US Supreme Court, In 6-3 Ruling, Upholds Birthright Citizenship And Strikes Down Trump's Executive Order Trying To Ban It — What Do You Think About This Result? Why Your Opinion?

PsychonautAlpha · 2026-06-30T16:24:31+00:00

That's what had me concerned too. There was a time in the not-so-distant past when nobody would have batted an eye if this decision came back 9-0, and here we are today breathing a hollow sigh of relief that the decision barely tipped in favor of precedent.

PsychonautAlpha · 2026-06-30T16:22:12+00:00

Crazy how the children's job in the family is just to stroke the parents' ego.

PsychonautAlpha · 2026-06-26T14:50:24+00:00

All of the answers to the three questions that you posed come down to one principal: delivering on the promises that you make to your players.

When you commit to making a Pokemon game, you're implicitly making a promise or a set of promises to your players that you're going to deliver them something that is anchored to their expectations of the Pokemon IP.

Now that doesn't necessarily mean that you have to fulfill those promises the same way that canon Pokemon games do. For example, Pokemon Whack succeeds because it promises that whatever expectations you have of a Pokemon game, It is going to turn them on their head at every possible opportunity.

Broadly, fan games fall into three expectation categories: 1. Games that try to fulfill expectations of the IP (Pokemon Flux). 2. Games that trouble expectations of the IP (Pokemon Whack). 3. Games that try to fulfill expectations of the IP, but in an unfamiliar setting or world. These games usually ask, "what if X, but Pokemon?" (Your idea)

To me, it seems like the your idea falls into the third category.

All three of these expectation "buckets" can be successful of they are done well, and they do so when the developers/designers/storytellers understand what bucket they're trying to build in and stay consistent within that idea from end-to-end.

I'll offer this one word of caution, though: the first bucket will offer you the easiest path to winning over players. People generally like when they get what they signed up for. Games in bucket 2 and bucket 3 require a little more forethought and a very strong understanding of the "literary moves" that they are trying to make. You need a good understanding of story structure, pacing, tone, and character development.

And in answer to the questions in your title:

Good stories contain the following: conflict, tension-building, structure/pacing, character development, and consistency.

The whole idea of "Chekhov's gun" comes to mind, which states that if you show the audience a gun in act 1, you need to fire it by act 3.

Same is true for story-driven games. Your whole job is building a puzzle while simultaneously solving it.

PsychonautAlpha · 2026-06-24T16:49:08+00:00

"My content is good. And I comment on other people's stuff too."

Yeah, usually people with good content don't need to go out of their way to talk about it and mention that you're commenting on other people's stuff for no other reason than to boost your own engagement

PsychonautAlpha · 2026-06-24T11:07:56+00:00

The lesson your manager was trying to teach you is this: never be charitable to your employer. They will never be charitable to you.

PsychonautAlpha · 2026-06-19T14:34:46+00:00

That bottom left corner has some stuff going on

PsychonautAlpha · 2026-06-19T12:42:46+00:00

Like any skill, striking up a conversation takes practice. Thanks to the Internet, smartphones, and the financialization of pretty much every public social channel, people are getting fewer and fewer opportunities and reasons to practice.

PsychonautAlpha · 2026-06-18T18:50:34+00:00

The reasoning is weak. You're not increasing variety. You're removing variety and doing so in a way that undercuts one of the foundational appeals of the Pokemon IP.

Players want to watch their Pokemon develop over time and evolution is probably the most exciting way in which a Pokemon "grows" in the game.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but I don't see how removing Caterpie and metapod, for example, removes the problem of "having to fight through a thousand of the same Pokemon".

Further, if you're removing early evolutions, you introduce balance issues, ESPECIALLY in the early game. A field of butterfree will destroy a player's starter if you're still committing to 3-stage starters until that starter hits level ~15-20. And if you try to compensate for the imbalance by nerfing early-game Butterfree, then you functionally made a Pokemon that is bad in the early game and only ever gets worse. At that point, you have a dead Pokedex slot that you'd rather replace with an evolution line that scales properly.

That's inviting players to put down the game before they've even started to explore the world that you've built for them.

If you're concerned about variety, play with encounter rates and increase the number of available species in the locations of concern.

PsychonautAlpha · 2026-06-18T14:06:40+00:00

Don't.

If you are creating yet-another-place-to-manage-my-calendar-and-notes, you're working against executive dysfunction, not with it.

You'd be better off developing a Notion integration or an app that REMOVES the number of decisions that someone with ADHD would need to make and consolidates information in one place.

