperfocusing on any ethereal, super in depth mechanics of what makes up your world is only as valuable as the story you wish to tell.

If the story you are telling takes place entirely within The Bogmire Fenlands, and is mostly about a man desperately trying to convince the mudwitch of the swamps that his love is earnest by sacrificing his own blood to The Marshlurk (an ancient spirit of wetlands) international politics may struggle to remain relevant.

LIMNOLOGY ON THE OTHER HAND

[cacturnia]

shout out to the silly creatures from scavengers reign‼️‼️

[ohnoitstbskyen]

What’s your thoughts on Delicious in Dungeons Character Designs?

Ryoko Kui is the best to ever do it.

[ohnoitstbskyen]

To expand on this a little bit: Ryoko Kui takes the tools of character design seriously, and uses them with forethought and consideration to set her characters apart, give them personality and specificity, and thinks very carefully about what each piece of design communicates and how it interacts with all the other design in her story.

Body shape, face shape, noses, eyes, brows, hair, proportion, fashion, ears, posture, roundness and angularity, broadness and slenderness, posture... Kui clearly thinks about ALL of it, and incorporates all of it.

And this is part of what gives her story such a profound sense of taking place within a world, a whole world inhabited by thousands of people each of whom are as full and unique and distinct as every other one. You look at a group of her characters and none of them feel like Copy Pasted NPC Placeholder #3457, they each feel as though there is a life there, an individuality, even if they are never actually deeply explored in the story.

Compare and contrast with something like Genshin Impact's style of character design:

Now, I don't bring this up just to sh** on Genshin - its character design style is adapted very effectively to the kind of story and world it is trying to build, which is to say a gacha story where every part of a character is formulated towards the singular goal of appeal. It's a world inhabited by nothing but main characters, essentially, and it is a laser-focused power fantasy structured around constantly pursuing the high of maximum damage numbers pumped out by maximally cool and badass battle moves executed with maximal grace by physically perfect avatars who provide the player with maximal aesthetic pleasure.

But because of that, its character design style is under severe pressure to regress to the mean - i.e. skinny bodies, young bodies, beauty ideals, and a minimal amount of physical difference. This style of character design tends to focus all of its effort in colorful, detailed and attention-grabbing fashion and hair styles, and generally avoids "alienating" design features like, well, literally anything that could be conceptualized by anyone as "ugly." Big strong noses, for example, or larger ears, or wrinkles, scarring, skin folds and so on. Fatness functionally does not exist in Genshin Impact's character roster for this reason, and it's part of the reason why the franchise struggles so notably to design characters of color - the concept of "beauty" is deeply bound up in systemic biases of class, race, gender and nationalism, and since Genshin's character design ethos is "make every character as broadly beautiful as possible" it has to keep hitting the same limited set of beats over and over and over again, and it reinforces the biases it inherits with its inability to step outside of them.

So Genshin Impact characters have a tendency, for me at least, to all kinda blur together into a brightly colored cavalcade of lowest-common-denominator ambulatory clothing racks, characters whose bodies exist for the primary purpose of transporting a highly elaborate costume around.

Kui by contrast very very actively seeks out elements of physical difference, and incorporates them into her design process - she seems to delight in inventing as many nose shapes as possible, as many different kinds of eyes as she can think of, and the result is that she has a character roster which is recognizable even if you change or remove very important parts of their basic design.

Where Genshin Impact (and that style of character design) would severely struggle to make characters recognizable without their costumes, because the characters in large part are their costumes, Kui's design style makes characters extremely recognizable not only in and out of costume, but even if the fundamental nature of their bodies change across species, and it makes her characters of the same race and species eminently recognizable from one another, even while sharing many physical traits and aesthetic features.

anyway tl;dr Ryoko Kui is the best to ever do it.

[kuroimarzipan]

i wanted to collect all the mementos tarot in one post now that ive finished them all!!

[neonir]

Grimlette.....pog............

[vixensdungeon]

The fact that there are D&D 5e players who don’t know how the rules work is so absurd to me. Like, they’ve had the basic rules up for free since before the rulebooks were even in stores, so even not having the rulebook is no excuse. At that point you’re doing it on purpose.

[pieroguetrader]

Here is how you gatekeep the game. The new players will be too afraid to make mistakes and would rather quit if we have this mentality. Especially femmes, POC and queer people, who were afraid to enter the spaces gatekept for snobby nerdy white straight men for decades. Ew.

[vixensdungeon]

What mentality? One where learning the rules is considered good? This isn’t about mistakes. I certainly made them when I started out. But I also bothered to read the rulebook.

