Reference Kick

Why not make it a matter of "things were so good for so long that we thought that we could totally get rid of this small necessary evil in order to make the world perfect, because we forgot why it was necessary in the first place. So we fucked with the balance so now things have gone all fuckshit because we thought we were so smart."

I'm a radical proponent of the "evil isn't real" theory of the human psyche, but honestly even I think it's overkill to write off Evil as a narrative device entirely. Not-real things appear in fiction all the time, after all. A lot of these games that involve those roving gangs of ultraevil baddies who outnumber the population of normal people 3 to 1 are trading heavily on suspension of disbelief anyway. It can be interesting to bust that open and interrogate it, absolutely, but you can't frame it as a genuine revelation when everyone involved in the process is at least loosely aware of the absurdity. The devs know it, the player knows it, but there's a social contract in place to bend the rules of reality in service to delivering the interactions the audience is here for.

Not to say that "it's just fiction, don't read so much into it" is a fair angle to take either. These tropes are reflected in real worldviews and real ideas of the human condition. But often I think there's a bit of ambiguity on how unreal the ontologically evil badguys are meant to be. I think that's what gives tropes like these their staying power. They can remain "apolitical" by introducing a clear element of absurdity and allowing the viewer to decide how much that element infects the whole of the concept. Everyone can agree that these spontaneuously respawning packs of raiders are obviously not meant to be taken at face value, but where one player may take this as a sign that the whole thing is meant to be a little unreal, another player may say, sure, their numbers are exaggerated, but there's some real nasty fuckers out there in the world, and our society is just a hair away from these cutthroats overrunning us all. In the end, everyone gets to choose how much of their worldview is honestly represented in the work, and all come away satisfied.

It's a neat trick, if a little dark, and there's still some background miasma of what a work of fiction decides are the markers of an ontologically evil badguy. Like, if all the good guys live in castles, and all the evil guys live in huts, that kind of gives off an impression, you know? What decisions a work makes about who these evil guys are and how they fit into the world can have a big impact on how it's percieved. It doesn't matter how fantastic you make your villains, if the heroes in your setting talk about them the way racists talk about immigrants, you have a problem. I think often fiction with these bandit-types try to dodge the most outright xenophobic implications by framing them as evil people from all cultures who have abandoned their old lives in order to prey on the weak, but that still reinforces a specific worldview about what evil is and where it comes from, even if it's less overtly offensive than the "foreign hordes".

Friendliness pellets: retool the combat into some nonviolent activity that just happens to look/play "like combat." Viability here depends on how abstracted your combat was to start with, (the deckbuilder Griftlands has an if anything more intricate card battle system for persuasion than for fighting, and that works fine, but stapling nonviolence onto a dark souls type system might be a tougher sell) and the tone of the work.

Rubber bullets: just declare that most or all fighting in your game is non-lethal. That knock on the head won't be leaving them with a potentially fatal concussion, and that meteor spell was perfectly safe. Don't worry about it. Trying to take this too seriously generally does not work, but it can be fun to see in more tongue in cheek games (Tactical Breach Wizards' Jen casting feather fall on the windows she blasts people out of comes to mind.)

Rubber monsters: the enemies are some kind of mindlessly hostile entity, robots or zombies or demons or whatever, something the player won't need to feel bad about destroying. This can end up boring, and doesn't work if you want a villain to fight that's cool, sympathetic, or interesting to interact with. Either intersperse some non-monster villains and take a different approach for them, or just give one of those demons a fun personality--but watch out! If one guy from this type of entity seems capable of having a conversation or negotiating with the player character(s), you might start getting questions about what makes them so different from the rest of the horde, which leads into...

My "these beings with hopes dreams and fears are fundamentally fine to kill" shirt is raising a lot of questions answered by the shirt: just have a category of character that are all inherently evil, or all evil aside from specific named ones who are ~different~ for some nebulous or unexplained reason. It's not like real life racism if they have fantasy traits or come from another planet! Don't worry about it!! Pros: easy. Cons: everything else.

Victim blaming: put the combat enemies into a category that makes it clear that their own choices are what makes it reasonable to kill them. Approach and effectiveness will vary based on intended audience, and the ubiquity of this type of enemy can strain credulity depending on the game's setting (see previous discussion.) It also speaks pretty directly to the creator's politics, what kind of life choices they think could only be made out of malice and/or deserves a death sentence, and where their real life societal anxieties are focused.

Parody: just stick a lampshade on it! Tells the player that you've noticed your story is on shaky moral foundations, but doesn't require the extra work of doing something about it. Sometimes this is an okay middle ground between bogging your runtime down in navel gazing the player doesn't want to hear, and just ignoring all the unfortunate implications. Effectiveness varies by tone of the story.

Two guys on the moon: accept that your protagonist kills people. Throw everything they've done onto the floor in a pile and tell the player, "listen, you deal with this if you want to. You decide whether it was worth it. You tell me whether Hornet gets a pass for fourth-hearting Karmelita in a girl power moment." This can be a hard sell if your audience is looking for a sympathetic protagonist. Also some of that audience will assume you endorse anything you didn't specifically stick a "this is bad" or "I don't actually agree with this guy" sticker on which is inevitable but also annoying.

Actually thinking about it (cursory): Have the heroes mull their morals over in passing, and recognize the shared humanity of their opponents. Do the "perhaps, in another life, we could have been friends" for a couple named villains. Like 'Parody' it mostly serves to tell the player, 'hey, I know what this looks like, but,' and then let them get back to the hacking and slashing without taking up too much of their time. Comes across as perfunctory as it is though.

Bounce light is something I didn't cover but I adore it!

Gamut Mask

(image via )

James Gurney is an absolute master and gives really good clarity on colour techniques. Yes, it is traditional paint focused, but the principles are the same. Yes it is informed by the environmental colour but as a painting technique it is achieved this way!

While it's not super important to know about the mathematical side of blend modes, I think it's worth knowing at least enough about how each of the categories of blend modes works and why they do what they do; if for no other reason than having a starting point when you start experimenting with them in your work.

An overview of the basic blend modes and how they work from Genevieve's Design Studio: Accessible with minimal color knowledge; practical and illustration focused. https://youtu.be/kMc87hQrJd0?si=TWCB365pKSfWS8p0. (16 minutes) This creator also has a ton of free resources you can download, including a Blend Modes cheatsheet, but fair warning: you have to create an account to get them!

Are they seen as an abomination by its creator or does their creator see them as a true person?

Were do they fall on the spectrum?

Halloween's been over for 2 months ? don't care personnally. I made some brushes to help me painting intricate architectural details with minimum effort, and at first this painting was just to try them out but I got carried away... I didn't planned anything here, just pure experimentation, testing things out, having fun, intuitively building details in, I really enjoy working a bit mindlessly like that. would love to dive more into dark fantasy aesthetic, been drawing that a lot, I need to world build a bit more I think !

IMPROVISED ASSET