Ninja Burger delivers to Midna and Wolf!Link
Arctic Mayhem by Black Ace
Hi all. It's been another fairly quiet month for me. My family had another birthday celebration, this time for my Dad and my Grandma. Not much else to divulge in terms of RL stuff.
I made decent progress in Forgotten Gates this month, though not quite as much as I'd hoped. I thought I might be able to put out a new version of the demo, but it was not to be. What I did get done was finishing Shemri's skills, designing a couple more guard rooms, and mostly implementing a new enemy type: moblins. I'd been using Gerudo guards for testing the guard rooms, but I figured moblins would fit better with the forest theme which is currently our only dungeon type. X)
I also figured out (I think) the cause of an occasional bug I was seeing with DynParams. It would sometimes crash the game with a memory access error during dungeon generation. It turns out there were some map events set to run as parallel processing -- I'd changed things to use a single parallel processing common event which calls everything that needs to be done, but I forgot to update some of the map events accordingly. Nothing really happened in these events, so it didn't affect much...unless they happened to be started right after a @dynparams_overwrite_next comment command in some other part of the code. :P So I updated those map events and hopefully that should be the end of that bug. I'd like to update DynParams so that errors like that can't happen, but I haven't been able to figure out a way to detect when parallel process or other occurrences cause interruptions in the script execution. e.ea
Last Saturday my game night group FINALLY turned out in enough numbers for Ninja Burger RPG. n.n We made a delivery in the Twilight Princess-era Zelda world, to Midna and Wolf!Link. Along the way we fought some common Zelda enemies, navigated some tricky terrain (including Heiress von Heirington managing to float up a cliff using a giant gum bubble), and clashed with the mischievous Skull Kid.
Splatoon 3:
Heeeeere we go again. :) Splatoon 3 is pretty much exactly what you'd expect -- more or less the same as Splatoon 2, just with some new stages and weapons and such. So, let's talk about what's new! The weapon featured most on advertisements and cover art is the tri-stringer, a bow-like weapon. The way it works mechanically is a little unintuitive: you can do (relatively) quick, weak shots in a spread of three close to yourself, or you can hold the fire button to pull those shots together into a somewhat stronger long-range shot. If you charge it fully (which is still quicker than most charger-type weapons), it'll plant a little bomb at the point of impact, further increasing the damage potential if the target doesn't manage to get away. The result is a weapon that can be used at either short or long range, but is easily outshined by the more dedicated weapons within their own favored range. e.ea I haven't learned to make effective use of it, and I doubt I will. X)
Then there's the splatana wiper. As you might guess from the name, this weapon is held like a sword, but it actually fires horizontal "slice" shots at about the same range as the standard splattershot and being a little easier to hit with. The downside? The rate of fire is only about 4 shots per second at best, and it still takes 4 hits to score a KO. You can also charge a shot for a vertical slice that's stronger and travels farther, and it's a very quick charge, but still not enough for a one-hit KO...unless you manage to do it at point-blank range and hit with both the shot and the blade itself, thus somewhat justifying the whole katana theme. X) It's very tricky to pull that off in a chaotic fight against moving targets that are making your screen shake with their own shots, though.
