Life gets busy again
Spelunky won in 101 seconds by Spelunky God
This video will probably be just a mishmash of confusing images to anybody not familiar with the game, but what the hey, it's a crazy-impressive feat. n.n
Hi all. Things have definitely picked up again at work with the fall semester. I feel like, how did I ever find time to even keep up with log reviews? X) But I remember feeling like that in previous fall semesters, and I survived those okay.
In game dev, I made a few more fixes to the DynBattleDisplay plugin, and the plugin for re-implementing the Forgotten Gates battle system is slowly starting to take shape. I also made a plugin called DynBattlerChange which allows the manual transforming of enemies, something which in vanilla RM2K3 can only be done as behaviors which the enemies decide to take on their turn. It also has the capability to reposition the enemies as well, seeing as changing what the enemy is might make it necessary to move them, and while I was at it I threw in the ability to reposition heroes as well. I was hoping to release it before the end of the month, but the documentation is taking longer than I expected, and I also realized recently I need to add something to store data about which heroes have been repositioned when loading a saved game.
On NMR, I ran a scene for the NMR In Space RP challenge as Sousa. It was a Star Trek spoof, with the other participants choosing to take the roles of Captain, Security Chief, and Uniquely Lifelike Yet Still Clearly Non-Human Android. Sousa popped into the scene as a wizened monk with a curiousity about their culture and a casual disregard for the apparent laws of physics...and it dawned on the other players with a mix of delight and dread that they were essentially dealing with Q. >3 "S" contrived to bring a few confused Romulan scout fighters into the vicinity to observe Star Fleet's conflict with them, then when ship-to-ship combat started to get boring, he popped the pilots onto the bridge for a fist brawl. Eventually he decided to go observe Romulan culture for a while, taking the Romulans and their craft with him. Despite the chaotic nature of the scene and the fact it didn't give the other players much way to "win", only respond as best they could to S's whimsy, it was declared to have been an excellent scene by all involved. n.n
The Iwa plot about a cultish enemy force slaughtering people for an as-of-yet-unclear reason got another scene done. It involved the Iwa nin pretending to be a caravan trying to escape the country in order to draw out some of the foes who had been attacking travelers on the road. In my first pose of the scene, I indulged in the corniness of narratively pointing out that the bee-commanding Cherii was perfect for this, seeing as it was a sting operation. ;9 There was also a big scene for Kumo folk because the player of the Seven-Tails jinchuuriki decided to have her char killed off in the ending scene of the Recluse plot, so the bijuu had to be recaptured.
Lumino City:
Yay once again for Humble Bundles. :) This one comes from the "Leading Ladies" bundle, which is a collection of games which feature female protagonists (although their inclusion of Trine 2 is a bit of a stretch, as there's only one female amongst the three protagonists).
Lumino City is a point-and-click adventure game about a young girl trying to reach her grandfather, who was apparently kidnapped while she was downstairs getting some tea ready. In order to find him, she has to traverse the oddly-constructed Lumino City, of which her grandfather was once the handyman. Lots of things in the city are in poor working order since he hasn't been around to fix them up in a while, so the girl has to figure out how to repair them or otherwise negotiate passage with the residents in order to continue.
Lumino City's big hook is its graphical style, which not only looks unique, but was produced in a unique way. The game's environments and characters were actually physically constructed, mostly out of some sort of colored cardboard I think, and photographed. It gives the game a very cobbled-together feel, as though it's a playset for make-believe made by somebody who is artistically talented, but more interested in sparking the childish imagination than providing a convincing facsimile of something.
For the gameplay, this title focuses on puzzles, even more so than most point-and-click adventures. There's a bit of the find-X-and-use-on-Y stuff, but most of the puzzles really are straight-up PUZZLES presented in a single-screen package with only a thin fictional wrapper to excuse why solving it is necessary for the plot to progress. For example, the first puzzle was a padlock with buttons on it and arrows pointing from one button to another (most of them with arrows leading in several possible directions). As a computer scientist, I immediately recognized it as a "directional graph" and figured the goal was to find a "complete traversal", although it was simple enough that anybody could muddle through it eventually...if they guessed that what they were supposed to do is "press all the buttons by moving along the arrows without pressing any button twice". Most of the other puzzles are of a similar nature: place all the gears on the right spindles, reflect the light using mirrors at the right angles, follow the cryptic directions to dig up potatoes, etc. Intuitive math stuff.
