Minecraft merriment
Serious by Joy Williams
Hi all. No big family gathering this month, because sickness forced us to reschedule. X) Now we're planning to celebrate FOUR birthdays this upcoming Sunday.
My sister and her husband usually haven't participated regularly in my Saturday night game group, but for the last few weeks they have. My sister has been getting to pick the game since she's done so infrequently in the past (yes, I do keep records), and she decided we should do a Minecraft run since there's been a big update of that recently. We haven't gotten to a point of seeing any of the special stuff that's been added yet, but we've got a nice base set up (some of the players are into aesthetic building) and some automated resource production (most importantly an 'iron farm', I'm sure you can look it up if you're not familiar and want to see how that works).
This month in Forgotten Gates I finished converting everything (I think) to the message data system which stores messages in separate files instead of in the RPG Maker database. This included rewriting the monster behavior code to make use of this system. I made some 'common behavior' functions to handle how things usually work, as opposed to how I had it before with each monster type having their own behavior function -- some of them still need some special code, but the majority just give hints about their next action. That should make things a bit easier for me in the long run.
The scene I started last month on Zelda RPG has picked up and flown in the last couple weeks, at least compared to how things usually go. While Shemri sat staring at her adoptive daughter and the man-child so audacious as to be friendly with her, who should sit down by Shemri but her frenemy, Itami. Realizing that Itami is probably better than her at discerning shady intent, Shemri swallowed her pride and asked her what she thought the boy was up to. Itami took over spoofing the boy, to whom she eventually assigned the name Oran, and had him innocently chatting with the girl (whom I called Lundir) by all appearances...although he rolled up his sleeve to show Lundir his forearm for some reason. Shemri almost jumped over two rows of tables to intervene when she saw Lundir TAKE ORAN'S HAND AND TRACE HER FINGERS UP HIS ARM, but Itami convinced her to be sneaky and continue observing.
The teens left the dining hall with Oran apparently having told Lundir he wanted to show her something cool, and the grownup Gerudo trailed behind them as they headed out of Gerudo Fortress and into the valley. The thing Oran wanted to show was a flower that had somehow sprouted from the canyon walls near the bridge. He went to try and retrieve it, although it was a little outside easy reach from the cliff. Lundir started to wonder why there was this one specific flower growing there, especially so soon after the ocean receded...and came up with the idea that MAYBE IT'S A MONSTER THAT LURES PREY WITH AN APPENDAGE THAT LOOKS LIKE A FLOWER! 8O So that set her off running after Oran and shouting, and Shemri started closing the distance too thanks to that alarm.
Wandersong:
Yet another Humble Bundle game, although I think I would've picked it up on my own eventually. Wandersong is sort of a parody game, but of games in general more than any specific one or even a particular genre. It follows a good-natured and ingenuous bard who finds out from a rainbow-haired ethereal girl in a dream that THE WORLD IS GOING TO END. 8O She is seeking the one worthy to wield a magical lightning sword and slay the Overseers, who are growing sickly and corrupted, in order that this world may be cleansed and the cycle of creation begun anew. The bard, who can barely LIFT the sword, is clearly not the chosen Hero...not that he's interested in going along with the plan once he hears what it entails anyway. D: So the rainbow-haired girl tells him that maybe, just maybe...if he can manage to gather the pieces of the Earthsong from the Overseers, and sing it...then the creator deity might hear, and decide to let this world continue on. :o
Wandersong's main charm is in its characters and story. As the bard (whom you get to name a little ways in, although you're limited to four letters with each letter chosen from a pool of 8 options) seeks out the Overseers, he encounters people with various foibles and troubles, including a drummer looking to form a band, a pirate crew (although really they're just merchants selling coffee beans) whose captain longs to meet the mermaid who saved him from drowning, the residents of a big city dominated by a toy factory who want to infiltrate and sabotage it, and a pair of neighboring countries who've been at war with each other for so long hardly anyone remembers what the war was about. Naturally, the bard wants to help all of them -- much to the irritation of the cranky young witch, Miriam, who joins his quest early on. Why can't he focus on the whole SAVING THE WORLD thing!? DX But of course it always works out that helping others puts them further on the path to their goal. It's the sort of story that acknowledges and embraces its own idealistic outlook while still addressing some of the difficulties that come with it. For me, it helps that the bard strongly resembles my own character Aubrey, and his relationship with Miriam reminds me of the one Aubrey (or Aburei as his name was spelled on Naruto MUSH Rivalry) had with Reina. ;)
The art style of the game is also noteworthy. It's purposely very simple, done mainly with vector art in solid colors and very few frames in the animations. It looks almost like papercrafts. I don't think it would win too many awards for outstanding technical achievement, but it suits the storybook feel of the game as a whole and gives an appealing vibe.