How about the story mode? Well, it's a mix of what the last couple story modes were like and the Octo Expansion from Splatoon 2. A good number of the stages are special challenges more than lengthy traversals, and you're often given a choice between two or three weapons to take into them. Also, all the secret collectibles have been moved out of the stages themselves and into the hub world, which is a tad disappointing to me. There are still secrets in the stages that will give you some extra power eggs, but you'll have more of that currency than you need easily by the end, especially if you're thorough enough to play all the stages. Oh, and the story itself? Goofy and hardly important as usual, although you do learn early on that DJ Octavio isn't behind the disappearance of the Great Zapfish this time. >o>
Getting back to the online competition aspect of the game, there's the usual Turf War mode and the much more lucrative Anarchy Battles (which are really the same as Ranked Battles from before). They've also split Anarchy Battles into Series and Open, but that only changes the reward structure. In Series, you pay an amount of rank points to enter, then you do battles until you win five or lose three, whichever comes first. You're then rewarded based on your performance. It's a little scary to pay the steep entrance fee, but getting even 1 win before you end the series almost pays for it on its own, and unless you really lose a lot more often than you win, you'll advance quicker on average by playing Series. A more meaningful change is that you don't have separate rankings for the game's different Anarchy Battle types (namely Splat Zones, Tower Control, Rainmaker, and Clam Blitz). You have a single ranking for all of them, so if you really wanted to, you could just play when your favorite type is available. Also, for veterans of Splatoon 2 they gave the option of starting at a higher rank based on their existing play data. In my case, as somebody who pretty much climbed as high as the rankings went in Splatoon 2, it started me off at B-.
How about Splatfests? :D They're still around, but now there are THREE teams for each event. The first one divided players along their response to this question: Which would you choose to bring with you to a deserted island, gear, grub, or fun? I reluctantly gave the honest and practical answer of "gear", knowing that in past Splatfests, the less popular side has often won (I have a theory that a lot of the most expert players purposely choose the side they think will lose the popular vote, just so they can have the satisfaction of swinging the result with their wins). Well, turns out they've changed up the scoring system a bit. First, even the week leading up to the actual Splatfest counts, with the team collecting the most conch shells by playing matches winning 10 points (Team Fun in this case, where I suspect the zealots congregated). That's almost as much a matter of just playing a lot rather than winning. Then, the team that was most popular got 10 points (Team Gear, as I expected). Finally, there's the actual Splatfest wins...but they split this into two categories, Open Battles and Pro Battles. I'm not sure what the difference between them is -- I mostly did Pro Battles myself, and due to this self-selection, ended up against tougher opponents and didn't do as well as I'd have liked. X) But in the end, Team Gear took Open Battles while Team Fun took Pro Battles (sorry Team Grub, you're all outta luck at 0 points). A tie? NO, because Open Battles was worth 15 points while Pro Battles was worth 10! @.@ You'd think it'd be the other way around if anything, but that's how they decided to do it. Team Gear FTW.
One final thing I'd like to mention is that they came up with some new money sinks to keep players busy. X) Before, you spent your cash on clothing and weapons, and if you were practically-minded you could almost ignore the clothing -- you technically only need one shirt, shoes, and hat with any given ability you might want to emphasize. Well, now you don't even need money for the weapons -- you use tickets specifically granted for Sheldon's shop. But instead, you can splurge your regular cash on decorations for your locker! :D That's right, they have a locker area where you can arrange clothing, weapons, stickers, and various geegaws to SHOW YOUR PERSONALITY! Nevermind that most players will very rarely bother looking at anybody's locker and it has zero gameplay effect, buying knick-knacks is probably the biggest long-term expense for collectors in this game, especially if you care to get MULTIPLES of things. Most of them are fairly cheap compared to the clothes, but a few are ridiculously pricey, and there are tons of them. There's also a gacha machine in the game lobby that dispenses little rewards, including titles you can use on your placard that shows at the beginning of each match (at least somebody actually SEES that reliably). It costs a moderate 5000 coins for the first pull each day then jumps up to a whopping 30,000. Finally, you can spend cash to upgrade the "star power" of the clothes you already have. For clothes having less than 3 secondary ability slots, this will bump up the number of slots, giving you a way (albeit an expensive one) to upgrade clothing you really like the look of if you missed the Splatfests and can't gather super sea snails for the purpose. Other than that, it just increases your rate of earning XP on those clothes. Not your general XP that applies to your character mind you, but the XP of the clothes themselves, which determines how quickly you earn secondary abilities. Maybe handy if you really want to farm ability chunks, but otherwise I don't see much practical point in it.
Bottom line? It's yet another Splatoon game, get it if you like the series and want to continue playing the latest.