So you might be thinking at this point that this sounds like a terrible game for all but puzzle fanatics to attempt. After all, even if you'd enjoy the majority of the puzzles in the game, at the first puzzle you run into which you can't understand you'd be stuck, right? Well, they actually included something rather interesting as an out for such situations. The little girl protagonist has her grandfather's handyman manual, which contains solutions for all of the puzzles in the game. It's still not as simple as cracking open the book and looking at the answer; the manual has over 1000 pages, most of which are just random diagrams and explanations in a foreign language. To look up the right page for a particular puzzle, you have to look in the table of contents...which gives the page numbers as arithmetic expressions involving objects in the scene where the puzzle takes place. X) For example, you might have to count the number of bushes and plug it into a formula that tells you to subtract 5 from that and then multiply by 11 (and it does get a little more complicated than that with parentheses and powers and such). So if you can't do basic plug-and-chug algebra even, you probably are beneath the game's target knowledge age demographic after all. ;)
Bottom line? A charming little point-and-click adventure game, though with more focus on puzzles than story. Get it if you enjoy stretching your brain.
Invisible, Inc.:
An interesting little tactical stealth game from the same studio that made Mark of the Ninja. Without spoiling too much, I'll say that this studio sure seems to like downer endings. X)
As a tiny bit of background, I once tried out X-COM: Enemy Unknown during a free weekend. I found it interesting, but not enjoyable enough to be worth investing in, especially since the last mission I did ended with a VIP getting killed by enemies that had JUST dropped into the stage with no chance for me to intervene. XD What does that have to do with Invisible, Inc.? From my limited experience, I would describe Invisible, Inc. as "the fun parts of X-COM". ;)
Invisible, Inc. is a turn-based stealth game in which you guide agents in exploring and plundering the bases of dystopian mega-corporations. Each agent gets a certain number of action points per turn, used to move, check around corners, etc. Naturally, you generally want them to avoid the attention of guards, security cameras, and the like, for which hiding behind cover is essential. There are some little nuances to it regarding how guards and robots react to different things, such as doors opening and agents moving in their peripheral vision, but it's mostly pretty straightforward as far as avoiding being found goes.
What gives the game more complexity is that there is a separate layer of gameplay having to do with hacking. Many of the devices in the game--security cameras, robots, safes, etc.--can be hacked by your company's A.I. to make things easier. Of course, hacking isn't free--it takes precious power to do it, power which primarily comes from terminals raided by your agents. Some devices are also protected by daemons which will trigger nasty effects when hacked, and unless you've invested in some way of scouting them out you don't know ahead of time what they will be.
Finally, there's a time pressure involved. The more turns you spend in a given stage, the higher the alert level will rise, and at certain thresholds bad things will happen--additional security cameras will activate, devices will be wrapped in an extra firewall layer, new guards will enter the building, etc. I'm not quite sure, but I think there's also a real-time clock involved--the game gives you 72 in-game hours for a regular campaign, most of which is eaten up by travel time between stages, but I think it also counts the time you spend pondering and executing your moves. In the map menu between stages, they even show you the remaining-time clock counting down, reminding you that stopping to think, while really quite small peanuts compared to the travel time, is not without cost.
With all that said, the game does have its share of frustrations. The stages are randomly generated, and the balancing of them doesn't feel great. Some stages can be swept almost unopposed, but others have clusters of sentinels that make it nearly impossible to get through an area without being detected. I've even seen a couple stages where a guard wandered into the room my agents started in on their very first turn, giving me almost no chance of dealing with them.
Bottom line? I don't think it'd be for everyone, but it's an engaging tactical puzzler for those who like that sort of thing and don't mind some occasional unfairness.
