Ninja vs. Squidkids
No Doubt by Petra
Hi all. This month was pretty similar to the last in most respects, although we're starting to see businesses open up again at least. I was finally able to get that haircut, although I had to schedule an appointment and wait until the end of the week for it.
In ASCRS development, a lot of time was taken up because I decided to allow defenses to apply to multiple attacks, which meant I had to make a bunch of changes to facilitate that. I'd originally decided against allowing that for both design and implementation reasons -- it seemed to me like it could be too powerful a move, and it made things trickier to code. But then I changed my mind, figuring I'd rather have a capability in the system that I can turn off if it proves too powerful than never experiment with it. Besides, I can do things like make it cost Awesome-Sauce points to use. I'm not 100% confident that I've squashed all the bugs I've introduced during those changes, but it seems to be working on a cursory level.
After that, I decided to implement a quality-of-life feature I'd been thinking about for a while. I want to have elements of the UI highlight when there's a particular reason to use them, for example, when a new player joins in they won't have any characters, so the Add Character button should highlight for them to suggest that they start with that. I do this with a simple animation which causes the UI element to glow yellow once per second. However, when I tried this out in practice, anytime more than one element was highlighted at a time their animations would almost invariably be out of sync. It looked ugly and felt distracting. So I wrote a script to keep them synchronized. It basically keeps a list of all the elements which need the synchronization, then when one gets activated, it looks through the list until it finds another that's already active and starts up its animation in sync with that one -- or if it's the only one just goes from the beginning.
In Ninja Burger RPG, I was the GM again last time. I decided to let my Splatoon obsession drive things for this run. ;) Our customer was Cap'n Cuttlefish, who requested a large order be delivered to the top of Moray Towers, a stage in the game that involves long, switch-backing ramps. When the team arrived (via a convenient warp-pipe in the kitchen which we use as our excuse to visit other fictional worlds, especially video game ones), they found that the tower was covered in 'enemy' ink, which in the Splatoon world means you need to cut a path with your own ink to get anywhere. Weapons dealer Shelldon explained the situation to them and offered to let them borrow some of his prototype weapons for the job, for the sake of testing them. I went so far as to prepare different mechanics for the various classes of Splatoon weapons to fit vaguely into the Ninja Burger combat system, with special considerations like different bonuses and penalties at different ranges and special abilities like being able to move quickly or attack around corners and ledges. My own character Koseitama went with the splatbrella, because it allowed her to get a bonus from her Trick Umbrella Style quality. ;)
As they went up the tower, the team was opposed by the inklings who'd claimed it, who were essentially just a bunch of rambunctious kids. The combat turned out more arduous and long-lasting than I'd anticipated, primarily because even the low-level foes had bonuses that applied to most of their rolls, while the ninja team were all +0 Ninjas with skills that mostly didn't apply. I mentioned partway through that we should probably think about spending some Honor points to upgrade for next time. There were also some very lucky rolls on the enemy side. X) My own character got knocked out about three-quarters of the way through. Nevertheless, we finally got to the top, where they found Cap'n Cuttlefish regaling the youngsters (who had respawned up there after getting splatted) with tales from his army days. Apparently the order was for all of them, and the kiddies had claimed the tower because they wanted to experience their own seige battle. After an easy drop-off, the team headed back down, reluctantly returned their weapons, and went home.
On Zelda RPG, things have been proceeding rather slowly. Aubrey visited the Crimson Wolfos on his loftwing, happy to find everybody there was alive. When he went back to report this good news at Gerudo Fortress, there was discussion about how people have started to conquer the sea with boats, and thus it would be a good idea to build a dock at Gerudo Fortress to receive them for trade and such. Shemri went and found some...Termina-origin Gerudo (she tries not to refer to them as pirates just as she tries not to call the local Gerudo thieves) who have the know-how for such a project. Meanwhile, back at the Crimson Wolfos, the Triforce of Wisdom came crashing through the roof and reunited with Zelda (which also ended her disguise as Sheik). No explanation as to why that happened yet, it just did. The player of Ghirahim, who had the ToW, hasn't been around, but he knew his possession of it would be temporary.
