In my experience the most popular and fun “party games” are boardgames such as Top Ten, Time’s Up, Hot & Cold or Codenames (more or less in that order). They work best for 6 to 10 players. Though I don’t think they shine in a highly competitive tournament setting.

Randomness exists in all of these games but I consider it very balanced/smoothed out so it shouldn’t really affect the outcome. Not all of the games I mentioned have permanent teams, but that can easily be changed with house rules.

Considering the comfy curled up pose of the cat I was thinking since AI already has problems generating hair/fingers/toes due to their variety, how difficult would sleeping/lying cats be.

It’s a vampire cat!

What exactly do you consider insane about it?

From this limited view pedestrians seem to have a pretty nice place there. Crosswalks are highlighted strongly and there’s no traffic lights to slow down pedestrians so they have the priority and the necessary attention. Sidwalks seem wide enough as well.

Yes the road is wider than the bike path, but they each have one lane per direction and there don’t appear to be any sharp turns. The bike lane should perhaps be a little wider, but if there’s only a low number of cyclers it seems equal-ish.

I feel like the little “hill” where the bike lanes and crosswalk intersect should start earlier, that way bikes could come to a halt at the top of the hill and wouldn’t have to accelerate through it, instead they could use it as a sort of break to build up potential energy for a little speed boost later on. Either way the hill seems like a decent idea considering bike drivers occasionally try to drive past pedestrians without a clear path, overestimating their agility - especially at high speeds.

While one could argue for a similar hill on the road, I’d consider that an unnecessary nuisance for the bus driver and passengers. Being shaken around while getting up for a stop is not a nice experience. A hill would also scratch the underside of a low-floor bus.

Ideally bus and tram stops should probably be placed just before a crossing, not after. That way the bus doesn’t block view of pedestrians for cars coming from the opposite direction. The bus driver will usually have to stop for the station either way, so might as well combine the stop for the station with the stop for the crosswalk.

That said I’d argue it’s more of a pedestrians > cars > bicycles or maybe even a pedestrians > cars/bycycles system. Not quite as bad as your suggestion, but still not ideal.

edits: Added a comment about bus stop location. Added comment on low-floor bus.

What does “too comfortable” mean in this context? To me it sounds like you’re bringing up the situation where students don’t care or find the subject boring and then do other things like staring at their phone, doodling, chatting, etc. Is that what you’re referring to?

I don’t think that situation has to do with comfort directly, if anything people feel uncomfortable because boredom is not comfortable. The cause for that boredom could be bad teaching/presentation, or maybe the taught information builds up on knowledge that the student doesn’t have cause they missed a class or didn’t understand the subject at hand or they simply just don’t care and find the topic uninteresting. The brain is good at conserving energy so when a situation seems unimportant it shuts off focus or shifts it to something else. That’s not always helpful.

I’ve heard that for people to be teachable they have to feel safe. Feeling afraid makes your body enter a defensive stance and this includes not only resisting harm but also resisting knowledge transfer. I assume that’s why people who struggle with a subject at school sometimes have a difficult time catching up even when with tutoring.

It would then be similar to how you can’t convince a stranger who believes in wrong things - controversial topics cause stressful situations and when you’re seen as an enemy their brain goes into a defensive mode, distrusting you and not letting new information in. You first have to build up a certain level of trust and mutual understanding.

Maybe that’s nothing new. Either way, this picture reminded me of that.

This reminds me of “Fun to imagine with Richard Feynman” (Youtube link)

In it he said that he thinks people who find science dull lose out on a lot of pleasure. Then he goes on to explain some of the physics behind things we encounter everyday.

I feel like comparing OTTD to OpenLoco is a bit similar to comparing Freeciv to Freecol. OTTD and Freeciv just had so much more popularity and development. But OpenLoco and Freecol are still nice to try.

Of course! TTD and Locomotion were developed by the same person. From my understanding Locomotion is closer to the Roller Coaster Tycoon engine and UI. Also I think I remember reading an interview in which Chris Sawyer said Locomotion had the cleanest code out of the three.

Looking at those feet I feel like some people could get jealous.

Very true, but only the fact that the game had such an incredible and easy to use map editor was the reason this was possible.

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I’m aware of that and also see the problem, but argue that that’s partially because most people just aren’t used to this. People’s actions depend a lot on what they consider the norm. Take waiters or other service people as an example - in some cultures it’s usual to tip them, in others it’s unusual or even frowned upon.

You would have to at least have a base minimum purchase price and then accept tips on top.

That’s also fine. If the initial price were lower than other comparable games then I assume that more people could be convinced to tip. Or even just if a company is very open about their work / income and dedicated to communicating to their players. I think there’s already some companies like that, though perhaps not necessarily the big ones.

That’s where work contracts can help. Any form of tipping and how it is split would have to be handled by a contract anyway.

He’s not talking about donations though, he’s talking about paying full price THEN tipping.

I’m aware of that. The “Pay what you want.” concept mentioned in my first paragraph was its own idea/suggestion/thought, since it kinda fits the topic. It’s a different thing.

It’s a blatant excuse to pay developers less while placing financial guilt on the people paying for the product. It’s the same way tipping at a restaurant works.

Not really, really good video games take months or even years to complete, so your developers will want to be paid for that time before they become profitable. At restaurants the initial investment isn’t quite as high, as far as wages are concerned. I’d argue that you get tipped before even getting your first monthly paycheck. That can not be the case for video game tips.

I assume software developers and other people in the IT sector are also in higher demand than waiters, so they don’t have it quite as bad as waiters. That’s why I think they’re not comparable.

That said, I do believe that a company that is open about the tips it receives could be interesting for developers. If I saw that tips were actually split evenly among all the employees and their work hours then I think it’d be worth considering applying there. Though I guess for fairness those tips should even be paid out if employees quit or get kicked out so you’d have to track how much each person contributed to each product and that could be a bit of a bureaucratic hassle.

I think the concept of “Pay what you want.” is a very friendly approach to this. It already exists on platforms like itch.io and some free to play games financed through donations, like Dwarf Fortress, also became extremely popular. Humble Bundles are also pretty famous for this. And of course kickstarters do something a bit similar to this.

Personally I’d love to see donation buttons/infos especially for all the free music and games that exist out there. But I want to make sure my donations reach the people who actually worked on it, so I dislike products like paypal or patreon where a portion of the money goes to men in the middle and their managers/owners, etc. A bank account number or something along those lines where I can transfer money a bit more directly would be nice, but some creators only provide paypal buttons, so I won’t donate.

I never played the game but watched some trailers and gameplay videos. I’m 99% certain that Helldivers 2 is following the Starship Troopers formula and purely making fun of patrionism, propaganda, war, the military, military personnel, “freedom”, heroism, politics and military advertisements and turning that into a game. There’s just so many obvious signs, it seems impossible to miss. In other words, it is a political game. Or maybe I just really don’t get either of the two.

Seems to be mostly about horror stuff. I guess a bit of a focus on more random negative events / disasters? My assumption it’s mind/madness related, so perhaps some of it is only in a pawns imagination/hallucination.

Judging by the few existing screenshots I guess that’d also allow for some random natural disasters like earth movement / quakes (big hole in the ground) and makes me think of other stuff like flooding, tornados, etc. But there’s probably already a ton of natural disaster mods.

Also glasses, latex gloves, calculators, earrings and whatever that horseshoe-shaped device below the calculator and next to the potions is. 🤔