I decided to start a Patreon campaign to help finance the game. The link to the campaign is https://www.patreon.com/dateariane and like most Patreon campaigns, I want to make it worth your money.
Right now, signing up for a $5 a month “dater” tier subscription or higher will get you access to an alpha version of the first 20% or so of Ariane in Paradise, and I hope to release more chunks of the game on that site each month.
There are two other tiers: $1 “Watcher”, which I have posted 110 pictures, most not available anywhere, and a $20 “Producer” tier that will get you in the games credits.
Eventually I will release Ariane in Paradise to the public for free, but Patreon supporters are likely going to get first dibs. So if you can help out, I would really appreciate it!
June is “pride month” in the US, and it is usually filled with corporations trying to show how forward thinking they are in appealing to the LGBT community. For a while now, I have been thinking that I am part of that community myself. The thing is I am not L, G, B. or T.
The current extended acronym is LGBTQIA+ or Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transexual, Queer, Intersex, Aro/Ace Spectrum, and + for others. I’m in the A group. Took me a while to figure out where, but I finally solved the mystery:
I’m Aromantic.
What is Aromanticism?
Aromanticism is probably the least popular (less than 1% identify), and least understood sexual orientation, even by the people that are aromantic.
An aromantic is a person who experiences little or no romantic attraction to others. Where romantic people have an emotional need to be with another person in a romantic relationship, aromantics are often satisfied with friendships and other non-romantic relationships.
It is important to note that aromantics do not lack emotional/personal connection, but simply have no instinctual need to develop connections of a romantic nature. Aromantics can have needs for just as much empathetic support as romantics, but these needs can be fulfilled in a platonic way.
It is possible for an aromantic individual to be involved in, and enjoy, a devoted relationship with another person, but these relations are often closer friendships, naturally reflecting the closeness of the two individuals and not a purposely initiated monogamous separation as is often found in romantic couples.
Aromantics may experience squishes which are the aromantic or platonic equivalent of a romantic crush. When an aromantic gets into a relationship that’s more than friends – but less than romantic – that is known as a queerplatonic relationship.
Like all romantic identities aromantics can be of any sexual orientation.
That last sentence is really important. There is a false impression that all aromantics are also asexual, but the truth is most aromantics, are very sexual, and come in all the flavors: Hetero, homo, bi, pan, and poly. And yes, also asexuals.
Here are some of the symptoms of aromanticism. This list is incomplete and just because you have felt some of these does not mean you are aromantic:
You don’t have any desire to be in a relationship.
You experience outside pressure to be in a relationship, but ignore it, or even fear it. The phrase “You just haven’t met the right person yet” gets repeated to you a lot.
If you are in a relationship, you get accused of not loving or caring for that person, because you have no idea how to express it. Most of your relationships end because of it.
Romantic gestures, both giving and receiving, feel awkward and unimportant.
Kissing, cuddling, and other non-sexual touching feel awkward and unimportant.
When you “have a crush” on someone, your instinct is to desire to hang out with them and be their friend (We aromantics call this a “squish” or a platonic crush), rather than a desire to make out, have sex, or be their significant other.
In fact “crushes” involving thoughts of physical contact or long term plans never occur. (aromantic) or very rarely occur (gray romantic).
You have to get to know a person really well before you even start to think about a romance with them (the term is “demiromantic”)
Shyness about asking someone out on a date are not about fears of “What if they say NO?”, but rather “What if they say YES?”
Thoughts of being alone the rest of your life do not really bother you that much.
Aromanticism means you cannot feel romantic attraction. Like any romantic or sexual orientation, it is a part of a person’s nature, and while attraction patterns can be fluid, no one can force their romantic/sexual orientation(s) to change, not even by behaving contrary to those orientations. Dating someone won’t make an aromantic person feel romantic attraction or love. Great sex won’t do it. Even loving someone strongly as a friend won’t suddenly flip the switch in an aro’s brain and lead them to feel romantic attraction. Either you feel attracted to someone in a particular way or you don’t.
