ave-aria:

starforgedsteel:

berrybird:

• Sticking a landing will royally fuck up your joints and possibly shatter your ankles, depending on how high you’re jumping/falling from. There’s a very good reason free-runners dive and roll. 
• Hand-to-hand fights usually only last a matter of seconds, sometimes a few minutes. It’s exhausting work and unless you have a lot of training and history with hand-to-hand combat, you’re going to tire out really fast. 
• Arrows are very effective and you can’t just yank them out without doing a lot of damage. Most of the time the head of the arrow will break off inside the body if you try pulling it out, and arrows are built to pierce deep. An arrow wound demands medical attention. 
• Throwing your opponent across the room is really not all that smart. You’re giving them the chance to get up and run away. Unless you’re trying to put distance between you so you can shoot them or something, don’t throw them. 
• Everyone has something called a “flinch response” when they fight. This is pretty much the brain’s way of telling you “get the fuck out of here or we’re gonna die.” Experienced fighters have trained to suppress this. Think about how long your character has been fighting. A character in a fist fight for the first time is going to take a few hits before their survival instinct kicks in and they start hitting back. A character in a fist fight for the eighth time that week is going to respond a little differently. 
• ADRENALINE WORKS AGAINST YOU WHEN YOU FIGHT. THIS IS IMPORTANT. A lot of times people think that adrenaline will kick in and give you some badass fighting skills, but it’s actually the opposite. Adrenaline is what tires you out in a battle and it also affects the fighter’s efficacy - meaning it makes them shaky and inaccurate, and overall they lose about 60% of their fighting skill because their brain is focusing on not dying. Adrenaline keeps you alive, it doesn’t give you the skill to pull off a perfect roundhouse kick to the opponent’s face. 
• Swords WILL bend or break if you hit something hard enough. They also dull easily and take a lot of maintenance. In reality, someone who fights with a sword would have to have to repair or replace it constantly.
• Fights get messy. There’s blood and sweat everywhere, and that will make it hard to hold your weapon or get a good grip on someone. 
• A serious battle also smells horrible. There’s lots of sweat, but also the smell of urine and feces. After someone dies, their bowels and bladder empty. There might also be some questionable things on the ground which can be very psychologically traumatizing. Remember to think about all of the character’s senses when they’re in a fight. Everything WILL affect them in some way. 
• If your sword is sharpened down to a fine edge, the rest of the blade can’t go through the cut you make. You’ll just end up putting a tiny, shallow scratch in the surface of whatever you strike, and you could probably break your sword. 
• ARCHERS ARE STRONG TOO. Have you ever drawn a bow? It takes a lot of strength, especially when you’re shooting a bow with a higher draw weight. Draw weight basically means “the amount of force you have to use to pull this sucker back enough to fire it.” To give you an idea of how that works, here’s a helpful link to tell you about finding bow sizes and draw weights for your characters.  (CLICK ME)
• If an archer has to use a bow they’re not used to, it will probably throw them off a little until they’ve done a few practice shots with it and figured out its draw weight and stability. 
• People bleed. If they get punched in the face, they’ll probably get a bloody nose. If they get stabbed or cut somehow, they’ll bleed accordingly. And if they’ve been fighting for a while, they’ve got a LOT of blood rushing around to provide them with oxygen. They’re going to bleed a lot. 
• Here’s a link to a chart to show you how much blood a person can lose without dying. (CLICK ME) 
• If you want a more in-depth medical chart, try this one. (CLICK ME)

Hopefully this helps someone out there. If you reblog, feel free to add more tips for writers or correct anything I’ve gotten wrong here. 

How to apply Writing techniques for action scenes:

- Short sentences. Choppy. One action, then another. When there’s a lull in the fight, take a moment, using longer phrases to analyze the situation–then dive back in. Snap, snap, snap.
- Same thing with words - short, simple, and strong in the thick of battle. Save the longer syllables for elsewhere.
- Characters do not dwell on things when they are in the heat of the moment. They will get punched in the face. Focus on actions, not thoughts.
- Go back and cut out as many adverbs as possible.
- No seriously, if there’s ever a time to use the strongest verbs in your vocabulary - Bellow, thrash, heave, shriek, snarl, splinter, bolt, hurtle, crumble, shatter, charge, raze - it’s now.
- Don’t forget your other senses. People might not even be sure what they saw during a fight, but they always know how they felt.
- Taste: Dry mouth, salt from sweat, copper tang from blood, etc
- Smell: OP nailed it
- Touch: Headache, sore muscles, tense muscles, exhaustion, blood pounding. Bruised knuckles/bowstring fingers. Injuries that ache and pulse, sting and flare white hot with pain.
- Pain will stay with a character. Even if it’s minor.
- Sound and sight might blur or sharpen depending on the character and their experience/exhaustion. Colors and quick movements will catch the eye. Loud sounds or noises from behind may serve as a fighter’s only alert before an attack.
- If something unexpected happens, shifting the character’s whole attention to that thing will shift the Audience’s attention, too.
- Aftermath. This is where the details resurface, the characters pick up things they cast aside during the fight, both literally and metaphorically. Fights are chaotic, fast paced, and self-centered. Characters know only their self, their goals, what’s in their way, and the quickest way around those threats. The aftermath is when people can regain their emotions, their relationships, their rationality/introspection, and anything else they couldn’t afford to think or feel while their lives were on the line.