Shadowrun: Hong Kong:
Yup, another one of these from the Humble Bundles. The story this time is that you are a former street kid from Seattle, Washington who was adopted along with your 'brother', an ork named Duncan, by an elderly Chinese man called Raymond Black. After having left home for several years (under vague circumstances that you can imply some reasoning to through dialogue choices in a flashback scene a little ways into the story), you receive an urgent message from Raymond asking you to meet him in Hong Kong. You arrive at the docks and are reunited with Duncan, who has become an operative in Lone Star, the security organization with just-shy-of-police authority. Together you head to the meeting place and run into a group of shadowrunners, who in a tense standoff claim that they were hired by Raymond to escort him into the heart of an extra-filthy slum called Kowloon Walled City. Before things can come to a head, all but two of the shadowrunners are sniped, and a police assault team barks at you to submit to arrest as terrorists, including calling out you and Duncan by name.
Forced into a slapdash alliance with the remaining shadowrunners -- an ork shaman named Gobbet and a dwarf decker with the handle Is0bel -- you flee to safety through the sewers. Your new friends introduce you to their underworld crime boss, who has your identities erased and starts looking into why Raymond never showed up at the rendezvous point...for the price of you working for her, of course. In between shadowruns, you experience nightmares that seem to be coming from the nearby Walled City, and everybody else is having them too. Visions of buildings collapsing together, and people going mad, and an otherworldly figure with a thousand teeth...as usual, you're going to end up saving the world as a side effect of saving your own hide.
In case anyone's curious, I played this one as Cherry O'Lostwood, my chubby fairy character, adapted to the Shadowrun world as a dwarf mage. I min-maxed pretty hard on this one, putting nearly all XP into Willpower and Spellcasting, and I was able to max them out by the end. It paid off too - she very nearly couldn't miss except at very long range. Such is often the case in RPGs, especially ones where you control multiple characters -- min-maxing does more to make you powerful than leave you vulnerable because the skills you apply roll from a narrow subset of stats based on your character class.
As you'd probably expect, the gameplay is pretty similar to the other Shadowrun titles. There are a couple of definite additions, though. In certain segments, you can click on a holstered gun icon in the corner of the screen to go from free-roaming mode -- in which you click spots for your main character to run to and your squad-mates follow behind while the world goes about its business around you -- to battle mode -- in which everything proceeds in turn-based fashion and you control each of your squad-mates individually. This allows you to sneak up to the edge of an encounter to get the first move and even spend a turn using buff skills before you attack. You have to guess at where exactly that edge is, though, so that's a little frustrating.
The other additions are in the cyber-world. There are stealth segments with enemies that move on set routes scanning areas. Fortunately they actually highlight the tiles they're scanning, so you can clearly see what's going on. Still, the general control scheme of Shadowrun is an awkward one for stealth, especially real-time, because you control your avatar by clicking on tiles and watching them take whatever they calculate is the shortest route to where you said to go, which might cut through an area you didn't expect. I also occasionally had instances where the game didn't seem to register my click at all and I got caught as a result. :P
Finally, there's a hacking minigame to get at the prizes in the cyber-world. It's a little unintuitive, but not hard once you've muddled through it once. First you have to memorize and repeat sequences on a number pad, which adds time to the leeway you have in the next segment -- you can forego the remainder of this challenge at any point, as it goes from sequences 4 to 8 digits long. Then you're presented with about a dozen sequences of strange characters while a display above them briefly flashes random bits of the correct sequence. The trick is to calmly latch onto the first character or two they give you, take a look through the given sequences to see which ones match, and then return to watching the blips for more clues, rather than trying to catch and remember all the blips at once. It's not terribly hard once you pick up this discipline.
Bottom line? Pretty much exactly what you'd expect from the series. Get it if you like tactical RPGs.