There’s a built in contradiction with this orientation. How do you know that you’ve never experienced romantic attraction if you don’t know what romantic attraction feels like? It is a thought that many of us aromantic types try to deal with.
I consider myself aromantic. I have never been head over heels in love or any of that other mushy feelings described by authors and poets. I do feel friendly “squishes” occasionally and I have a normal sexual libido. Is romantic attraction just some combination of the two? Because I have felt that, does that mean I am not aromantic? This is part of the self doubt.
Based on what people say “falling in love” feels like, I can say confidently that no I have never felt this.
Now the romantics will say, “That’s so sad, that is so tragic, to never feel what romantic love is like.”
To me, never feeling romantic love, feels natural and normal, it’s the 99% who are romantics that are the tragic freaks.
I haven’t posted anything in a while, because I have been busy working on Ariane in Paradise. I am basically two thirds done. Not only did I finish all the segments mentioned in my last post, I finished two of the three “day two afternoon” segments, a casino segment and one above I won’t describe (but there are enough clues in the picture to figure it out).
These last two segments are kind of odd and break away from the themes and mood of the rest of the story. Generally segments like this are unpopular, but I think they serve a purpose of world building. The island feels like a real place with lots of stories happening on it, and it does not have to all be about romance, sex and nudity.
The third afternoon segment I have planned is sort of a “high seas adventure” on a sailboat. Finishing it finishes day 2, so part of me wants to hurry up, but this is also in a way the main exciting climactic point of the game, and if I try to rush it, I could ruin it like Game of Thrones season 8 (sorry I couldn’t resist).
Bottom line is I need a break to think about this final segment, plus think about day 3 and where that is going. Also Guild Wars 2 is releasing a new chapter on Tuesday so I suspect I’ll be spending a lot of time there.
If I do any work on the game in the next month, it will be to add sound effects and music and achievements, none of which I have even started on.
It has been a while since I made a progress report on Ariane in Paradise. Last report was that I was a third of the way done, so I can now report that I am now more than a third of the way done.
I am trying to not upload pictures of days 2 and 3 (I’ve actually done work on both) as I consider them spoilers. I’ve already released quite a few from day 1. The photos I am posting here are “placeholder” pictures that are not even used in the game.
Day 2 consists of three paths with 5 events, all having some kind of puzzle aspect. These basically work like the downtown adventures of Date Ariane, or the puzzles from the 4th story of Something’s In The Air.
One path is a hike to a waterfall. I decided I wanted this to be an all day activity, and needed a really special puzzle. My first thought was a classic adventure game where you have to build something to move on, my second was some kind of “escape room” type of puzzle. I felt both were kind of lame, but then found a way to combine the two ideas, to make something really great, and I’ve been working on this path extensively to get it to work the way I want it.
Path two consists of a day on a crowded beach. If your game is set on a tropical paradise vacation, there’s got to be a visit to a crowded beach somewhere.
I haven’t written it yet, but I do have a puzzle figured out which you can succeed or fail at, the thing is I am still thinking about what happens when you succeed and when you fail. Besides swimming, tanning, drinking, and getting sand everywhere, what is there to do on the beach?
Path 3 is a snorkel trip to a coral reef. All I’ve really done on this one is enough set building to make this picture. Not sure what I want to do, yet.
But I’m leaning towards borrowing an idea from Chaotic’s Miranda which involves a game of hide and seek in the coral. Find Ariane before you run out of air. Again, not sure of the rewards and punishments based on success and failure.
Two of these paths, beach and coral, are morning only. I want to create two afternoon activities. One idea is a trip to a casino to play roulette. The twist on this puzzle: You actually play a game of roulette with a number of random success and failure outcomes, again haven’t written them yet.
Anyways, that’s enough updating, I better get back to work.
My favorite PC game for the past 16 years has been Guild Wars (2004) and its sequel Guild Wars 2 (2012). For those of you doing the math in your head and thinking Guild Wars has only been out for 15 years, well I am one of the lucky few to get into the closed beta that came out in October 2003. So yes I have been playing for nearly 16 years.
