(no subject)

[chocolatepot]

At last, the Antique & Artisan Show is over! Can't wait to get back to work and have people start hassling me about stuff they want me to do now that I no longer have "I'm really busy because of the show" as an excuse not to do their pet projects. There I bought a partial set of Hall China refrigerator containers (will be trying to collect the butter dish and bigger pitcher), a box of sheet music containing some real hits, a watch that I think was a bad buy but was cheap, and a 1944 McCall's.

I thought I was ready to send out a pattern to one of my smallest testers, but I misjudged how long it would take to do instructions - although with danabren's advice from the last one and the relative simplicity of this dress, these came together quickly! But writing out instructions makes it clear where I need to change things on the pattern itself, of course, and add pieces I just didn't think about before (plackets and so on).

Someone I contacted on Tumblr about drawing my logo got back to me! Having that will be nice.

Watching Cranford this evening. Real talk: I like it because I identify with the spinsters who are variously still looking to get married, disdainful of men, and/or regretful about never having had a family.

I've been playing Hogwarts Mystery, too. Pros: More HP stuff to engage with; intriguing pre-series setting (between chapters one and two of PS/SS); promise of seeing young Charlie and Tonks eventually; storyline with very fanfic plot and some sympathetic NPCs. Cons: Only one person can have each name, and since the OFC I came up with when I was 13 has a relatively common one I was not able to be her, MEGA DISAPPOINTMENT; for something with a railroad plot, it has terribly ugly animation/characters; said railroad plot doesn't allow for real exploration of the setting; the energy thing everyone complains about definitely detracts from gameplay, although the waiting period is better than on a couple of Playrix games I play; the antagonist is unconvincing and irritating. I'm more interested in the upcoming Niantic AR game, although after PokeGo it's pretty certain that the servers will be impossible to get on for the first week.

Comments

[author_by_night]

promise of seeing young Charlie and Tonks eventually

Ooh, I often wrote them as friends at school (as well as lovers). Wonder if that will be confirmed...

Can you play multiple versions, like Sims? I'm so tempted to play a "good" character, but also kind of an evil one.

Also, this is totally taking me back to my roleplaying days. I was always Remus, but truth be told, I got sick of always being Remus. Maybe that's also why I want an evil character. (With a redemption arc! I'm... not sure the gameplay will be advanced enough for that, though. I feel like Sims is a better game for stuff like that, I imagine this game is a bit more structured?)

ETA: Googled a bit... do you really have to pay lots of money for more energy? Or are people on the internet just being simplistic, as usual?

TBH I may run into the same problem I ran into with RPGs in fandom, if it's more rule based. I feel like my inner writer would always kick in back then and go "but that doesn't make sense," which could happen here. Am I better off just finally writing my Bill-Charlie-Tonks generation fanfic?

[chocolatepot]

It's the kind of game where you control one character moving through a set storyline - which I think is a miscalculation of what the fans, even the casual ones, want (which is a sandbox to run around in) - so you can't have multiples and you can't even control the personality too much, beyond picking "the courage option" or "the empathy option" in conversations. IMO it would be better if there were at least different story branches that your conversation choices could lead you to.

You don't really have to pay money to get more energy, unless you want to just sit down and play for an hour or something. Which is probably why it upsets the game reviewers, since they normally play play play and then write. You start off with a 24 energy unit maximum, and every so often you can get that raised; when you're in a class, you do a bunch of actions that cost varying amounts of energy within a set time limit in order to pass it and learn the new spell/potion/flying-thing. The energy regenerates one point every three minutes. So basically, say you're in a 4hr long class, you play all your energy, then close out the app and do other things for an hour and a bit, then play all that energy, then go away again, etc. People must be paying for energy, though, because from Tumblr I can see that some people are way farther ahead than me.

You are probably better off writing fic. That being said, you might end up shipping the new characters. There are a lot of jokes about your character's BFF Rowan being in love with you, and your character being in love with Penny (the one attractively-rendered person in the entire game, so she's startlingly beautiful when everyone else looks like highly-zoomed-in designs from Sims 3) or them all being in a throuple, and it's all pretty justified tbh. There's also Merula, the bully, who insists that she's the best witch at Hogwarts from like day one (okay ...), and Ben Copper, the adorably anxious Gryffindor.

I saw someone post a screen from second year, where Rowan gushes over the fact that Bill winked at him (Rowan's gender always matches yours; this is the only person I've seen play a boy). Looking forward to that.

[author_by_night]

which I think is a miscalculation of what the fans, even the casual ones, want (which is a sandbox to run around in)

Yeah, that's more what I was hoping for. But I might try it. Knowing that it's not really a sandbox kind of game helps.

To be fair, even The Sims released Sims Medieval, except it was way more traditional game than sandboxy. (It also took away the generations aspect. I'd really wanted to play with different generations of royalty, for instance.) You'd think that with the popularity of The Sims, more sandbox games would be released, but alas.

[chocolatepot]

It's really likely that the Niantic game is going to be nothing but a sandbox, given their past output. So you might only have to wait a few months!

[danabren]

Thanks for the info on the HP game, it doesn't sound like it's worth starting, combined with people showing off their characters and they all (save one) had the same damn hairstyle.

Oops, I dropped the ball on following up on the rest of the instructions! Do you still want me to do that, or are you through that step of the process? I am so sorry, I really did mean to get back to it.

[chocolatepot]

It's really not. I'm sucked into it because ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ it takes very little for me to become emotionally invested, I guess, but it's just not a good game.

You can if you like! I made some edits since I sent you the link, but there's probably stuff I missed.