Hey, it's five o'clock. It's time for watch me work. I'm SLP. We are doing it again Because that's what we do We're doing watch me work. We've been doing this show for like I don't know someone good in math It's since like 2009 or 2010. We started in the lobby of the public theater Where I sat down and just started asking people how you doing like Weird, you know, how was your work going and the show? Basically grew out of that when COVID hit and the lockdown hit we went on zoom Helped by howl around who was helping us before of course And they helped the expanded New Work Development Department has embraced us and here we are so We've got Amritha. We've got Zoe. We've got Haley's Comet and I'll help him out and we've got the folks from howl around Anything so so what we do we do the same thing every time we meet we work for 20 minutes together And then I take your questions about your work and your creative process But we don't have time to share work specifically. We do have plenty of time to talk about process And if you have a question about your process, Zoe will tell you how to get in touch or Amritha You want to say anything before Zoe? I Will just very quickly say hello everyone I'm so grateful the New Work Development is supporting watch me work with SLP. Great to see you all Welcome welcome, and then I'm going to hand it over to Zoe and Haley to talk more about how watch me work works Hi everyone, I'm Zoe my pronouns are she her I'm the New Work Development Manager happy to see everyone Her what's already been said we're gonna work for 20 minutes and once we are opening up for questions Please go ahead and use the raise your hand function and we'll make a queue of questions And then I'll ask for you to unmute and ask your question. So that's how we're gonna have a nice little queue of questions Great, and I'm doing something that I never do But I always believe in trying new things. I have started a test kitchen Which is another way of saying I've started up a band and we have some gigs I'm trying out new songs working on a new show if you want to come to one of the gigs The link to the website is in the chat You can sign up for our mailing list and we'd love to see you there. So there's that and Okay, so here we go 20 minutes Hey Okay So, um If you have questions about your work your creative process you want to talk about how you're doing Well, whatever we are here Happy to see you Welcome in the people who haven't been here before if there are any Welcome in back to people who have been here before Yes, if you have questions, please go ahead and use your raise the hand function And we'll go ahead and call your your call on your name to unmute Mary please go ahead and unmute yourself Hi, I don't know what this means, but my Mount Holyoke College pen Ran out while I was doing my work. I'm also a Mount Holyoke alum I think the ghost of Mary Lyon was trying to speak to us Yes, I think she's yellow as they call them now moho moho Oh fellow moho graduate of Mount Holyoke College. What do you think? What is your process when you are working on something like how much of your day do you give to writing and Still have time to do other things like laundry and taking care of your family and then time for yourself That's great. Um, yeah, and it's it's a start the way we slice our days, you know the sandwich that we make with our days it's it's it's a It's an ever-changing sandwich and we should all do what works best for us So I mean I was watching some wonderful, you know, one of those American master shows or well Maybe it wasn't that it was some great show about some great writer who happened to be called Ernest Hemingway and You know, mr. Hemingway apparently when he was living in Key West would in the morning You know from whatever time to whatever time he would be up in his Upstairs study and the children would know that dad was up there, but they couldn't bother him, you know And then he'd come downstairs after lunch and he'd go fishing on a boat, you know, and I'm like, yeah, that's it So yeah, um, you know my son walks in my office at right after he gets up and That's how the day starts, but what's so any anything works basically whatever works for you is what's gonna work My son comes in my office At 6 o'clock in the morning and he reads aloud because I like to hear him read he needs to read but I have did it Did I have these wonderful things? earplugs and I put them in my ears and He's uh, you know a foot away from me reading out loud and I'm writing so whatever works and I Sometimes it's three hours. Sometimes it's 20 minutes Whatever work I would say try to do something every day Do something every I mean right, you know I do something and maybe you have lots of somethings, you know Maybe you have to practice an instrument and that's you can do that for 20 minutes And then you can write for an hour or oh you have a subway ride to your day job And you can write longhand in your notebook on the subway Just put in the time find a way to put the time in Does that help Mary? I mean Yes, I'm in the middle of my master's thesis and I'm writing an original play And I'm just trying to figure out like do I you know do I do a chunk on Monday? And then take Tuesday off, but I like the idea of a little bit each day and just kind of Ship away at it Yeah, yeah, and I think also my what might help is choosing your favorite time of the day like What is your favorite work time of the days morning or your afternoon person a night owl? What do you think but definitely not a night owl? I'm gonna I'm gonna go with morning I usually start teaching in the afternoon.  I was like, yes It's just my thesis and index cards, but That's great, and you can carry them in your pocket, right and almost colorful index car. Those are those a fun So for the the actual paint for the play, it's this for I'm writing study guides for secondary school educators They're a different color There you go.  So thank you. I Thank you, Mary. Thank you. And yay, Mount Hoyok. Yay Thank you, Mary Charlie, please go ahead and unmute yourself to ask your question. Thank you. Hey, Charlie. Hey, SLP This really nice place right now my co-writer and I are just we're probably like one session away from finishing a first crap draft of something We've been having a lot of fun with it and but but I And then we'll take a little break and then come back and see Probably better see what we have but we haven't you know, we haven't been trying to be too objective or wherever We just like flying with it feeding off each other. It's been fun but That was floating around up here any thoughts about like Without ruining all the fun, but still getting back and trying to see this a little more objectively Any thoughts about how to get down without going too low and get all pissy about what we did Right, right So how long are you going to take as a pause between? No more than a week Maybe less great. Yeah, great great. Okay. So you neither of you are going to read it at all. I Don't know we haven't decided. Yeah, I have a heart I mean if that was the right thing to do we would I'd I probably will take it out and read it through once Before we get back together Okay, are you curious? Sure. Sure. So are you gonna read it like? sitting down or Standing up or what? Probably sitting down in a comfortable chair Okay, okay Okay, I mean if you say I should like be doing wind sprints or something I've listened to that but No, I'm just thinking I wanted I wanted to be pleasant for you. How about You can I mean do something silly. I'm just making this up. Let's see if it makes any sense. You can Yes, do like say every Five minutes you can set your timer every five minutes you're reading the timer goes off and you have to compliment yourself. Oh My god, that was Wow, good job, man. Good job like that.  Oh my gosh. This is such a great scene great go back to it You know, I mean it it helps you get out of your yourself And then when you read it with your friend when you get back together, I Don't know what you if you like to Drink wine you might involve wine, you know If you if you like that if you don't then please don't you don't start drinking Because I suggested so but if you if you're someone who enjoys a glass of wine You might want to share a glass of wine with your friend. You might even want to open a bottle of champagne and Celebrate make it a party Thank you. I will try some of that Yeah We're not there yet. Not there yet.  