Sean Flannigan

easy isometric pixel art is still coming... with a ton of new features!

create anything with easymetric soon on @aseprite.org

I should play Iji again

I wrote this comic 2 years ago. I was terrified when I wrote it but had hope it wouldn't come to pass and would be a reminder of how bad things got before we pulled back.

It not only has, it has gotten even worse. This is absolutely terrifying and will destroy lives if passed.

This is exactly how kittens work in real life too

Wow. Is this game inspired by that old Sim City interview where the designer said that if it were built to be a realistic representation of a city, it'd be mostly carparks? This looks great!

An auto-outline Lua script for Aseprite — Sean Flannigan An auto-outline Lua script for Aseprite that automatically renders an outline on a new layer as you draw.

I wrote an Aseprite plugin script that automatically maintains an outline of what you're drawing

www.seanflannigan.com/blog/aseprit...

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Waterworld the quest for dry land dos screenshot

I played that

Nandeck is cool! A bit intimidating at first and kinda fiddly, but heaps nicer than editing card images by hand

Everyone's investing in this new software that steals something useful and regurgitates it into something completely useless faster than humans ever could! Time to incorporate it into all our workflows so we don't get left behind.

I wrote a blog post about this www.seanflannigan.com/blog/en-plei...

Mouse is pony rat

That's a really cool purse but is "From the 1900s" meaning like 125 years ago or after I was born?

Working remotely with Kitty was fantastic - I bet this will be a good talk!

A plein air setup - a tripod with a light U-Go pochade box with Cobra water-mixable oil paint on the palette, a couple brushes and small palette knife, a metal container for water, a small painting on the box. the scene takes place on a wooden deck facing two blueberry plants with bird nets over them and steps to a bushy garden.

Quick plein air kit test on the deck to make sure I've got everything I need before venturing out with it!

The best part of accumulating a giant backlog of games from bundles and steam sales has been the wealth of reference material 😆

The tutorial is for understanding the tools, the post tutorial scenarios are hopefully unique challenges where I can try applying the tools and get the economy working myself. I think all of those games' tutorials did a pretty good job on that front to teach me each game's unique toolset!

-to have a functioning economy, so I liked having the tutorial to get me to 'bare minimum functioning economy ' and then let me figure out how to make it work from there. What I really want from a strategy game is to understand the tools thoroughly but to be given new scenarios to figure out myself.

-the end of your first run, Tavern Keeper guides you with story beats as hand rails - even though they could all be considered conventional strategy games in one way or another there's not much I can take from one and apply to another and all have different core requirements to understand in order -

Tropico has a series of short tutorial missions explaining different economies and approaches, Dungeon Tycoon is really an idle game with a strategy skin but on boards you just long enough to take the training wheels off, dotAge has a unique turn based approach and guides you with hints until-

I've been playing a bunch of strategy games lately and they all have such wildly different approaches that I really appreciate their in depth tutorials - the Two Point series guides through multiple scenarios as it introduces each mechanic with hints when you need a certain building/role,

And games where exploring the mechanics and being a bit bewildered is an intended part of the experience probably shouldn't have one at all. No one size fits all solution, haha. It's all about the audience!

When I worked on F2P mobile games, the tutorial needed to be water-tight or you'd lose people in 5 mins. You put tracking analytics on every click and see what percent of players stop at each step. Big hand, glowy buttons, guided tutorials. Can't risk someone getting stuck for 10 seconds or *DELETE*

And of course the tutorial approach needs to change based on expected audience and game complexity. A throwback Boomer Shooter probably doesn't need one at all but a strategy game probably needs a whole separate tutorial mission.

I think a very good tutorial for an action game is if you can hand it to a speedrunner and a newbie and have neither get frustrated.

I think as an experienced game player the most frustrating tutorials are ones that slow you down when you clearly know what to do already. Don't pause the game and show me how to jump over a log if I've been jumping around already.

If your game has appeal, you should be prepared for some number of players who pick it up as their first game. And even as someone who's played a thousand games over the decades I like a bit of on-ramp in most cases.

So now we include the info in the game itself. Doing things like using a standard control scheme helps a lot of players jump right in, but what if it's their first time playing your game's genre, or the other games they played in the genre were non-standard?

I like tutorials! They were really developed out of necessity once games stopped coming with physical manuals. We still had complex games but they'd come with booklets explaining the intricacies. Now players don't want to read before they start playing - fair enough.