awesome! The Broken Sandbox (Test and get feedback on your LPs here!)

The all-italics bothers me a bit too, although for me it's at least still been readable. If bumping up the text size helps, then I'll do that going forward.

Yeah, same.

In my opinion there's no need for every LP to have the updates under spoiler, but I understand they are useful if there are very big pictures in the update. Not only because of the italic, having everything in spoiler make it harder to find a specific update.
Also keep in mind that we actually post and share opinions, but there are tons of "lurker" that just read our threads, and usually they want to just passively read and scroll the page without having to push buttons to show the update under spoiler.

I hear you, but I know even when I lurked I had problems with my browser spazzing out and failing to display images and picture loading delay making sure I always ended up at the top of the page when the entire screen jerked upwards at random intervals. I think that's more annoying than having to click a few tags, to be honest. I mean, the DA2 LP made people's browsers crash. I would find that more inconvenient especially if it was a pc I was stuck with, and I was plain told in the LP discussion thread that was what kept gegi from reading it - the browser couldn't handle it.

The LP is a blast to follow just because it's so ridiculous, and I like that you abbreviated the title name so a certain revelation later has more comedic impact. The images might be a little excessive though - I don't mind them for the most part, but as a reader I personally like to imagine what certain things look like for myself. Maybe pick and choose more stringently which things to illustrate with images? Mundane things like an empty roll of clingfilm don't need pictures IMHO, and when we get a barrage of them the visuals kind of lose their impact somewhat as well as serve to distract us from the text. Especially since your updates are nice and short and snappy and HILARIOUS; in those little snippets, the text stands very well on its own and doesn't need too many pretty pictures to hold our attention.

Ah, I see. I was worrying that I wasn't really spacing things out so well, or worse, was making the posts too short, hence, well, the empty roll of clingfilm. XD So, I'll try to lay off so many pictures. It'll make things easier. :3

On the subject of spoiler tags: I want as many people to be able to read and enjoy my LP as possible. I've had my tablet browser crash in other LPs (I still can't get into ILU Brother) and it's a giant pain in the ass, much more so than having to click a button to see the update. I'd rather have someone not read my LP because they can't be bothered to press a button (?) than not read my LP because they literally can't.

Can someone with a slow internet check my LP: http://brokenforum.com/index.php?threads/lets-play-g-senjou-no-maou.3240/
Does it crash? Take too long to load? Any noticeable major problems?

Took a long time to load but didn't crash.

I will second what Jacquelle said. It loaded really, really slow, but once it did, I could scroll without noticable lag, and no images crashed, testing the first page.

I've actually tried reading it quite a few times, because I'm rather interested in what G-Senjou no Maou is like, but always stopped because it took waaaaaaay too long to load, haha.

It loads pretty slowly, yes. Doesn't crash my very crasheable browser though, so that's good!

This is the kind of LP that would really benefit from spoiler tags, since it's so huge and image heavy.

Thinking of maybe reviving my Animamundi LP, so I want some feedback on the size of the portraits I'm using for dialogue. Not going to spoiler my test post because I want you to be able to see it with proper formatting.

Does it look better with larger portraits as in this post, or does it look better with smaller, square portraits, like in the test post below?

Chapter 1: Part 3 (Video)

I recommend that you have the video running as you read the screenshots, just so you get the effect of the ominous latin chanting.



[ Mephistopheles ]
Those who have yet to find their way...
Those who have not yet awakened to the truth...

[ Mephistopheles ]
And thou, Georik Zaberisk, who shall one day be my master...



Wait, isn't it supposed to be the other way around?! You just said I was going to be your master! Make up your mind, dude.

And on that note, welcome to your first dose of Animamundi's freaky anatomy. And no, it isn't just because he's a devil and has a weird body - everybody in the game looks like that. Man, just look at those hands. Those shoulders. I'm pretty sure Mephistopheles isn't supposed to be a hunchback.

And when thy life be done, thy soul I shall receive...

The time for that has yet to come. For now, I merely wish to chat with thee.



Aww, he's just lonely and wants somebody to talk to~



There it is. The core game mechanic of this visual novel: timed choices. You have roughly ten seconds to choose an option: if you don't, the clock breaks and the game chooses for you. Check out the video to see it in action.

And with that, here's the first audience participation segment! Mephistopheles is going to present a series of questions to you. Please vote for all of them, unless you choose not to listen to him in the first question, in which case you are free to answer or ignore the rest of the questions as you wish.