Click to viewHi all. This month was pretty similar to the last in most respects, although we're starting to see businesses open up again at least. I was finally able to get that haircut, although I had to schedule an appointment and wait until the end of the week for it.
In ASCRS development, a lot of time was taken up because I decided to allow defenses to apply to multiple attacks, which meant I had to make a bunch of changes to facilitate that. I'd originally decided against allowing that for both design and implementation reasons -- it seemed to me like it could be too powerful a move, and it made things trickier to code. But then I changed my mind, figuring I'd rather have a capability in the system that I can turn off if it proves too powerful than never experiment with it. Besides, I can do things like make it cost Awesome-Sauce points to use. I'm not 100% confident that I've squashed all the bugs I've introduced during those changes, but it seems to be working on a cursory level.
After that, I decided to implement a quality-of-life feature I'd been thinking about for a while. I want to have elements of the UI highlight when there's a particular reason to use them, for example, when a new player joins in they won't have any characters, so the Add Character button should highlight for them to suggest that they start with that. I do this with a simple animation which causes the UI element to glow yellow once per second. However, when I tried this out in practice, anytime more than one element was highlighted at a time their animations would almost invariably be out of sync. It looked ugly and felt distracting. So I wrote a script to keep them synchronized. It basically keeps a list of all the elements which need the synchronization, then when one gets activated, it looks through the list until it finds another that's already active and starts up its animation in sync with that one -- or if it's the only one just goes from the beginning.
In Ninja Burger RPG, I was the GM again last time. I decided to let my Splatoon obsession drive things for this run. ;) Our customer was Cap'n Cuttlefish, who requested a large order be delivered to the top of Moray Towers, a stage in the game that involves long, switch-backing ramps. When the team arrived (via a convenient warp-pipe in the kitchen which we use as our excuse to visit other fictional worlds, especially video game ones), they found that the tower was covered in 'enemy' ink, which in the Splatoon world means you need to cut a path with your own ink to get anywhere. Weapons dealer Shelldon explained the situation to them and offered to let them borrow some of his prototype weapons for the job, for the sake of testing them. I went so far as to prepare different mechanics for the various classes of Splatoon weapons to fit vaguely into the Ninja Burger combat system, with special considerations like different bonuses and penalties at different ranges and special abilities like being able to move quickly or attack around corners and ledges. My own character Koseitama went with the splatbrella, because it allowed her to get a bonus from her Trick Umbrella Style quality. ;)
As they went up the tower, the team was opposed by the inklings who'd claimed it, who were essentially just a bunch of rambunctious kids. The combat turned out more arduous and long-lasting than I'd anticipated, primarily because even the low-level foes had bonuses that applied to most of their rolls, while the ninja team were all +0 Ninjas with skills that mostly didn't apply. I mentioned partway through that we should probably think about spending some Honor points to upgrade for next time. There were also some very lucky rolls on the enemy side. X) My own character got knocked out about three-quarters of the way through. Nevertheless, we finally got to the top, where they found Cap'n Cuttlefish regaling the youngsters (who had respawned up there after getting splatted) with tales from his army days. Apparently the order was for all of them, and the kiddies had claimed the tower because they wanted to experience their own seige battle. After an easy drop-off, the team headed back down, reluctantly returned their weapons, and went home.
On Zelda RPG, things have been proceeding rather slowly. Aubrey visited the Crimson Wolfos on his loftwing, happy to find everybody there was alive. When he went back to report this good news at Gerudo Fortress, there was discussion about how people have started to conquer the sea with boats, and thus it would be a good idea to build a dock at Gerudo Fortress to receive them for trade and such. Shemri went and found some...Termina-origin Gerudo (she tries not to refer to them as pirates just as she tries not to call the local Gerudo thieves) who have the know-how for such a project. Meanwhile, back at the Crimson Wolfos, the Triforce of Wisdom came crashing through the roof and reunited with Zelda (which also ended her disguise as Sheik). No explanation as to why that happened yet, it just did. The player of Ghirahim, who had the ToW, hasn't been around, but he knew his possession of it would be temporary.