Do everything you can to keep the fight here and now. Maximize the physical, minimize the theoretical. Keep things immediate - no theories or what ifs.

If writing a strategist, who needs to think ahead, try this: keep strategy to before-and-after fights. Lay out plans in calm periods, try to guess what enemies are thinking or what they will do. During combat, however, the character should think about his options, enemies, and terrain in immediate terms; that is, in shapes and direction. (Large enemy rushing me; dive left, circle around / Scaffolding on fire, pool below me / two foes helping each other, separate them.)

Lastly, after writing, read it aloud. Anyplace your tongue catches up on a fast moving scene, edit. Smooth action scenes rarely come on the first try.

OMG Yang and Weiss at the end! <3

naighikariyami:

So I just got into a job (unrelated to game development) that has good pay and doesn’t seen difficult.

However, despite this I feel still feel conflicted.

Sure it sounds and it is good but who does it affect? Just me. It just feels a bit selfish for me.
I mean I could just donate money to a good cause but for me it isn’t enough.

I honestly want to make immersive games that have a good balance of fun and seriousness with some sort of meaning like in a lot of childrens’ films.

Games that encourages players to reflect on their lives and the planet we live in.

Games that encourages helping each other and eliminating discrimination, hate and violence.

Because if you look deeper into the world you will see everyday that there are many people suffering, not just from violent conflict, but from discrimination, hunger, poverty and abuse.
This not only affects humans but animals and Earth itself. We all take Earth for granted, when without it, we wouldn’t be alive.

I want to change the bad habits we humans have in order to live and progress in the world for centuries.
I want to be able to say: I’m proud to be human.

I believe Video Games is the way to do it. You can experience the life of another, making you understand more about their situation. Or you could simulate what the world would be like if we continue on how we currently do.

This is why I feel guilty that I am not spending time on designing these important types of games, despite getting a decent job. Although I do understand it is necessary to have a job to support yourself and your family, but I just can’t help feeling this way.

Video Games is probably one of the biggest reasons why I am alive and is how I met most of my friends.

I guess what I could do is just learn as much as possible from this job to help improve my games and save a lot of money to give myself time to design and develop these games in the future.

Damn past me, you be diggin deep inside.

So I was looking at some old posts and stumbled on this. I still feel mostly the same way, but after this job I learned a lot of things.

I was the youngest employee in the whole company, everyone was literally ranging from 30 to 60 maybe even 70.

Pretty much nobody played Video Games or watched Anime. So instead I spent more time talking about their past, movies, tv shows, their kids and business.

When I asked some of them about Video Games they said they don’t play any games. But I think most of my coworkers were just not nerds, except one old guy who was into Sci-Fi, anything space related and ham radio, he was a pretty cool guy and we talked about heaps about classic Sci-Fi shows and movies.

I was also good friends with one other guy who was much more closer to my age, only like 5 years difference, we talked about life in general, business and philosophy. Despite not talking about games or digital media in general, I learned a lot from this guy and he was probably the reason I was able to push myself to do what I never would have done before.

Like confessing to a girl that I liked (and getting over the rejection lol) to getting a ABN (Australian Business Number) and a business name! This seriously changed my life and I gained a lot more confidence than I had before allowing me to push further beyond my comfort zone.

There were a few more cool peeps but most of them left early.

But besides these people, a lot of people were husbands and wives working for their family. So most of them were average people trying to get by and unfortunately a lot of them had the mentality of “I’m too old to learn this” or “It’s too late for me, that’s only for young people”, which gave me first hand experience on the difficulty on changing the minds of older generations.

Who knew changing the world was soo difficult.

I worked in an electronics factory, where a lot of the people there were from foreign countries but have lived here for many years, most of them unfortunately either didn’t have dreams or gave up on them, maybe because their parents were discouraging them, maybe because the situation demanded finances as soon as possible to survive.

Dreams should be given the greatest effort, but it is a tragedy that many are not achieved.