For the best effect, think of this as a personality test and answer based on your instincts. Don't stop and think too much about it. ;)



1. Are you of a mind to talk with me for a while?
(A) I am
(B) I am not

2. A day will come when God will appear to thee in a dream, and speak unto thee the appointed day. As I appear, whispering to thee in thy dreams. At that time, when thou art told to give thy life... Wilt thou be able?
(A) I will
(B) I won't

3. Say a war were to start and thou wert required to join one of the warring sides. On one side, defeat and death are likely, but thou wouldst fight for pride and honor. On the other, victory and glory are likely, but thou must abandon honor in battle to attain glory. Which wouldst thou choose?
(A) Defeat
(B) Victory

4. Let us say thy side emerged victorious, attaining fame and glory. And say once again thou wert put into a situation in which battle was inevitable... Which path wouldst thou choose?
(A) To do battle again to attain more glory?
(B) Or to use thy position to leak information to the defeated military forces?

5. Thou hast sacrificed the lives of many soldiers, but managed to protect thy home village. However, the village is ravaged by starvation and suffering, and all place the blame on thy shoulders. Driven by hunger, murder and crime become rampant, and thou art responsible for restoring peace. Which path wouldst thou choose?
(A) To achieve this through generosity, tolerance and love.
(B) To achieve this through fury and ruthless control.

6. If thou heard a voice within thy dreams... Would that be the shining voice of God from Heaven? Or the voice of a devil from the depths of Hell? To which wouldst thou listen?
(A) The voice of God from Heaven
(B) The voice of a devil from Hell

7. If thou wert granted immortality, and could choose one long companion for eternity... Which wouldst thou choose?
(A) A man
(B) A woman
(C) Either

8. And, finally, answer me this. Have my questions made thee uneasy?
(A) Terribly uneasy.
(B) Not in the least.

That concludes my questions for now. Thou shalt find the answers within thyself.

Regardless, thy destiny is to obey the forces of darkness and become the ruler of Hell...

However, thou dost yet lack the skill to control me.



His voice starts to echo here, as if he's fading away into the distance.

[ Mephistopheles ]
Do not forget. The answers to my questions reside in thine own self.

[ Mephistopheles ]
And now, future master. I shall give thee a gift.

[ Mephistopheles ]
Look in the corner of thy room. There thou wilt find a gift from me finely wrapped.

[ Mephistopheles ]
And now, I will look forward to our next encounter...

I think it looks better with the smaller portraits imo.

I also prefer the smaller ones.

Smaller portraits, definitely. The larger ones push the text lines too far apart.

Thanks, y'all! I'll definitely switch to the smaller portraits when/if I restart the LP. :)

CSL: You nearly got lost amidst the spoilers discussion!

As someone unfamiliar with Greek geography and specific histories, I admit I don't follow the political ramifications of your battles as well as others might. I appreciate how you've presented Philip's strategic thought processes, but I become a bit lost trying to keep track of all the locations and rulers. Given my knowledge (or lack thereof), a bit more context every couple of updates just to refresh our minds. I do, however, appreciate how you've tied together images from the game and from the present-day. It helps to build a historical narrative that I might otherwise get lost in. I also like how you don't explain every mechanic, but just hit on them as they come.

So I started up the Animamundi LP again, and I'm wondering if my commentary is excessive/obtrusive? It has a pretty decent story, so I don't want to get in its way too much.

So far, not at all. We haven't gotten to the meat of the game, so the snark is nice to keep us hooked while it picks up a pace. That's what I think at least.

Gotcha, thanks! I'll tune it down a little when... stuff... starts happening. :)

I haven't asked earlier because it's pretty long already, but if anyone has feedback on the structure of my ADWR LP, I would be very grateful.

(Unfortunately the image quality of the first few pages is a bit lower and that's not something I can fix, but I was going to go back and replace the earlier character portraits with the smaller portraits I switched to partway through. Already done, because insomnia.)

If its cool with everyone, general feedback on my Xcom LP would be totally awesome:

http://brokenforum.com/index.php?th...by-b-movie-aliens-in-xcom-enemy-unknown.4511/

I feel rather comfortable with where I'm at with my SaGa Frontier LP, but given that I'm trying to encourage active audience participation wih Xcom, I want to know if I'm making it fun for everyone and what I could do to enhance the experience.