It's going well. I love that your guitar in the background, bro. Oh, yeah Thank you for this and for making this time and for everyone who's involved in running the show It's really great. This is my first time here So thank you for having me I'm in a place right now with with this play that I've been working on. It's like my family play That is kind of something I've been working on for a long time And I feel like I put all these dominos just like in this perfect order and Then I realized I hated it and I blew it up and then I Put them all back and so now I've got this first act Which is I feel like this domino goes into that domino and so there's this very What feels like Just structurally coherent thing But now I'm like, oh, that's if I'm starting to feel like a little bit like Overwhelmed by putting those dominoes in place and the crafty like kind of game of it and I'm like craving The burst of lightning or something that's less Like I feel like I'm trying to do a trick like I'm trying to I'm trying to trick it. I'm trying to be like oh well if I follow all these rules Then it'll be amazing and it's like I've got this first act and I and I like it but to proceed I don't know whether or not I should continue along this path of like very diligently trying to like set up the action in a very rulesy rulesy way or Just like let me just write the dream Whatever flash happens. I feel like that's kind of scary to me I'm also feel like it's what I need to do and I guess I'm just like Wondering I guess to put it in the form of a question. It's like When you've got something that you feel like is sort of technically working. How do you? Move when you feel like There's other things that need to happen for it to Know it's a really great question Chris. Are they your rules? Are they rules from like an outside source like? You know Joe Smith's rules of playwriting. Are they someone else's rules? Yeah, there's rules that worked for me in getting me here like But I haven't that's a really good question. They're definitely someone else's rules Okay, okay, okay, so that because that because a lot of times when we make up our own rules and our own systems were less resistant to them, you know, so Your resistance might just be that there's someone else's rules that that have worked for you in the past and you're wondering Will they work again? Is that what you're? Yeah, that's like the trick thing where I'm like I want to repeat the the magic thing that happened Right, right, right, right, right hmm Well, I mean You can you can do both. You know, you can follow the rules the dominoes the things you've set up and write the second act and Then if you're not happy with it, you could rewrite it in another way Yeah, you know because I wouldn't I mean there's nothing wrong with Following sort of this these rules, you know, you know, I mean it is, you know, I can screen screenplay writers are more Attentive to those kinds of things and on page one it has to be this on page three It has to be this those kinds of things and there's nothing wrong with that. It's just You want you don't want it to feel mechanical or you know arch so Go ahead and write it and that's what the rewrite might be for you know. Yeah, I think the other I think the other thing about like When I just kind of let go of the mechanical way is that I feel like my place starts to like become about everything It becomes a magnet for like any idea that crosses my mind It's like well, that's going in that's it and then all of a sudden it's nothing because it's everything And so I like always I'm like I'm me down to something Right I hear you so I mean, it's a great that's it's just a great observation about yourself in your process I would say for you know, I mean, how many pages is your second act going to be? I Wanted to be 70 pages For the second act. Mm-hmm. Okay, great. So You write those 70 pages and then you see what you think about it You know, and if it's like well, it's working then you don't have to blow it up and you know If it's working, it's it's working. That's great if it's Feels kind of false or fake or stiff or whatever your judgment is of your work, then you can go in there and You know turn over the soil a little bit and write another draft, you know Totally, but but you're in them. You're in the middle and in the middle is where you have to really stick to it, you know What do they say in the Scottish play screw your courage to the sticking post I like that Yeah, I'm reason I did I get it right? Did I am I quoting my Shakespeare? I am very close I think it's sticking place or post one of the two, but Yeah, yeah, okay, but yes, you know stick with it, bro, bro And shout out my holy oak because I'm from Northampton, Massachusetts in Smith College That's where I grew up on Smith College campus. So shout out Western Mass colleges. Oh my gosh, that is fantastic We're taking over. Thank you, Chris. Thank you Thank you Who's gonna be next next? Let's just do random quotes of Shakespeare. No Misha save us I think I'm unmuted am I you are unmuted. Yes. Yes. Thank you. So my um Hello all people my question is I think I have two but I'm trying to figure out how to make them short. So the first one is I'm always told You should turn these short plays into full length plays, but I don't know why I always have a reservation about doing that So I'll write a play and I'll stop at about 20 pages 10 to 20 and then I say, okay, this is enough If I push it, it won't have the same effect and then sometimes I think Maybe it's me having too much respect for the craft that I don't think I'm good enough to do that So I'm trying to figure out a good resolution Hmm I appreciate and admire you tremendously for like saying hey, this is how long it should be sam shepard The great playwright sam shepard who passed away, uh, not too long ago had a wonderful essay called Time in which he talks about how to paraphrase Harb horrifically a play should be just as long as it is You know what I mean because he would write plays of all sorts of lengths and He was really feeling like, you know Sometimes play should only be 10 minutes carol churchill has a great play called Far away, is that what it's called? Someone's in Far away Isn't it amazing? Yes, like you don't want it to be any longer. It's just like You know a lot of information in a straight line of time Right, right. So so you could say hey, I'm following in sam shepard's footsteps I'm following in carol church's footsteps Those are good. That's good company um, okay, if you want to Link you can write a lot of short plays many people, you know, write a lot of short plays that are related If your producers are asking for like an an evening of seiza um But I I I do think um That just just If your characters have more to do Then by all means allow them to allow them the ability to do it So it's like if you're watching a on tv, for example, if you're watching a 30 minute show And it's just 30 minutes and that's a nice episode. That's great And then the next episode takes over from where the previous episode left off um That might be what you're writing, you know Some some some and that's cool, too Uh, we have all these forms now that we can write in so feel confident that if you feel good about the length then Then feel good about it. Yeah Okay, thank you. Also. My name is pronounced naisha and My second question, um, this one's a little different and also tricky when writing about Black males there's been this debate. They are often emasculated in In media on stage and screenplays. This is what I've been hearing not a hundred percent certain So I'm trying to understand if I'm going to write from that perspective How can I tell a story without making them seem? Emasculated Seem that's a word that hamlet likes to use. Um What did you say? I am not seems something like that. Anyway What people perceive And what we write are often two totally different things Hmm, you know, so I'm thinking okay all august wilson's plays. I would I say there are a lot of black men in those plays I ain't seen none of them emasculated Uh thoughts of a colored man was on Broadway a couple years ago I didn't see those brothers didn't seem emasculated to the like to me top dog on a dog. They weren't emasculated I mean They were all these men the athello. That's not an emasculated man. These men are Seem very powerful and Wanting things and everything that great characters should be so I don't know what you're reading Stop reading the stop reading Stop reading those those books and articles because I don't think that they don't they don't jive with any reality that I've seen I don't know what it you know And if you're going to write a character just be true to what what does he want? How does he get it? What's he going for? You know, what does he love? What is he moving toward? What is he moving away from all the things that any other character Would need and want to be authentic on the page and on the and on the stage and you you write a You know a black male character just like you write a black female character Just like you write a horse of a different color. I mean a good character needs Needs great things You know Does that does that make sense? It does it does it actually solidified an argument that I presented uh Two other people who were telling me about um That topic of emasculation and I Pointed it out I use the same reference august wilson's plays aren't like that. Um Detroit fences Yeah, I've I've read all of his cycle plays. Um, I read a lot of plays about those characters But I just wondered if one one that I wrote a lot of people told me the character was too strong and a lot A lot to take in So I guess I guess in my mind I was looking for validation and maybe I received it too strong, you know too strong too much to You know, I mean also people have the right to their opinions and and you know, we we need to take in what helps And and leave the rest And I will consider this. Thank you very much. Thank you, Naisha. Thank you Thank you, Naisha, and thank you for teaching me how to say your name. Um Um, we actually got a question in the