Christmas 2013
Meet the Cores
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Hi all, happy new year. My holiday time is going very enjoyably, as typically happens. :) I'm up at my Grandma's place along with my aunts and immediate family, including my little brother's fiance. We've been playing lots of games, particularly said little brother and his fiance with me. At first we were trying to complete the run of Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles which we started last year, but my memory card got corrupted again and the game deleted our save file. x.x I'm going to have to get a new one. After that we picked up New Super Mario Bros. U, which we'd gotten through the first two worlds of on a random Sunday, and finished it off in one day. Much quicker than an RPG, though that's not to say we didn't have our difficulties bumping into each other throughout the quest. X) Now we've started up Super Mario 3D Land, which was of course one of my Christmas gifts. I also got Pikmin 3, Rayman Legends, and Game & Wario, and on the 3DS front I got The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds and Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon. I should be set for a while. n.n
Progress in Forgotten Gates got a big boost this month thanks to the week after finals having almost nothing to do at work. X) The progress isn't anything particularly visible in the game, though, just code improvements and design decisions. I wrote functions for storing and retrieving compressed data with arbitrary "chunk sizes" like I mentioned last time, and updated various places in my code to make use of them. I also spent quite a lot of time in my Excel spreadsheet establishing functions to calculate the prices of various item types, which was a very interesting exercise of figuring out what it should look like algebraically (in a very simplified description, exponentially increasing cost as utility rises) and then tweaking the values that go into the formulas until the results looked reasonable. With that done, I'm trying to debug the dungeon generation code.
On NMR, I ran another scene for the What If? Switching Sides RP challenge. In this one, Noab took the role of a ruthless mercenary commander, another character named Onimitsu who is more or less on the good side of the fence normally joined him to crush a rebellion, and a spider-using nin called Meruin who is normally lawful evil played the hero. We used my experimental Conflict Resolution System again, which marked the first PvP trial of it. It seemed to take a little too long to me, which hopefully will be mitigated by a "tension level" mechanic I came up with to encourage higher-level attacks as the fight goes on.
Spelunky:
This game has a history similar to that of Cave Story, spookily enough considering the similarity in names. X) It started as a cult-sensation freeware game, then a "HD" version was developed for commercial sale. The premise of the game is that you are an intrepid explorer, a cartoonish fellow suggestive of Indiana Jones, and you are delving into an underground world full of treasures and danger. It's a 2D platformer with very little forgiveness for errors, giving you four health to start with and throwing some hazards at you which can take that much away at one shot or even kill you instantly regardless of how much health you manage to gather. The stages are randomly generated each time you play; I've read a couple articles on Gamasutra lately discussing whether such games should be termed Rogue-likes, Rogue-like-likes, Rogue-lites, procedural death labyrinths, etc. Whatever the case, the appeal of the game is that you can't win it by memorizing the layout; you can only gain a general mastery of the cave-exploring skills that make it theoretically possible to survive any given world the game might throw at you.
