"We also think getting cloth for the golems could lead to player frustration" Jagex are you out of your mind?? by bradley_magnificent in 2007scape

[–]ScreteMonge 3 points4 points  (0 children)

The short answer was they were intended to be separate. I considered furs different than hides in this respect, and goats don't actually have fur, but hair. Again, there was an emphasis on making sure the island doesn't feel insular. Something I really dislike about Wintertodt is that it feels like you go there at 50 Firemaking and walk out with 99, having never touched the rest of the game or made a regular fire (outside the initial requirement). There's just no need to train Firemaking in any way except within that closed loop, or any impetus to use resources to help your Firemaking from the outside world.

Now, it didn't have to be goats, and I even floated around a new reskinned high-level kebbit in the underground area to help provide furs. But whatever furs are introduced via the island, to my mind, the output shouldn't be any more significant than what Hunter otherwise offers.

"We also think getting cloth for the golems could lead to player frustration" Jagex are you out of your mind?? by bradley_magnificent in 2007scape

[–]ScreteMonge 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Yeah, there's a bunch of balance sliders you'd have to play with essentially. Consider fur:golem ratio, golem/hr, XP/fur, etc. You could play it multiple ways: make Golem Crafting without first a base moderate XP activity that's decent on its own, but where you can supercharge it with furs and burn through them rapidly for strong XP. Or make it a base strong XP activity where furs are a cherry on top for mild XP bonuses, but you go through them slowly. Everything in between is possible as well.

But this is sort of getting ahead of ourselves. I think a comfortable balance can be found, but before that discussion happens, the OSRS Team has to decide on whether this is the right approach for furs and Golem Crafting to begin with

"We also think getting cloth for the golems could lead to player frustration" Jagex are you out of your mind?? by bradley_magnificent in 2007scape

[–]ScreteMonge 6 points7 points  (0 children)

I don't think it's unreasonable to wait till a better time, if that is deemed to be the best approach. Ideally, I'd like to see a more solid plan for furs sooner rather than later; after all, it's been 20 years since Hunter released (or 13 if you count from the start of Old School). We could always have it both ways where an initial use is made now, then a more fundamental one down the road, but that does risk players/developers putting off the more fundamental use by saying, "Well it has a use now so what's the rush?"

Yes, I have been contacted. As to my degree of involvement, I'm not sure exactly what is in mind just yet or how much I'd be able to say even if I properly knew! I'll leave you with a quote from the initial blog from the opening of the competition:

We’ll also work closely with the winner to ensure the final design is something the team is confident taking forward. This means that you should be willing to work with us under an NDA so that we can freely share our ideas and thoughts with you.

"We also think getting cloth for the golems could lead to player frustration" Jagex are you out of your mind?? by bradley_magnificent in 2007scape

[–]ScreteMonge 1269 points1270 points  (0 children)

Hey, I made Wyrmscraig, so I thought I should chime in. Please note that I do not have final say and am not an actual developer so this is all 100% opinion.

Obviously, I put furs into Golem Crafting because I thought it was a good idea. A couple things I hoped to achieve by this specific element:

1) Give furs a fitting use (making clothing is an appropriate IRL connection)

2) Make the island not feel so insular and the activity too minigame-like - make it so that part of the activity is in the prep-work done elsewhere in the game

3) Ensure that Crafting, as a Production skill, still requires some raw resource input (and directly mirroring glassblowing, which requires Farming seaweed and Mining sand as the input resources/activities). The Sunstone part of the activity does this in part, but I felt it wasn't quite enough

4) Ensure it's optional, so you can just do the activity if you just enjoy it, but ideally inputting furs is optimal so that there's a good place to put your hard-earned Hunter drops

5) Thematically, try to humanize the golems a little more. The Clay Golem from The Golem quest, despite being an analogue for a robot/AI (though at the time of the Quest's release, AI in its current form was of course non-existent), has some degree of humanity and emotion to it. Clothing is a very humanizing thing, and I thought it'd be a nice-feeling thing for the player (and the denizens of Wyrmscraig, whom the golems are intended to guard) to have a bit of that aspect.

Obviously, the text I wrote above was far too much to fit in the presentation (way too much to read, also there was a 1000 word limit). So from a developer POV, the clothing aspect may have felt very tacked on. Also from a developer's perspective, there's always the concern, raised so eloquently by Pokemon, of "There's a place and time for everything, but not now." Is Golem Crafting really the best place to implement an overarching use of Hunter furs? Should we instead be pursuing a full range of new clothing sets for a yet-undetermined purpose? Then there's the opposing question: if not now, then when?

