bvanevery

In real life some of these spaces I never did laundry in, and nobody was doing laundry, because the beer and music were far more important. Especially when the laundromat was in another part of town, so I'd never actually haul my laundry to it.
It was this weird business that various people would try to run. A friend of mine started up this laundromat that was also a whisky bar. He took us after hours to check it out. I had already had a bunch of Belgian beer and I got so sick on the whiskey, sickest I've ever been on alcohol in my life. Still can't consider a smoke flavored whiskey to this day.

No I don't. I find most people's videos incredibly boring, even if they're supposed to be on an interesting subject. Making videos is so common that lots and lots of people are terrible videographers. They just let things drag on, they waste people's time. So making a video of a subject that is also boring, looking over the shoulder or listening to someone play a game, is even worse.

I'll watch my Mom play a video game in real life for like 30 seconds. That teaches me something about what she's doing, and that's all it's worth. I'm an indie game designer and developer. I see it; I get it; that's all I need.

Games are interactive and are meant to be played. I can't relate to people only watching games, at all. I know people do it. I cannot relate to it in any way. It is alien to me.

One thing I've realized about people's YouTube play sessions, is they get their audience more from the audio they're doing, than from the video. Because people listen to these videos, while they're eating dinner or doing laundry and so forth. Their eyes and hands are on something else.

In the early 2000s I went through a whole period of mythological city building with the game Zeus. And there were real laundromats in Seattle integrating alcohol, board games, video games, and even music performances in them. I still see laundromats in other cities today with an arcade cabinet in them, and more than once I've thought, "Why can't this be an arcade game that doesn't suck?" They haven't gotten any money out of me. So I can relate to the idea of building out a more swank laundromat, 90s / 2000s style. But by that same token, mythological city building is better than laundromat building, and more period.

I actually haven't perused the builder game space in quite awhile. There was a long period where my extreme jadedness was justified. Minecraft Alpha for instance was terrible as a game. But it was a bunch of kids' first game, that was a big part of it, that they had no preexisting concept of what should go into a proper builder game. Another was insider cult rituals of finding secret stuff to do in the game, how things worked. Went hand in hand with outsourcing "why you bother to play the game" to social media.

I spent 5 calendar years modding Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri to make my SMACX AI Growth mod. I solved many things, but one totally rubbish thing caused me more rage quits over the years than all other sources combined. Probe teams can take over cities for trivial amounts of credits, compared to the value of the city and the military units in it. The original game formula is completely overpowered and broken. My mod is .txt modding only, as anyone who bought the game could originally do. I was able to mitigate the problem but not solve it. It's now down to goddamn irritating instead of absolutely infuriating. The only way to fix the mechanic short of making a totally new game from scratch, is binary modding the original game. People do that, and I have the technical skills to do it, but I studiously avoided any invitations to engage in binary modding. It took me 5 calendar years as it was to perfect my .txt mod to the degree it could be perfected. I'm done providing free stuff for the internet that way. Next gaming effort gets me a paycheck (I hope someday).