Finally there's the mechanics, which I would say is the weakest aspect of the game, but still intriguing. It's a light 2D platformer in which the left stick controls movement (including up to jump, although you can also press the A button for that) and the right stick causes the bard to sing music. There are 8 possible notes corresponding to the 8 basic directions. What effect this has on the world varies from one situation to another. Sometimes it's very straightforward, like platform plants that grow in the direction you tilt the stick. Other times there are DDR-like singing challenges where you have to press the stick in the direction indicated by a GUI. There's even a chapter where you learn sequences of notes that act as magic spells to change the environment. It's basically an exploration of what can be done with the right stick, with platforming and puzzles of very mild challenge (though of course I say that as a veteran player).
Bottom line? If you like cutesy yet thoughtful stories and aren't very hungry for difficulty, Wandersong is worth a play.
Iron Danger:
More Humble Bundle. Iron Danger is a tactics game with a unique twist: you can rewind time a certain amount to change your decisions.
The story starts with an attack on an unassuming fishing village. The protagonist, an early-teens girl called Kipuna, flees for her life through the burning wreckage, only for a floor to collapse under her. She plummets down into a strange chamber and is impaled through the chest on a tall spike of glowing rock, killing her instantly. xox Yep, the protagonist dies in the first scene...but that's not the end of it. The rock she was impaled on turns out to be magic, and she finds herself stopped in time having a conversation with some strange, crystallic being. The being teaches her to control the flow of time, and Kipuna is able to go back to before her fall and avoid it -- although somehow a shard of the rock remains with her, stuck through her torso. The shard also gives her fire magic, turning her into a combat mage to be reckoned with. Kipuna soon runs into the only other villager still alive, the town's blacksmith, and together they fight their way through the mechanically-augmented Northlanders to Kipuna's family fishing boat and escape. Soon, Kipuna will find herself reluctantly tasked with gathering other magic shards in the quest to defend against the Northlander army's aggression...
Unlike most tactics games, where the movement spaces and possible actions are clearly and rigidly defined, Iron Danger is rather loose and ad-hoc. When you go to select a spot to move to, the cursor will show how many 'heartbeats' it will take to reach that spot, but that will be part of a range of space that will take that same number. The exact timing with which things happen is finicky and important -- if you tell a character to make a melee attack against an enemy for example, whether they succeed or get hit themselves depends mainly on just when their swing begins and when the enemy comes into range. The game gets away with this because if things turn out poorly, you can rewind time and try again in a slightly different approach. Of course, the enemy may act differently in response to your new movement. It becomes a matter of feeling things out through trial and error as much as coming up with a plan and executing it. The controls are a tad awkward -- it's easy to forget whether you're currently controlling Kipuna or her companion (she always has exactly one with her, but who it is varies by chapter), and the camera is always locked to rotate around the currently controlled character, so it's sometimes hard to look at things that are far away. But so long as you don't let the action flow forward too far, you can always fix any mistakes, so the awkwardness is tolerable...just annoying.
Bottom line? Intriguing mechanically, though it gets a little frustrating having to fiddle your way through combats by trying stuff until something gets you through without killing you. Pick it up if you like experimental gameplay, in both the sense that it's something unusual and that it requires you to experiment. X)
Click to viewHi all. No big family gathering this month, because sickness forced us to reschedule. X) Now we're planning to celebrate FOUR birthdays this upcoming Sunday.
My sister and her husband usually haven't participated regularly in my Saturday night game group, but for the last few weeks they have. My sister has been getting to pick the game since she's done so infrequently in the past (yes, I do keep records), and she decided we should do a Minecraft run since there's been a big update of that recently. We haven't gotten to a point of seeing any of the special stuff that's been added yet, but we've got a nice base set up (some of the players are into aesthetic building) and some automated resource production (most importantly an 'iron farm', I'm sure you can look it up if you're not familiar and want to see how that works).
This month in Forgotten Gates I finished converting everything (I think) to the message data system which stores messages in separate files instead of in the RPG Maker database. This included rewriting the monster behavior code to make use of this system. I made some 'common behavior' functions to handle how things usually work, as opposed to how I had it before with each monster type having their own behavior function -- some of them still need some special code, but the majority just give hints about their next action. That should make things a bit easier for me in the long run.
