Attack of the Mushroom Men
Fireflies by Owl City
Hi all. Work took a sudden downturn in busy-ness the first couple weeks of this month. c.c On the third week things picked up again to a decent level, though not quite to where they were before. I'm certainly not complaining, it allows me to get personal stuff done a lot more. n.n
In game dev, I've mainly been working on the reimplimentation of Forgotten Gates's battle system as a DynRPG plugin. I've gotten most of the code for implementing skills written, although I can't quite test it yet. Right now I'm working on updating the spreadsheet of battle data I made, which was originally intended just to help me do quick-and-dirty experimentation with stat changes and such, to actually house the data used in-game and export it to the plugin. I found a C++ class somebody wrote online for handling simple data reading from .csv files, which should suit my purposes fine.
I've also made a little progress in Bombercan. I made animations for the player avatar's walking and dieing, and linked both to the appropriate occurrences in-game.
On NMR, a relatively new player is making a name for herself by running a plot about a fungus-manipulating clan called the Kinokochi. Their backstory is that they were once the primary rivals of the spider-manipulating Okumo clan in the Land of Water, but when the Okumo developed breeds of spiders resistant to the fungus, they drove the Kinokochi out--this was all before the formation of the Great Hidden Villages. Well, the Kinokochi have been working on fungus that will once again cripple the Okumo's spiders and (they think) allow them to become the leaders of Kirigakure. One little problem, aside from the fact the Okumo probably wouldn't appreciate it: their fungus farms, the largest of which is under Sunagakure for some reason, have the unintended side effect of poisoning local water supplies. The Kinokochi have a hive mind of sorts, and it seems to have taken them out of touch with human morality; when Suna nin investigated to discover what was making their villagers sick and found the fungus farm underground, the Kinokochi overseeing it apologized and assured them it was accidental, but told them they'd just have to wait another month for the growth process to complete before he moved out. -.- Naturally fighting ensued, and there wound up being a cloud of spores released around Suna that turned anybody without the ninja training to snap out of it into a sleepwalking stabber. c.c Dark stuff.
Ratchet & Clank: Into the Nexus:
This one turned out quite a bit shorter than I expected, almost as short as Quest for Booty. It felt unfinished in a number of ways. The stage selection screen was pretty basic, just a 2D map with a grand total of six areas on it. There were less than half of the number of weapons available in some of the larger games, and I still didn't have two of them unlocked by the end (although that's partly because the ending sneaked up on me and I thus didn't go about fulfilling optional challenges first). The framerate was a little low and it hurt my eyes to play for long periods. x.x
Shortcomings aside, Into the Nexus is a fairly typical Ratchet and Clank title with the usual fun gameplay. They added a side mode in which Clank occasionally goes to the Netherverse, a 2D realm in which he is able to manipulate the direction of gravity to navigate and solve puzzles involving other gravity-affected objects. There are also a couple of places where you can fly around with a jet-pack earned halfway through the game (they control where this is allowed by requiring fueling stations to get started and having "no-fly zones" which instantly suck your jet-pack dry). One more interesting thing was that the second-to-last stage was a trip through a museum which paid homage to the series' history. It was mostly a big puzzle-platforming sequence, but for aficionados it was a nice touch.
Can't think of much else to say about it. c.ca Bottom line? I certainly wouldn't want to pay full AAA price for it, but as long as you know you're getting a three-to-four hour game and budget accordingly, it's not a bad experience.
Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor:
Yay for getting big titles a year after release with all the DLC at a fraction of the original price. X) Shadow of Mordor is set in the time period between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, when the incorporeal Dark Lord Sauron is rebuilding his army in Mordor. The outpost where the rangers of Gondor watch over Mordor is overrun, and one ranger in particular is forced to watch while his wife and son are slain in a blood ritual before he too is sacrificed. Instead of moving on to the afterlife, he finds himself bound to the wraith of an elven lord who suffered a similar fate at Sauron's hands in ages past. Unable to permanently die and imbued with supernatural powers by his ghostly partner, the ranger sets off to wreak havoc amongst Sauron's army and slay the dark servant who cursed him to this fate.
