u/NotATem

UPDATE: Thanks to u/Karel08 and u/gamemaniax I was able to create the article! You can find it here. Thank you guys so much- you saved me several hours of stress-googling.

Hi, all! I'm a Wikipedia editor trying to do some research on an Indonesian publishing company called Indira.

Indira apparently published the Nancy Drew series in the 1980s, translating and reprinting the newest entries in the series for an Indonesian audience. I'm having some trouble finding information on the company-- I don't speak Bahasa Indonesia and the English-language internet just sends you to information about Indira Gandhi or other famous women with the same name.

The publishing company I was able to find information on seems to have closed in 2006, and seems to be most famous for publishing the Tintin series and other comics. These Nancy Drew books would have been cheap paperbacks for children, and I could see a comics publisher printing them- but I don't know if the Indira that published Tintin is the same Indira that published Nancy Drew and I can't find a source.

I'd be incredibly grateful if you guys could point me towards more information about the company- and specifically could help me find proof that they published these Nancy Drew books? They don't have an article on English-language Wikipedia and Wikipedia really doesn't like it if you cite another language's version of Wikipedia.

Thank you so much!

So, obviously, it's not great to spoil metroidbranias for people when you're recommending them, you don't want to tell them about, like, the goal of the game or the deepest lore or what have you. But I'm starting to think that you should set some expectations for how to play the game when you recommend it.

My partner and I recently started playing Blue Prince together. We'd previously played Outer Wilds together- they'd played before and I hadn't, so they got to experience me seeing it for the first time. We've been having a lot of fun unwinding the mysteries together! But we're getting close to the game's ending/>!first off-ramp, !<and my partner suddenly got really hesitant! Their first experience with this genre was Outer Wilds, and >!that is a game you can really only play once- once you've seen the credits, you have seen the most impactful part of the game, and if you go back to uncover secrets you will feel kind of hollow and melancholy about it. You want to unravel everything in one playthrough!<.

But when I heard people recommending Blue Prince, and occasionally heard them talking about it without their dang spoiler tags, I learnt something important- Blue Prince is a roguelike, and as such, >!you are not going to beat it in one run, or one playthrough. You're meant to come back again and again, and there are multiple places where you can decide you've had enough and don't want to solve any more of this mystery and be satisfied. Getting to Room 46 is more like getting to the Hades fight in Hades I than the ending of OW- I've even heard people call it the end of the tutorial.!<

We're going to hit that ending soon and I'm really excited to see what happens when we do. But I am glad I had that element spoiled- otherwise, I would have played a lot more cautiously, like my partner did, and had a lot less fun.

I think that it's important to let people know what kind of experience they're going to have when they play a game, and details like that can really help them set their expectations so that they can have a good time. Things like 'this game has a couple off ramps, the credits are the end of the tutorial' or 'this is a game you can only play once, take it slow and explore everything' or 'this is a roguelike and you will die a lot but that's not a setback' or 'there's no combat in this game'-- those will all help you figure out whether it's a game you'd like to play.

I've seen people spreading some misinformation about what save corruption is, how it works, and what you can avoid it. I'd like to tell you how it actually works and what you can do about it.

TLDR: Save corruption is less under your control than anyone would like. The best way to manage it is to back up your game regularly.

My credentials: I'm a game dev, and while I'm not on the Paralives team, I know a fair bit about how code works. I'm also an avid Sims 2 player, and we spread a bunch of myths about save corruption for decades before realizing what was actually happening. I'd like the PL community to avoid the same fate.

So, what is save corruption? Save corruption happens when something about your paras, your builds, or your hood gets saved in a way the game can't handle. It's called "corruption" because the data gets screwed up- kind of like that one messed up Windows start screen. When the game tries to open a corrupted save, it finds something it doesn't expect and freaks out. It will either refuse to read the file or crash when it gets to the part it can't read.

The thing is, most of the time, the problem is not anything you've done. A lot of the time the issue is literally just "the game copied over the wrong info to the wrong place". Like, if it saves the number for your sim's money over your sim's skills, it not only thinks you have 5076898 Guitar skill, but that number can leak into other parts of data and mess with it, too. That's not something you did; the save process fucked up.

And, obviously, custom content can't really touch any of this. A new hair or skintone is not going to change your sim's info badly enough to make the save corrupt. The game recognizes them just like it recognizes any other hair and acts accordingly; they follow the rules it expects.

Well, what about mods? Mods edit your game, but they usually do this by changing the rules for what the game expects. This keeps the data in line with what the game can handle (and is thus generally not a problem, unless the rules they're changing are rules about how paras/houses/etc are saved). If you want to be super careful, I'd avoid mods that change paras' relationships- add new relationship types like 'third cousin', allow paras to remove or ignore family relationships, etc.- and mods that remove build mode limitations. I'd also avoid anything obviously vibe coded and anything with a description obviously written by AI. But a mod that, like, adds a new skill that works like every other skill? Game expects it; probably not gonna be an issue.

...A lot of people think of save corruption like it's black magic that you have to ward off with rituals. Don't save while your sim is at work or outside, don't ever delete sims, don't let your sim marry the mailman, don't add mods to your game and nuke any custom content that breathes funny.

Most of the time, these rituals aren't based in any kind of fact. The people making them up are going off of what happened when their save corrupted. They're well intentioned, but often wrong- and wrong in ways that hurt other people's ability to have fun.

The crux of the problem is this: Paralives is unstable right now because it's in early access. Save corruption bugs are hell to debug because they sneak up on you- they can take a while to pop up and when they do you might not notice them until your save bricks.

Keep backups and save regularly. But save corruption is generally not your fault, or under your control. It is a thing that happens when data gets messed up, and in a stable game, there isn't all THAT much the player can do to mess up their data.

A good rule of thumb: if anti-corruption advice feels like magical thinking, it probably won't do anything about corruption, good or bad. If it's not obvious how it affects your save, and the devs haven't said anything about it? The person telling you to never save at midnight and remove all your mods might as well be telling you never to cross a black cat's path or break a mirror.

Hey, guys- I love Supergiant's games, and I can play Transistor and Bastion and even Pyre no problem. But Hades I is giving me trouble because of all the flashing lights- they give me migraines. I want to be able to get past the third zone and maybe take on the final boss.

It looks like there are a number of mods that serve various accessibility functions, but not one that cuts down on the flashing lights- would it be possible for me to request, or put out a bounty for, a Less Flashing Lights mod? I literally just want to be able to play the game without being in horrible mindsearing pain.

So, hey! I'm trying to create a game about ancient Assyrian doctors where you diagnose a sick patient. I'm writing a series of dropdowns that look like this:

HEAD

(dropdown: 2bind $head1, "nothing", "fever", "dizziness", "shortness of breath")

{(if: $head1 contains "fever")[(set:$head1Diag to true)]}

And then, on the next page, trying to use the results of the dropdowns to create a challenge the player has to pass, like this:

(set: _symptoms to (array: $head1diag, $head2diag, $torso1diag, $torso2diag, $legs1diag)

)

(if:(all-pass:_symptoms where _symptoms is not false))[

(set:$diagnosed to true)

You think you've got a good list of the King's symptoms now.

[[Let's put them together.|diagnosis3]]

]

(else:)[That doesn't sound right. If you're having trouble remembering what ails the king, check your [[case notes.]] ]

This isn't working. Every time, regardless of what I put in, the game lets me through.

Can I get some advice about what it is I'm doing wrong?