thegreatcrate:

I remember the first time I did this in Skyrim. I was so excited when I saw I could catch a butterfly and then…well, I felt kinda bad.

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I play a game while I’m editing stories now, called “paragraph importance”. Each paragraph has to work like the piece of a puzzle, or a link in a chain, where the overarching idea is portrayed in the small steps. It must form a cohesive whole. As I’m reading through I ask myself, “What is this paragraph about? Is this paragraph important? Would anything change if I deleted it?” It works wonders for weeding out the unnecessary bits.

I have a similar game I play when I’m writing an essay: the first sentence of a paragraph tells you what it’s about, and when you put them all together, you should get a nice little paragraph summarizing your essay. And, of course, they should transition from the last sentence of the previous paragraph.

It doesn’t quite apply to other forms of writing, but it’s a pretty good way to make sure you’re getting your point across well.

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As for the image, panels 1 + 2 pretty much describe me now that we’re actually running the experiment I’ve spent the last two months creating. It used to be just a big block of code, and now it’s all growed up :’)

Also, KillScreen’s Things I Ate in Skyrim.

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Also, I’m playing FF VI and enjoying it a lot. At least in the GBA port, you can really see how it falls in between the other SNES era FF games and FF VII, the way they play with the point of view at times and integrate cutscenes and dialog into battle. From what I understand, at least the tutorial conversations you get in battle didn’t exist in the SNES version. But it’s a nice touch, making the “battle screen” less of an alternate dimension and more of an actual place.

Twice so far I’ve had to control three parties in a battle against a series of enemies, which is sort of neat. Except for the part where you just place your parties at the perfect positions to block off all the enemies and there’s absolutely no challenge to it at all. Aside from that, because they split you up in situations like that and due to the story, the cast is gigantic. After a couple of hours you play through three separate “scenarios,” and the size of the cast doubles (from 4 to 8) by the time you finish all three and meet up. But what’s cool about that is that all the characters have different abilities - the Super Saiyan monk (he punches laser beams) has a combo system of sorts as his special ability, while the samurai can spend time preparing ridiculously powerful abilities. A few characters unlock new abilities later on in the story, I think, because there are empty spaces on their command menus. Anyway, it’s great to see an RPG actually distinguishing its cast members from each other.