[PA Comic] Friday, September 28, 2012 - Collaboration

Geth

Collaboration
http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2012/09/28

Falx

It's like every "critique my work" site ever.

RMS Oceanic

The red eyes are a nice touch.

Groosenat0r

First it was D&D, now Tycho's demonic influence has finally overwhelmed Gabe... The end times are truly upon us...

Grey Paladin

1000000000% accurate.

Karl

Groosenat0r wrote: »

First it was D&D, now Tycho's demonic influence has finally overwhelmed Gabe... The end times are truly upon us...

This will always be my favorite PA comic.

Peter Ebel

Yes!

Zek

I am perplexed by the middle panel. Why is Gabe looking to the left? Is he looking at the Brad from panel 1?

Axon

Now that's an ironic comic.

-Tal

Zek wrote: »

I am perplexed by the middle panel. Why is Gabe looking to the left? Is he looking at the Brad from panel 1?

I think he's looking at Kiko, as in "Oh Look[, Kiko,] it's Milton fucking Bradley!"

mato-andrew

Karl wrote: »

Groosenat0r wrote: »

First it was D&D, now Tycho's demonic influence has finally overwhelmed Gabe... The end times are truly upon us...

This will always be my favorite PA comic.

100% agree.

Jacques L'Homme

Ooh, poor Brad. Little did he know that, in it's natural environment, the Gabriel is a vicious ambush predator, and he walked right into his den.

Poor, poor Bradley.

Taramoor

-Tal wrote: »

Zek wrote: »

I am perplexed by the middle panel. Why is Gabe looking to the left? Is he looking at the Brad from panel 1?

I think he's looking at Kiko, as in "Oh Look[, Kiko,] it's Milton fucking Bradley!"

I thought he was doing the "talk out the side of your mouth and act like someone else is saying it" shtick.

Enlong

mnihil

Tycho's newspost wrote:

I wasn’t at the last Thornwatch playtest. I made the mistake of relaxing for one second last Friday, one Goddamn second, and PAX finally caught up with me and laid me out. I understand that it was… a thing.

Watching a game materialize is fascinating. I’ve written games, certainly; that’s the axis I feel like I have something to contribute in. But I have avoided “design” quite on purpose. I’m an editor, at heart. If I were being uncharitable, and that’s sort of in my wheelhouse, I would say that it was an effort to avoid responsibility - cowardice, essentially. That would be fine with me. But I also don’t want to design games, and when the first barriers arise I run from the hills. I don’t have the thing underneath the thing, the mania for it. But you need somebody around to tell you when you’re off the rails, because it’s very hard to see. You need an asshole, essentially. Well, another one. An external one. This is something I’m good at.

Because he decided to set it in Lookouts, there’s a lot of lore that needs making. We need to know this stuff anyway, so it’s a lot of fun writing poems and building it out. Right now I’m just going full blast in an attempt to be useful, we’ll see if that designation ultimately applies to any of this stuff. I did make a bit for the rule of thumb people use to remember how to call the Thornwatch though, which he seemed to like. These are all knots, and yes, I know how they look:

Twainward for burdens that no man should carry,
Bent Bow for battles you can’t fight alone,
Wagon-Wise for when the Watch must not tarry,
Crow’s Loop for travelers far from home.

Being sick gave me a chance to process more PAX, which I still have a lot left to do it turns out. I thought about Ironclad Tactics, and how good it was, and how I never had a chance to come back and play the last level of the demo. The reality is that I didn’t have to play it to know it was good.

When I went to see his little out of the way booth tucked in a hallway at the Hyatt (?) I realized that I was angry with him at some level. I like puzzles, and I like Puzzle Games; but SpaceChem is the first game in a very long time to make me feel like a fucking idiot. I described it as a harrowing embolism manifold because I could feel the vessel plumping, like a balloon, robbing my blood. I was worried that some shit might go down. But Zach is probably the nicest, most genuine person I’ve met in my tenure as Internet Demagogue. All his weaponry is turned inward; I couldn’t resent him. I think he’s just smarter than other people, I don’t think he can actually help it.

The genre I’ve heard referred to colloquially as Lane Based is big, big stuff now: that’s how people refer to games like the Orions and Spectromancers and SolForges, where you line up your cards on one side and deal damage to an opponent through the cracks. It’s Magic, but with highly regimented playfield. Ironclad Tactics has lanes of a sort, but it doesn’t model hitpoints - you succeed by running robots past the enemy line, a kind of villainous “end-zone.” Where this clanking, steam-driven design gets tasty is that everything is operating in phased, real-time turns. That means that there’s a lot of head-fakes, mind-games, and robots playing “chicken.” You’re building an engine in real time, always noodling on it, giving it twists here and there. Brilliant.

Your army is a deck, full of swords and guns you can bolt on your shimmying bots, and clutch maneuvers to perform end runs. You earn them as you play, and you’re always improving.

(CW)TB out.

Jerry Holkins is probably one of the luckiest human beings on this earth. I'm convinced that, in his collaborator and with Penny Arcade, he stumbled upon the one thing, of all things, able to provide him success and happiness. I don't know if he'd ever write a novel, either for the "cowardice", or his being enamoured with the minutiae, never quite right, never ready. I don't even think he's a novelist or storyteller at heart. He'd probably be as at home placing the words in a technical manual, like a child with their legos. That one idiosyncratic quirk, really, and he found a place for it. I find it fascinating, is all.

Then of course, one runs for the hills.

KoopahTroopah

I really desire a 4th panel for this one.

JimmyDarkmagic

Zek wrote: »

I am perplexed by the middle panel. Why is Gabe looking to the left? Is he looking at the Brad from panel 1?

I assumed he was rolling his eyes, or so angry that he couldn't look at him for a second.

Snazzier

Wow, that's just about the same response I got (in all caps with periods between each word), to an email I had otherwise laden with praise, when I once got up the gumption to write to my then favorite web comic artist -- whose comic I had read without interruption for ten years and bought the books for -- and gently suggested that a certain blue troll might be acting more than a bit out of character after his move to Seattle.

Then again, he hadn't specifically asked for feedback . . .