Woaaah FriendShapes Is Done, After 4 Years Of Work And Struggle - Literally All That's Left Is Any Fixes

Woaaah FriendShapes is done, after 4 years of work and struggle - literally all that's left is any fixes indicated by testers 🙏

These are so good I adore your style 🙏💜

Random FF9 drawings inspired by some of my friend's fics.

I just played the ending sequence of my game FriendShapes with all music in it I just did and wow, watching the credits with the music n seeing it basically capped off aside from one or two fixes is really somethin - still needs a few tweaks but it's really basically done, after almost 4 years - crazy

I low-key love the fact that sci-fi has so conditioned us to expect to be hanging out with a bunch of cool space aliens, that legitimate, actual scientists keep proposing the most bizarre, three-blunts-into-the-rotation "theories" to explain the fact we're not.

Some of my favourites include:

Zoo Theory: What if there are loads of aliens out there, but they're not talking to us because of the Prime Directive from Star Trek? (Or because they're doing experiments on us???)

Dark Forest Theory: What if there are loads of aliens out there, but they all hate us and each other so they're all just waiting with a shotgun pointed at the door, ready to open fire on anything that moves?

Planetarium Theory: What if there's at least one alien with mastery over light and matter that's just making it seem to us that the universe is empty to us as, like, a joke?

Berserker Theory: What if there were loads of aliens, but one of them made infinite killer robots that murdered everyone and are coming for us next?!!

Like, the universe is at least 13,700,000,000 years old and 46,000,000,000 light years big. We have had the ability to transmit and receive signals for, what, 100 years, and our signals have so far travelled 200 light years?

The fact is biological life almost certainly has, does, or will develop elsewhere in the universe, and it's not impossible that a tiny amount of it has, does, or will develop in a way that we would understand as "intelligent". But, like, we're realistically never going to know because of the scale of the things involved.

So I'm proposing my own hypothesis. I call it the "Fool in a Field" hypothesis. It goes like this:

Humanity is a guy standing in the middle of a field at midnight. It's pitch black, he can't move, and he's been standing there for ages. He's just had the thought to swing his arms. He swings one of his arms, once, and does not hit another person. "Oh no!" He says. "Robots have killed them all!"

I feel both of you totally, Freya, Fratley, the fall of Burmecia and Cleyra has a direct-line to my heart like absolutely nothing else and none of them get the screen time or acknowledgement in game to put my feelings to rest 🙏

I'm not done talking about Freya, actually.

Because ending the game with her reunited and back together with her long-lost lover makes sense, in a way: it's her goal, she's been searching for him, she's been longing for him since his disappearance. In a traditional story arc, she would indeed find Fratley again, stay with him in spite of the obstacles (such as, you know, amnesia), and consider herself content and happy.

But the thing is, the game doesn't really... give us an arc there. We see Fratley in Cleyra, he reveals he has no memory, he runs off once again - and then nothing, until the epilogue. Poor Freya gets nothing in terms of her own story arc and character development; it feels like all her pages in this book were torn out and we never got to read them. We were just handed the epilogue and assured it fit the rest of the story, despite all evidence to the contrary.

It isn't even necessarily that I don't think Freya should have gotten Fratley back. It definitely isn't that I believe his amnesia could or should have been magically cured somehow.

But goddamn do I feel like he should have re-entered the story at some point between Cleyra and the epilogue, even if only briefly - something to make that epilogue make sense, instead of feeling like a cheap nod to what Freya once said she wanted. Is it still what she wants? She never says so. She seldom ever mentions Fratley again after he nopes his way out of the story, and then only obliquely. He's not even the man she loves anymore; that man doesn't exist anymore, and she never gets the chance to properly mourn him. She just winds up in a relationship with the man who currently wears his face, hoping to find love there.

Freya Crescent deserved better.