girl-like-substance
the seal will bite you if you give him half a chance
Posts: 527
Pronouns: xe/xem
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Post by girl-like-substance on Feb 23, 2019 21:54:14 GMT
This is my extravaganza entry for Minty! I felt like the intersection of 'robots with issues' and 'clefairy' was something that might appeal, so that's what I went for. I've drawn inspiration from a few different prompts, but some of the ones that were uppermost in my mind were: and
Anyway, this is a Twine game, or story, or something like that; really it's just an odd little thing that you can click around in and do some stuff with. Make art! Teach some clefairy to moonwalk! Turn off life support and kill nine hundred people! (Please don't do that last one.) I guess I should also warn for like, people feeling badly, but nothing really very concrete. With all that out of the way, the game itself is attached to this post and linked here; click the link, open it with your browser, and it should run from there.
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Post by admin on Feb 23, 2019 22:37:57 GMT
God, this is just. The cutest thing I've messed with in a while. :_; Just ... it's like a virtual pet simulator that stabs you in the heart in the end. While oozing with cuteness. So, at the risk of repeating myself via chat, I have to say my absolute favorite part is probably the entire idea that clefairy are actually these intelligent, spacefaring beings that tend to seek out planets for the sole purpose of ... becoming the most desirable pet on them, 100% so they can be adopted and pampered. They are interplanetary freeloaders, and that's amazing. Like. They have enough know-how to accrue the credits needed to charter a ship, they can navigate striking such a deal (probably in a second alien language, as the database shows the ship itself doesn't have a clefairy dictionary), and they have enough culture to create art and judge it intellectually (or at least enough culture to know that tweed really helps in allowing one to pass for an art critic), but their main goal is literally just to be pampered. Not to join an intergalactic federation or even to prove that they are, in fact, intelligent enough to do so. They just want to be fed and given affection Actually, I'm pretty sure that makes them the most intelligent beings in the galaxy, come to think of it. Like. These clefairy have figured out how to get other beings to plop them in the lap of luxury with minimal effort. I mean, sure, they have to live in the wild and maybe battle a little bit, but yes, actually, they are as adorable as weird cats, and look at where cats wound up. (I'm inclined to think that clefairy got the idea from cats.) Also, can I just say that I love how you interpreted the alien invasion prompt? Like ... I just love how the "invasion" in this cases is almost 900 clefairy getting dropped off on a mountain so they can paste stickers to boulders and harass the local wildlife with tubes of glitter. It's so adorably benign. Not to mention all of the good endings. ;_; Like. Even when presented with the choice to be an evasive dick or decline, I just. Couldn't do it. ;;_;; The clefairy were too strong.And finally, there is of course the ship, which is ... just so fascinating. I know the point isn't to focus on it, but I just love the idea that these robots grew some sort of sentience and regretted it or at least came to regret it after fostering a small town's worth of clefairy for a while. And those notes of hesitance and loneliness at the end. ;_; Godspeed, alien ship. May you not be lonely again. Although it'll probably help if I played this game, like, thirty more times.In short, loved this! Thank you~
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girl-like-substance
the seal will bite you if you give him half a chance
Posts: 527
Pronouns: xe/xem
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Post by girl-like-substance on Mar 7, 2019 18:23:39 GMT
I'm delighted you liked it! And that nothing broke, lol. I'm super rusty, and a lot of stuff here, like the different permutations of your potential artwork, was stuff I'd never learned how to do in the first place, so I had to learn it from scratch anyway. I really enjoyed brushing up on my Twine skills (such as they are), though, and it's good to know the results went down well too!
I imagined there's probably like one clefairy that wears horn-rimmed glasses and a tie who handles all their interactions in the wider world. Basically, I imagined the clefairy as playing by Bugs Bunny logic in a sci-fi world; they pull out costumes from nowhere and the world just sorta warps around them to accommodate them. That's why they all suddenly dress like art critics as soon as there's art around to critique. But they're also like, a weird cross between cats and toddlers, which is why their art is based on glitter and craft paper and 90% of their time is spent playing with whatever they can find.
It's definitely not a coincidence that the ship's cat is the sole survivor of the starship's original crew – or that cats themselves are being smuggled off Earth because aliens find them so cute they just have to have them as pets. To the extent that cats are referred to as 'Sol-III-alpha' and humans as 'Sol-III-beta', because when most of the galaxy thinks of Earth, they think of cats first and those odd self-destructive bipeds second. :V
It's almost literally Audrey II's plan from Little Shop of Horrors, but with less murder: arrive on Earth, become irresistible to every human that sees you, worm your way into every household on the planet. That's … kinda where the plans diverge, since the clefairy don't want to eat people, they just want to have their every need catered to by a horde of witless lesser beings, but still, it was this combination of insidious and 'this isn't even a problem really, is it?' that I really enjoyed writing.
That's their master plan! Nobody escapes the cuteness. But that doesn't have to be a bad thing; the ship isn't immune to their charm, in part at least because there's a human playing them (you can completely not interact with the clefairy at all, but it's designed to be hard to resist), but it works out okay for them, I think. Like it's good for them to interact with other people every once in a while.
I did mean for the ship to be a big part of this too, so you're not wrong to highlight it – the AI collective governing the ship and its mechs was envisioned as like an autopilot mingled with all the programmes that run individual systems (hence their use of 'we'), that accidentally formed a gestalt consciousness, expelled the ship's crew (violently or otherwise), and has since been taking transport/smuggling jobs (most of which are jokes, ngl) to cover the cost of fuel and supplies and to give them some sense of purpose. Their regrets are sorta tied to the act of expulsion in the logs and the very earliest job in the list, and I wrote the rest of the game from the viewpoint of a ship that was really penitent and regretful about what happened, whatever that might have been.
The clefairy might have conned the AI into caring for them, as they do everyone, but like I said, it feels like it did them good. I'd like to think that in future the ship will be a bit more hopeful in their future dealings with organics, now they know they can make friends – like, there's a marked difference between how they interact with the clefairy and with the beheeyem in that diary entry, for instance.
Anyway, I've talked about this poor traumatised spaceship for way too long now. I'm so glad you liked this! I kept thinking of new things to add, like tracking the kind of art you made and the dance you tried on the systems diagnostics screen, or charting declining oxygen levels on the same screen if you passed checkpoints while still having life support off, and it was a really fun, interesting experience trying to implement all that. I'm delighted it all paid off!
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