Click to viewHi all. It's been another fairly quiet month for me. My family had another birthday celebration, this time for my Dad and my Grandma. Not much else to divulge in terms of RL stuff.
I made decent progress in Forgotten Gates this month, though not quite as much as I'd hoped. I thought I might be able to put out a new version of the demo, but it was not to be. What I did get done was finishing Shemri's skills, designing a couple more guard rooms, and mostly implementing a new enemy type: moblins. I'd been using Gerudo guards for testing the guard rooms, but I figured moblins would fit better with the forest theme which is currently our only dungeon type. X)
I also figured out (I think) the cause of an occasional bug I was seeing with DynParams. It would sometimes crash the game with a memory access error during dungeon generation. It turns out there were some map events set to run as parallel processing -- I'd changed things to use a single parallel processing common event which calls everything that needs to be done, but I forgot to update some of the map events accordingly. Nothing really happened in these events, so it didn't affect much...unless they happened to be started right after a @dynparams_overwrite_next comment command in some other part of the code. :P So I updated those map events and hopefully that should be the end of that bug. I'd like to update DynParams so that errors like that can't happen, but I haven't been able to figure out a way to detect when parallel process or other occurrences cause interruptions in the script execution. e.ea
Last Saturday my game night group FINALLY turned out in enough numbers for Ninja Burger RPG. n.n We made a delivery in the Twilight Princess-era Zelda world, to Midna and Wolf!Link. Along the way we fought some common Zelda enemies, navigated some tricky terrain (including Heiress von Heirington managing to float up a cliff using a giant gum bubble), and clashed with the mischievous Skull Kid.
Splatoon 3:
Heeeeere we go again. :) Splatoon 3 is pretty much exactly what you'd expect -- more or less the same as Splatoon 2, just with some new stages and weapons and such. So, let's talk about what's new! The weapon featured most on advertisements and cover art is the tri-stringer, a bow-like weapon. The way it works mechanically is a little unintuitive: you can do (relatively) quick, weak shots in a spread of three close to yourself, or you can hold the fire button to pull those shots together into a somewhat stronger long-range shot. If you charge it fully (which is still quicker than most charger-type weapons), it'll plant a little bomb at the point of impact, further increasing the damage potential if the target doesn't manage to get away. The result is a weapon that can be used at either short or long range, but is easily outshined by the more dedicated weapons within their own favored range. e.ea I haven't learned to make effective use of it, and I doubt I will. X)
Then there's the splatana wiper. As you might guess from the name, this weapon is held like a sword, but it actually fires horizontal "slice" shots at about the same range as the standard splattershot and being a little easier to hit with. The downside? The rate of fire is only about 4 shots per second at best, and it still takes 4 hits to score a KO. You can also charge a shot for a vertical slice that's stronger and travels farther, and it's a very quick charge, but still not enough for a one-hit KO...unless you manage to do it at point-blank range and hit with both the shot and the blade itself, thus somewhat justifying the whole katana theme. X) It's very tricky to pull that off in a chaotic fight against moving targets that are making your screen shake with their own shots, though.
