I've been cruising along only because I can afford to, but those idyllic days of doing nothing are fast coming to an end. I looked over my budget for the next couple months and things are looking grim. I've got to get my ass into gear, pronto. Can't survive without money, but I'm still riding a wave of apathy. It's gonna be real hard to shake off the dust that's settled in.
Good news though. I finished the rough draft for Chapter 36 of Love Sick. I'll refine and iron out the kinks tomorrow. I cut it shorter than usual for dramatic effect and saved the rest for next chapter. People might think I'm shortchanging them on the content but I see it as an opportunity to make what little there is a lot better. Smaller pieces are easier to manage.
Thanks to a user's avatar, I discovered Houkago Play. It's an interesting manga so far. It does give me a lot of different ideas, and considering Anonymous' request for a RokuNami story, maybe I should consider incorporating elements--namely the super tsundere aspect. I always enjoyed the love/hate mechanics of tsundere. It's really stupid but that's what makes it so entertaining!
Since my interest in stealth games have been piqued by MGS videos, I decided to look into another one called Tenchu: Stealth Assassins. I'm astonished by some of the mechanics because they put modern games to shame. There's a lot of jank for a PSX title but I don't think I've seen a game handle dead body discoveries any better. If an enemy spots a dead body, they'll actually call for back up and move into an irregular patrol route, fundamentally affecting the layout of the level--not to mention, each stage has different presets for enemy type and placement. That's next-level shit right there.
Contrast that with The Last of Us where the enemy stupidly walks over to the dead body and stands there, pondering the existence of life, before you end it for him. Then another enemy spots the bodies and does the same damn thing and it's the same reaction whether it's one corpse or five of them. You'd think the enemies would be more cautious if they saw a mountain of their dead buddies.
One of my favorite things about MGS2 is how layered the Alert system was. If a dead body was discovered, the enemies called for back up and extra soldiers would patrol the area. The system would've been more impressive if patrol routes were dynamically altered too, but I guess that's asking for too much.
I've been watching a lot of Watch Dogs lately and the way dead bodies are handled is similarly atrocious to The Last of Us. They slowly walk over to the corpse spouting lines of confusion in plain sight of your crosshairs. I don't know if it's a failure of AI design or AI programming. I give devs slack since AI is one of the hardest things to program in a game. If they couldn't get it right, they probably settled for a lower level version of their intended vision. But if this was their vision to begin with, then what the hell? Then again, since you can't move dead bodies in the game, I'll chalk it up to developmental limits. Still, I find it sad that games from more than ten years ago can handle this aspect better than games today. That's mind-blowing in a terrible way.
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