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.

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.

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.

28.07.17

I haven't been feeling super great about things in general for the past few days. I'm not sure what that's about and the timing coinciding with Ludum Dare isn't a nice surprise. Maybe they're related, who knows. So the mood's a little less pleasant this time around.

The local LD competition I'm participating in did their team formation today. In hindsight, I can blame myself for jumping into a team early, but I'm not entirely satisfied with the people who got added to the team I was in afterwards. I guess I'll find out how it turns out in the coming days, but one of them claimed to have no experience in any of the fields relating to making a game (programming, art, etc.), and one of them is apparently late to arrive. Furthermore, we were expected to present our initial game idea by 13:00, but most of the team said that they can't really arrive before 12:00, giving us way too little time for such a crucial foundation for the next three days. But I'm trying to keep my attitude positive and I hope to be proven wrong, as usual.

On another topic, partially related to what I mentioned a few days ago, that I've been more critical towards accepting games... I looked back at the reason I started looking through all of Steam's games and trying as many as I could... And I couldn't really remember it. I guess I was maybe afraid of missing out on any potential good releases? But now I feel like the only actual good releases are games I'd already hear about one way or the other. Maybe I just wanted to play games to not be bored? Well, a lot of the games I choose right now are indeed boring, if only offering some variety from the usual stuff I play. And at the end of it all, my favorites are always the kinds of games that are made over a lot of time, with a lot of people, and with at least some advertising behind it, so there's no way I'd ever accidentally miss any of those. And that's normal, because more time and more people can just make more content and more quality. I do enjoy a good indie every now and then, and while it's true my top 60 contains some less known games, most of them, especially the ones near the top, are still super popular. I just feel like I'm not helping anyone else by trying to find these games and that I'm not helping myself either, because, collectively, people have already done this job for me for the large majority.
But the silver lining is that the less games I add to be tried out, the faster I get to finishing everything I have set out to try already. I'll eventually either run out of games, get bored, and repeat the cycle, remember my goal and start filling my queue again, or find happiness in some other place. I may not have a clear goal in mind, but I'm moving towards it, whatever it is.

27.07.17

I'm approaching the end of Danganronpa 2 after clearing yet another chapter. The plot thickens, as usual, and I'm not too hopeful that they'll answer many of the questions that they've created about the story before it ends for this episode. But hey, there's already the next, I just need to wait for it to be localized.

Also Ludum Dare is coming up this weekend, so I'll be occupied with that Friday - Monday in all likelihood. No new games then, but do expect a write-up of what I did, during or after the event.

26.07.17

I went ahead and labelled a bunch of posts either "thoughts" or "ramblings". Basically, "thoughts" are posts where I talk about games in a more general sense instead of the typical game-specific opinions I give. "ramblings" are kind of the same, except the label is used when I don't feel like I actually had anything worthwhile to say.

It's been a while since I've added any games, as mentioned just yesterday, so I got an entirety of two extra games today.
Tangledeep claims to be roguelike that is inspired by classic RPGs. It does actually look more like an RPG, and as such I'm not really sure what would make it a roguelike. There are also no negative reviews at all for me to try to understand what could potentially be wrong with the game. So, I guess I'll have to try it myself.
Kingsway is something I've heard about a little bit more, perhaps because of its rather unique gameplay mechanic where the game is built like an OS. Apparently it's terribly shallow beneath that unique cover, but I've decided to try it regardless.

25.07.17

I'm almost certainly becoming more critical towards the games I see on Steam, and what I add to my list. This may have been apparent from the drought of new games being added. I'd like to think of this as a good thing, meaning I spend less time on stuff that's bad, and more time on stuff that's good. Not to mention it helps me catch up with the list instead of letting it slip ever further away. But this begs another question. What's the point of this at all then? I originally wanted to not miss any of the so-called hidden gems by also looking through many of the less popular games on Steam. Well, now that my program is taking care of what I am nearly certain is absolute rubbish, there are very few of these unpopular games left, and even then I rarely decide I want to play them. Maybe this is a good thing? Maybe, through looking through tens of thousands of games, I have finally confirmed on my own that this system Steam has is working. That good games are going to have lots of ratings, and that they are going to have lots of good and highly rated ratings. This of course means that good games surface and are very easy to find, while the rest is left in the depths of the unknown and unfound, as it should be. Wouldn't that be wonderful. Still, I'll continue what I'm doing.

PS. I'm starting to run out of games that aren't in Early Access, but this will be a topic for when that actually happens.

As per a friend's request, I played a few games of the newly released Gigantic with them. As I didn't and probably wouldn't have picked this game on my own, I don't feel too strong an urge to say much about it, but... It's a little something between a third-person shooter and a MOBA. Think Paragon without the laning and the minions. MOBAs may be saturated, but it still manages to scratch an itch that some people may not have gotten satisfied from other games. It has no laning or minions so it's not purely a traditional MOBA, and is indeed probably closest to Overwatch. Still, it's neither first person nor strictly a shooter. Honestly, you'd probably still be better off playing Overwatch if you like these kinds of things, but if you want something that's like Overwatch, while not actually being Overwatch, go ahead and try Gigantic. I found no obvious flaws with it, and it would've probably been a big hit, but with the giant known as Overwatch, the bar is simply set higher these days.

24.07.17

Progress, progress, but not much I can really say that isn't a spoiler. I'm still quite enjoying the story, but it seems they felt the need to be overly fanciful at times, which is actually making the story a little too ridiculous to immediately believe. It's a shame, because there's this conflict between the murder mysteries that they're trying to make highly logical and then certain other parts of the game which are just plain impossible in reality. I feel that these small flaws pile up and subtract from what could be an excellent game (or story, if you'd rather call it that), making it simply a good game.

23.07.17

I spent the morning on this little thing called V. It's a game about deciding whether the color on the screen matches the word on the screen, but there are, of course, lots of little twists to it. The game's free, so I'd recommend you try it, even if it only provides an hour or few of entertainment.

PS. Check out the colorblind settings.

22.07.17

I found this cute little boss rush game named She Save that will probably take no more than a literal hour once I try to play it. It's apparently not very good and I'm not expecting anything, but it's just one hour.

21.07.17

Some more Danganronpa and Terraria. Both are probably going to take a while, so I don't have much to say in the meanwhile.

20.07.17

Oh shit, it's Edmund McMillens next game, The End Is Nigh. Lots of comparisons to Super Meat Boy here, but it describedly plays more like an adventure platformer. Well, I simply have to try it.

I started playing Danganronpa 2 today, and it's proving to be both slower and a bit more interesting than the previous installment. I'd credit the latter to a more thought-through plot that is less predictable. Oh, Danganronpa is sort of like a VN murder mystery. While there is actual gameplay and not only clicking through the thing, it's still mostly text, so it's not really a game.

19.07.17

I gave Hearthlands a brief try. It's a city-builder game that also incorporates resource management and some RTS elements. I can't say I found it particularly bad, but it's trying to do a tad too many things without putting much effort into making any one of those work well. With the amount of high-quality games of this genre already out there, the niche is kind of full and you need to put in a whole lot of effort to surpass them in even just one aspect. This game rather does the opposite and as such completely pales in comparison. It's just comparatively boring and I wouldn't recommend playing it.