Shadowrun: Hong Kong:
Yup, another one of these from the Humble Bundles. The story this time is that you are a former street kid from Seattle, Washington who was adopted along with your 'brother', an ork named Duncan, by an elderly Chinese man called Raymond Black. After having left home for several years (under vague circumstances that you can imply some reasoning to through dialogue choices in a flashback scene a little ways into the story), you receive an urgent message from Raymond asking you to meet him in Hong Kong. You arrive at the docks and are reunited with Duncan, who has become an operative in Lone Star, the security organization with just-shy-of-police authority. Together you head to the meeting place and run into a group of shadowrunners, who in a tense standoff claim that they were hired by Raymond to escort him into the heart of an extra-filthy slum called Kowloon Walled City. Before things can come to a head, all but two of the shadowrunners are sniped, and a police assault team barks at you to submit to arrest as terrorists, including calling out you and Duncan by name.
Forced into a slapdash alliance with the remaining shadowrunners -- an ork shaman named Gobbet and a dwarf decker with the handle Is0bel -- you flee to safety through the sewers. Your new friends introduce you to their underworld crime boss, who has your identities erased and starts looking into why Raymond never showed up at the rendezvous point...for the price of you working for her, of course. In between shadowruns, you experience nightmares that seem to be coming from the nearby Walled City, and everybody else is having them too. Visions of buildings collapsing together, and people going mad, and an otherworldly figure with a thousand teeth...as usual, you're going to end up saving the world as a side effect of saving your own hide.
In case anyone's curious, I played this one as Cherry O'Lostwood, my chubby fairy character, adapted to the Shadowrun world as a dwarf mage. I min-maxed pretty hard on this one, putting nearly all XP into Willpower and Spellcasting, and I was able to max them out by the end. It paid off too - she very nearly couldn't miss except at very long range. Such is often the case in RPGs, especially ones where you control multiple characters -- min-maxing does more to make you powerful than leave you vulnerable because the skills you apply roll from a narrow subset of stats based on your character class.
As you'd probably expect, the gameplay is pretty similar to the other Shadowrun titles. There are a couple of definite additions, though. In certain segments, you can click on a holstered gun icon in the corner of the screen to go from free-roaming mode -- in which you click spots for your main character to run to and your squad-mates follow behind while the world goes about its business around you -- to battle mode -- in which everything proceeds in turn-based fashion and you control each of your squad-mates individually. This allows you to sneak up to the edge of an encounter to get the first move and even spend a turn using buff skills before you attack. You have to guess at where exactly that edge is, though, so that's a little frustrating.
The other additions are in the cyber-world. There are stealth segments with enemies that move on set routes scanning areas. Fortunately they actually highlight the tiles they're scanning, so you can clearly see what's going on. Still, the general control scheme of Shadowrun is an awkward one for stealth, especially real-time, because you control your avatar by clicking on tiles and watching them take whatever they calculate is the shortest route to where you said to go, which might cut through an area you didn't expect. I also occasionally had instances where the game didn't seem to register my click at all and I got caught as a result. :P
Finally, there's a hacking minigame to get at the prizes in the cyber-world. It's a little unintuitive, but not hard once you've muddled through it once. First you have to memorize and repeat sequences on a number pad, which adds time to the leeway you have in the next segment -- you can forego the remainder of this challenge at any point, as it goes from sequences 4 to 8 digits long. Then you're presented with about a dozen sequences of strange characters while a display above them briefly flashes random bits of the correct sequence. The trick is to calmly latch onto the first character or two they give you, take a look through the given sequences to see which ones match, and then return to watching the blips for more clues, rather than trying to catch and remember all the blips at once. It's not terribly hard once you pick up this discipline.
Bottom line? Pretty much exactly what you'd expect from the series. Get it if you like tactical RPGs.