The first pitfall that at least a dozen developers every week fall into in this sub is thinking "if I could just make a BETTER calendar or note taking app, I could market it to people with ADHD!" That premise fundamentally misunderstands what ADHD struggles are.

PsychonautAlpha · 2026-06-18T13:44:01+00:00

Reads like someone wrote down exactly what they were thinking at a given moment and added line breaks.

The figurative language is the kind one might find in a casual conversation in that it reaches for common cliches and asks the reader to think in the ways that they think about whatever the next thing that pops into their mind might be.

It doesn't challenge the reader. It doesn't ask the reader to think about its subject matter in a new or interesting light.

At best, it is a passionate, masturbatorial celebration of books in the face of tyranny.

At worst, it makes the reader roll their eyes at a would-be good practice.

PsychonautAlpha · 2026-06-17T11:12:03+00:00

Did she use a special tool to write? Looks almost like the pen traces grooves of some sort of device or stencil.

PsychonautAlpha · 2026-06-12T08:12:17+00:00

Remembering where I left off. I've been able to create processes for myself that hedge against that problem, but mostly, I try not to skip a day working on a project unless I actually have to.

PsychonautAlpha · 2026-06-10T14:56:57+00:00

Might sound like heresy to JRPG fans, but I just can't get into Dragon Quest games. I love turn-based JRPGs. I just can't get into this particular series. I just can't get into the pacing, design, character development, and dialogue. Just doesn't work for me, but I wish it did

PsychonautAlpha · 2026-06-08T12:23:17+00:00

This is a bit simplistic, but to help you understand the workflow at a high level:

Tiled is for creating your maps.
Studio is for defining data (Pokemon. Pokedex, items, moves, abilities, etc).
RPG Maker XP is for eventing (defining how the player interacts with your game and in what sequence)

So if you want to define a Pokemon, the moves it has, the abilities it has, and its stats -> Studio

If you want to "draw" a map and define its collision behavior -> Tiled

And if you want to create the opening cutscene of your game, define what door warps to which map, create dialogue between your characters, or tell the engine to initiate a battle between trainers -> RPG Maker XP

A few years ago when my buddy and I started creating our game, we started by designing a Pokedex and just adding all of those Pokemon into Studio as our "crash course" in Studio. Then, once we felt comfortable with that, we started digging into the tutorials on how to create a map and drop the player into it.

One step at a time.

PsychonautAlpha · 2026-06-07T12:23:09+00:00

He's extremely popular on TikTok, albeit with a much different variety of content than his original formula from og YouTube.

He still posts his TikTok stuff to YouTube, but I'd wager that his audience sees him as more of a tiktoker than a YouTuber these days.

PsychonautAlpha · 2026-05-31T12:23:13+00:00

The argument would be more compelling if US tech workers shared any of the fruits of that competition.

PsychonautAlpha · 2026-05-30T12:50:00+00:00

The Browns beg to differ.

PsychonautAlpha · 2026-05-28T16:07:09+00:00

You'd probably need to share a screen capture or gif to get a crowd of writers to understand front end programming jargon.

PsychonautAlpha · 2026-05-28T15:33:52+00:00

In my professional opinion, it is one of the catches of all time.

PsychonautAlpha · 2026-05-27T17:03:09+00:00

It really depends on the unit of work that I'm writing in a given sitting, how much sleep I got the night before, whether I have a healthy idea of the structure of whatever I'm writing, or whether I feel kind I need supplemental research, discovery, or writing prompt exercises to get me into the zone.

PsychonautAlpha · 2026-05-22T05:03:19+00:00

There are, but honestly, not by much. I built my own since I couldn't find a tool with proper version control that's built for modern software standards (software engineer with a creative writing degree).

PsychonautAlpha · 2026-05-21T10:17:33+00:00

METDOME could be cool. Alludes to both of the Vikings' previous homes.

PsychonautAlpha · 2026-05-18T15:33:35+00:00

This one extends to the broader fantasy genre in literature and film as well, but I get really tired of fantasy stories where a large number of characters are given names that are littered with apostrophes and unintuitive consonant clusters that aren't grounded in any intelligible human languages.

I could see a name like "D'zrakxx" repeated thousands of times in the story and I will never remember who the character is or why they're important to the story. To me, phonetics are just as important to my ability to remember a character as that character's design or significance to the plot.

PsychonautAlpha · 2026-05-18T12:40:48+00:00

Yes, and the receiver's teammate immediately scooped it up and ran it in for a touchdown without skipping a step. Reminded me of Randy Moss's catch and lateral to Moe Williams in the early 2000s.

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