Disclaimer: I decided to write this without editing or proofreading. I will likely come back to correct my correction notice in the distant future.

Capsule Dragons is a website that is meant to be an independent blog about independent video game development.

I post news about browser games and link to an account where anyone can play any games I make there. (I plan on uploading a few tech demos, with detailed notes, if anyone is interested in learning about how/why I coded something.)

However, in 2020, after acknowledging real-world situations, the website started to take a virtue-signaling approach that went rapidly downhill, to the point where opinions and bias ruined everything.

This is not a website meant to take action in any community to support any cause. I have specifically added a disclaimer on the about page that this is an “unofficial, opinionated blog” (or something along those lines).

As someone who is describing a need to take action for issues that I view myself responsible for, I don’t think making this website into what I wanted to talk about for taking action is the way to go. I can encourage developers to be generally respectful and at least think twice before you act, but, political reform and community reform isn’t something this website was meant for, and it’s actually the wrong place to post it here.

So… why use all this virtue signaling?

The purpose was just one thing, to hold myself accountable for supporting some things I wanted to get involved in later, so that I would come back here and remember what standards I hold myself accountable to. Upon finding out that there were no more standards or notes, I began to cringe at failing to do anything useful.

On the outside, Capsule Dragons’ change in the description you see next to the website (there’s a reason I fixed that) made it sound like it would appeal to public relations, though my goal is not to become more popular or to virtue-signal anyone. (That is also the reason why I am not describing anything “about” myself).

It started with “I’m aware of what’s going on in the world.” to “I would like to help” to “You must take action if you read this” to changing that to the website’s mini description you see if you look it up, and now I’ve regretted all of this, because it’s not holding true to my point or values.

…And about Infidemia… Instead of a virtue-signaling game, it’s… literally just a video game. I noticed it didn’t feel genuine and that’s why I revised it (again). Doing some work on it today, and remembering what work I did, I feel like those changes have felt genuine.

That’s the important thing for this website, is being genuine. I’m honest that I don’t really like the games I make because I’m expecting a more professional result but I don’t follow through with my expectations. I’m honest that I care about people (even if I seem without emotion in real life), though this went way too far. It made it stressful to work on this website as well, as I felt that I had to portray the values I wanted to show, but then that just became what I didn’t want it to become – a huge virtue signal move.

What exactly is virtue signaling, though?

According to Oxford Dictionaries (citation needed), it means “the action or practice of publicly expressing opinions or sentiments intended to demonstrate one’s good character or the moral correctness of one’s position on a particular issue”.

That’s exactly what the website became, even if I had the intent of showing that I care (caring in general), it became filled with speculation and guesses as to why my opinions were right or wrong, and honestly, this is not the intention.

This is a website about games development and random things going on in my personal life that I sometimes discuss but don’t usually, mostly not discussing those things because I don’t want those things to gain attention or to be listed here.

Ironically, the changes in my personality to view my opinions as right or wrong (a personal event) had made their way to this website and now I’m talking about that event, but, I guess the focus here is that I started to become a pseudo-activist.

I don’t think social activism is bad, I think it actually might lead to more discussions (as long as it’s not just people virtue signaling each other. If it’s people being open to discussing topics that they deem societally inappropriate, that’s what I would like to hear). Though… the issue about all this is that it doesn’t get the point across.

And even getting across the point wouldn’t be appropriate to do here. Maybe on a political opinion blog, or maybe on another website altogether, but, we have to remember that Capsule Dragons is a website about the game series I made, and even if it’s changing to become a better place, this is, in my opinion, the cringy way of improving the website.

There are some changes I need to make to the Capsule Dragons video game series, actually, though this is just me having a moment where I realized I messed up. The renaming of the main enemies in the game will change, and I had a plan of what to change the enemy name to, though I don’t think I wrote it down. I think it was supposed to be something along the lines of “poison slimes” (though that doesn’t sound good) because the reason the enemies were purple was because that was like a poison element, maybe it was like a shadow/darkness element, though based on how it was used in the first game’s lore, it’s more of a poisonous element, as it damaged the game world (poison, toxicity, just like my toxic approaches that I talked about making me cringe…)

On an unrelated note, the dragons themselves need more creative names, as “Red”, “Blue”, “Pink”, etc., just aren’t good enough.

