I almost didn’t pick up Sankarea, but I’m very glad I did, and the
show’s direction is part of the reason why – it’s taken an otherwise
unremarkable premise and lent it an unmistakable atmosphere. It turns
out director Shinichi Omata (working under a pseudonym) is an old hand
at SHAFT now working on his own projects, much like Shin Oonuma, and you
can see some of the techniques common to Akiyuki Shinbou and his
protégés here played in a more subtle, but still effective, manner.
In these two books, the authors of four dozen open source applications
explain how their software is structured, and why. What are each
program’s major components? How do they interact? And what did their
builders learn during their development? In answering these questions,
the contributors to these books provide unique insights into how they
think.
A fascinating read, especially when it comes to looking at applications
that I myself use. The deeply-thought-out designs, like LLVM’s, are
educational in and of themselves, but it’s also fun to see how programs
that didn’t start out so well-architected have been forced to evolve
over time to meet new demands. (MediaWiki, I’m looking at you.)
Nazuna saves the day once again. Working!! (first season) episode 6.
No dithering, since it caused quite a bit of visible noise, but I did
apply a little fuzziness on color comparisons between frames.
Here’s the preview for the upcoming second batch of prologue episodes,
featuring the film’s other main character Eiji.
A second chapter of the “Another Side” companion manga is also out; you
can grab a translated
version
from /a/non scanlations.
So I had this idea for a visual novel mechanic, probably inspired by
playing too many Infinity series games, where the player
takes the role of a “ghost” who can’t actually talk to any of the
characters, but can interact with their environment when no one’s
looking. At the beginning and end of every scene, you would get a chance
to either remove objects from the “stage,” or place things that you’ve
taken in previous scenes. One scene might be set in a kitchen, for
instance, where you’d get the opportunity to take a knife from the
counter and later conveniently leave it at the scene of a particularly
tense fight.
I have a feeling this has been done before, but I can’t recall where.
Edit: I suppose I should mention that the idea was to have the
stage-setting replace choices as the primary plot branching mechanism.
Going back to the knife example, let’s say the climactic dust-up is
between Alice, who is relatively weak physically, and Mallory, who’s
fairly strong. Leaving the knife for Alice in that scene would thus mean
the difference between her getting overpowered almost immediately and
her having a shot at fending for herself. (In fact, my biggest qualm
with this concept is that it could quickly turn into a combinatorial tar
pit given enough manipulable objects and scenes.) A few people have
showed me adventure games with a “ghost director” mechanic at their
core, but they all seemed fairly linear plot-wise.