In particular, should I be clearer on how the mechanics of the game works, or do you guys prefer the more narrative take I've been doing with the mission reports? Also, does my heavy encouragement of RP cause discourage those who aren't interested in RP'ing from participating in the RP? Finally, any other general comments or critiques would be most appreciated.

Thanks guys!

Nerys, as you know, I've been following your ADWR LP for a while. The images take a while to load but aren't nearly browser crashingly bad... and that's pretty much the only thing I'd point out as somewhat negative.

I really like how you play Riona and your narration is pretty damn good. I also like how you chose such a controversial game and how you handle those bits.

I love the censorship too but we haven't seen any of that in a while. :(

Snark, it looks fine to me the way it is. The only thing that comes to mind is maybe organizing recent stuff on the first post? I don't know, perhaps updating it with our research situation every so often, or indexing character profiles/missions. The RP is awesome, but maybe some people would like not wading between group shenanigans to find relevant info.

Um, now that I think about it. Since the audience has to participate in desicions, maybe elaborating a bit more on technical stuff would be nice, so that we can take informed desicions. For example, knowing what works what way in combat so that when we chose skills we already know what is useful in practice.

I'm quite happy with the level of reader participation; it's often enough to feel significant, but not so often that things drag while waiting for one poll after another. And I'm really enjoying the narrative part; it's sufficiently tied to the actual results to not feel over-the-top, while also being more interesting than just covering the mechanics directly. I might be more interested in the mechanics if I weren't planning on eventually getting the game myself.

The heavy encouragement of RP is sort of a mixed benefit, for me. I got in on voter participation early enough that I enjoy watching some of it, but if I were coming to the thread a few days after all that started, I think I'd be too intimidated by the implied RP canon to want to join in at that stage. But having come in when I did, I like the little comments that reference the RP, even if I'm mostly skimming that stuff. (And, sure, it's a little frustrating sometimes when there are a ton of updates to the thread and it's all RP, but that's no different from other threads where all the update notices are for people posting reaction gifs or the like.)

Thanks, Kaneda! I've been thinking about what to do about the images, since I use such a mix of large images or just portraits + text depending on what the scene needs. Would it be annoyingly inconsistent if I spoiler tagged the really image-heavy posts (like this set of posts from the end of Part 1) but left the rest as-is?

Your LP is awesome and you should feel awesome. I like the character narrative but a few more explanations of the mechanics would be nice too; maybe a way to combine them?

As I'm active in the RP I can't really say, but maybe make it clear that even if you don't want to do elaborate in-character posts like Davian Korran and me, smaller less elaborate posts (I. E. what Aaron's doing) are also perfectly acceptable? Like you dn't need narration or anything, just commenting on the action from your character's POV is fine. And we take up a lot less of the thread now that we've got our own thread but I agree an index of updates would be good so people don't have to read the RP if they don't want to.

I'd like to second the request for more explanation of mechanics. Maybe elaborate a little more on your strategy during missions, weigh in on what you think are the pros and cons of each tech/class skill, the difference between classes, and so on? I mean, I have no idea how X-COM plays whatsoever so some of the missions confuse me. I can always go look up GameFAQs and wikis and discussion boards, but I also want to know what YOU think about how to play this game. Problems with this: (1) That might influence the way we vote, and (2) I really enjoy your updates as they are; your commentary is often hilarious and more lengthy elaboration on the mechanics might make it not as fun as others to read? (But given that most people have been asking for more mechanics explanation...) So maybe put this kind of analysis in extra updates or spoilers or something? But that might make your posts clunkier... :<

EDIT: Also I love the mini commander logs in between missions. LOVE THEM. They're like bite-size versions of the awesomeness in the main updates. SO YEAH, KEEP EM COMING <3

Hey guys, thanks for the responses! I'm going to have to wait for the weekend before I can implement any substantive changes, but I'll definitely take your comments to heart.

Just wanted to run an idea by you guys; how does the following sound ad a compromise between the narrative mission logs and more in depth explanation of the mechanics? I'll keep the narrative for the logs, but try incorporate more videos that explain the basic mechanics if the game?

Like this, those who aren't interested in mechanics can just not watch them, and those who are would be better served by videos since I'm terrible at explaining stuff.

Annoyingly inconsistent no, not really. that page is the one with the spider infestation aahhhhh

The problem is that most pages of the LP take a while to load, not only that one, so you'd end up having to tag everything anyway if you want it to be comfortable to read for people with slow-ish internet connections. Which may not be bad, actually; if the text size is a problem, you can either crank up the size or choose another font.