I mean, maybe if they have unique attacks (“This is the power of ‘Blue Fire’!! This flame shall deal 9,000 damage to the boss!”) there was a use in that, though it just didn’t feel creative enough. Still naming the dragons based on the colors of the rainbow, mostly (Blue should have been Indigo if Icey was named Blue… just a side note), is still possible in more creative names – Fredrick could be Red’s full name, as an example, or maybe alternate spellings are used in creative ways to add a pun to each name.

I’m not saying that this has some political association with it, I’m just unhappy with a naming convention.

The point of this correction is to apologize, but also to improve.

Around the time I finished one of the more ingenuine articles, I sent a letter to some people, telling them kind of the same thing, but it was too demanding and it was actually insensitive to the current condition of these people – assuming they were well off was a bad way to go, especially when I remembered that I ended up sending this message of demanding to help out when someone who would need this help was told that instead. …That was a huge learning experience for me, because when I got direct feedback on a message like that, that’s when I realized I was being told that I was virtue-signaling.

The term “virtue-signaling” might have some political connotation with it, but let’s just ignore that. In fact, let’s come up with a new term, of “subjective morality”, since that’s technically slightly more or less creative.

Adding a subjective morality to opinions is not really a good way to open up discussion about them – I’m writing this section mostly to keep myself accountable, where I remember what not to do – though since this article would be irrelevant if I wasn’t talking to the reader, I would like to tell the audience that I will try to keep things on this website clearer.

If I’m describing opinions about current events, I’ll label the article as opinion, and not making up a tag to tell the readers this has to be right or wrong.

If I am describing current events, I promise to cite any resources I use for analysis, and to actually provide some analysis of the situation, as practice for decent journalism. I had some complaints myself after reading pieces that either supported or went against my perspective, and in my perspective I think both needed more analysis of the issue and less opinion (maybe opinion, but at least label it opinion, or have a part where you analyze the issue and then talk about your opinion of it…)

Additionally, I will continue to add corrections, disclaimers, and anything else that I need to do to keep this website updated. (There should be one at the top of the page, telling the reader that this page will be updated should I find inconsistencies, although it’s currently low on my list of priorities, so please check back later if there are updates)

I have yet to fix my profile.

It would be easier for me to issue a simple apology statement, and that’s what I view this as, the easy option of a simple apology, though even if there’s not a point in doing this, remaining silent about my mistakes wouldn’t help me, as it would make this website less accountable than it already is.

I have some standards I’ll hold myself accountable to, but I won’t list them off here, because I think that trying to change the reader’s opinion is not what this website is about. If it were to be argumentative, sure, but, this is meant to be a list of posts about myself complaining that I never make a decent game (see the About page).

One of my major issues about all of the things I started to do was that I started to do them wrong.

That’s the purpose of this correction, to point out that I messed up, not because I want someone to forgive me, but because I want to remember that I messed up here.

When I started talking about all the things I wanted to do, I made it sound like I was demanding that the readers of this site go out and do that themselves. Though… I also didn’t know what I was talking about.

Now that I’ve done (barely any research) on topics of interest, I’ve come to the conclusion that my research is not done yet, and that it takes time to actually get involved in all this, and that this website is not the right place to get involved, and I was explaining everything the wrong way.

This page is also a chance for a correction at several other mistakes I made.

Infidemia’s description in one of my posts called the heroes of the story “activists”, though during that time, I was trying to add a subjective morality to the game, and make it seem like the characters were doing what I thought was right and what had to be right. I don’t agree with calling out specific opinions right or wrong (…that’s actually the premise of another project I have…) though the game is not designed around giving the player “right choices” or “wrong choices”. Upon playing some games that appeared to have “right” or “wrong” choices, I wasn’t happy with how the other choices didn’t help to make gameplay interesting, though instead I was glad to see story-driven games that allowed players to experiment with choices and determine their own opinions about the game world.