Shadow of Mordor uses the same primary combat mechanics as the Batman Arkham games: left-click to attack, right-click to counter, tap space to dodge, press one of several other buttons for a special move once you've built up enough combo, etc. The general flow of gameplay feels significantly different, though. It's much more open-world, with nearly all of the events taking place in locations that are simply part of a larger map, and some of them can require you to cover quite a bit of territory. Furthermore, there are happenings independent of your current mission which can randomly interact with it. At any given time, there are a number of orc captains floating about Mordor, which are tougher and more dangerous than their common kin. Lots of missions involve taking down one of these captains, which can actually be fairly easy if you somehow manage to catch them alone, but that's rather rare since any other mooks nearby will come running while you're fighting them...and if another captain or two happens to be nearby, well, you'll have quite a lot to handle at once. X)
You should expect to die a lot early on in this game, both from trial-and-error learning and from Early Game Hell. They throw you into the open world with very little in the way of instruction, and your ground-zero character strength combined with the fact you haven't thinned out the ranks of orc captains at all makes Mordor a deadly place. As you grow in durability and pick up some better combat moves, things get easier, especially once you gain the power (about halfway through the game) to mind-control orcs--a few allies in a skirmish go a longway toward giving you breathing room and can even take out enemy captains, although that can be annoying occasionally when you wanted to dominate said captain and add him to your army. X)
There's also a lot to be said for simply learning to play the game to maximum effectiveness, though. Probably the most important lesson they don't directly teach you is, you can climb nearly any surface in the game. X) Once I realized this, not only did it become way easier to get around, I was able to evade notice much more easily because most orcs never look up. Getting a feel for what you can get away with stealth-wise is also important. At a distance, even if you pass within an orc's cone of vision it will take a little while for them to register you enough to come looking, and longer still to be certain you're a threat. They even display an arrow icon above an orc that "sees" you, which fills with yellow for suspicion, then red for aggression. When I first started playing, I crept around in most places at a painfully slow rate; once I was more familiar with the game, I just dashed to where I was going because I knew that as long as I didn't pass within a few yards of an orc's face, he probably wouldn't pursue me or raise an alarm. Also, stealth kills can be done blatantly face-to-face, as long as you do it in the second or so of surprise the orc displays when he first sees you.
One more thing I should mention is that the controls are occasionally not that great. Climbing is designed to intelligently move along surfaces in context of what's possible without too much input from the player, but it sometimes does things in an unexpected way. It's especially irksome when you're trying to get up from the ground onto a wall, but for some reason your avatar keeps failing to grab on after running up a bit. The dodge mechanic is, well, dodgy, with a seeming lag before it registers and a requirement that you push in the direction you're dodging, so by the time you react to the SPACEBAR icon warning you that there's an uncounterable attacking incoming, it's already too late if you weren't anticipating it ahead of time. Beast riding is very clunky too, making it hard to turn and do precise actions like finishing a downed enemy. Fortunately, these annoyances are relatively sparse.
Bottom line? Definitely a nice game, though significantly more challenging than its spiritual brothers in the Arkham series. Get it if you want to stab a bunch of orcs. ;)
No Time to Explain:
Remember Muzzle Velocity, that entry I wrote up for the Game Design Challenge about making a platformer with no jumping? Turns out there was already at least one fairly well-known game using the same basic premise. X) No Time to Explain is a physics-based puzzle-platformer in which the main conceit is propelling yourself with a gun operated by your controller's right stick. As typical for physics-based games, the control can get rather dicey, especially as you get higher up into the sadistically tricky stages. It qualifies as a masocore game, in which you should expect to die frequently but take very little time between doing so and getting to try again. Dieing doesn't even set you back to the start of the stage in most cases, just to the last place where your avatar touched the ground. Of course, in the more sadistic stages, that can be effectively the same thing. e.e
They change things up every so often to keep things interesting. Sometimes your main gun, a continuous-beam energy cannon, gets replaced by a powerful shotgun that can only blast once before you need to touch the ground, or an unexplained psychic ability to gravitate yourself toward a nearby point, or slingshot yourself in a particular direction. There are also stage elements like torches which set you on fire and allow you to burn wooden obstacles (of course you have seconds to find water before you expire), and boxes that rotate the stage (effectively changing the direction of gravity) when you touch them. The puzzles in the game are seldom terribly brain-bending, but they manage to maintain a certain degree of learning throughout.
Oh, and story? A shades-wearing version of yourself blasts through the wall of your home, proclaims himself to be YOU FROM THE FUTURE, and says there's no time to explain -- right before being grabbed by a giant crab. You pick up the energy cannon future-you dropped and set off in pursuit. Wacky hijinks through a wide variety of timelines and alternate universes ensues. It's unabashedly silly and unreliant on plot, just enjoy the gameplay. :P
Bottom line? A bit high on frustration in parts, but on the whole a fun little indie title with an intriguing gameplay premise.