hellground chat Right on Do you ever feel blocked because you have too many ideas and don't know how to get them all out coherently? How do you navigate that bottleneck of thoughts? Yeah, that's a great question from the chat. Uh um I I feel it's it's very helpful to Do one project at a time? You know, even if you're just, you know, you can make a list I can't show you my my desk is is a is a pile of lists and inboxes and Different boxes for different projects Um, because I work on different projects every day, you know throughout the day and so But I I really work on I really practice working on one project at once So right now This is the project I'm working on. Watch me work. We're talking to you, you know I really work to focus Um And if you just say, okay, I've got 17 projects. I want to work on today For the next 20 minutes. I'm just going to work on project a And you just focus on that project, you know Now, okay. Now I'm going to work on project are I'm just focusing on that project Um, and after a while, maybe you'll prefer to work on project a most of the day or most of your during most of your work time But just you train yourself to just Work on one project at a time It's the same thing like when you're talking to someone don't also be reading your phone Just talk to them Just talk to them. You see you know what I mean It's kind of one that I have to practice too. Also Is that is that helpful? I hope I can't see your face while I'm talking with you, but I would assume it was helpful I S l t that's funny. That's funny. That's funny.  I'm well. How's your shoulder? You know It's healing. It's healing. Yeah, I can do this Thanks for asking So, um, I'm working on the play that I was telling you about Um, uh, the two women where I'm trying to figure out the time even though it does take place The the beginning takes place out of sit-in, but I didn't want to do it in 1960 So I'm I'm kind of Playing around with um I guess Maybe like his history in the sense that like I'm I'm put I didn't want to put it in a specific place in a specific time Because I feel like I wanted to kind of put it It create my own world in which it's applicable, but not Not to the T of what has happened or would happen Do you know what I mean? Um I so Okay, like, you know, I so I'm trying to do like, you know, his historical things but not like But not like, okay. This happened in 1960. So this story is going to take place in 1960 I actually wanted to take place probably Maybe in the 50s Or the 30s, but I don't know this was the issue I had last time when I when I said and you said, you know Right ignorantly and and and I and I'm doing that. I'm totally doing it But I haven't set like a, you know, I I know what state I wanted to be in but I I haven't necessarily said like Oh, it'll be in this city. Um, and I haven't said. Oh, it'll be in this year I've just been taking events the way I dreamed this story It's just it's just like a events that keep happening that cause the characters to either get closer or separate um So that's actually not even my question. Um my question is, um I'm writing out of order And and it's it's still coming along. I'm still actually like I don't know if I should be smiling when I'm writing, but I'm like, wow, this is really coming out and um But there's one scene That is especially violent And I have a very, uh strong Reaction to like writing it. I know I have to write it. Um, it's what kind of turns the play in a It it changes it changes everything that one event But it's like the one part that I'm like I don't I don't feel Brave enough to write it I don't feel brave enough to write it. Um, because it's just, um I've already written another part that was violent and I was like, oh boy, that's you know Again, I'm like it's coming and flowing but like that one part is just very, um Hard to even approach So I I know I need to get it out. I need to do it. Um Do you have any thoughts on like, you know, and I don't want it to be gratuitous or like for the sake of right Whatever it is necessary. Um, but it's just Right, right. So Great crystal and you you've been coming to this show for a long time So I've been talking about your work for a long time and you always have really cool questions and you're always working on interesting stuff um a couple things As we as we know or we should know all Most sex acts are not pornographic And uh, you could people say trauma porn and say they say they don't want to see trauma any trauma They don't want to see any violence. They don't want and I think violence porn is just violence That's violent acts in plays or that have to happen because they have to that's where the story's going But they're poorly constructed and poorly written Because we are still learning how to how to write them appropriately I would say do everything you can on the front end to take care of your characters Everything okay, so you want to make sure that they are uh human and And hitting all the all the human beats if you know that that has to happen in your story And there's no way to tell the story without showing this Unfortunate violent act do everything you can to take care of your characters show them as humans To the full extent of their humanity Okay, so make sure you're doing that so don't shortcut anything just to get to the part that's gonna make people go Oh, no. Oh my god, you know like that. I mean please because that's porn, right? That's that's ding dong pizza blowjob, right? I'm sorry, but if I don't mean to offend anybody, but that's that's porn and not that we don't like porn So that's I mean a lot of people would watch that but that's that is the With a violent act in there that would be the equivalent of violence porn or trauma porn, right? You want to really really really develop your characters and ask yourself two questions One, why won't you set it in a particular year? I I don't understand that and um two, what are you afraid of? What am I afraid of as far as the writing or I don't know seems to be Yeah, I'm smelling I'm into I'm I'm I'm feeling you know Something that is causing you great You know joy as you write it but also concern. Why don't you set it in a particular year? I could happen in the 30s. It could happen in the 50s. It could happen in the I mean What's up with that? I I don't understand that quite I I don't understand it quite myself either I I I I wanted to I wanted to write something that was like this this could happen But I don't know how to explain it like I I I don't know I don't I don't have a good answer I don't have a good answer It's just I'm just again because you are showing A violent act in a historical context and so again take care of your characters You know, yeah, you have to for lack of better earn it. That's horrible But you need to really they need to be human. They need to be authentic human few humans for that to really You know You need to be able to write that So Does that go for the person who is doing the yep Yes, oh, yes, and that's the hard part about it. Yeah, everybody has to be a human And Yeah Yeah, we can only make the the victims the humans, you know what I mean and the and the person doing the the crime whatever They're a ha, you know, no everybody has to be a human That's what I'm talking about And and and they might draw some of their humanity from a particular historic context if it's 1957 That's very different from 1964 And I said write what write ignorantly just sure get it out there But last week you're I mean last time your question was more concerned with the the voice of the Language the vernacular used and that's what I was referring to and I said right just don't worry about getting the vernacular correct You're right. Yeah. Yeah, I didn't say, you know the other points. I you know Yeah Choose a year choose it choose a year. You already chosen a city and a But here's 558. Oh, okay. No, no, I'm just looking at I'm just going. Oh, it's 558 Okay, but check in check in next week. Let's let's check in again. Oh for sure. Thank you Last question. I batarian, please go ahead and unmute yourself. Hey Hi, um, I like to say I'm a smith college alum. So it's nice to see other western mass people here Um, but my question is two years ago I wrote this 10 minute play for this 24 hour festival and decides just to revisit it and My theme the theme was like check out. So I wrote about uncle Vanya and and I shared this play with someone and I wrote about like it kind of had brought it up like Stennis Lopsky was a character kind of touched upon uncle Vanya, but also not And I realized I actually like that Draft I wanted to work on it. But because someone said I can I totally see Stennis Lopsky like this. I This is how he would behave. I'm like, oh, I wasn't trying to be so reality-based and now I'm just like Afraid that if I work on it and change things that It I don't know. I feel like because it's like Stennis Lopsky uncle Vanya.  Yeah. So how do we yeah, um, do you have it doesn't have to be Stennis Lopsky Kind of yes But also because Why So it's like it's my first time using real people. It just needed to be people who were in that first production of uncle Vanya So it's someone we never met That's true.  Yeah, he didn't you know They wrote the history. They didn't mention him He's kind of bitter I would be wouldn't you be yeah This whole movement happened and they don't even mention his name That's true You know, there are there are so many ways to get around around these Around these rules people Haha, right So, so, you know, you could you know, try that Yeah, okay.  I'm gonna put this thing in the chat again To remind you guys I have a test kitchen and it's a meaning I'm gonna be hanging around town playing music as I work on a new show Uh, and so, uh, if you want to get on the website, I mean on the mailing list Join the bands called Sula and the joyful noises to the nickname that my dad gave me years ago So Sula and the joyful noise. I have a brand new six piece band.  Thank you howl round for hosting us and embracing us And making this just a wonderful wonderful experience every week. Will we be back next week? Please tell us. Yes So yeah, let me just say yes. We'll see you. Thank you so much. See you next week everyone Bye


Thank you for the introduction and sorry for today, and this talk is about the method to control the homogeneic reaction for oproximate arithmetic, and sorry, okay. How can I... I think it's a USB thing, right? It's quite essential. Maybe. Okay, and okay. As introduced in the previous section, homogeneic reaction is a grid system that allows arbitrarily computation between grid data. So after the first construction of pre-homogeneic reaction in 2009, theoretically arbitrarily it can be evaluated in a polynomial time using pre-homogeneic reaction. But still the performance of homogeneic reaction scheme is an open problem. So let me ask some questions first. So can you compare the significant digit to the product of 32 integers? Or did you guess how long did it take to reflect 1,000 protein points numbers? So it would be very great if we could say yes with confidence. But unfortunately it's not true yet because of some limitation in homogeneic reaction. So basically current homogeneic reaction scheme supports two operations, audition and multiplication. But if you think about just using a reflection point operation, the rounding operation makes a key role in efficiency. So the use of significant digits makes a kind of trade-off between precision and efficiency in the sense of size of big storage and computational cost. But basically the rounding or the instruction of the most significant digit is not represented by a polynomial with a similar degree. So that was the main obstacle to use homogeneic reaction of the real data. So the first approach, we can think about V-twice encryption and express every circuit with just boolean circuit using base gates. But only for just one single multiplication with e-commit integers, single multiplication will require a circuit with linear depth already. So it is already in practice to perform some one single multiplication between 64 bits numbers. So in this area, it is very common to consider some bit-wise encryption and just bootstrapping by damele and tucca and nichen shu and e-sparling works, but still its complexity is obtained by base bootstrapping time multiplied by number of bits. And normally it is much more than one minute. So I think if one multiplication requires more than one minute, then you cannot say that homogeneic reaction is practical. So the second approach is just word-size encryption. So if you are given some real numbers, you can just quantize them into some integers and encrypt them in a single cycle text. But if you encrypt them in a single cycle text, then the rounding operation cannot be performed on encrypted data. So as a computation progressed, the size of plain text grows exponentially on the best of circuit. So consequently, finally you cannot store this huge number in plain text space anymore. So there have been some researches to reduce the speed of growth of plain text size, but basically they could not solve this exponential growth of plain text size. So in this talk, I want to introduce a new method to construct homomorphic encryption with three operations, audition multiplication and rounding operation. And we have a new idea to enable batching technique to encrypt a better of complex number in a single cycle text. And I'll show you some implementation research based on that. So the first idea is to embrace noise. It means that previously the encryption noise problems on ring running in the error problem, for example, was considered to be unpassable and plain text was stored in a totally different place. But why don't we just add this encryption noise directly to plain text? Of course, we cannot recover the exact message from its encrypted cycle text, but in the case of approximate arithmetic, if e is small enough, then m plus e is a kind of food approximation to original message, and e can substitute the original message in following computation. So our encryption, our cycle text will be a vector with this kind of encryption structure. Homomorphic operation is done in cycle text modulus. So the size of the message will be very smaller compared to the size of cycle text modulus. And audition and multiplication is performed inside of modular. Of course, we have some more error coming from e-seaching technique, for example, but it doesn't matter because a small error will not destroy your signature digit. So first, this idea reduced the size of cycle text modulus already, but it is not enough because its size of plain text still grows exponentially. The second idea is called rescaling process. So as I said, the rounding operation is key operation in protein point operation, so rescaling process does the similar thing on encrypted data. Technically, it's just divided into cycle text by p and rounding to the nearest integer, but inside of cycle text, plain text is together divided by p. So you can obtain an encryption of p and divided by p from an encryption of n while the cycle text modulus is divided by p together. So you will have a kind of level structure homomorphic encryption. How can you apply this idea to real, real number operation? Assume that you are given these four real numbers. So first, let's multiply 1000 as a quantization value to obtain these integers, and after encryption, you will have some more error on expected values from encryption toys, and after multiplication, you can perform rescaling and maintaining the size of a signature digit, and multiplication again and take rescaling. After that, you can assume two levels of homomorphism encryption while maintaining the size of messages. So finally, you will obtain this value. If we again divide this value by quantization value 1000, then you can check that this diagram commutes. So multiplication of these four real numbers will be this value. The good point of this level structure is that the required size of the cycle text modulus is close to linearly on death, and it's pretty reasonable in the messages. Okay, now let's talk about this technique. So the use of ring structure, such as cyclotomy ring, is the essential point in the practical implementation of homomorphism fusion in real world. All of the current dimension of homomorphism fusion uses this kind of ring structure. So in the previous scheme, such as BGV or FOV schemes, they had a kind of plain text modulus tip. So a plain text was polyomere inside of this cyclotomy ring modulus tip, and this cyclotomy ring could be represented as a product of several rings because the cyclotomy ring could be expressed as a product of several renomere. So this CRT function gives you natural matching table. You can store several messages here and compute inverse of CRT if you need to obtain corresponding renomere stored in several messages. But in the case of our scheme, we don't have any plain text modulus of CRT. So a plain text can be considered to be a small polyomere in this cyclotomy ring structure. And as you know, this cyclotomy ring is used over a integer. So this kind of mapping cannot be applied to our scheme. Instead, we consider another extension of z. So z has characteristic zero. So by the way, this extension of integer z over characteristic zero space is a complex plane. So this cyclotomy renomere can be split into product of linear renomere with its loose or primitive loose of units in complex plane. So you have n number of roots, but we can find two of them. We can pick half of these n roots so that none of them are conjugated because arbitrary roots of this polynomial have its conjugation. These conjugations are also loose. So we can pick non-conjugated primitive roots of unity and send an arbitrary polynomial to its evaluations at this chosen n over 2 number of points. So let me show you one example. So for simplicity, let's consider a power 2 case. n is a power 2 and cyclotomy ring becomes x to the n plus 1. In this case, 5 is one good element with the older n over 2. So you can just pick representative evaluation points like this. So if you want to encode these pair of complex numbers, then you can first find a polynomial such that using inverse discrete transformation to find a polynomial with this value when evaluating zeta 0 and with this value when evaluating zeta 1. And then we may work like some scaling vector and round into the integral polynomial to be used in real homomorphic inclusion scheme. So this is a final encoded polynomial. You can double check that if you evaluate zeta n to the fifth polynomial, then the result will be a really close value to this value, multiplied by scaling vectors. And I show you some additional functionalities of this scheme. So basically mx is corresponding to this vector and you can gain some good functionalities if you apply some element in Gallup group. So if you consider this cyclotest by substitutes x by x to the fifth, then this cyclotest will be a cyclotesting gradient, this polynomial with respect to this gradient. And you can find that if you decode this polynomial into vector, then this vector will be obtained from this vector by just rotating once more. So you can rotate the inner cyclotest vector by once more using key switching key and you can take slow-dice conjugation also by taking x or your inverse. So as a summary, you can store almost n over 2 complex numbers in a single cyclotest and perform addition, multiplication, and rounding in a sequence test. So you can set the amortized time for rotation and give a lot of rotation and slow-dice conjugation. So now let me show you some example and implementation research. Sigmund function is one very popular function used in statistics and machine learning area. So once we try to make a global approximation on Sigmund and evaluate it remotely quickly. So for example, when the input precision is 16 bits, the use of D27 polynomial gave us very good precision and at error less than 0.03. Sigmund is just one example, so we can use our scheme to evaluate arbitrary analytic functions, including exponential functions and trigonometric functions. And in particular, in the case of white pre-cutting inverse, white pre-cutting inverse has a very special form of a Taylor decomposition with power of degree. So we can compute the 2 to the n bits of precision of white pre-cutting inverse with very small complexity. So this is about IDIS competition. So IDIS competition is one on-year workshop about data privacy. So normally IDIS genomic security and privacy protection competition is called together with IDIS auction. So this year, the third test code this year was homomorphically based resisting regression. It means that you are given many samples of genotype and phenotype data with patients and health people. And you should compute some modeling vector to predict this is a good new client. In this experimentation, we could compute the modeling vector of resisting regression using based on more than 1,000 samples and running time was about 10 minutes with very good accuracy. AUC is one measurement to see the quality of results. The ideal AUC was 0.71 in the case of an uninterrupted computation. And we could achieve 0.69. These days, the standardization of homomorphic encryption is ongoing. So the second standardization meeting will be at MIT in the next year, March. And our library was introduced in one of these white papers written in the last workshop. And you can find our open source library from this other resource. Okay, thank you for your time. That's pretty on show. The entity to represent your complex value? Yes. And so can you say you work with the entity with point data value? The use of entity cannot be applied to our case because entity is a function of a discrete space. And if you take entity over some small polynomial, then the size of a polynomial grows so much because entity is a function of a small polynomial. Oh, so you will do this? Yes, so I mean, the previous, of course, our message inputting method can be understood kind of spirit information, but it's over continuous numbers. Difference from previous work was on modular space, like modular space. So, is it right? Any other questions? Okay, if there are no other questions, let's thank the speaker again. Thank you.


n my feet about what does that look like. I am conscious that, on the particular example that you shared with the committee previously, I think that it was not just a single local authority, but a number of local authorities working together. If it is three or four, there are three reports, four reports to the committee. We want to understand that the money has been best expended and results are often a way of doing that. We have a structure with the new community justice arrangements, with community justice outcome improvement plans at local levels, and maybe changes of that nature should be reported annually within the lines that you would expect an improvement plan to report back, and that should be analysed. My fear is that, as we have seen over the years, those plans are all gathered and committed, but how much depth is there as an analysis over that to decide what are the plans for next year? It might be scrutinised locally, but does it look at it in the aggregated form? That is community justice Scotland's hope of them. I am just going to make the point that community justice Scotland has responsibility for gathering all the annual reports from each of the community justice partnerships, which should, in theory, state their progress against outcomes at a local level. In that sense, community justice Scotland will be doing a bit of work, I believe, over the next year. I am not quite sure of their timescales, but it is published in their work plan, which said out their reporting on progress against outcomes across the country. I think that that could be something that the committee could look into. I was going to say that it just seems a long way from here, if you like, and no one wants to tread on the territory of local authorities. Clearly, at some point, we will have the cabinet secretary for justice in here, holding them to account. We have other legislation on the way. Hate to use the place cluttered landscape, but all of us here are more interested in a situation where figures are turned around because of positive intervention. Whoever does that? The difficulties in knowing what is going on at any one part of the justice system at any one time is quite considerable, but I think that that is somewhere where community justice Scotland, as it continues to develop, will be able to perhaps provide a little bit of clarity. I would definitely echo Tom's point about not wanting to be too micro-level and getting in amongst local authority decisions. I think that there is definitely a role for both the Scottish Government and for yourselves to take out an overview of the system. If we can establish what trends are happening in terms of funding allocation, that can go a long way to seeing whether that is the direction that we want it to be. I think that the problem at the minute is that we do not really know what money is going where, necessarily. Thank you very much indeed. That was certainly a concern when we set up community justice Scotland that would be the overrhyw thing. We are concerned that it may dictate to local partnerships because they are based in 32 local authorities. Now I think that the question seems to be whether there is the flexibility there, but the question is where is the funding going and I think that we possibly need a mechanism to look at it being spent in the very best way possible because it is based on local authorities. Perhaps there is a tendency to look to local authority first to provide service, so I think that there is an analysis needed there to make sure that the third sector is not excluded from those non-statutory tight activities. As you said, Tom, you can make such a difference to preventing the escalation of crime and bad outcomes. Liam, I think that you have a very pertinent question. Me? Yes. Ah, yes, I have. I was not sure that you have. It is better to be good. I am going to start with a statement in the interests of complete transparency, which is that I was a non-executive director of family mediation, Grampian, several years ago, which, as you have heard, is now part of the relationship to Scotland. Just in terms of long-term funding, we have explored funding at some length, in terms of the fact that it seems to be short-term at the moment. Tom Halpin, in your submission, you talked about that it would be ideal to have a five- to ten-year funding cycle. How realistic is that, or is that somewhere that we could get to, both in terms of Government funding but also in terms of, say, big lottery funding? Are we ever actually going to get to the ideal? There are some different types of services. You know that there will be an initiative, you want to try something out, et cetera, so clearly you understand what you are involved in there. But if you look at a major change fund success, like the wise groups leading news routes or sacros leading shine, it is such a significant change that you have to invest in that. So why was it, in every single year there, we lost really good staff December, January, because of the young person starting a family, wanting a mortgage, and there's no certainty of our funding? In an organisation like mine, who has built up some reserves that we can take the risk of, there's not, I shouldn't notice these, but another partner in the same relationship says, why don't I have those reserves? I need to tell people they're at risk, I can carry that, and I'm having to negotiate within the partnership. So I do believe in that example, the Government could have invested for five years and allowed