Click to viewThis video will probably be just a mishmash of confusing images to anybody not familiar with the game, but what the hey, it's a crazy-impressive feat. n.n
Hi all. Things have definitely picked up again at work with the fall semester. I feel like, how did I ever find time to even keep up with log reviews? X) But I remember feeling like that in previous fall semesters, and I survived those okay.
In game dev, I made a few more fixes to the DynBattleDisplay plugin, and the plugin for re-implementing the Forgotten Gates battle system is slowly starting to take shape. I also made a plugin called DynBattlerChange which allows the manual transforming of enemies, something which in vanilla RM2K3 can only be done as behaviors which the enemies decide to take on their turn. It also has the capability to reposition the enemies as well, seeing as changing what the enemy is might make it necessary to move them, and while I was at it I threw in the ability to reposition heroes as well. I was hoping to release it before the end of the month, but the documentation is taking longer than I expected, and I also realized recently I need to add something to store data about which heroes have been repositioned when loading a saved game.
On NMR, I ran a scene for the NMR In Space RP challenge as Sousa. It was a Star Trek spoof, with the other participants choosing to take the roles of Captain, Security Chief, and Uniquely Lifelike Yet Still Clearly Non-Human Android. Sousa popped into the scene as a wizened monk with a curiousity about their culture and a casual disregard for the apparent laws of physics...and it dawned on the other players with a mix of delight and dread that they were essentially dealing with Q. >3 "S" contrived to bring a few confused Romulan scout fighters into the vicinity to observe Star Fleet's conflict with them, then when ship-to-ship combat started to get boring, he popped the pilots onto the bridge for a fist brawl. Eventually he decided to go observe Romulan culture for a while, taking the Romulans and their craft with him. Despite the chaotic nature of the scene and the fact it didn't give the other players much way to "win", only respond as best they could to S's whimsy, it was declared to have been an excellent scene by all involved. n.n
The Iwa plot about a cultish enemy force slaughtering people for an as-of-yet-unclear reason got another scene done. It involved the Iwa nin pretending to be a caravan trying to escape the country in order to draw out some of the foes who had been attacking travelers on the road. In my first pose of the scene, I indulged in the corniness of narratively pointing out that the bee-commanding Cherii was perfect for this, seeing as it was a sting operation. ;9 There was also a big scene for Kumo folk because the player of the Seven-Tails jinchuuriki decided to have her char killed off in the ending scene of the Recluse plot, so the bijuu had to be recaptured.
Lumino City:
Yay once again for Humble Bundles. :) This one comes from the "Leading Ladies" bundle, which is a collection of games which feature female protagonists (although their inclusion of Trine 2 is a bit of a stretch, as there's only one female amongst the three protagonists).
Lumino City is a point-and-click adventure game about a young girl trying to reach her grandfather, who was apparently kidnapped while she was downstairs getting some tea ready. In order to find him, she has to traverse the oddly-constructed Lumino City, of which her grandfather was once the handyman. Lots of things in the city are in poor working order since he hasn't been around to fix them up in a while, so the girl has to figure out how to repair them or otherwise negotiate passage with the residents in order to continue.
Lumino City's big hook is its graphical style, which not only looks unique, but was produced in a unique way. The game's environments and characters were actually physically constructed, mostly out of some sort of colored cardboard I think, and photographed. It gives the game a very cobbled-together feel, as though it's a playset for make-believe made by somebody who is artistically talented, but more interested in sparking the childish imagination than providing a convincing facsimile of something.
For the gameplay, this title focuses on puzzles, even more so than most point-and-click adventures. There's a bit of the find-X-and-use-on-Y stuff, but most of the puzzles really are straight-up PUZZLES presented in a single-screen package with only a thin fictional wrapper to excuse why solving it is necessary for the plot to progress. For example, the first puzzle was a padlock with buttons on it and arrows pointing from one button to another (most of them with arrows leading in several possible directions). As a computer scientist, I immediately recognized it as a "directional graph" and figured the goal was to find a "complete traversal", although it was simple enough that anybody could muddle through it eventually...if they guessed that what they were supposed to do is "press all the buttons by moving along the arrows without pressing any button twice". Most of the other puzzles are of a similar nature: place all the gears on the right spindles, reflect the light using mirrors at the right angles, follow the cryptic directions to dig up potatoes, etc. Intuitive math stuff.