Click to viewHi all. Work took a sudden downturn in busy-ness the first couple weeks of this month. c.c On the third week things picked up again to a decent level, though not quite to where they were before. I'm certainly not complaining, it allows me to get personal stuff done a lot more. n.n
In game dev, I've mainly been working on the reimplimentation of Forgotten Gates's battle system as a DynRPG plugin. I've gotten most of the code for implementing skills written, although I can't quite test it yet. Right now I'm working on updating the spreadsheet of battle data I made, which was originally intended just to help me do quick-and-dirty experimentation with stat changes and such, to actually house the data used in-game and export it to the plugin. I found a C++ class somebody wrote online for handling simple data reading from .csv files, which should suit my purposes fine.
I've also made a little progress in Bombercan. I made animations for the player avatar's walking and dieing, and linked both to the appropriate occurrences in-game.
On NMR, a relatively new player is making a name for herself by running a plot about a fungus-manipulating clan called the Kinokochi. Their backstory is that they were once the primary rivals of the spider-manipulating Okumo clan in the Land of Water, but when the Okumo developed breeds of spiders resistant to the fungus, they drove the Kinokochi out--this was all before the formation of the Great Hidden Villages. Well, the Kinokochi have been working on fungus that will once again cripple the Okumo's spiders and (they think) allow them to become the leaders of Kirigakure. One little problem, aside from the fact the Okumo probably wouldn't appreciate it: their fungus farms, the largest of which is under Sunagakure for some reason, have the unintended side effect of poisoning local water supplies. The Kinokochi have a hive mind of sorts, and it seems to have taken them out of touch with human morality; when Suna nin investigated to discover what was making their villagers sick and found the fungus farm underground, the Kinokochi overseeing it apologized and assured them it was accidental, but told them they'd just have to wait another month for the growth process to complete before he moved out. -.- Naturally fighting ensued, and there wound up being a cloud of spores released around Suna that turned anybody without the ninja training to snap out of it into a sleepwalking stabber. c.c Dark stuff.
Ratchet & Clank: Into the Nexus:
This one turned out quite a bit shorter than I expected, almost as short as Quest for Booty. It felt unfinished in a number of ways. The stage selection screen was pretty basic, just a 2D map with a grand total of six areas on it. There were less than half of the number of weapons available in some of the larger games, and I still didn't have two of them unlocked by the end (although that's partly because the ending sneaked up on me and I thus didn't go about fulfilling optional challenges first). The framerate was a little low and it hurt my eyes to play for long periods. x.x
Shortcomings aside, Into the Nexus is a fairly typical Ratchet and Clank title with the usual fun gameplay. They added a side mode in which Clank occasionally goes to the Netherverse, a 2D realm in which he is able to manipulate the direction of gravity to navigate and solve puzzles involving other gravity-affected objects. There are also a couple of places where you can fly around with a jet-pack earned halfway through the game (they control where this is allowed by requiring fueling stations to get started and having "no-fly zones" which instantly suck your jet-pack dry). One more interesting thing was that the second-to-last stage was a trip through a museum which paid homage to the series' history. It was mostly a big puzzle-platforming sequence, but for aficionados it was a nice touch.
Can't think of much else to say about it. c.ca Bottom line? I certainly wouldn't want to pay full AAA price for it, but as long as you know you're getting a three-to-four hour game and budget accordingly, it's not a bad experience.
Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor:
Yay for getting big titles a year after release with all the DLC at a fraction of the original price. X) Shadow of Mordor is set in the time period between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, when the incorporeal Dark Lord Sauron is rebuilding his army in Mordor. The outpost where the rangers of Gondor watch over Mordor is overrun, and one ranger in particular is forced to watch while his wife and son are slain in a blood ritual before he too is sacrificed. Instead of moving on to the afterlife, he finds himself bound to the wraith of an elven lord who suffered a similar fate at Sauron's hands in ages past. Unable to permanently die and imbued with supernatural powers by his ghostly partner, the ranger sets off to wreak havoc amongst Sauron's army and slay the dark servant who cursed him to this fate.