How about the story mode? Well, it's a mix of what the last couple story modes were like and the Octo Expansion from Splatoon 2. A good number of the stages are special challenges more than lengthy traversals, and you're often given a choice between two or three weapons to take into them. Also, all the secret collectibles have been moved out of the stages themselves and into the hub world, which is a tad disappointing to me. There are still secrets in the stages that will give you some extra power eggs, but you'll have more of that currency than you need easily by the end, especially if you're thorough enough to play all the stages. Oh, and the story itself? Goofy and hardly important as usual, although you do learn early on that DJ Octavio isn't behind the disappearance of the Great Zapfish this time. >o>
Getting back to the online competition aspect of the game, there's the usual Turf War mode and the much more lucrative Anarchy Battles (which are really the same as Ranked Battles from before). They've also split Anarchy Battles into Series and Open, but that only changes the reward structure. In Series, you pay an amount of rank points to enter, then you do battles until you win five or lose three, whichever comes first. You're then rewarded based on your performance. It's a little scary to pay the steep entrance fee, but getting even 1 win before you end the series almost pays for it on its own, and unless you really lose a lot more often than you win, you'll advance quicker on average by playing Series. A more meaningful change is that you don't have separate rankings for the game's different Anarchy Battle types (namely Splat Zones, Tower Control, Rainmaker, and Clam Blitz). You have a single ranking for all of them, so if you really wanted to, you could just play when your favorite type is available. Also, for veterans of Splatoon 2 they gave the option of starting at a higher rank based on their existing play data. In my case, as somebody who pretty much climbed as high as the rankings went in Splatoon 2, it started me off at B-.
How about Splatfests? :D They're still around, but now there are THREE teams for each event. The first one divided players along their response to this question: Which would you choose to bring with you to a deserted island, gear, grub, or fun? I reluctantly gave the honest and practical answer of "gear", knowing that in past Splatfests, the less popular side has often won (I have a theory that a lot of the most expert players purposely choose the side they think will lose the popular vote, just so they can have the satisfaction of swinging the result with their wins). Well, turns out they've changed up the scoring system a bit. First, even the week leading up to the actual Splatfest counts, with the team collecting the most conch shells by playing matches winning 10 points (Team Fun in this case, where I suspect the zealots congregated). That's almost as much a matter of just playing a lot rather than winning. Then, the team that was most popular got 10 points (Team Gear, as I expected). Finally, there's the actual Splatfest wins...but they split this into two categories, Open Battles and Pro Battles. I'm not sure what the difference between them is -- I mostly did Pro Battles myself, and due to this self-selection, ended up against tougher opponents and didn't do as well as I'd have liked. X) But in the end, Team Gear took Open Battles while Team Fun took Pro Battles (sorry Team Grub, you're all outta luck at 0 points). A tie? NO, because Open Battles was worth 15 points while Pro Battles was worth 10! @.@ You'd think it'd be the other way around if anything, but that's how they decided to do it. Team Gear FTW.
One final thing I'd like to mention is that they came up with some new money sinks to keep players busy. X) Before, you spent your cash on clothing and weapons, and if you were practically-minded you could almost ignore the clothing -- you technically only need one shirt, shoes, and hat with any given ability you might want to emphasize. Well, now you don't even need money for the weapons -- you use tickets specifically granted for Sheldon's shop. But instead, you can splurge your regular cash on decorations for your locker! :D That's right, they have a locker area where you can arrange clothing, weapons, stickers, and various geegaws to SHOW YOUR PERSONALITY! Nevermind that most players will very rarely bother looking at anybody's locker and it has zero gameplay effect, buying knick-knacks is probably the biggest long-term expense for collectors in this game, especially if you care to get MULTIPLES of things. Most of them are fairly cheap compared to the clothes, but a few are ridiculously pricey, and there are tons of them. There's also a gacha machine in the game lobby that dispenses little rewards, including titles you can use on your placard that shows at the beginning of each match (at least somebody actually SEES that reliably). It costs a moderate 5000 coins for the first pull each day then jumps up to a whopping 30,000. Finally, you can spend cash to upgrade the "star power" of the clothes you already have. For clothes having less than 3 secondary ability slots, this will bump up the number of slots, giving you a way (albeit an expensive one) to upgrade clothing you really like the look of if you missed the Splatfests and can't gather super sea snails for the purpose. Other than that, it just increases your rate of earning XP on those clothes. Not your general XP that applies to your character mind you, but the XP of the clothes themselves, which determines how quickly you earn secondary abilities. Maybe handy if you really want to farm ability chunks, but otherwise I don't see much practical point in it.
Bottom line? It's yet another Splatoon game, get it if you like the series and want to continue playing the latest.