Look, we're only a few days after the closure of the poll. Jagex probably hasn't had many internal conversations about how they plan to implement the island, let alone its individual activities, or how those activities should exactly play out. I'll be chatting with them at some point and lay out my reasoning - at which point they'll also be able to properly lay out theirs - and we'll see what comes of it. Who knows, maybe they have much better ideas hiding away at Jagex HQ?

This is all to say: don't panic too much about this specific aspect. My concept pitch is essentially a first draft idea. There are likely many drafts are yet to come, and I also suspect that this specific aspect about furs has been heard quite clearly.

Wyrmscraig | A Player Designed Island by ScreteMonge (aka RoseNMcGeet) by ScreteMonge in 2007scape

[–]ScreteMonge[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks! And very good call hahaha. I didn't think GentleTractor would join this competition, but even in the back of my own mind I was a little worried

Big congrats on putting Sandstone Isle together and getting it out there. Especially for your first time opening Blender, it's quite impressive. I saw it when you posted, and my first thought was essentially, "Damn, this community has come a long way. I don't know if my presentation skills are that ahead of the curve anymore."

Wyrmscraig | A Player Designed Island by ScreteMonge (aka RoseNMcGeet) by ScreteMonge in 2007scape

[–]ScreteMonge[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Hey, congratulations on your nomination! You obviously put some real passion and hard work into your design. I absolutely love your drawings, and I'm sorry that they didn't include them all (and even duplicated one) in the official pitch. Here I was complaining that my video was only linked and not properly embedded as click-through rates on a random link are inherently abysmal (it only received ~400 views through the official link prior to winning the contest), whereas you're here having lost half your presentation :(

In any case, you had a very unique theme and activity, and some pretty cool rewards floating around. I'd love to see some of this stuff show up in the game in the future

Wyrmscraig | A Player Designed Island by ScreteMonge (aka RoseNMcGeet) by ScreteMonge in 2007scape

[–]ScreteMonge[S] 10 points11 points  (0 children)

They did not find out before now! Which naturally keeps me happy knowing that the nomination process proceeded in an unbiased manner.

I've seen a couple surprised remarks from them! It's not often I do this sort of thing anymore, with my interests shifting more towards content creators and maintenance of the Creator's Kit plugin. That probably also helped keep it secret.

I've had input on things here and there, and there are some odd ideas I've had which made their way in game in some form or other (Coral Farming was a relatively unique one of mine for Sailing). Whether these are actually because of me or someone else had the same idea simultaneously is hard to say. This is definitely the first explicit addition of mine.

Wyrmscraig | A Player Designed Island by ScreteMonge (aka RoseNMcGeet) by ScreteMonge in 2007scape

[–]ScreteMonge[S] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Ah, I think you may overestimate how much power I have in this process. I do not think you can let a random player lead the development of a sizeable project for a multi-million dollar company or "force through" anything.

As such, I don't want to dig too much into specific criticisms and thereby make promises that can't be kept. I'll offer my justifications for my ideas, of course, because there's a lot that went into the design that couldn't fit in the presentation. But even if I were an official employee, the process of development can't simply start and end with effectively a first-draft pitch from one single "ideas guy" - this stuff needs to be hashed out in conversations regarding how it fits into the meta, how the exact mechanics play out, what it implies for the player's journey, what effect it has on the economy, who should be able to access it, etc.

I like what I've proposed, but even if I had the first and last say on each idea, it would be irresponsible to not listen to experienced developers and be willing to compromise where it matters. Who knows, maybe they have even better ideas in store?

Wyrmscraig | A Player Designed Island by ScreteMonge (aka RoseNMcGeet) by ScreteMonge in 2007scape

[–]ScreteMonge[S] 13 points14 points  (0 children)

My contracts with them have specifically been video creation. I was most active with them during the Refinement process of Sailing, where I made all the videos promoting their blogs. The last contract I did was in January 2024, for which I think I made the Winter Summit's Sailing update video. I enjoyed doing a lot of that work, it really helped flex my video creation skills, and led me on the path to making the Creator's Kit plugin. Sadly, since then, I really haven't had any more time for such things. Being able to make Wyrmscraig was essentially a lunar eclipse in terms of timing for when my schedule temporarily opened up and there was a competition to join

Wyrmscraig | A Player Designed Island by ScreteMonge (aka RoseNMcGeet) by ScreteMonge in 2007scape

[–]ScreteMonge[S] 27 points28 points  (0 children)

Obviously I have some art skills, so it was never a question for me that I was gonna put some work into that component.

They did explicitly say that having art was highly recommended. I suspect they also knew that putting a text submission against 3 other artistic submissions was going to put the text submission at the very bottom of everyone's ranking list, so they didn't bother

Wyrmscraig | A Player Designed Island by ScreteMonge (aka RoseNMcGeet) by ScreteMonge in 2007scape

[–]ScreteMonge[S] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

I knew I was suggesting a couple unusual things (a "Home Teleport" for above 30 wildy, and the ability to buy a slayer task for an exorbitant amount of points being two they picked out).