That’s the kind of thing Infidemia is supposed to be, where you can experiment with “what-ifs” (the one concept that started the game), and I decided to change the endings of the game to make the player learn something however they decide to play the game. The idea of a “good ending” and a “bad ending” I didn’t like, although it might be good for a platformer game to encourage the player to play through the whole game and experiment with all the offered mechanics, it’s not really suitable for a role-playing game. Maybe rewarding the player’s experimentation would be interesting, so then the player’s encouraged to try out different playstyles, though that’s my opinion.

Another thing to note – Infidemia is probably not going to be as friendly as the Capsule Dragons games, based on the content of the game so far. All what this means is that for players who may not like the presence of such content should at least check back for news on the content rating and listed content in the game, and maybe play the demo (check back for a demo, too) to see how that content’s represented exactly. I’m putting this out there to inform potential players interested in the game that you may want to review the demo first if you are interested.

Also… a big part of Infidemia’s story is the surprise, not one surprise or multiple, just adding an element of surprise, so I won’t go in-depth about story, game content, or how gameplay mechanics are involved in the story.

Sorry for those previous 2 paragraphs, kind of ended up talking about development instead of corrections to make.

I’ll talk about a correction to the modding policy, though I’ll also talk about development a bit more (sorry for including development info in an article about corrections)

Oh, yeah, the modding policy will be corrected at various points. That’s also another thing I wanted to correct, is that although there’s the potential to add mods to Infidemia, people could do potentially anything with a modification, and it’s impossible to control what people do with the game through modifications. Sure, I’d generally like modifications to be acceptable for anyone to download and use, but I can’t stop people from making modifications that could be potentially disrespectful or that damage the functionality of the game. That’s why there’s a loose policy, because trying to enforce uncontrolled modifications would not change much, though I do encourage players to modify the game with whatever beneficial enhancements or additions they find interesting.

Some fun things about modifying Infidemia:

–> Language Patches (Speculation – a possibility, but as of right now this would probably be a pain to do with the current system)

I’m not sure how many people would be interested in Infidemia, though I am interested in hearing responses about the game from a larger audience, and by allowing semi-open modifications, additional resources that can be added to the “mods” folder means that the Infidemia script might be able to be translated… but I’m not sure what tools would be needed. As this isn’t something I know much about, please note that it might actually be a pain to make language patches to the game using the mods options available and that this may not be a fun thing if that’s how it works.

–> Difficulty Options

I haven’t decided whether or not to include difficulty options or to leave everything at a default setting. Level scaling for enemies wasn’t going well when I playtested, so maybe letting the players decide what new options to adjust could make Infidemia’s combat more interesting.

–> Useful Stuff!

Minimaps, clocks, and a lot of UI (user interface) elements are a standard in many games now, though Infidemia’s UI is only on the menus and battle screens, so the potential for more UI stuff on the overworld could be really useful.

Another thing that might be cool to add would be a progress tracker kind of thing; while I had plans to do a quest tracker, I felt that I still need to consider that option more and I think letting the player add this option if they want could be an interesting thing to see.

Anything to make the game more accessible (maybe adjusting window sizes, UI elements, scaling settings – those kinds of things I find useful whenever playing a game, though that’s just what I find more accessible) Every player will have their own things they may want to add or remove, so anything you consider useful could be added!

–> Cheats

There are a few cheat codes in Infidemia already, though the way to activate them would currently require savefile editing. Luckily, mods may be the way to add cheat codes. Unlimited currency, items, levels, etc., would be fun to mess around with, though until I decide on using a cheatcode database for my game or not, it would be interesting to see players come up with a cheat system.

Anyway, I’ll hold myself more accountable in the future, and will try to fix things I notice that are going badly on this website. There may be more articles like this one (or not), just note that the purpose of these kinds of articles are for accountability and reliability.

Thanks for reading!

-ZoruaAl

…Also, if the website is not secure, try going to

welcome to the capsule dragons website

(Adding that “www” helps to go to the secure version; I’m not sure what certificate issues are going on behind the scenes, though I hope to figure those out to eventually fix the website on my own, when these kinds of things happen)