Word is that many of those 100 layoffs came not from Guild Wars 2, but from unannounced games that have been worked on in secret for the last 3 or 4 years. It only makes sense that a company that has only released two titles in its 19 years of existence would be working on other games, but it sounds like these projects are not in any state to make them releasable so they were cut.
Zoom Out Part 2: The issue is actually mobile games
The second biggest MMORPG of all time is Lineage, the vast majority of the players are in South Korea, which why you may not have heard of it. It is the main source of income of NCSoft, the parent company of ArenaNet.
So much that NCSoft is working on mobile versions of its other titles: Lineage2M, Aion2, Blade & Soul 2, Blade & Soul M, and Blade & Soul S. Notably missing is Guild Wars 2. I would not be surprised if that was one of the unspecified unfinished projects they were working on. If so, it is possible that a major factor in these ArenaNet layoffs had to do with their inability to make a Guild Wars 2 mobile game.
Heavy speculation on my part: I notice that Lineage2M was developed by an outside 3rd party and is paying royalties to NCSoft for the privilege. Could NCSoft now be shopping around the Guild Wars 2 property to 3rd party developers to make a Guild Wars 2 mobile game? If ArenaNet was making a mobile game, then scrapped it after the Diablo fiasco, it is possible that the work so far may be sold by NCSoft as well.
A third party developer releasing a GW2 mobile game would not face the negative backlash that would happen if ArenaNet did it. Follow up speculation: How bad will this game be?
The upshot of this theory is that NCSoft will need Guild Wars 2 to continue to succeed. Otherwise the IP will become worthless.
Zoom Out Part 3: Mobile games are REALLY bad for gaming in general
Companies have fallen in love with mobile gaming. Nearly everyone has a phone they can play games on. I see this with my games. I primarily make games for PCs, but there seems to be big demand for mobile versions, because not everyone has a PC.
The thing with mobile games is that the freemium business model has taken over the industry, despite the really ugly dark side of this business model’s source of revenue.
Basically it is about getting “Whales”, people willing to pay hundreds of dollars in micro transactions to get really good at the game. So many games use this business model, that it is very tough to find mobile games that don’t use it.
I prefer to buy mobile games outright. I’d rather spend $5, $10, $20 or more for a mobile game that will give me hours of fun without trying to sell me crap. You literally can’t find games like this anymore.
So profitable have these micro transactions have become, that PC game companies are adding it to PC games that you pay full price for. EA has even bragged that every game it releases has some online element and micro transaction store.
Guild Wars 2 does this, too. The core game is free and you can spend $30 to $60 for the two expansions, which is all you really need to play everything the game offers. But they are constantly releasing cosmetic skins for weapons and armor, novelties, and other stuff that you can either farm gold to get, or just pay a few bucks for gems that can be turned into gold. I admit I spend a fair amount on Guild Wars 2‘s gem store, but not more than I can afford, and I never bought something and thought “This isn’t worth it.”
What Guild Wars 2 does not do is do anything “Pay to win”. You cannot buy armor or weapons that are better than the craftable armor and weapons you make by playing the game. But “pay to win” PC games are a thing these days, and gamers should not support them at any price.
So why exactly is this bad for PC gaming? Because the biggest driving force of the PC game is Single Player Games, which have a built in flaw: you really can’t do micro transactions in single player games. Therefore, they do not make as much money as multiplayer games. And yet there is still great demand for single player games.
Bottom line is that mobile gaming and PC\Console gaming are two different beasts, with two different player bases, but gaming companies decisions are not about pleasing the players, it’s about pleasing the bottom line.
Zoom Out Part 4: Players need to play smarter, and beat these developers at their own game.
It’s all about putting your money where your heart is. Support the games you actually enjoy. Be picky about what games you are willing to buy for $60 on opening day instead of $30 if you wait 3 months, or $10 if you wait a year.
Never support “Play to win” games or random loot boxes that result in duplicates. Ask yourself, “How much do I enjoy playing this game?”, and only spend what you think it is worth to you.
