never-hinged rizo hours

If you read the link the company does of course say they’re replacing the existing forums with new ones, and I’m sure no one would say the old ones didn’t perhaps need a lil bit of a glow up, some tech debt fixing… but there’s a few key notes in there:

They are NOT carrying over any history, data messages etc. from the old forums

They are NOT archiving, retaining or in any way saving the existing forums in any way

They have NOT provided any reasoning past ‘as part of continued efforts to support developers’

As an offhand, moderate read, this sounds to me like a desire for some change in the forums but deciding nuking everything is less expensive than rebuilding and carrying over info.

If I’m cynical, and likely realistic? Probably to increase sales of their latest GameMaker software by making it inherently more difficult for someone getting the older software for cheap pushing it to its limits. The amount of institutional knowledge on those forums is absurd.

And even if it is a benign reason, it’s still terrible because what do you mean you’re doing this with no recourse or potential for change? You sell software that runs on community goodwill? In an era where people are pulling away to open source software?? Crazy.

There are yeeeaaars of answers, plugins, suggestion, community built up on those forums - I’ve used the em to learn and grow my own skillet!!! And soon it won’t exist.

At the very least, they gave a ‘heads up’ - the deletion occurs mid December, so archiving by the community is possible from now. It’s just absurd that it needs to happen in the first place.

https://web.archive.org/web/20260000000000*/https://forums.rpgmakerweb.com/

https://rpgmakerchat.com/

https://github.com/imraf/rpgmakerweb-archive/

I took half an hour aside to hopefully make something which might help you (or might confuse you further) .

Alright, so you need to start thinking of animals as shapes, and not so much as animals. Here’s a bog-standard but ugly as ass pony for you.

You need to start seeing this pony as this. Mr Pons is showing his main shapes. His head is circles and connecting lines. Every part of him needs to be some sort of polygon which you can envision with your head.

All of those shapes can be pulled or pushed to make something new. I took our ugly ass Mr Pons and made him into some hunky warrior horse. So you’re wondering, what the hell Velle, how the heck did you get him there. Well, his shapes are still the same.

I just made them larger and pulled those lines out. Every straight line that connects the dots can be bent, every shape can be pulled, misshapen or distorted. You can also squash elements. As you can see, I moved his legs up, I gave him shorter limbs. Shorter and stockier can mean stronger which is what I was aiming for.

Alternatively we could pinch those lines in and make a pretty weak looking animal. I mean look, he has basically no ass. This is kind of where your foundations in anatomy start to play a major role, even though I pinched this animal a lot you can still look at it and think “That’s a horse.” His neck is still long, his withers are still prominent, it still holds himself with a good posture.

Anyway, moving on… I find the best way to get a good but unique sort of characterisation of a animal is to pull, push, bend and pinch. I will distort each part. This horse is a combination of strong characteristics, and weaker characteristics. He is pretty balanced, but he ended up as strong horse who might have some speed which his light limbs. I want a fellow like this one to pull me in a carriage as I drink Champagne or some fizz or something.

Another good way to characterise an animal is to exaggerate areas which stands out to you. So this is a quick sketch of my cat Winnie who is currently asleep next to me. She’s a pretty standard looking cat to most people.

Working on that image I made something which is more of a play on how I like to describe her to other people. When I describe her to other people I usually revert to, “She has large ears, chunky cheeks, kind of skinny with a saggy belly, long black tail and teeny white toes.” There we go, we have our aim. If look at that description and look at the image below you can see where I forced out those characteristics.

I quickly slopped some colours in for you guys because my cat is adorable ok.

Also being cruel to their image can make you draw a really good representation of them. Here’s my brothers pug bitch Frankie. As you can see, I was not kind at all in drawing her. I made her wall eye really obvious, squished her face since pugs are just a big squish, chunked her neck out since she has a shit tonne of skin there and gave her these long ass legs. Seriously, this dog has the longest legs I’ve ever seen on a pug. However taking how mean I was, it works in a representation of her. She is a just a big happy wrinkle with a lot of quirks.

and when it released for ios? holy fuck were they DROWNING in money. when they took a weekend to put the game on sale for a dollar, down from five, a couple months after release, they made as much in that one weekend as they did since its release. it was among the top paid apps for weeks.

with critics, peggle was among some of the top downloadable, mobile, and general best games of all time at the time of its release in 2007 and onwards, and it only shot up in popularity as they made it more accessible to more people. and this was in a time before candy crush.

the thing about simple addictive puzzle games is that they make you feel competent, confident, smart, and cool for being good at them. not everybody can learn how to aim in a shooter or the best strategy in an rpg. but anybodys grandmother or baby brother can play a simple puzzle game, and the nature of these games and the way they make you feel only makes you want to play more and more.

however very very fucking few people who play simple puzzle games that you can master on the toilet would be going to E3 in the early 2010s. remember in 2012 when every ~hardcore gamer~ would screech about ‘fake gamers’ who only play candy crush? thats what peggle was. it was THE crack mobile game from the pre-candycrush era.

no one who was excited about peggle was going to E3. the hundreds of thousands of people who played peggle were not the type of people who would consider going to (or even giving a shit about) E3.

but it sold like hot cakes, and candy crush was churning out content like a madman, and EA owned popcap now, so because the game sold amazingly, and because they wanted to keep cashing in on it, and because corporate drones who controlled the scripts didnt comprehend that their consumerbase isnt one homogeneous mass, they decided to announce peggle 2 at E3 2013.

but not just “oh by the way peggle 2”, no. peggle sold like skyrim, it sold like black ops, clearly they should be saving the best for last, they should announce it like it was the craziest most incredible announcement of the night!

thus:

2026: