Done with the dragging project!
Soul On Fire by Third Day
Hi all. I've had another slow month at work. It only took a couple of days worth of coding time for my team-mates to create the code modifications necessary for our project, but testing was an absolute quagmire. Other teams were modifying code related to ours and putting it in the testing environment, so anytime any of their changes had bugs, our tests were liable to error out before they even reached our part of the code. But we were FINALLY able to run through the process yesterday, and next week we should hopefully have new work to do, work that doesn't rely on the mainframe system. X)
I haven't made quite as much progress in Forgotten Gates this month as I did last month, but it's been decent. Mostly I've been working on revamping the combat system to make use of "selector skills" that have no immediate effect, simply allowing me to get targeting input from the player and feed it into my battle plugin. I'm conceptually at the point where a simple single-target skill at least should work, but of course things almost never work out right on the first try in programming. ;)
On NMR, Aburei ran once again into Reina, Mushi's odd-jobs-of-dubious-integrity alt. Still blissfully unaware of Reina's rogue tendencies, Aburei agreed to travel with her for a while. n.n They ran into a situation while passing through a town wherein Reina was hired to assist a lender in forcibly collecting debts, while Aburei wound up treating one of the debtors, who had been mugged and thus had no means of paying back his loan. After a tense moment, they tracked down the mugger, thanks to the nose of Aburei's badger summon Hachimitsu. The thief was an unaffiliated ninja with debts of his own, though not to that same lender. A little bit of scuffle ensued, and of course justice prevailed. ;)
Mushi also asked me about starting up something unrelated to NMR, and what we decided on was an attempt to revive Triforce MUCK, if only on a small level. We're planning to use the MUCK's LiveJournal community to do some RP, which frankly should work better for me since I rarely find time to sit down with a group and pose back and forth -- asynchronous posting allows for a more do-it-as-you-have-free-moments approach. Fallon/Itami is interested too, and I may convince Mituni and Meiling from the Pokemon MUs to participate. Mushi wanted to start with new characters, so I'm thinking of making an incarnation of John. Only problem is "detective" isn't really a thing in a medieval fantasy setting, but I'm sure I'll be able to adjust him as necessary.
Starbound:
I actually picked this game up a loooong time ago, back when it was in early access, and spent a ton of time playing through what was available at the time. Recently I noticed that it's "officially complete", so I played through it again. Annoyingly, the characters I made back in early access got wiped, but oh well.
Starbound is a 2D explore-and-craft-in-a-randomly-generated-world game with a soft sci-fi theme. The easy comparison is with Terraria, which, if you recall my review of that, I enjoyed but regretted the amount of time it took. X) Starbound is similar, but not quite as grindy. It's easier to collect enough materials to craft the next tier of equipment, and you mainly just need to craft armor and critical tools -- the weapons you'll find while exploring are better than what you can craft anyway. Starbound also isn't as dangerous as Terraria, mainly because monsters don't spawn as readily and those that do appear aren't automatically aware of your presence. It makes for a much more relaxed exploration experience.
It's a very good thing that exploring is easier in Starbound, because you'll do more of it. There are hundreds of randomly-generated planets in the game, each with a general climate -- plains, forests, snowy, ocean, etc. -- permutated with smaller biomes for some variety. Each planet will also have a few special areas, like a town, a castle, or a dungeon. To encourage players to find these places, aside from the fact they tend to be rich in resources, the series of main plot missions involve scanning artifacts from the game's different races in order to "gain enough clues" to determine where the MacGuffins are.
Then, once you do have the location, you're sent on a special mission in a preconstructed area with no randomness. You are not allowed to edit these environments, so it's more like a regular game. This does allow for more tight level design, but at the cost of being able to construct your own arena for boss fights, which as I mentioned was an interesting aspect of Terraria. Still, it's fun.
Bottom line? An enjoyable game, and easier to get into and complete than Terraria, but still a huge time sink. X) Get it if you don't mind spending hours doing that one more thing before taking a break.
Last Word:
A game from one of the RPG Maker Humble Bundles, though it eschews RPG combat. Last Word is set in a world where winning a verbal argument grants the winner brief suggestive power over the loser. An eccentric professor invites a group of upper-crust socialites (plus the protagonist, a self-sufficient young lady whose family used to be aristocracy) to a party. There, the professor unveils his latest invention: The Mouth, a device that can amplify and project a discourser's discussionary power, and more importantly, leaves no way for those on the other side to argue back. The professor promptly ensnares his guests by insisting that none of them leave until he announces he is done with them, then leaves them to sample his wine collection and fret amongst themselves. As the night goes on, the protagonist is drawn into the professor's scheme: an attempt to locate the Last Word, a legendary item which makes the bearer invincible in debate.
Sounds like a highly original and intriguing premise, doesn't it? And story-wise, it is. Unfortunately, the discourse "combat" of the game is a let-down. X) With the description of the game as a war of words, I was expecting to be involved in lots of conversations with witty dialogue and response choices with subtle differences. Instead, I got an abstract push-of-war that involves building and spending two stages of a mana-like resource to move a marker to the opponent's side of a pegged ruler. There's a little bit of fiction to it in that you are using Disruptive statements to gain Power, Submissive statements to turn Power into Tact, then using the leeway granted by Tact to make Aggressive statements that do the most pushing, but no actual conversation appears during the contest. There's also a rock-paper-scissors system of tones that allow you to shake your opponent's composure, with different tones giving different bonuses depending on which kind of statement they're used in. At first I couldn't figure out how to play it very well, and I gave up on the game when it seemed as if I would have to do a ton of grinding to get anywhere. Later on I gave it another shot, and finally noticed the crucial tidbit that Aggressive statements push harder the more you've managed to rattle your opponent's composure beforehand. After that it wasn't too hard, and decently engaging, but it's still disappointing that there's no actual wordplay involved.
Bottom line? Possibly worth the modest price tag if you like short, original games and unusual conflict systems, but be aware of what it actually is.
Click to viewHi all. I've had another slow month at work. It only took a couple of days worth of coding time for my team-mates to create the code modifications necessary for our project, but testing was an absolute quagmire. Other teams were modifying code related to ours and putting it in the testing environment, so anytime any of their changes had bugs, our tests were liable to error out before they even reached our part of the code. But we were FINALLY able to run through the process yesterday, and next week we should hopefully have new work to do, work that doesn't rely on the mainframe system. X)
I haven't made quite as much progress in Forgotten Gates this month as I did last month, but it's been decent. Mostly I've been working on revamping the combat system to make use of "selector skills" that have no immediate effect, simply allowing me to get targeting input from the player and feed it into my battle plugin. I'm conceptually at the point where a simple single-target skill at least should work, but of course things almost never work out right on the first try in programming. ;)
On NMR, Aburei ran once again into Reina, Mushi's odd-jobs-of-dubious-integrity alt. Still blissfully unaware of Reina's rogue tendencies, Aburei agreed to travel with her for a while. n.n They ran into a situation while passing through a town wherein Reina was hired to assist a lender in forcibly collecting debts, while Aburei wound up treating one of the debtors, who had been mugged and thus had no means of paying back his loan. After a tense moment, they tracked down the mugger, thanks to the nose of Aburei's badger summon Hachimitsu. The thief was an unaffiliated ninja with debts of his own, though not to that same lender. A little bit of scuffle ensued, and of course justice prevailed. ;)
Mushi also asked me about starting up something unrelated to NMR, and what we decided on was an attempt to revive Triforce MUCK, if only on a small level. We're planning to use the MUCK's LiveJournal community to do some RP, which frankly should work better for me since I rarely find time to sit down with a group and pose back and forth -- asynchronous posting allows for a more do-it-as-you-have-free-moments approach. Fallon/Itami is interested too, and I may convince Mituni and Meiling from the Pokemon MUs to participate. Mushi wanted to start with new characters, so I'm thinking of making an incarnation of John. Only problem is "detective" isn't really a thing in a medieval fantasy setting, but I'm sure I'll be able to adjust him as necessary.
Starbound:
I actually picked this game up a loooong time ago, back when it was in early access, and spent a ton of time playing through what was available at the time. Recently I noticed that it's "officially complete", so I played through it again. Annoyingly, the characters I made back in early access got wiped, but oh well.
Starbound is a 2D explore-and-craft-in-a-randomly-generated-world game with a soft sci-fi theme. The easy comparison is with Terraria, which, if you recall my review of that, I enjoyed but regretted the amount of time it took. X) Starbound is similar, but not quite as grindy. It's easier to collect enough materials to craft the next tier of equipment, and you mainly just need to craft armor and critical tools -- the weapons you'll find while exploring are better than what you can craft anyway. Starbound also isn't as dangerous as Terraria, mainly because monsters don't spawn as readily and those that do appear aren't automatically aware of your presence. It makes for a much more relaxed exploration experience.
It's a very good thing that exploring is easier in Starbound, because you'll do more of it. There are hundreds of randomly-generated planets in the game, each with a general climate -- plains, forests, snowy, ocean, etc. -- permutated with smaller biomes for some variety. Each planet will also have a few special areas, like a town, a castle, or a dungeon. To encourage players to find these places, aside from the fact they tend to be rich in resources, the series of main plot missions involve scanning artifacts from the game's different races in order to "gain enough clues" to determine where the MacGuffins are.
Then, once you do have the location, you're sent on a special mission in a preconstructed area with no randomness. You are not allowed to edit these environments, so it's more like a regular game. This does allow for more tight level design, but at the cost of being able to construct your own arena for boss fights, which as I mentioned was an interesting aspect of Terraria. Still, it's fun.
Bottom line? An enjoyable game, and easier to get into and complete than Terraria, but still a huge time sink. X) Get it if you don't mind spending hours doing that one more thing before taking a break.
Last Word:
A game from one of the RPG Maker Humble Bundles, though it eschews RPG combat. Last Word is set in a world where winning a verbal argument grants the winner brief suggestive power over the loser. An eccentric professor invites a group of upper-crust socialites (plus the protagonist, a self-sufficient young lady whose family used to be aristocracy) to a party. There, the professor unveils his latest invention: The Mouth, a device that can amplify and project a discourser's discussionary power, and more importantly, leaves no way for those on the other side to argue back. The professor promptly ensnares his guests by insisting that none of them leave until he announces he is done with them, then leaves them to sample his wine collection and fret amongst themselves. As the night goes on, the protagonist is drawn into the professor's scheme: an attempt to locate the Last Word, a legendary item which makes the bearer invincible in debate.
Sounds like a highly original and intriguing premise, doesn't it? And story-wise, it is. Unfortunately, the discourse "combat" of the game is a let-down. X) With the description of the game as a war of words, I was expecting to be involved in lots of conversations with witty dialogue and response choices with subtle differences. Instead, I got an abstract push-of-war that involves building and spending two stages of a mana-like resource to move a marker to the opponent's side of a pegged ruler. There's a little bit of fiction to it in that you are using Disruptive statements to gain Power, Submissive statements to turn Power into Tact, then using the leeway granted by Tact to make Aggressive statements that do the most pushing, but no actual conversation appears during the contest. There's also a rock-paper-scissors system of tones that allow you to shake your opponent's composure, with different tones giving different bonuses depending on which kind of statement they're used in. At first I couldn't figure out how to play it very well, and I gave up on the game when it seemed as if I would have to do a ton of grinding to get anywhere. Later on I gave it another shot, and finally noticed the crucial tidbit that Aggressive statements push harder the more you've managed to rattle your opponent's composure beforehand. After that it wasn't too hard, and decently engaging, but it's still disappointing that there's no actual wordplay involved.
Bottom line? Possibly worth the modest price tag if you like short, original games and unusual conflict systems, but be aware of what it actually is.