Looks like my eye problems aren't done plaguing me yet. It's nothing to write about here in detail, but I've developed some form of depression as a side effect. As such I will be taking a break from writing in this blog until further notice. I hope to be back when the problem has been resolved, but I'm not sure about anything right now. Until later, Torn out.
13.08.17
So I managed to play through Monolith today. Monolith is a top-down shooter where you clear rooms and avoid enemy bullets. It's pretty much exactly Binding of Isaac made into a bullet hell game. Honestly, for as long as it lasted, I really liked it more than The Binding of Isaac. Your movement is very responsive, all attacks are well defined - the gameplay is tight. The aesthetics match the music perfectly and create a very "old" feel, I guess. Not that people ever stopped making games with these kinds of graphics, but I digress, I loved the visuals and sounds.
"Wait, Torn, you're not actually saying this game is like The Binding of Isaac, but better?" No, no, sadly it is not. What this game really lacks is content, as is always the case these days. I don't know if people get bored or run out of ideas, but they can really make great game mechanics, and then not add any meat to it all. But this issue isn't really specific to this game.
So, in conclusion, I liked this game. I wouldn't really recommend it because it hasn't got enough content and is over too soon, but it's worth your time if you get a chance to play it.
12.08.17
I won't be playing this, as I already have a couple such games on mobile, but Draw Puzzle looks like a nice relaxing game. Draw lines, watch pictures happen. You're not actually the one making these pictures in these kinds of games, but since you're the one drawing the lines, it feels like you are, and it's always a nice feeling to make something that looks good. =)
11.08.17
I managed to hurt my eye yesterday and as such I will spend less time looking at a monitor for the next several days. I hope for it to be mostly fine by next week.
10.08.17
Oh look, the first game in the latest entry to The Legend of Heroes series is on Steam: Trails of Cold Steel. I didn't really like Trails in the Sky when it released in English a few years ago, but since it was originally a 2004 game, I'm willing to give the newer one a try. Maybe 9 years of additional experience will have improved things. The Legend of Heroes series is a turn-based strategy type of JRPGs. This latest entry is finally in proper 3D, which is nice.
09.08.17
I don't know why I feel reluctant to start with another game. I'll never finish my backlog at this rate. I played some Factorio today. That was about all.
08.08.17
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I believe that what I said about the game yesterday is correct, except for the "not enough content" part. I think the actual word I was looking for was "shallow". There's an okay amount of content, but as I explained, it doesn't offer enough possibilities as a whole.
07.08.17
I started with Monster Slayers today. It is, as the description states, a deck-building rogue-like. You start off with a class that determines your starting deck. You have HP, MP, and AP as resource pools, and cards that use your resource pools to decrease the enemy's resource pools - mainly their HP. As the game progresses you can upgrade and delete your cards as well as add new ones. Battles are fought 1v1 in rapidly increasing difficulty and you can buy permanent upgrades that persist through deaths.
I don't usually give a game's full feature list. When I do, it's probably because I wish to point out that that's all there is to that game. Now, generally I'd follow that up by calling the game shit, but I'm not going to do that here. I quite liked Monster Slayers. Despite being turn-based, it feels quite fast, and instead of the usual "attack the enemy once, enemy attacks you once" combat these kinds of games provide, this one had a lot of focus put into attack chains, to chain together lots of cards. The longest card chain I got was 11 cards, and this mechanic feels really, really good. The progression system also keeps you playing for a long time, as I'm not even nearly halfway through after 5 hours.
But the problem is mainly the lack of content. This combines with the fact that the game doesn't require all too much thinking, and suddenly you feel like you're on a treadmill, except you're not even getting any exercise done. I would've loved features like bigger parties, bigger groups of enemies, cards that depend on one another a little bit more... I don't know... something. I really wanted to like this game more, but playing it literally made me nauseous. I've no idea why, but it consistently happens when doing repetitive low-effort tasks for a long time.
So, would I recommend this game? I'd recommend to try this game, it's really fun for the first couple of hours. But ultimately I can't say it's a good game. Great idea, great execution, just not enough content and possibilities.
06.08.17
Fully completing Danganronpa 2 requires a shocking amount of time, possibly another full day after completing the main game. Mainly that maxing your Island mode relationship with each character takes a ridiculous amount of in-game days, which requires multiple playthroughs. The light novel took me only about 1-2 hours, and I really enjoyed it. But I skipped maxing my relationship, instead opting to view the dialogue from other people's playthroughs. So that's not entirely the reason why I still didn't start a new game today.
I spent more hours than I care to admit thinking up a new formula with which to give Steam's games a proper rating based on their review percentage and the number of reviews. It took a few tries to come up with something that'd at least seem better than what I previously had. Basically, what I wanted was something that would: a) Estimate the result closer to 50% the fewer reviews it had. b) Get ever more slowly closer to its actual rating as its number of reviews increased but never quite reach it.
I previously used Laplace smoothing and took the base 10 logarithm of the number of reviews so that it would approach the given rating much, much slower than regular Laplace smoothing. α = 0.5, β = 1.0 I had two problems with this. The first one was that I didn't actually understand what this formula was doing. Just that it was moving ratings with a low sample size closer to α / β, ratings with a high sample size closer to the real rating, and that I could control its "adjustment intensity" by increasing or decreasing α and β or the base of the logarithm. The other problem was that it gave highly rated games with a low sample size too good of a rating, and if I were to turn the knob to value the sample size more, then it would start to over-value the sample size on ratings with a high sample size.
