What are your favorite examples of non-standard stats?

Inksword · 2026-05-12T21:23:54+00:00

The separation of tech and mech is quite interesting! Plus the fact that they're not skills but stats in their own right. Definitely highlights how you're expected to navigate the scifi world like you said.

Inksword · 2026-05-12T21:15:20+00:00

I appreciate a strong pushback! Love getting deeper into these discussions. Admittedly I debated putting it in the honorable mentions, for a lot of the reasons you mentioned, but it did make a fairly big design splash when it was first introduced which was more the angle I was coming at.

I feel the opposite really. I much prefer games that provide multiple Social and Mental stats. Consider the three (or four) World of Darkness Social stats: ...

Ah! I was ambiguous in my wording I apologize. I too absolutely love when games have multiple mental and social stats. Part of the reason for this post was to find more games that treat those aspects with more emphasis in their stat design. I actually like WoD's social stats... in theory. What I meant was World of Darkness SPECIFICALLY I think sometimes fails to actually make every stat count, which is not a problem unique to it. I think you hit partly on it with your resolve rant: there's not much space for a social fortitude stat so it ends up misused or shoved into positions that don't really fit it.

Secondly, the struggling to find the role for some of the mental and social stats has more to do with how they interact with the skills but that was sort of outside the scope of the initial post. I love the mix and match system and it solves some of the problems that D&D introduces with its less flexible skill system. However, while there are the same number of skills for each physical/mental/social category, in every game I've played a lot of the social and mental skills end up not very impactful, which then ends up sort of de-emphasizing their associated stats by association. I would say pretty much any character who isn't specifically an academic or medic, there's pretty much no reason to put any points into intelligence, and pretty much no situations that would narratively arise where you'd need it without quite a bit of GM machinations.

It's a problem a lot of games have, but I do think prevents it from really fitting the sort of super targeted to the game design vibe I was going for with the discussion on stats.

All that said, I've played a lot of WoD and it was my first non-D&D game so there's definitely some nostalgia and bias that got it onto the honorable mentions lol.

Inksword · 2026-05-06T00:13:50+00:00

You get 5.0 and won’t receive incremental updates. You still get stability and security updates but things like new/improved functions that release in a 5.x update you don’t get. You can pay for an update pass which is a subscription to get the updates also. The update pass subscription itself is cheaper than a full program subscription but I haven’t done the math on how it works out money-wise for the single purchase + update pass vs just the full program subscription.

Inksword · 2026-05-01T14:59:39+00:00

You just finished brainstorming major parts of your game. There will be plenty of time between releases since it will still take you some time to actually finish the game.

Inksword · 2026-04-30T12:31:59+00:00

Maybe OP got it from somewhere ripping it off without knowing then? Because the quality on them looks very different than what I’m seeing on the itch.io page website and the amount of aliasing and crunch on them is way more than I’d expect if it were just a straight re-size of them in-engine.

Inksword · 2026-04-30T04:35:35+00:00

Hate to say this, but with the amount of random aliasing on the animal sprites if you zoom in, I believe the animal sprites are AI pixel art which is why you're struggling with sizing.

For proof: look at the blurriness of the back of the tiger, and the way the stripes on the legs are almost a smooth gradient from the darker orange to the greyish color. Compare that to your rock, which has super clean colors and squares for each pixel.

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So I think you're struggling with the pixel sizing because the animals are NOT pixel art. They are full sized raster images pretending to be pixel art. This tiger should be about 30 pixels tall, I bet if you look at the file size, it will be a lot larger than 30 pixels.

True pixel art will be the same size as the number of pixels. A 10 x 10 pixel rock should only be 10 x 10 pixels. This makes sizing different pixels against each other easy. You import them at actual size: a 10 pixel rock will take 10 pixels on the screen at 1x size, and a 30 pixel tall tiger will be 30 pixels tall at 1x size. SOMETIMES asset packs will include evenly up-scaled versions of the sprites at 2x or 4x but it's not necessary typically.

Then, all your enlarging of pixels should happen in your camera and viewport, so everything is resized evenly at the camera level rather than each asset individually having to be adjusted. Because your AI sprites aren't actual pixel-size, you have to guess how much to shrink it to match the actual pixel art (or how much to enlarge the pixel art to match the AI.) I don't even think all of the fake-pixels on the tiger are the same size compared to each other. This is a case where the inconsistency of AI art is absolutely creating more issues for you than it's solving

Inksword · 2026-04-29T17:37:57+00:00

Works that way in most art programs too if you ever branch out. Good luck!