us to, because we're to design IT systems around us, but to integrate outcomes, evaluation methodologies into risk assessments, that was never going to happen in six months of the year. So I do think that we're shy away from saying that that's the budgetary system of the Scottish Government or the Scottish Parliament, and of course at the other end of that I've got some very vulnerable hard work in young people starting off in their life with no certainty. That's just not acceptable, and then you get in between that, that three-year contracts are the reality, but what we are doing at the moment is we are constantly managing change in the workforce. Stuart Valentine? I think in terms of Scottish Government funding, three years funding with no amounts would be an incredible step forward certainly for our network, and we were awarded three years funding from the Cora Foundation's fund that I mentioned previously, although you weren't told what you would get in the future years until about three months before that money would kick in, so you were given a three-year award, but there was no certainty for what years two and three would be, and you don't find that out until about the turn of the year. The big lottery has been one of the few funders that would give five years funding, and that is certainly extremely helpful for those services who have been fortunate enough to get it. One additional point that's worth mentioning is for those agencies who do get long-term core funding, who have had it year on year. Often there will be no cost of living increase, so certainly within our network there's been no cost of living increase for the past 15 years, which means year on year effectively it's resulting in a reduction in funding, which of course you just have to manage, but the whole issue of cost of living increase to funding, especially from the Scottish Government, is certainly a key one for the voluntary sector. Okay. Thank you. Patiently, and then I'll come to you. I should probably have declared beforehand that we do receive some money from Scottish Governments in that sense, and perhaps not entirely impartial, but the question of how long term can we be, if we look at, you know, we understand the realities of yearly parliamentary budgets and about how there's a limitation to that, and perhaps at the very far end of the spectrum it's not perhaps reasonable to be 20 years down the line, but at the risk of sounding slightly petulant and maybe facetious, if we would look at private company contracts to the justice system, for example, to provide prison services, to provide electronic monitoring services. I don't think that G4S or Circo are going to be on a one-year rolling contract that changes every year, so obviously there is scope within the system for flexibility, and I think I would encourage that flexibility wherever we can find it. Good point. Ewan. It's on the question of 10-year funding, and I have no idea how we would achieve that, but for our purposes as an organisation, even an extension from two-year to three-year funding would hugely enhance our ability to make commitments of the type that we require to make. I'll give you an example. Our lease is due for renewal. On a two-year funding cycle, we have to take a year-on-year lease, which is significantly more expensive for the same property, as against taking it on, say, a six-year term, but with a three-year break clause. So that one year of increase in the cycle would be a very significant assistance to us. I hear what my colleagues here say, and I recognise and sympathise with it. We don't have the problem of having to worry about laying off staff, because virtually all of our staff are volunteers. We can only afford to pay two salaries in our organisation out of a total staff of just in excess of 20. It is a matter of great concern to me personally that, of the two-salary staff, they are working now and have been for some time at a figure marked the less in the living wage. That has to change for our purposes. It's not just that it's unfair, it is frankly unsustainable. I'm sorry that I keep making that point, but that really is the central point that I want to get across here. If I might stick with you, Mr McOffright, on funding, but on a slightly different point, in your submission, you talked about legal aid and being underfunded. I just wanted to give you an opportunity to develop that. What do you specifically mean by legal aid being underfunded? As part of that, you suggest that experienced solicitors are deserting this sort of work. Do you have any evidence that suggests that that has increased since there were some regulation changes in January? No, we move and shake, as it were, in the legal profession. We have significant anecdotal evidence to that effect. I suspect that the type of written evidence that I can provide for you would not be entirely satisfactory in the sense that it is in the form of, for instance, postings on our Facebook page. I speak daily to solicitors. Solicitors refer us inquiries because they want to help the client, but they are not being funded to do it. That is one of the real reasons why we are finding such a significant increase in our workload, particularly over the past couple of years. The word that I hear from the solicitors that I speak to is that they simply cannot afford to continue legal aid work. You enter the Samarit Corsicourt, Glasgow Sheriff Court, and you will see that people doing the legal aid work tend to be more seasoned, gentlemen and ladies, because younger solicitors are not moving into that branch because there is no money in it for them. I think that perhaps the most stark illustration of that that I have come across in the last month or so is the announcement by the Law Society of Scotland that, in order to overcome the shortage of new entrants to legal aid work, they are proposing to have first-year trainee solicitors authorised to appear in court. When you put that against the other side of that equation, where the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service are being handsomely funded to properly train a number of more prosecutors, where does that leave your equality of arms? There is a serious problem here. I cannot really stand it up, if you like, other than by anecdotal evidence, but there is so much of that, and I see it washing through into our increased workload that I am in no doubt at all that the legal aid system is in crisis. I could ask specifically about the duty solicitor scheme. I am aware that eight bar associations asked a previous panel that they would not know about it, but Glasgow, Ms Carers of Justice organisations, said that they thought that that was a real problem. The duty solicitor scheme and where eight have said that they would not take part, and that that was as a result of the criminal legal aid not being solution. Yes. I can understand that legal aid rates, as I understand it, have over the past 20 years shown quite a significant real-terms reduction, and the rates that, as I understand it, are being paid to solicitors now are certainly not economic. I am an enrolled solicitor, I am not a practicing solicitor, so I do not actually do court work. We work in conjunction with, rather than in competition with, solicitors, where we get our casework to a point, but it is ready to be heard before a court. We then liaise with the legal teams who do that. In the context of that, we have a great deal of contact with solicitors and counsel in the criminal field, and they are all saying the same thing. We cannot afford to do the work as a result, were it not for us, the work would not get done. We are an entirely pro bono service. I would prefer that we did not have any casework to do it. I would prefer that properly funded solicitors were able to take it from point A to point Z. Regrettably, that is not how it is just now. Is there anything further that the panel would like to ask? We have no more questions. I thank you very much for an excellent session. I will suspend now to allow the witnesses to leave. Agenda item 3 is consideration of a proposal by the Scottish Government to consent to the UK Government legislating using the powers under the European Union withdrawal act in relation to two UK statutory instruments. The first is the civil jurisdiction and judgments hate convention on choice of courts agreements 2005 and the EU exit regulations 2018. The second is the international recovery of maintenance hate convention on the international recovery of child support and other forms of family maintenance 2007, EU exit regulation 2018. I refer members to paper 5, which is a private paper. Do members have any comments? We have submissions from the law society on both regulations and from Professor Janine Carullers, all of whom seem to be content with the instruments. That would be my only comment is that the submissions were, I found, extremely useful. Is the committee content to recommend that the Scottish Parliament gives its consent to the UK Parliament to pass those two statutory instruments? That concludes the 25th meeting of 2018. Our next meeting will be Tuesday, 23 October, when we will continue our post-legislate of scrutiny of the police and fire reform act and pre-budget scrutiny. I now close this meeting.