So I sat down and started to make a formula from scratch that would fill the criteria mentioned above. After tweaking the numbers I settled on "A game with 10x the amount of reviews should have 2x the score certainty." Alternatively "...half the score uncertainty." would describe it better. So if a game with 1 review had an uncertainty of 100% (certainty of 0%), then something with 10 reviews would have half that uncertainty - 50%, 100 reviews - 25%, and so on. And what certainty means is just how big of a portion of the final rating would be the actual rating, and the remaining would be 50%. Putting that all together: r - (r - 0.5) * 2-log10(a + 1), where r is the rating and a is the amount of reviews. This definitely emphasizes the amount of ratings more when there aren't many of them, and the actual rating itself when there are. It also has two "knobs" to turn, should I want to adjust it, instead of just the one the previous formula had.
But, uh, I'll get around to a game by the name of Monster Slayers tomorrow.
But, uh, I'll get around to a game by the name of Monster Slayers tomorrow.
05.08.17
Nothing really new today. I cleaned various things today, including my computer and my Steam library. Basically I finally gave up on trying to play Torchlight II with my friends since the netcode was not on our side and people and enemies weren't synced at all. Also tried Shardbound which wasn't any interesting, just another card game, mostly a Duelyst clone.
Though I completed Danganronpa 2's Story mode, it seems there's a little more story there in the form of an Island mode where I can finish learning about everyone through interacting with them (that sounds kind of weird, actually), as well as apparently a light novel that'll take a couple of hours. I'm probably not going to 100% it, but I will spend a few more hours on it.
04.08.17
It would seem Thursdays are the most popular day for releasing games, followed shortly by Friday, then by Wednesday a little farther off. Any other days only have a small fraction of games released on them in comparison. There's about a whopping 50 games released on both Thursday and Friday, with maybe about 40 on Wednesday, and 60 on the others combined, for a total of about 200 games every week. That is honestly a sickening amount of games, the vast majority of which are utter garbage. I fear the day when there are more games than people care to browse through, and some good ones end up getting lost. But for today, we can still enjoy Steam reviews to give us a decent quality standard.
With that said, here's two new games I'm barely interested in.
Immortal Planet - some sort of action-RPG.
The Darkside Detective - a comedic point-and-click adventure.
I also finally finished Danganronpa 2. I think it was a nice sequel to the first one (sorry for the spoiler), but generally very similar to it, with perhaps small improvements in various places. I'd still question if its uniqueness warranted the clearly lacking quality in certain, mostly visual, aspects, but I guess they did a good job given the resources they had? The ending got a little bit weird for me, but I ultimately like the conclusion, even if it's a little far-fetched. I guess I'll be looking forward to the next episode and perhaps I'll even try the spin-off titles.
Overall, it's clearly flawed in some parts of the story, and the art style can be very uncomfortable, but I'd still recommend it if you like murder mysteries and/or pseudo-VNs.
I also finally finished Danganronpa 2. I think it was a nice sequel to the first one (sorry for the spoiler), but generally very similar to it, with perhaps small improvements in various places. I'd still question if its uniqueness warranted the clearly lacking quality in certain, mostly visual, aspects, but I guess they did a good job given the resources they had? The ending got a little bit weird for me, but I ultimately like the conclusion, even if it's a little far-fetched. I guess I'll be looking forward to the next episode and perhaps I'll even try the spin-off titles.
Overall, it's clearly flawed in some parts of the story, and the art style can be very uncomfortable, but I'd still recommend it if you like murder mysteries and/or pseudo-VNs.
03.08.17
Uh, darn, I wasn't being productive today. I mean, playing games isn't very productive in the first place, but I wasn't even managing to do that much.
02.08.17
Oh hey, Pyre released. It's from the creators of Bastion and Transistor, the latter of which I really should get around to playing. It's also got pretty good reviews. I'll let it be a surprise what exactly the game is about, but it seems to have: a) a lot of story, b) action-based games instead of lethal combat, c) a branching story. Any or all of those might not be entirely true, but that's the impression I got. I'll probably wait with this until I finish Transistor, whenever that'll be.
01.08.17
I spent today resting from the fatigue of working dawn-to-dusk for three days straight. Played various games with friends... nothing noteworthy though. Will probably get back to my routine shortly enough.
31.07.17
Day 3 was mostly spent on polish and making the levels out of the building blocks we already had. In the end we scrapped having the flashlight consume power, and we didn't quite have time for making UI for the tutorial. The enemy AI was also underwhelming. But overall, I think the finished game was a little better and a little more complete than last time around.
Here's a link to the Ludum Dare page, if you're interested in giving it a try. It's a 3-day game made by non-professionals, so it's clearly nothing good, but I can't just not link something that I myself helped make.
30.07.17
Day 2 was spent mostly on making these various missing interactions so that everything would behave as expected. Deadly spikes and bullets, enemies that could be killed / destroyed, UI for the ammunition, various triggers for events and some moving parts like platforms and doors. Some of these less-crucial interactions also got pushed into day 3, but I can't quite remember in hindsight what those were.
We also got the lighting system in and the first batch of levels that were supposed to act as a sort of introduction. Most of the art and animation was also put in during this day.
29.07.17
Most of our team members weren't too enthusiastic about suggesting game ideas. In the end, like last LD, the idea we ultimately picked wasn't one that I liked. I guess it can't be helped in a team, but it feels kinda bad when you can't really make what you want even when working on such a small thing as a Ludum Dare game.
We settled on a platformer where the environment was mostly pitch black and you had a limited source of power cells that you found in the levels that you could use either on a flashlight so you could see where you're going, or as ammo for a gun, to kill enemy threats.
My suspicions about one of my teammates were justified, as he was mostly useless at best, distracting us from working at worst. Excluding him, we had two programmers and two 2D artists. Still, by the end of the first day, we had managed to finish character movement, some platforms, and some enemies. So while there wasn't much interaction between anything, things could move around properly.
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