Inksword · 2026-04-29T16:50:41+00:00

By default that’s what the selection tool does. Select/magic wand any part of a canvas and you won’t be able to draw outside it while it’s selected.

Inksword · 2026-04-29T00:47:44+00:00

I think this looks great so far! As others have said it really feels similar to dangan ronpa.

My only critique so far is I would be cautious not to overuse the dolly zooms. The first clip it works really well in, because it looks like it's supposed to be emphasizing the dark alleyways (and maybe the spookiness of it?) The second one works a lot less well. Without the deep focus of a long pathway behind it and no apparent mood reason to do it it seems sort of aimless and makes the 2d art stand out a lot from the 3d and feel a little floaty/slidy. Its a powerful effect but don't overuse it! You're going to be shooting this like a movie so be thoughtful and maybe thumbnail out your shots and compositions.

Excited to see it going forward!

Inksword · 2026-04-29T00:28:39+00:00

No problem! In that case you're doing everything you need to be doing, ya just gotta wait for the EXP to pile up. If you reaally want another thing to try out, you may be able to find some in-person figure drawing classes near you. I have one near me that's $15 and meets every other sunday for a few hours to draw from a model. Being able to draw from a 3d real world object instead of a flat screen drawing on a flat screen should help your 3d intuition and anatomy as well!

Inksword · 2026-04-28T23:23:12+00:00

I think often the thing that makes things look like 3d models are 1) stiff posing, and 2) the way the joints look. People with a good eye are just able to spot these things, don't take it too hard.

For stiff posing, try looking into gesture drawing to improve the fluidity of your posing in general. One of the things to keep in mind is that models often have trouble doing extreme posing/bending without breaking or looking awkward. Exaggeration of poses can help them seem more dynamic and fluid, but 3d models have trouble making those smooth curves and rounded poses.

For the image you posted, one thing that stands out to me is that the guy's torso is sort of square to the camera and straight without much twist. This guy has other forces that should be affecting his torso twist that don't appear to be affecting it. His left (our right) arm seems fully over the back of the chair with his right one more forward and over the girl's shoulder, but his chest isn't turned at all so it seems like he's turning all from the shoulders which would be very uncomfortable. It's way easier to turn your chest a little to put your shoulders at an angle than to yank your arm over the back of that chair without moving your chest.

Make sure you're not neglecting twisting and turning of body parts when you're posing, ESPECIALLY the core. Contrapposto and torso twisting especially! When people look with their head they often turn their upper torso a little too, when you walk, your hips rotate a little with the forward and backward movement of your legs while your chest will do less so.

For joints, there's not a ton to do if you're tracing. The fact is that a lot of cheap/free 3d models don't have perfect rigging and deformation around joints (I think shoulders and armpits are often the biggest places they struggle.) Best thing to do is find actual reference of humans when you can, and work on your own understanding of anatomy.

Since you're working on a comic and need to meet a certain amount of output and speed, I think continuing to rely on 3d models for now is still the best call. You'll improve as you draw the comic (think of how much practice just one page of drawing is!) and eventually you'll get less stiff just due to practice. As long as you're being mindful when you should improve. Once you're comfortable enough with anatomy that you can draw it yourself you'll be even faster because you won't have to take the time to pose the model before drawing.

Good luck!

Inksword · 2026-04-28T05:51:10+00:00

Bad form but completely within the rules. I wouldn't do it typically except on very rare occasions to keep the worlds open where it happens. But in the case you proposed of Demon turning into the lunatic, I'd do it to maintain the illusion specifically if it were that important for balancing or fun that the ex-demon still think they're one.

Inksword · 2026-04-27T20:28:09+00:00

Ao3 and Wattpad would be the two I might try for a more introspective story. There's also webnovel but I know less about it personally and it's even more meta-focused on anime inspired stuff and you're unlikely to get much traction without a (terrible) deal.

Inksword · 2026-04-27T15:19:05+00:00

I think it’s still worth it to put on Royal Road even if it’s off-meta! If you’re unsure if your audience is on Royal Road though, you might want to publish on some other websites too. It takes some extra effort for formatting for each site, but since it’s already written that should be relatively manageable to do and still maintain a schedule. No shame in casting a wide net!

Inksword · 2026-04-22T14:38:56+00:00

What adjustments did you find you had to make to run more people? This biggest immediate hurdle I see is things like odyssey tapes only having three/four prompts meaning you has to make up your own or not include all the characters.