So I'm still working on my best game for 2018 video because I'm kind of struggling to put together a long enough list to make it worthwhile. But in the meantime, there's a game I wanted to cover that is both really great and also in need of some significant tweaks to allow it to reach its full potential. Luckily, it's in early access and comes from one of the best indie developers out there. Supergiant Games' newest title Hades is a rogue, light, isometric dungeon crawler that features the studio's insanely high quality and distinctive art style. It's always excellent writing and voice acting and very, very good but still a little bit rough around the edges gameplay to craft something that has a real chance to be one of the best games of 2019. Supergiant's previous game Pyre was one of my best games of 2017 and Transistor and Bastion were both really good though niche titles. Hades has a chance to be Supergiant's first huge commercial hit because the core gameplay is both snappy and skill based enough to offer even more casual players something fun. In addition to the amazing and I mean amazing, absolutely amazing art and again snappy gameplay you've got really fun story and dialogue. I'd go so far as to say it has the makings of the best story ever to appear in a rogue, light game. Now it's got some real issues that are currently holding it back but that's what Early Access is for right? Let's dig down a bit and find out if the game is for you in the state it is now after the logo. Supergiant Supergiant Games is an interesting developer. They are a favorite studio amongst people who love indie games and for good reason. Supergiant hasn't produced a bad game and they haven't produced a game that's easy to explain. All of them are relatively small but conceptually ambitious. Seriously I was talking to my wife about this game and she asked me what other games Supergiant had made and I was like well there's that one game that's like a religious ritual but also like basketball and then there's the one that's like a weird tactical real time turn based one where you play as a pop star and use your guitar as a weapon and then there was the first one that was an RPG where you play as a little kid and was like a story where a narrator describes every single thing you do. Supergiant's games have all been challenging artistically as well as mechanically. And one of the coolest things about Supergiant is how they maintain a singular style and aesthetic while also having each game remain distinct. This is the fourth title and every single one is a drastic departure from each of the previous games but at the same time each of those games is immediately identifiable as a Supergiant game. Music is uniformly fantastic. The art is amazing and distinctive. And this unique art style has lent all of the games a sort of aesthetic continuity that's rare in games actually. Mechanically the games have evolved in interesting ways. Bastion was a fairly familiar gameplay experience that managed to be unique because its art style was stunning and because its narrative quirks were unique and memorable even if the gameplay was a little bit rough. Transistor was nearly avant-garde in its gameplay systems and high art in its presentation and design. It was complex and different and not the kind of game anyone could pick up in the middle and understand. Pyre was just fantastic, easy to learn and difficult to master with a memorable story wrapped up inside a super tight and utterly unique sports game. PS I think that online multiplayer might have made that game a tremendous success if they'd done it but you know by guns. But while all of the first three games were excellent games, they were also not the kind of games that had a huge market necessarily. None of them were the kind of game that's easy to sell in a paragraph. It's not just the size of the studio or the lack of big time marketing that made Supergiant's games relatively small. It's that the games themselves have again been avant-garde challenging games that by their very design only appealed to a certain niche market of players. And I really liked that about the games. I'm a guy who likes experimental art, film and music. I saw Eraserhead in the theaters when I released. I love bands that only appeal to niche tastes. I'm a musician who likes bands that make music for other musicians but I also have pop tastes deep down. I love bands like Collexico and Transam and Godspeed You Black Emperor. But I love Simon and Garfunkel and Sam Cook and The Shins even more. Hades is shaping up to be Supergiant's first highly accessible and commercially viable game for a number of reasons and that has me excited. Hades relies on a very familiar hack and slash combat system mixed with accessible and relatively simple roguelike progression mechanics. Now, while roguelike games have become much more common in recent years, this style of game remains tricky to get right because balancing fun and difficulty is the most important part of the design. The game genre is built upon failure. If a player picks up your roguelike game and beats it in 10 hours, you've totally failed. But you've also got to make sure that the game feels like it's respecting a player's time. Balancing a feeling of consistent progression without making a game so frustrating that players quit or making it so easy that large sections of the content become irrelevant is what makes or breaks a roguelike. What this ends up meaning in practice is that many of the best roguelikes have several simultaneous progression systems. A game like Diablo in many ways closely mirrors what we've come to expect in roguelites, especially in the greater rifts. You run randomly populated and generated levels over and over getting further each time. The difference between Diablo and a true roguelike is that Diablo relies only on vertical progression. Vertical progression is a system where a player progresses through content mainly by leveling up numbers. Those numbers can be health and damage values or they can be getting badass armor or weapons but the progression is mainly a matter of those numbers going up. Back to Diablo, you run those rifts to get better gear so that you can run the next rift. Then you keep running that one until you get better gear so you can run the next rift and on and on. Now certainly there's some skill involved in the game but it relies far less on that than it does on simply getting better and better gear on your character. This is most often seen in RPGs or MMOs that rely almost completely on vertical progression to the point that it's literally impossible to defeat content without the progression system. Go to a high level area in Warcraft or enter a Destiny raid severely underleveled and you will eventually run into enemies that simply cannot be damaged by the player at all. On the other side there are roguelites like Spelunky where almost all of the progression is simply player progression. You will advance in Spelunky only as you get better at the game. You can't play the first level over and over until you have twice as much health. This makes Spelunky an unbelievably punishing game at first.  This is great for driving a feeling of accomplishment in players but also great at frustrating players to the point of quitting. The most successful roguelites combine these systems. Binding of Isaac makes heavy use of player progression. As you play it you will eventually become so familiar with its enemies, bosses, and tile sets that you'll be capable of beating the game without picking up an item. And as you're improving as a player you're also unlocking more and more powerful items that have a chance to drop. The beauty of Isaac and in my opinion the ultimate secret to its explosive success is the subtle generosity of its progression system. While the game is difficult for new players and a game demands a healthy dose of player skill progression, its upgrades mean that occasionally, as you are learning, you will run into a super powerful combination that lets you break the game. This means that every so often as the frustration of the game is about to get to a new player, they'll get brimstone and Tammy's head and suddenly tear through the game to give them a release valve. It is tuned perfectly between hardest nails and player power. And then at the end of that curve, once you unlock more and more and more items, half of them are bad. So the more items you unlock the harder the game gets because it gets less and less likely that you'll get one of the few truly broken combinations. Dead Cells combines item unlocks, player skill progression, and a vertical progression system for a more conventional and smooth progression. You get better and more familiar with the game. You unlock better and better items and over time you actually upgrade those items so more and more powerful versions of them drop with more and more interesting synergies. This means that unlike Isaac, the game is getting consistently easier on a mechanical level. But unlike Isaac, the base moment to moment gameplay is extremely tight and fun so it doesn't really matter. And this is balanced somewhat by the later levels featuring much more difficult enemies. You can still run into combinations that make the game easier but you rarely run into things like the guppy transformation that make the game trivial. And then you've got games like Nuclear Throne and Enter the Gungeon that rely almost completely on player skill progression and item drop RNG. Difficulty is mainly managed by how good the player gets with all of the weapons and a good run and a bad run will be decided by how you play, the RNG of enemy placement, and the RNG of whether or not you get great weapons to drop. In its current state, Hades has very, very limited vertical progression and falls much more closely into the Nuclear Throne or Enter the Gungeon style of roguelite. Which means almost all of your progress is based upon your skill, whether good upgrades drop during runs, and whether you choose wisely amongst those upgrades. And this is fine in theory, but the current difficulty and gameplay balance can be so chaotic that it feels less like it relies on skill and more like it relies on attrition and blind luck at times. The limited vertical progression in Hades is centered around slowly upgrading a