Do you have to spend money to make the game fun? That’s a good sign you shouldn’t spend the money. Don’t buy “shovelware” or bad licensed games.
Best of all, support games that DON’T have micro transactions. If you are looking for a good mobile time killer, this is likely to be tough.
Since June of 2015, there has been a sometimes less than friendly war between Daz Studio and Poser which basically share a small community of 3D rendering hobbyists.
That was when Daz released their latest advanced model Victoria 7 specifically designed to not work in Poser. Now some people have found often complicated ways to get Vicky 7 to work in Poser, but because it was not designed for that program its use was limited. At the time, Daz Studio had features, like physics rendering with their IRay renderer, that Poser could not match.
This was great and all, but it went over most of our heads. How does this help us Poser users make beautiful pictures like the people using Daz Studio are doing?
A few of the more techie hobbyists got together a year ago to start working on a new figure that would take full advantage of subdivision surface morphing and adaptable figure weighting that most of us still don’t understand and came up with a new model named La Femme.
I made the above picture to demonstrate her features. This is the model straight out of the box with zero morphs and add-ons. Notice the joints: Shoulders, elbows, hips, knees, hands and feet. I didn’t have to adjust a single joint to get it to look good, it did it on its own.
The point is is that the weighted figure can do any weird pose that humans can do and look like a human is doing them. That is what adaptable figure weighting is all about.
The “free” version comes with 140 facial morphs and 30 facial “chips” that can be used to make almost any face you want. At the top of this post is a La Femme version of Ariane I made playing with those 140 dials.
If you’re into this stuff, you probably want to get the body morphs, too. This is not free and comes in two parts. There is the basic body kit, which adds a ton of new dials to controlling the body shape, and the high definition kit that doubles the polygons in certain parts of both the face and body to significantly increase the detail. These two were designed to compliment each other and make pretty much any kind of body you want.
Bottom line is it surpasses Daz’s Genesis 8 in complexity thanks to the use of tools not available in Daz Studio yet.
The Big Question: Will it be supported?
Even thought I have already created a La Femme version of Ariane, I plan to finish Ariane in Paradise with the V4 version. Partly because I am too far into the project now to switch models, and partly because there isn’t a very good selection of clothing or poses available yet.
Genesis 8 currently has many advantages. There are more users of Daz Studio than there are of Poser, and there is a big catalog of characters and clothing available for her.
To be successful, La Femme needs similar and continuing support. More characters, more clothing, more exclusives. Because it cannot be used in Daz Studio, that support has to come from us Poser users.
I personally will be watching with great interest.
In the last year, I wrote about government interference in the internet, and corporate interference of the internet, but there is another group that has to be acknowledged, the users themselves who often use illegal means to make money online. This group is decentralized and located all over the world. The internet is filled with fraud.
Advertising Fraud
Hucksters infected 1.7 million computers with malware that remotely directed traffic to “spoofed” websites — “empty websites designed for bot traffic” that served up a video ad purchased from one of the internet’s vast programmatic ad-exchanges, but that were designed, according to the indictments, “to fool advertisers into thinking that an impression of their ad was served on a premium publisher site,” like that of Vogue or The Economist.
Some were sent to browse the internet to gather tracking cookies from other websites, just as a human visitor would have done through regular behavior. Fake people with fake cookies and fake social-media accounts, fake-moving their fake cursors, fake-clicking on fake websites — the fraudsters had essentially created a simulacrum of the internet, where the only real things were the ads.
Increasingly sophisticated scam artists are stealing millions from advertisers trying to get the word out to legitimate potential customers, whose ads are actually going to robots pretending to be interested customers.
For sellers, Amazon is a quasi-state. They rely on its infrastructure — its warehouses, shipping network, financial systems, and portal to millions of customers — and pay taxes in the form of fees. They also live in terror of its rules, which often change and are harshly enforced. A cryptic email like the one Plansky received can send a seller’s business into bankruptcy, with few avenues for appeal.