[thydungeongal]

Viv I can't believe you would be this femmephobic: us silly girls can't read

[hellfridge]

When I tell you there's nothing I hate more than being underestimated in nerdy spaces because someone decided I'm"just a girl" that was NOT an invitation for you to lower the bar to what you assume my level is lol

Seriously. If you don't like/need the rules, just don't play D&D 5e. Roleplay doesn't require a system and you can homebrew whatever the fuck you want but if you never learn the rules then you're not playing D&D 5e, you're playing a vague rule free game with the same aesthetic, which is just as valid but not the same thing at all. The rules are the wholeass game sry not sry

[xeansicemane]

Me, seeing the OP: "Ah! A nice moment to talk about 5e's shortcomings re: the oddly difficult to learn action economy and ruleset"

[The rest of the post]

Good lord.

But for real folks don't be afraid to shop around a little. World of Darkness has a well earned stink to it but the recent editions have righted more than a few wrongs and it's not as entrenched in hard rules. Powered by the Apocalypse games (personal faves are Blades in the Dark and Monster of the Week) are also REALLY good systems to play if you're a theater kid type.

Lancer is less rules heavy than 5e but still pretty mechanical, while still being accessible to new people. (It also has the best first party online tool in COMP/CON).

[vexwerewolf]

Hey @vixensdungeon, I wanna personally congratulate you because I genuinely don't think you could possibly have picked a worse system to make this point with even if you tried. Having both run and played in over a dozen D&D 5e games, and at least twice that many games using other systems, I can confidently say D&D 5e is one of the most obtuse and unintuitive systems out there.

It exists as a compromise between the absurdly number-crunched 3.5e (which everyone claims to have loved, but curiously never seems to want to play again) and the streamlined, integral 4e (which everyone hated but cannot, in retrospect, explain why). It bears the weight of a full half century of history, including vestigial design decisions made by people who are literally dead, from a time when they were playing a fundamentally different game.

There are a lot of rules in 5e that are painfully obtuse and are not clarified in the section of the book that you would expect. There are hundreds of spells, and six types of dice. Grappling is simplified from the absolute fucking nightmare it was on 3.5e but I still have to look up the rules every time a player tries it. Monsters lost their role designators from 4e (the same ones Lancer preserved) which makes building balanced enemy comps hard. Players can stack like six or seven abilities onto a single attack, each of which is on a separate page. There are now six saving throws, and some spells are attacks, some only proc a saving throw, and some spells are an attack that subsequently procs a saving throw.

Compare that to Blades in the Dark or Powered by the Apocalypse, where quite literally every action my character can take and every mechanic that directly affects them fits on a double-sided sheet of A4 paper.

Yes, it is bothersome to have to explain a mechanic to a player several sessions in a row. However, D&D 5e is an obtuse three-dimensional nightmare maze of a game that I would accuse of being intentionally designed to confuse people if I didn't know that it was designed by a temporally dissociated non-committee of people with fundamentally different conceptions of game design and what constitutes fun.

[vixensdungeon]

Name another game with a playing culture where most players only play that one game but seemingly have no interested in learning its rules and I'll make a post about that one. 🙂

[vexwerewolf]

I'm gonna be honest friendo it feels like a lot of people in this thread are misrepresenting players being confused by this janky ass Winchester Mystery House of a game and having to regularly consult one of its three 300+ page core rulebooks (and two essentially vital supplements XGE and TCE) as "not bothering to learn the rules"

[neonir]

I'm going to honest friendo, if 5e is a Winchester Mystery House to you, I frankly cannot imagine how you managed to play 3.5e or 4e.

"It has 6 types of dice"

Really? This is what it takes to make a game an unknowable puzzle nowadays? Having to use different dice when dealing damage.

"So many spells! Attack rolls or saving throws or both D:"

That's 2 mechanics and a list of abilities to pick from...would it make you happier to have *less*?

Maybe 5e is complicated if you are comparing to like.... friday night boardgames with your parents, but gee whiz, it doesn't even make it's way into the top 100 of confusing rpgs.

[bowelfly]

Brother Gregor never spoke and often spooked the neophytes with his appearance, but he was a gentle soul and a phenomenal cook and knew more ways to prepare a fish than the abbot knew hymns

[kuroimarzipan]

finally finished my rogue trader's portrait.... pieces that fought with me every single step of the way lmfao its not even in the right style but i needed to finish it and move on. anyway this is selais von valancius shes a voidborn noble, officer and iconoclast. she likes to study people and is excessively conceited. jae is her sugar baby

[neonir]

"Abelard, Slap his nuts."

[tujiux]

Malignin Fates.