The deluxe version of Spelunky doesn't just involve nicer graphics and sound. It includes new monsters, new secret areas (including one that requires reaching what was the big secret area in the old version, beating the boss, and then foregoing the end reward to face an even tougher boss), and some subtle changes to the game mechanics, mostly making it easier (it's still plenty difficult). Ironically, one of the most addicting new features for hardcore gamers (which is Spelunky's target audience to begin with) is Internet leaderboards, especially for the daily challenge. While the game world is always random, it is generated from a number seed, so if you send that same seed to all players, they can all play the same world. Everyone is given only one chance at the daily challenge, though theoretically one could cheat by having different players (or even a single player with multiple accounts) explore the world first so you know what's coming. I tend to score between 100th and 300th place on most daily challenges, which is absurdly satisfying even though I don't even know any of the other players. X)
Bottom line? This game is not for the neophyte gamer, but it's deep fun for the expert. Definitely get it if you've got the chops, and now's a good time--Steam still has their holiday sale going on. ;)
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Click to viewHi all, happy new year. My holiday time is going very enjoyably, as typically happens. :) I'm up at my Grandma's place along with my aunts and immediate family, including my little brother's fiance. We've been playing lots of games, particularly said little brother and his fiance with me. At first we were trying to complete the run of Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles which we started last year, but my memory card got corrupted again and the game deleted our save file. x.x I'm going to have to get a new one. After that we picked up New Super Mario Bros. U, which we'd gotten through the first two worlds of on a random Sunday, and finished it off in one day. Much quicker than an RPG, though that's not to say we didn't have our difficulties bumping into each other throughout the quest. X) Now we've started up Super Mario 3D Land, which was of course one of my Christmas gifts. I also got Pikmin 3, Rayman Legends, and Game & Wario, and on the 3DS front I got The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds and Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon. I should be set for a while. n.n
Progress in Forgotten Gates got a big boost this month thanks to the week after finals having almost nothing to do at work. X) The progress isn't anything particularly visible in the game, though, just code improvements and design decisions. I wrote functions for storing and retrieving compressed data with arbitrary "chunk sizes" like I mentioned last time, and updated various places in my code to make use of them. I also spent quite a lot of time in my Excel spreadsheet establishing functions to calculate the prices of various item types, which was a very interesting exercise of figuring out what it should look like algebraically (in a very simplified description, exponentially increasing cost as utility rises) and then tweaking the values that go into the formulas until the results looked reasonable. With that done, I'm trying to debug the dungeon generation code.
On NMR, I ran another scene for the What If? Switching Sides RP challenge. In this one, Noab took the role of a ruthless mercenary commander, another character named Onimitsu who is more or less on the good side of the fence normally joined him to crush a rebellion, and a spider-using nin called Meruin who is normally lawful evil played the hero. We used my experimental Conflict Resolution System again, which marked the first PvP trial of it. It seemed to take a little too long to me, which hopefully will be mitigated by a "tension level" mechanic I came up with to encourage higher-level attacks as the fight goes on.
Spelunky:
This game has a history similar to that of Cave Story, spookily enough considering the similarity in names. X) It started as a cult-sensation freeware game, then a "HD" version was developed for commercial sale. The premise of the game is that you are an intrepid explorer, a cartoonish fellow suggestive of Indiana Jones, and you are delving into an underground world full of treasures and danger. It's a 2D platformer with very little forgiveness for errors, giving you four health to start with and throwing some hazards at you which can take that much away at one shot or even kill you instantly regardless of how much health you manage to gather. The stages are randomly generated each time you play; I've read a couple articles on Gamasutra lately discussing whether such games should be termed Rogue-likes, Rogue-like-likes, Rogue-lites, procedural death labyrinths, etc. Whatever the case, the appeal of the game is that you can't win it by memorizing the layout; you can only gain a general mastery of the cave-exploring skills that make it theoretically possible to survive any given world the game might throw at you.
The deluxe version of Spelunky doesn't just involve nicer graphics and sound. It includes new monsters, new secret areas (including one that requires reaching what was the big secret area in the old version, beating the boss, and then foregoing the end reward to face an even tougher boss), and some subtle changes to the game mechanics, mostly making it easier (it's still plenty difficult). Ironically, one of the most addicting new features for hardcore gamers (which is Spelunky's target audience to begin with) is Internet leaderboards, especially for the daily challenge. While the game world is always random, it is generated from a number seed, so if you send that same seed to all players, they can all play the same world. Everyone is given only one chance at the daily challenge, though theoretically one could cheat by having different players (or even a single player with multiple accounts) explore the world first so you know what's coming. I tend to score between 100th and 300th place on most daily challenges, which is absurdly satisfying even though I don't even know any of the other players. X)
Bottom line? This game is not for the neophyte gamer, but it's deep fun for the expert. Definitely get it if you've got the chops, and now's a good time--Steam still has their holiday sale going on. ;)