And Snark, that sounds about right. The narrative in the missions is awesome though, so don't leave it completely out if you can. :(

If you don't think you can explain stuff, letting videos do it works. I'd like to hear your thoughts on the things despicted on the videos, too. If it isn't too much of a pain in the ass, of course.

Oh definitely, I won't be leaving the narrative out, in fact, I wanted to use videos partly so that the narrative sections won't get bogged down by technical details.

I'm of two minds on giving my opinion skills and mechanics though; I can understand why people would want me to share what I thought of skills, research and so forth, but as Ana pointed out, I fear it may effect how you guys vote. This is especially the case given how I have a rather strong preference for certain research priorities and soldier skills, and I thought part of the fun of the LP was to let you guys take ownership over not only your characters, but our overall course of action.

Still, if you guys want me to share more of my opinions of the mechanics side, I'll be happy to do that too :)

C-can someone tell me how to make my own thread? I don't know how... What does "You have insufficient privileges to post here" even mean?

You have to wait a week to post new threads after registering.

...are you from LSF, by the way? Your username sounds familiar.

A-ah... that's why. *has only been here for a few days*

LSF? No? This is the first Forum I've ever been apart of. Maybe you heard my name from the Vocaloid song I took it from?

Oh yeah, it's probably that. Anyway welcome to the forum! :D

Okay, I've officially implemented all the changes that were suggested for my Heartache 101 LP. I wrote more for the opening post and added a picture, there's nary a .png to be seen (at least in my posts, I can't control whether or not any showed up outside of my posts), I bolded the names that appear before in-game text to make it more clear that it's from the game, and I double checked everything just to make sure. So, I'd love to hear some updated opinions (or first opinions if you didn't offer critique before) on how I'm doing and what I might be able to do to make my LP better. Again, especially of interest would be whether or not I'm overselling my own writing or the jokes to that point come off as obnoxious, the quality of the writing (are my jokes at all funny?), and any of the issues that have come up before (balance of summary vs. images and commentary, amount of commentary, loading time issues, how easy it is to differentiate between my commentary and the actual text from the game, etc.), but I'd love to hear about anything you think I could improve on.

Also, while I am looking for ideas for making my LP better, if you like it as it is, I'd love to know that too because while I might be able to make educated guesses, I don't know for sure when I'm doing something right if no one tells me. And hey, if you really like what you see, I'd love it if you'd stick around. I'm definitely looking for more readers. I already have quite a few screenshots prepared for future updates, so once I've gotten a little bit of feedback, the LP will be continuing soon. :)

That OP's looking much better, Nekochi.

As for myself, I need help deciding how best to present videos of the visual novel I'm recording. My main intention with having these videos is so that readers can listen to the voices and follow along, though I do expect at least a few to just watch the videos straight through and come back to the screenshots/transcription for the commentary.

The problem is, I'm not sure what video hosting site to use.

At first, I started out using Youtube videos embedded in Polsy, like this. The good thing about Polsy is that it's embedded in the middle of a blank grey page with no distractions or anything. It's very clean and tidy and I love that. But the problem is that I can't control what thumbnail Youtube throws up whenever I embed a video, and sometimes the thumbnail will spoil the contents of the video.

So I've switched to just using raw Youtube links instead, like this. That gets rid of the thumbnail-spoiling issue. The problem with this is I'm afraid that spoilers might show up in the related videos, and also it's a very cluttered interface, with ads and everything. It's also presented in a way that there are black bars on either side of the footage, which isn't too aesthetically pleasing.

The third alternative that I've been thinking about is Photobucket, like this. This is great because it automatically enlarges the video, making it easy to read, there's no issues with thumbnails spoiling the contents, and there won't be any spoilers lurking about in related videos. The problem is that it has some ads, which makes it not as clean as my ideal, Polsy.

Right now, I'm tempted to make the switch to all Photobucket all the way, but if I could get some advice on what to do or maybe other alternatives, I'd really appreciate it. :)

Photobucket has videos? I was not aware of that.

Maybe I'm missing something, but why can't you just post a link to a Polsy-embedded video?
Otherwise, the ads in Photobucket doesn't bother me, so I would say that's the best alternative.

I don't want to use Polsy because sometimes the video thumbnail will have an image that spoils stuff that comes later in the video, and Youtube won't let me control what image to use for the thumbnail. :(