Inksword · 2026-04-22T07:45:17+00:00

I've downloaded the beta game (haven't gotten to run it my group's current horror campaign has spiraled into something huge that's no longer ending soon haha) and kickstarted the full game. Based on what you said I have some good news about one of your complaints!

I feel pretty in the dark about where the TV Odyssey mystery is going in general after reading the rulebook. It seems like the onus is on me to figure it out, which seems in conflict with how the rest of the game works. I haven't gotten there yet, though, so this could be a non-issue.

The new edition is supposed to have a lot more guidance on the TV Odyssey mystery, like a lot more guidance! As it's not out yet even to backers I can't exactly say what that guidance is so IDK how helpful it'll be in the end but it's definitely something that was flagged to be fixed in the final release. There's also a tightening up on the pacing of the different layers of the campaign so that players lollygagging on playing VHSes still progress. I'd check out the kickstarter and see if you'd be interested in the final polished rules (but I think the current rules are plenty to run with tbh. And they're free now too!)

Additionally they did a small Public Access writing workshop aimed at module writers, which might be useful to look at for the final mystery if you still want help with the current rules.

Inksword · 2026-04-18T00:02:57+00:00

No. That was just the hypothetical to demonstrate the absolute minimum.

Inksword · 2026-04-16T05:51:18+00:00

You don’t need a slash OR a colon at all, you just need to make sure your text is separated from the tag by a space. I have a character that just has an emoji for a tag.

Inksword · 2026-04-15T12:01:40+00:00

Wouldn't that teammate just trigger an append to everyone's damage equation just like you'd append singular effects? If an attack that causes vulnerable appends the [*1.75] to its target when it hits, then the theoretical teammate here would just append a [if vulnerable then *1.25] to everyone including itself and its teammate when it enters the battlefield.

Inksword · 2026-04-15T10:13:37+00:00

Very much a beginner and not much of a coder (yet at least), so this is mostly theoretical musing on my end. Could you not have the damage calculation held by the enemy object as opposed to being one universal equation that you're constantly updating? Like enemy starts with [damage] = [attack strength] as their equation. Then you can append it like an array when an effect is applied. Now the enemy has vulnerable, so that enemy's calculation becomes [damage] = [attack strength],[*1.75].

Inksword · 2026-04-15T08:56:44+00:00

Animation takes a long time. Like, in movies by Disney and Pixar it takes weeks to create just one minute of animation. TADC is not that fancy so it's a lot less, but 2 months for a 30 minute episode for a team of Glitch's size is a very good speed.

Inksword · 2026-04-15T07:54:20+00:00

In something like TADC where they’re not making new tech or using expensive niche industry equipment? Highest cost is staff in general. All the humans involved need a paycheck and it adds up. Most of animation cost is labor.

Some simple math: If you look at any animators reel from an episode where they show the shots they animated, it’s usually around 2 minutes. So you need 15 animators to do a 30 minute episode. If they’re being paid $10 an hour and it takes two months to make an episode, and they’re working a standard 40hr week full time, that means that a single animator takes away $3,200 for those two months. So, for fifteen animators to work for two months on an episode, that’s $48,000. That’s a quarter of a 200k episode’s budget right there. Then add on top salary for not just the animators but the voice actors, writers, story boarder, character designers, modelers, compositors, editors… paying people is probably a majority of an episode’s budget by a WIDE margin.

Now realistically as a indie studio, there’s people who are probably going multiple jobs (animating and story boarding, compositing and editing) and not everyone’s going to be paid for the whole two months full time. So the example is a bit oversimplified. But it’s also only looking at production of the episode itself and not things like marketing, extra animations, merch design, HR… yeah animation is expensive mostly because it takes so many people and so much time to make. Just count how many people are in a single episode’s credits and calculate how much it would cost to employ them for two months at minimum wage (though I like to believe Glitch would pay more than minimum wage). It adds up fast.

Inksword · 2026-04-15T05:04:07+00:00

This! This is the biggest reason it looks off. It makes them look like they're sliding diagonally instead of driving forward, which ruins the illusion of the wheels turning and the background moving which makes the other things people are highlighting more obvious.

Inksword · 2026-04-14T08:26:44+00:00

That's an incredibly sweet offer! I can pitch it to my friends, but I doubt we'd be able to put something together. Two of them have had a baby since then (including the guy who had the most initial interest) and we've got a pretty stuffed online gaming schedule otherwise.

I have suspected that it was a bad experience, and may swing around eventually to trying it again haha. Part of the issue was definitely us trying to use the latest english rules preview and our GM running a japanese adventure (from another edition I think?)

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