arabelladusk

IF IT WERE GOOD ENOUGH FOR PROUST...

sadly, very little of my nerdy development work is done in bed. we work from our shared flat, though, so most of my work is done in proximity to a bed. glad to cut straight to the meat of what game dev really is, 10/10 would AMA again

I mean, unless you always roleplay in your head as Neville...

The Lovecraftian Thing is that there is this big swirly-whirly aether of unknowable power, knowledge and madness just beyond humanity's fingertips. There isn't really a way to interface directly with this aether without going totally nuts/exploding/ruining the drama, so a lot of the narrative is drip-fed through overheard conversations, ancient grimoires you slowly translate, lucid dreaming, being in the right haunted house at the very wrong time...

This is why CS works the way it does. You're not incompetent, you're just human - and we want you to feel powerful in the later game when you've worked your lil culty butt off to glean all that information and compile it into something usable, so you can finally start summoning and murdering and doing all your necessary eldritch biz.

In terms of eating one human, that's a toughie. I think it depends very much on the cuisine in question: nori-roll cannibalism might feature a very different individual than, say, a lovely ragu.

It was a weird development cycle, as Alexis left Failbetter, immediately made a Javascript prototype for CS, buggered off to do his whole 'I'm a really great writer' year at Bioware/Paradox/Telltale, then returned to focus again on CS.

As a super rough guesstimate, Alexis was probably 30/30/30 across writing, design and coding over the course of the project. (There're over 70k words in CS but he writes like billy-o.) The last month or so was really where he got to focus on embellishments, like additional interactions between parts of the game which really made it blossom (as you say, something something autographs).

For me, bleurgh, I'm too close to my workload to make a guesstimate right now! But I can say social media/marketing takes up WAY more time than you might think. Turns out 'the rest of humanity that isn't you' is quite a needy segment of society.

I ended up sitting next to him on a train for three hours. I didn't know who he was and ended up advising him about kitchen chairs, before realising he was responsible for Tomb Raider which got me into games, FOR WHICH HE APOLOGISED, smiling abashedly and saying, well, it *was* the 90s.

He's bae and we're friends.

We'd expect one run-through with one character to take anywhere between 2-8 hours, depending on how lucky/experienced you are, with a whole-game experience clocking in between 20-40 hours, depending on how often you choose to replay roles/how many times you die etc.

The game also doesn't include everything you need to know: it's designed to leave spaces for you to connect the dots, both mechanically and from a lore point of view. So it has a lot of potential to surprise you, even if you've played up to that magic 40 hour mark!

It'll cost £14.99 / $19.99, but there's a 10% off launch discount for the first week, AND anyone who buys it gets a limited edition called Perpetual Edition which gives you free DLC for life. Woot!

Finally: there are a plethora of cards. I know, because we massively underbudgeted for art. :D