Sellers are more worried about a case being opened on Amazon than in actual court, says Dave Bryant, an Amazon seller and blogger. Amazon’s judgment is swifter and less predictable, and now that the company controls nearly half of the online retail market in the US, its rulings can instantly determine the success or failure of your business, he says. “Amazon is the judge, the jury, and the executioner.”
Amazon is far from the only tech company that, having annexed a vast sphere of human activity, finds itself in the position of having to govern it. But Amazon is the only platform that has a $175 billion prize pool tempting people to game it, and the company must constantly implement new rules and penalties, which in turn, become tools for new abuses, which require yet more rules to police. The evolution of its moderation system has been hyper-charged. While Mark Zuckerberg mused recently that Facebook might need an analog to the Supreme Court to adjudicate disputes and hear appeals, Amazon already has something like a judicial system — one that is secretive, volatile, and often terrifying.
A recent article on The Verge called “Prime and Punishment” documented the cut throat underbelly of fraudsters undermining legitimate businesses using any tactics they can to get to the top of the search results.
For example, people used to buy five star reviews to get high on the search results, but then Amazon started deleting accounts that paid for five star reviews, so now some merchants are buying five star reviews for their competitors, then reporting their competitors and getting their competitors kicked off of Amazon. Read the full article for other dirty tricks.
This reminds me of the craziness that occasionally happened in Second Life‘s virtual marketplace for virtual items. Every week new drama emerged on the forums of a new fraud attack. It comes with the territory of online sales.
But Amazon has become so big, they need more than just automated processes to settle billions of disputes. It is making the worlds largest shopping site completely untrustworthy.
One could make the case that these are individuals using the site to be fraudulent to others, not the fault of Amazon. But Amazon is far from faultless when it comes to being honest in business. Just look at their underhanded fleecing of government in the “headquarters 2” debacle. It’s like they are encouraging fraud.
In both cases these license revocations only affected beta versions of apps that might be released in the future, not the popular apps used by most people. Apple determined that both companies were distributing these beta apps outside the company, and that is what triggered the terms of service locks.
Fraud seems to show up a lot in the app stores. If you search for “Messenger” thinking you will get Facebook Messenger, you will likely get instead one of a number of ad filled message monitoring apps that will cause unwanted pop up ads all over the place.
You know those Flashlight apps? You don’t need them. You can turn on a flashlight on your phone very easy without an app. Ditto apps with Q code and bar code readers. Your phone’s camera does that automatically without an app. Then there are popular religious apps with bible quotes. All of these are filled with ads.
Worst are “free” security apps like software cleaners and virus protection and “anti hacking” apps. If you are not paying for a service, your phone is being flooded with ads. These will hack your home screen and are sometimes very difficult to remove.
While I am on the topic, let me point out the fraud of “Freemium” games that Facebook was illegally pushing on minors at their parents expense. Gaming fraud deserves a post all its own.
Millions Lost
These are three areas where the internet has become the wild west. It seems there is no software to protect yourself from fraudsters that isn’t itself also a fraud. Promises of easy money online are just that: promises.
Want another example? Here is an article about defrauding kickstarter campaigns by publishing articles “for a fee”. I wouldn’t be surprised if similar scam artists are defrauding gofundme pages of people trying to fund life saving medical treatments.
For every person who has gotten rich off the internet there are dozens that have lost. It’s like in the movie Ready Player One, where if you kill a player, you collect all their gold, and the dead player has to start over at square one. It’s a very good metaphor for internet based businesses today.
It seems that everyone has a scam to sell, and the internet has grown so thick with these scams that many actually support government and corporate take over to get rid of it. Then only the big boys will make money online, and the economic hopes of the internet will be lost.
I’ve already lost hope that the internet would be the Great Equalizer that was promised. I suspect that what we will see is the continuous rise and fall of internet based empires. If you want to play in this environment, my best advice is to watch your back.
June is “pride month” in the US, and it is usually filled with corporations trying to show how forward thinking they are in appealing to the LGBT community. For a while now, I have been thinking that I am part of that community myself. The thing is I am not L, G, B. or T.