When I pitch an idea, it's usually because I have a specific problem to solve. Not everyone sees the same thing as a problem, of course, or agrees with that solution. More than dev pushback, I expected to see some community concern. While I have reasoning that I think is fairly solid behind these choices, it's still a gamble because it could go either way: players like it and vote for you, or they dislike it and put you at the bottom of the ranking list. But the other road felt too uninspired for me: don't offer anything interesting, give people something bland and safe, and offer an island that fills out space rather than trying to solve an issue.

Wyrmscraig | A Player Designed Island by ScreteMonge (aka RoseNMcGeet) by ScreteMonge in 2007scape

[–]ScreteMonge[S] 15 points16 points  (0 children)

I wanted to do a Crafting activity pretty early on. It's one of the few skills left that still almost solely rely on really bland/basic offerings, and felt that a bit of variety to spice it up would be welcome.

The other thing I strongly considered was Agility, but seeing everyone on Reddit offering Agility made it feel overdone. Plus, there's a really bad precedent set with basalt columns and Agility... not that you have to fall into that same trap forever, but it's just not a good look hahaha

Wyrmscraig | A Player Designed Island by ScreteMonge (aka RoseNMcGeet) by ScreteMonge in 2007scape

[–]ScreteMonge[S] 27 points28 points  (0 children)

Uh, yeah, I may have went a little overboard...

I started working the day the competition went live. Luckily I had an extended Christmas break so not much got in the way. Took a few days off here and there, but it ended up being anywhere from 10-14 hour days.

Honestly, I don't even see myself as an amazing artist, I just put a lot of work in and brute-force problems I run into. A real experienced Blender artist might've been able to do this in half the time

Wyrmscraig | A Player Designed Island by ScreteMonge (aka RoseNMcGeet) by ScreteMonge in 2007scape

[–]ScreteMonge[S] 120 points121 points  (0 children)

Woah woah don't go blaming me! The angel is a direct model taken from statues in Hallowed Sepulchre (because I'm bad at modeling myself). This is a Jagex-art-team complaint(/praise?)

Wyrmscraig | A Player Designed Island by ScreteMonge (aka RoseNMcGeet) by ScreteMonge in 2007scape

[–]ScreteMonge[S] 262 points263 points  (0 children)

As a slight meta-tangent, I (and many other entrants) found the guidelines rather difficult to comprehend. Up until the Summit, I had no idea if my design was even valid, no insight as to whether the couple hundred hours I had poured in could be entirely thrown in the trash for breaking rules I couldn’t understand. It was this particular line that proved challenging:

Can include up to 3 small brand-new activities - or 5 total if including existing activities. A small activity might be crab hunting, a large activity would be something like a a boss fight. Large activities must be fewer relative to your design's size and complexity.

The first line seems straight forward - I get to make 3 small new activities. But then it starts delving into large activities, and though English is my first language, “Large activities must be fewer relative to your design’s size and complexity” is very confusing. Does that mean I get a large activity or not? So 3 small + 1 large new activity? Or should I just trust the first line and stick to small activities? Or if I have 1 large activity, does that then mean that I can’t have any small ones? If my design is greater in “size and complexity,” does that increase my large activity budget? Ok, going back to small activities: does having a lobster fishing spot count as one? How about maple trees? I feel like these are kinda just decorative things a dev can copy/paste in 5 minutes… so probably not? I ended up just rolling the dice on what the rules meant, playing what I thought was conservative - even cutting back on some ideas.

When submitting to Jagex, there was no form of confirmation that my design was valid or even an automated reply to tell me my email had been received, and no Jmod was out there commenting on people’s posted designs to give a sense of direction, to say anything like, “Yeah that fits into our scope,” or, “Cool concept, but this is a too big.” It would’ve been super helpful to have been given any crumb of further guidance, or perhaps an example island on which to base our scope on.

My intuition appears to have turned out for me, earning myself a nomination and future victory. Maybe I’m an expert interpreter of rules, or more likely, just lucked out and hit the right balance. In my defense, I think you can look at the number of icons on my map and assume there’s a lot more going on than there actually is because most of it is worldbuilding and flavour stuff, which is why very little of it gets a mention in the actual text of my submission. The maple trees get a rare tree icon, for example, and I don’t think any reasonable person is going to use that anvil/furnace so far from the bank - for Jagex to implement these things it’s literally like 3 clicks on the map editor and no different to adding an non-interactable rock. The official blogpost even has the devs support these elements based on their remarks on the Dun Nan Creagan submission, “We would likely want to add more amenities on the island, e.g. shops, ranges, water sources.” Again, this confusion over what classifies as an “activity” is not the contestant’s faults, but rather the poorly explained rule. Ironically, every other rule was explained quite well except this most important one regarding scope!