Shadow of Mordor uses the same primary combat mechanics as the Batman Arkham games: left-click to attack, right-click to counter, tap space to dodge, press one of several other buttons for a special move once you've built up enough combo, etc. The general flow of gameplay feels significantly different, though. It's much more open-world, with nearly all of the events taking place in locations that are simply part of a larger map, and some of them can require you to cover quite a bit of territory. Furthermore, there are happenings independent of your current mission which can randomly interact with it. At any given time, there are a number of orc captains floating about Mordor, which are tougher and more dangerous than their common kin. Lots of missions involve taking down one of these captains, which can actually be fairly easy if you somehow manage to catch them alone, but that's rather rare since any other mooks nearby will come running while you're fighting them...and if another captain or two happens to be nearby, well, you'll have quite a lot to handle at once. X)
You should expect to die a lot early on in this game, both from trial-and-error learning and from Early Game Hell. They throw you into the open world with very little in the way of instruction, and your ground-zero character strength combined with the fact you haven't thinned out the ranks of orc captains at all makes Mordor a deadly place. As you grow in durability and pick up some better combat moves, things get easier, especially once you gain the power (about halfway through the game) to mind-control orcs--a few allies in a skirmish go a longway toward giving you breathing room and can even take out enemy captains, although that can be annoying occasionally when you wanted to dominate said captain and add him to your army. X)
There's also a lot to be said for simply learning to play the game to maximum effectiveness, though. Probably the most important lesson they don't directly teach you is, you can climb nearly any surface in the game. X) Once I realized this, not only did it become way easier to get around, I was able to evade notice much more easily because most orcs never look up. Getting a feel for what you can get away with stealth-wise is also important. At a distance, even if you pass within an orc's cone of vision it will take a little while for them to register you enough to come looking, and longer still to be certain you're a threat. They even display an arrow icon above an orc that "sees" you, which fills with yellow for suspicion, then red for aggression. When I first started playing, I crept around in most places at a painfully slow rate; once I was more familiar with the game, I just dashed to where I was going because I knew that as long as I didn't pass within a few yards of an orc's face, he probably wouldn't pursue me or raise an alarm. Also, stealth kills can be done blatantly face-to-face, as long as you do it in the second or so of surprise the orc displays when he first sees you.
One more thing I should mention is that the controls are occasionally not that great. Climbing is designed to intelligently move along surfaces in context of what's possible without too much input from the player, but it sometimes does things in an unexpected way. It's especially irksome when you're trying to get up from the ground onto a wall, but for some reason your avatar keeps failing to grab on after running up a bit. The dodge mechanic is, well, dodgy, with a seeming lag before it registers and a requirement that you push in the direction you're dodging, so by the time you react to the SPACEBAR icon warning you that there's an uncounterable attacking incoming, it's already too late if you weren't anticipating it ahead of time. Beast riding is very clunky too, making it hard to turn and do precise actions like finishing a downed enemy. Fortunately, these annoyances are relatively sparse.
Bottom line? Definitely a nice game, though significantly more challenging than its spiritual brothers in the Arkham series. Get it if you want to stab a bunch of orcs. ;)
No Time to Explain:
Remember Muzzle Velocity, that entry I wrote up for the Game Design Challenge about making a platformer with no jumping? Turns out there was already at least one fairly well-known game using the same basic premise. X) No Time to Explain is a physics-based puzzle-platformer in which the main conceit is propelling yourself with a gun operated by your controller's right stick. As typical for physics-based games, the control can get rather dicey, especially as you get higher up into the sadistically tricky stages. It qualifies as a masocore game, in which you should expect to die frequently but take very little time between doing so and getting to try again. Dieing doesn't even set you back to the start of the stage in most cases, just to the last place where your avatar touched the ground. Of course, in the more sadistic stages, that can be effectively the same thing. e.e
They change things up every so often to keep things interesting. Sometimes your main gun, a continuous-beam energy cannon, gets replaced by a powerful shotgun that can only blast once before you need to touch the ground, or an unexplained psychic ability to gravitate yourself toward a nearby point, or slingshot yourself in a particular direction. There are also stage elements like torches which set you on fire and allow you to burn wooden obstacles (of course you have seconds to find water before you expire), and boxes that rotate the stage (effectively changing the direction of gravity) when you touch them. The puzzles in the game are seldom terribly brain-bending, but they manage to maintain a certain degree of learning throughout.
Oh, and story? A shades-wearing version of yourself blasts through the wall of your home, proclaims himself to be YOU FROM THE FUTURE, and says there's no time to explain -- right before being grabbed by a giant crab. You pick up the energy cannon future-you dropped and set off in pursuit. Wacky hijinks through a wide variety of timelines and alternate universes ensues. It's unabashedly silly and unreliant on plot, just enjoy the gameplay. :P
Bottom line? A bit high on frustration in parts, but on the whole a fun little indie title with an intriguing gameplay premise.