#experiment 2

[freelancerpower]

flat fuck friday

[calvinofthemacaroni]

I cant with how stupid the agency's lift system is what is this bro

[devicecontact]

Krinkles showed a more zoomed out look of docs room in experiment 2 on stream :)

[2-lines-and-a-circle]

Experiment #2

Here is the second one I made today.I think I did better than the first one. I’m getting the hang of this! For those of you who aren’t familiar with this I’m working on a series called flavor of love, I compare characters to different chocolate flavors. People can also chose to partake in my matchups as well. I do them for both Haikyuu and Twisted Wonderland, but I’m thinking about adding others as well… 

I’m also doing matchups you can find that here: 2 Lines & A Circle : Flavor of Love, Find Your Match~ (tumblr.com)

Link to guide: 2 Lines & A Circle : Complete flavor of love list! (tumblr.com)

[just-petty-thoughts]

A 100 Hello

B 400 Hola

[jasminemunder]

Assessment 2 - Experiment 2

Following on from experiment 1, I played around with the same pictures using the crop and pen tool. The aim was to create something ambiguous and surreal. This experiment is incorporating my experience of taking these pictures in that certain time. Each image has repetitive cut-outs that place on top of each other to reflect the capturing and multiple takes to achieve the ‘natural’ photo. I also aimed to depict the idea of a ‘man-made’ construct as the result of these images was created by me.

[gardenscience]

Lemon Tree Haircuts

The lemon trees are approaching their 5th birthdays!  (WOW!) To celebrate, I decided to undertake a project that was much overdue: Haircuts.

Okay, leafcuts. Pruning. Whatever you want to call it, I’m a little embarrassed to admit that my lemon trees have never enjoyed the luxury of diligent landscaping. Part of this stems (pun mostly intended) from my own quasi-scientific curiosity in watching them grow. I wanted to see how tall they would get unimpeded. Impressively, they got so tall that it was no longer reasonable to keep them indoors. This was a problem, because outdoor growing isn’t an all-year option in this part of the world. In addition to preventing the trees from getting too large, I wanted to cut them vertically to encourage branching at the lower levels. Also, they were just looking kind of scrubby and I wanted to fix that. 

The relaxing “lemon tree spa day” started at my parents’ house. My parents have been kind enough to lemon-sit the trees during my recent move. The trees recently endured a windstorm and tipped over, so they were completely askew in their pots.

The above picture shows the upper spire of the tallest plant. It was well over 6 feet tall prior to being cut.

I’ll admit I don’t know a ton about cutting trees and shrubs, so I combined 3 indispensable-but-definitely-not-equal things to inform my pruning:

My dad’s expert advice

The internet’s dubious advice

My own questionable common sense

I cut all parts of the tree on which I did not want to encourage further growth, pruning right up to forks in the branches when possible. I chopped the entire growing top of both lemon trees, which was a tad scary. 

Above you can see the material taken from both trees. The largest tree still had a string tied around it from my efforts to straighten it out last summer.

When the haircuts were done, my mom (the esteemed @tango-mango) and I scrubbed every leaf of both trees with a gentle soap/water solution using a toothbrush. This is a recommended treatment for the pest called “scale”, which has perpetually plagued my poor lemons. Once that rather nasty endeavor was complete, we rinsed the leaves with water from a spray bottle and wiped away the remaining bugs. I imagine I’ll have to do a follow up treatment later, but we really gave them what for!

The spa treatment capped off with some straightening and pot maintenance. I have to say, the results of this entire endeavor are stunning. It turns out there were two beautiful, dainty trees hiding under all those bulky branches!

The lemon trees are now ready to move back to the apartment for the summer looking their absolute best. Mission success!

[game4000-vi]

Journal 2

For Experiment 2, I knew I wanted to make a game that facilitated more roleplay. I was unhappy with the lack of necessary roleplay in Experiment 1, and I wanted to make a game that relied on it much more heavily. I was stumped for a bit on what the content of the actual game should be, but I decided to try and make a game in one of my favorite film/book genres. I really like murder mysteries, and thought that could provide some interesting roleplay scenarios.

I was intimidated by actually making a game with this concept, and I definitely think I would need to do a lot more iterations to actually make it a complete game. I definitely took inspiration from where I’ve seen murder mysteries in games before, namely Werewolf, which then led me to thinking about Blood on the Clocktower. I was very inspired by the idea of two opposing sides and some neutral characters from that game, and remembering the goals from the discussion of Everyone is John, decided to have goals that fall under three different sides: reveal the truth, conceal the truth, and neutral (no goal). I wanted players to have a relation to the murder (that they kept hidden), inspired by these social deduction games. I also wanted players to have a public identity to allow for more roleplay than is allowed in a game like Werewolf, and tried to come up with archetypes that appear across many different mystery media. I wanted players to have freedom to set the game wherever they wanted to. At this point, I felt confident about my setup, but very uncertain of what I wanted the actual gameplay to be. I assigned some points and skills to try and give a gameplay benefit to roleplaying, but I wanted to use the playtest to see how players would actually react to this scenario.

I knew this was a GM heavy game, so I took on the role of the GM for testing and made a small two-room mystery. I had a feeling that gameplay would be pretty unstructured (I also went last in my group and we were running a bit short on time, so I went through the actual rules a little bit quickly), but I was surprised by how little the players interacted with the world. It seemed that they were roleplaying more outside of the structure that was supposed to exist in the game. I had wanted each conversation to encompass a turn, but conversations seemed to spill over out of turns. When I asked for feedback, I was told I needed to make the actual game more structured. This was what I expected, as I was happy with the setup but not the content of my game. One of my testers referenced Ace Attorney as inspiration to draw from (which I found interesting because I accidentally based the scenario for playtesting on my least favorite Ace Attorney case), in having specific things to interact with planned out. They also mentioned giving more of an outline for GMs to follow, which I agree would be very useful to have. I still don’t know the best way to do investigation work like this; I made a game for another class that was much more investigation heavy, but that had a pre-planned world that was used every time. Additionally, it was not really a roleplaying game, so it was designed far more around telling a determined story than letting the players make one. I’m still struggling with how exactly to create this sort of gameplay in a TTRPG. 

The idea of making a keepsake game has been brewing in my mind after talking about it in class. One of the reasons that I love Thousand Year Vampire the way that I do is because it leaves you with a physical record of your time playing it. I really like how it’s not just a list either: due to how things are removed (by forgetting or losing), you can learn some of the story just by looking at the inventory. I also felt this sort of satisfaction when playing Deep Forest, as seeing a finished drawing of the story we were forming felt like a satisfying conclusion. While I like having a physical piece, I also think what you don’t get to see is just as interesting. I really like how, looking at the Deep Forest map, it becomes unclear exactly the order of the events that occurred. Someone who wasn’t there wouldn’t be able to decipher it at all. In the same way that Thousand Year Door plays with your character’s memory, I think the connection to the player’s memory formed by keepsake games is part of what draws me to them. Years later, the player could completely forget what they thought while making it, and could draw new conclusions about what it means. One issue that I’ve run into though is the barrier of what the keepsake is. I came up with an idea that I would have maybe liked to build on during the ideation portion of class, but it would never be feasible to run for a game itself. The game surrounded needing to adapt a pair of pointe shoes to various different shows, showcasing the growth of the hypothetical dancer character (I thought about the way that pointe shoes must be broken to be used, and thought a game about molding them in different ways and customizing something that often isn’t customized beyond changing the color would be interesting). However, pointe shoes are far too expensive to expect players to pick up solely for a game, and I don’t think that the game would feel the same if it was hypothetical.