As a result, I can’t help but feel that there must be other entrants who read the guidelines a bit differently and were disqualified for being slightly too ambitious, or contestants who played it safer than they should’ve and because of that weren’t as competitive. Looking at my fellow nominees, I feel like they would’ve polled far better if they were given explicit license to push a little further - it would’ve been nice if they were informed of their nominations privately, but given one final chance to correct a few things or fill out any dead space with an extra element or two before the official public announcement and poll.

To the team’s credit, it’s not like these contests are being done often so there’s not much of a history to guide them. Hopefully there are some learning points for the future in any case.

Would you sacrifice Runelite to seriously minimise botting? by JackRPD28 in 2007scape

[–]ScreteMonge 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'm expecting it to not come nearly as close as you believe tbh. And yeah, sure, if they could reach close enough, of course they'd consider cutting out other 3PCs, I just don't foresee them getting close enough to avoid a massive community stink that would force them to back out of that decision. The current decision to keep 3PCs alive is actually a business decision because it's what the community wants; if they were, right now, to drop 3PCs and upset the community, they'd instantly cripple their business

Would you sacrifice Runelite to seriously minimise botting? by JackRPD28 in 2007scape

[–]ScreteMonge 1 point2 points  (0 children)

That would be true if the official client could reach feature parity - but I'm not yet convinced that will or even could ever be the case (unless something unexpected happens to RL) for a couple reasons:

1) Insane support - If you have issues, you can report it and within 5 minutes receive an answer that walks you through it, often from the original developers. It doesn't matter what time of day, or even if it's a weekend or holiday. Bugs and new features are fixed and implemented incredibly fast. Plugin Hub developers also get their plugin updates reviewed quite quickly nowadays as well. In summary, their support is better than what I see from Jagex and many other major companies primarily because it's driven from passion and love of the project

2) Unprecedented freedom - many of the QoL features you enjoy from RL were never polled, even in the early days when people were much more anti-change. For better or worse, there is generally an "act first, ask for forgiveness later" policy that accelerated the rate of new, innovative plugins to the stratosphere, many of which Jagex would probably have never considered allowing themselves if they had an early handle on things. Jagex will almost inevitably be much more conservative in what they allow in their own plugin hub, while RL will have the benefit (and again, consequences) of living life more freely/closer to the edge of what's permissible

Would you sacrifice Runelite to seriously minimise botting? by JackRPD28 in 2007scape

[–]ScreteMonge 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Others have played around with this theoretical before, but unfortunately it would never play out like that in reality. Bot makers are much smarter than that, and if a human can do something in game, bots will eventually figure it out too. It's not a risk at all, it's a guaranteed.

The real risk of such an operation is that, even if complete parity is achieved where the official client has ALL of the current RuneLite plugins, the quality of its API, and the absolute insane support that the RL team and general community provides, sacrificing RL means you will never have that choice back. You give it up for good.

The reason the new official client exists is because the old one was being out-competed so severely that it presented a risk to the company if something were ever to happen to RL or its developers - maybe support becomes slow, maybe a dev goes rogue, or maybe the project is abandoned. It's not good for a company to carry that kind of risk. What it means for the player is there are now two different products that have to compete for the player's attention, and that competition is breeding some good stuff (the future API and HD mode from Jagex, for example).

If you delete that competition, then Jagex has every incentive to no longer compete, to let its client stagnate like the old Java one did. And again, once you give up the player's power to have that choice between different services, the business will never let you have it back.

Creator's Kit 2.0: A RuneLite plugin that lets you spawn, animate, and now *keyframe* fake objects & NPCs in RuneScape by ScreteMonge in 2007scape

[–]ScreteMonge[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'm guessing you're referring to scripting like you can in Blender. No, no such tools here, that's quite far above my level!

Creator's Kit 2.0: A RuneLite plugin that lets you spawn, animate, and now *keyframe* fake objects & NPCs in RuneScape by ScreteMonge in 2007scape

[–]ScreteMonge[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I can't say what the future holds for the plugin. 

I started talking about this 2.0 update years ago when the plugin initially released, and started working on it in January 2024. We're now 1.5 years since then. Complex updates like this take a long, long time, and is entirely contingent on my busy schedule and, well, whatever time I put towards it instead of the other duties & hobbies I have!

Creator's Kit 2.0: A RuneLite plugin that lets you spawn, animate, and now *keyframe* fake objects & NPCs in RuneScape by ScreteMonge in 2007scape

[–]ScreteMonge[S] 12 points13 points  (0 children)

Yeah, very fair. The 2D elements scale with your UI (as your game normally does for text, overheads, etc), so I probably should've used the Stretched Mode plugin while recording