very small group of stats inherent to your character, not the gear or upgrades themselves. And the stats that you upgrade don't feel all that good because you're upgrading things that end up feeling like they're out of the player's control. Now, that might sound strange, but I'll explain. It's clear that Supergiant wants the progression in their game to be much more focused on player skill progression than on item or power-up progression. And that can be fine if the game is carefully tuned with that in mind. And the possibility of doing just that is clearly here, so I'm confident the game will get it right. And for now, let me give you a couple examples. There are three places where you can upgrade the damage your character does. You can slowly upgrade the damage you do when hitting an enemy in the back, when attacking immediately after dashing, and you can upgrade how much health you recover when counterattacking immediately after being damaged, a la Bloodborne or Dead Cells. Now, all of those sound like great places to have vertical progression. It's a way to upgrade your character without ever making any of the content too easy because in theory, none of these upgrades are simply passive damage boosts. All of them require a specific player action to take advantage of. But there's also a problem here because these upgrades don't mesh very well with the combat that's currently on offer. Hades, to its credit, is an insanely twitchy, fast-paced game. There's not all that much in tactical encounters here. In the first level, you can sometimes control whether you backstab an enemy or make a concerted effort to only attack after dashing, but the difficulty ramps up very, very quickly in the current build. Let's take a look at some first-level encounters here, okay? You'll notice that in order to stay alive, you've got to be dashing and dodging pretty regularly. But once you hit the first boss, you'll notice that the chaos on the screen has ramped up to a point where it's basically impossible to expect any player to keep track of everything happening. To the point, I'm curious if any of the developers feel like they are making actual decisions about when and where to attack enemies. There's only so much a player can take note of. There are so many things to be dodging that the idea of deliberately aiming for an enemy's back or timing dodges so that you can attack within one second, or especially the idea of counter-attacking after taking damage is kind of crazy to expect. By the second level, you will never be dealing with one enemy, or even with five enemies. You'll be dealing with ten or more enemies constantly attacking. It's not that you start button-mashing necessarily. It's that the game becomes a kind of rhythm game of dodge, dodge, attack, dodge, dodge, attack. Now the progression damage increases still will come into effect, but it won't actually be under your control. If this is the gameplay style, it seems to me Supergiant would simply be better off offering passive damage upgrades tied to the weapons or the upgrades themselves. The current system almost seems like a vestige of the gameplay style of their previous games, which were far more tactical. This game isn't tactical. It's akin to a bullet hell twitchy response type game you'd expect from 1988 or from games like Gungeon or Nuclear Throne. Hades is, again, much closer to enter the Gungeon than it is to Binding of Isaac.  But even there, there were slight tweaks that could make it feel better. There's a recovery time after dashing that feels, again, like the vestige of a time where gameplay might have been less insanely fast and more tactical. If there were less enemies, I could justify having the dash recovery time, but as it stands now, you're already punished for dodge spamming because by the second level, the arenas are littered with high damage environmental hazards. There was a build that relied on small amounts of high health enemies restricting the dodge would make more sense, but that's not the game Supergiant has here right now. And I know I'm sounding negative here, so I want to be clear. I love this game. I love the art. I love the story. The music is unbelievably good, and the gameplay is really, really excellent. And it isn't very early access with Supergiant saying the final release might be as late as 2020. But the point of a good early access release is to make sure the game can be everything it can be and there are some important balance and aggression issues that need to be worked out. The weapons on offer are all really cool and do change how you play, although the bow's slow charge time might need to be reduced just a tad. I also think Supergiant should consider not letting players choose which weapon they will use. No matter what a developer does, one of the weapons will always be better than the others, and players will naturally always choose the weapon they're most comfortable with. I feel like starting each run by assigning the player weapon would probably be a better system. The actual rogue light elements on offer are through boons and power-ups, and they are very cool. The power-ups are all satisfying and powerful and do drastically alter your play style. And choosing which way to go and which power-ups to choose gives the game a really nice feeling of progression within each discrete run. And there will be more weapons and powers added as development continues, apparently. So my main issues with the game right now boil down to four things. I think the recovery after dashing doesn't fit with the current game's ridiculously chaotic and twitchy style, the way the elite enemies are implemented, the total lack of vertical aggression, and boss health. I'm hoping that the difficulty spiking is a result of there being only two levels, and Supergiant wanted to provide hours of playtime and value to those who choose to buy in early access. But even so, when you get to the second level, Asphodel, the difficulty ramps up to insane, ridiculous levels. The game handles elite monsters by making them have two health bars. The first one is yellow and is called armor by the game. And if that was the entirety of the difference, I think it would be perfectly balanced, but it's actually not. Not only do the yellow enemies have two health bars, enemies who have a yellow health bar cannot be interrupted, meaning the only, only thing the player can do is either dash constantly or kite the enemies around over and over. In the first level, this plays fine and actually pretty fun because there are manageable amount of enemies and you do a reasonable amount of damage to them. But in the second level, when enemies who had previously been a mini-boss or regular enemies, there are traps all over the floor and certain enemies actually make others totally invulnerable, it gets to just impossible, ridiculous levels of chaos. There ends up being so much going on that it's just kind of a total button mashing mess. Watch, watch. Also, both bosses just take too damn long to kill. Now, I like hard games. I love Nuclear Throne and Gungeon and Isaac. I love the Souls games, so I don't want these encounters made easier. I want them made shorter. The first boss, Megara, features a bunch of immunity phases and constantly spawning adds. On top of that, the boss herself has only very brief periods where she can be safely attacked and she absorbs an outrageous amount of punishment. Fighting the boss quite literally takes almost as long as the entire floor leading up to her. The obvious solution here is to tone down the amount of enemies a bit, increase the damage the boss does, and cut her health by as much as half. The second boss is very cool mechanically and super cool visually, but again, has just too much health and during its final phase, it is such a chaotic mess of visual feedback that it is simply impossible for me to actually process what's happening. Between adds, boss heads, lava, explosions, boss ranged attacks, and the particle effects from your dashing and attacking, it is simply not feasible to expect a player to comprehend what's happening on their screen. Now, the boss health issue can be solved either through a vertical progression system that allows players to do more damage as they progress or simply cutting health. And honestly, I would probably prefer it to be accomplished through a vertical progression system. A very slow vertical progression system that gives players a passive bonus to all of their damage also helps players who aren't as skilled be able to eventually beat the game. Now, those are all big issues, but also issues I expect to be addressed as the game goes through development. As it stands right now, in its current condition, it is easily able to provide 20 plus hours of gameplay before you've upgraded everything and beat the two levels and bosses. It is a hell of a start, but some of these issues I have highlighted need to be addressed to make this game truly great. It's definitely in early access and the game is still rough mechanically in certain spots, but it's got so much potential and the care and crafts that have gone into the art, music, and gameplay make it clear that Hades has a real chance to be Supergiant's best game yet. And if the game is carefully balanced around the style of gameplay that's here, rather than a style of gameplay Supergiant might have originally intended, it has a chance to be a huge breakout hit.  Still, if this looks and sounds like something you'd like to play, I wholeheartedly recommend getting it in early access. I'm excited to play the game as it updates and watch it take its final form. If it was more clearly in its final form, I'd probably be less excited, but I hope to watch this game really hone in on the core experience and further refine everything that makes it play so well. If that sounds fun to you, give it a buy. It is 20 bucks, and as it is now, I feel it is well worth the price and I really can't wait to see where it goes. Alright, see you next time. Bye.


Hey Gullake Community Schools, this is Don Eastman, your high school principal. And I am here for the one district, one book theme that we have going this year to talk to you about this unique textured plant that I have. It's easy to grow, it's in a decorative container, and this will be your next clue if you can guess what this is.