So you might be thinking at this point that this sounds like a terrible game for all but puzzle fanatics to attempt. After all, even if you'd enjoy the majority of the puzzles in the game, at the first puzzle you run into which you can't understand you'd be stuck, right? Well, they actually included something rather interesting as an out for such situations. The little girl protagonist has her grandfather's handyman manual, which contains solutions for all of the puzzles in the game. It's still not as simple as cracking open the book and looking at the answer; the manual has over 1000 pages, most of which are just random diagrams and explanations in a foreign language. To look up the right page for a particular puzzle, you have to look in the table of contents...which gives the page numbers as arithmetic expressions involving objects in the scene where the puzzle takes place. X) For example, you might have to count the number of bushes and plug it into a formula that tells you to subtract 5 from that and then multiply by 11 (and it does get a little more complicated than that with parentheses and powers and such). So if you can't do basic plug-and-chug algebra even, you probably are beneath the game's target knowledge age demographic after all. ;)
Bottom line? A charming little point-and-click adventure game, though with more focus on puzzles than story. Get it if you enjoy stretching your brain.
Invisible, Inc.:
An interesting little tactical stealth game from the same studio that made Mark of the Ninja. Without spoiling too much, I'll say that this studio sure seems to like downer endings. X)
As a tiny bit of background, I once tried out X-COM: Enemy Unknown during a free weekend. I found it interesting, but not enjoyable enough to be worth investing in, especially since the last mission I did ended with a VIP getting killed by enemies that had JUST dropped into the stage with no chance for me to intervene. XD What does that have to do with Invisible, Inc.? From my limited experience, I would describe Invisible, Inc. as "the fun parts of X-COM". ;)
Invisible, Inc. is a turn-based stealth game in which you guide agents in exploring and plundering the bases of dystopian mega-corporations. Each agent gets a certain number of action points per turn, used to move, check around corners, etc. Naturally, you generally want them to avoid the attention of guards, security cameras, and the like, for which hiding behind cover is essential. There are some little nuances to it regarding how guards and robots react to different things, such as doors opening and agents moving in their peripheral vision, but it's mostly pretty straightforward as far as avoiding being found goes.
What gives the game more complexity is that there is a separate layer of gameplay having to do with hacking. Many of the devices in the game--security cameras, robots, safes, etc.--can be hacked by your company's A.I. to make things easier. Of course, hacking isn't free--it takes precious power to do it, power which primarily comes from terminals raided by your agents. Some devices are also protected by daemons which will trigger nasty effects when hacked, and unless you've invested in some way of scouting them out you don't know ahead of time what they will be.
Finally, there's a time pressure involved. The more turns you spend in a given stage, the higher the alert level will rise, and at certain thresholds bad things will happen--additional security cameras will activate, devices will be wrapped in an extra firewall layer, new guards will enter the building, etc. I'm not quite sure, but I think there's also a real-time clock involved--the game gives you 72 in-game hours for a regular campaign, most of which is eaten up by travel time between stages, but I think it also counts the time you spend pondering and executing your moves. In the map menu between stages, they even show you the remaining-time clock counting down, reminding you that stopping to think, while really quite small peanuts compared to the travel time, is not without cost.
With all that said, the game does have its share of frustrations. The stages are randomly generated, and the balancing of them doesn't feel great. Some stages can be swept almost unopposed, but others have clusters of sentinels that make it nearly impossible to get through an area without being detected. I've even seen a couple stages where a guard wandered into the room my agents started in on their very first turn, giving me almost no chance of dealing with them.
Bottom line? I don't think it'd be for everyone, but it's an engaging tactical puzzler for those who like that sort of thing and don't mind some occasional unfairness.