The scene I started last month on Zelda RPG has picked up and flown in the last couple weeks, at least compared to how things usually go. While Shemri sat staring at her adoptive daughter and the man-child so audacious as to be friendly with her, who should sit down by Shemri but her frenemy, Itami. Realizing that Itami is probably better than her at discerning shady intent, Shemri swallowed her pride and asked her what she thought the boy was up to. Itami took over spoofing the boy, to whom she eventually assigned the name Oran, and had him innocently chatting with the girl (whom I called Lundir) by all appearances...although he rolled up his sleeve to show Lundir his forearm for some reason. Shemri almost jumped over two rows of tables to intervene when she saw Lundir TAKE ORAN'S HAND AND TRACE HER FINGERS UP HIS ARM, but Itami convinced her to be sneaky and continue observing.
The teens left the dining hall with Oran apparently having told Lundir he wanted to show her something cool, and the grownup Gerudo trailed behind them as they headed out of Gerudo Fortress and into the valley. The thing Oran wanted to show was a flower that had somehow sprouted from the canyon walls near the bridge. He went to try and retrieve it, although it was a little outside easy reach from the cliff. Lundir started to wonder why there was this one specific flower growing there, especially so soon after the ocean receded...and came up with the idea that MAYBE IT'S A MONSTER THAT LURES PREY WITH AN APPENDAGE THAT LOOKS LIKE A FLOWER! 8O So that set her off running after Oran and shouting, and Shemri started closing the distance too thanks to that alarm.
Wandersong:
Yet another Humble Bundle game, although I think I would've picked it up on my own eventually. Wandersong is sort of a parody game, but of games in general more than any specific one or even a particular genre. It follows a good-natured and ingenuous bard who finds out from a rainbow-haired ethereal girl in a dream that THE WORLD IS GOING TO END. 8O She is seeking the one worthy to wield a magical lightning sword and slay the Overseers, who are growing sickly and corrupted, in order that this world may be cleansed and the cycle of creation begun anew. The bard, who can barely LIFT the sword, is clearly not the chosen Hero...not that he's interested in going along with the plan once he hears what it entails anyway. D: So the rainbow-haired girl tells him that maybe, just maybe...if he can manage to gather the pieces of the Earthsong from the Overseers, and sing it...then the creator deity might hear, and decide to let this world continue on. :o
Wandersong's main charm is in its characters and story. As the bard (whom you get to name a little ways in, although you're limited to four letters with each letter chosen from a pool of 8 options) seeks out the Overseers, he encounters people with various foibles and troubles, including a drummer looking to form a band, a pirate crew (although really they're just merchants selling coffee beans) whose captain longs to meet the mermaid who saved him from drowning, the residents of a big city dominated by a toy factory who want to infiltrate and sabotage it, and a pair of neighboring countries who've been at war with each other for so long hardly anyone remembers what the war was about. Naturally, the bard wants to help all of them -- much to the irritation of the cranky young witch, Miriam, who joins his quest early on. Why can't he focus on the whole SAVING THE WORLD thing!? DX But of course it always works out that helping others puts them further on the path to their goal. It's the sort of story that acknowledges and embraces its own idealistic outlook while still addressing some of the difficulties that come with it. For me, it helps that the bard strongly resembles my own character Aubrey, and his relationship with Miriam reminds me of the one Aubrey (or Aburei as his name was spelled on Naruto MUSH Rivalry) had with Reina. ;)
The art style of the game is also noteworthy. It's purposely very simple, done mainly with vector art in solid colors and very few frames in the animations. It looks almost like papercrafts. I don't think it would win too many awards for outstanding technical achievement, but it suits the storybook feel of the game as a whole and gives an appealing vibe.
Finally there's the mechanics, which I would say is the weakest aspect of the game, but still intriguing. It's a light 2D platformer in which the left stick controls movement (including up to jump, although you can also press the A button for that) and the right stick causes the bard to sing music. There are 8 possible notes corresponding to the 8 basic directions. What effect this has on the world varies from one situation to another. Sometimes it's very straightforward, like platform plants that grow in the direction you tilt the stick. Other times there are DDR-like singing challenges where you have to press the stick in the direction indicated by a GUI. There's even a chapter where you learn sequences of notes that act as magic spells to change the environment. It's basically an exploration of what can be done with the right stick, with platforming and puzzles of very mild challenge (though of course I say that as a veteran player).
Bottom line? If you like cutesy yet thoughtful stories and aren't very hungry for difficulty, Wandersong is worth a play.
Iron Danger:
More Humble Bundle. Iron Danger is a tactics game with a unique twist: you can rewind time a certain amount to change your decisions.
The story starts with an attack on an unassuming fishing village. The protagonist, an early-teens girl called Kipuna, flees for her life through the burning wreckage, only for a floor to collapse under her. She plummets down into a strange chamber and is impaled through the chest on a tall spike of glowing rock, killing her instantly. xox Yep, the protagonist dies in the first scene...but that's not the end of it. The rock she was impaled on turns out to be magic, and she finds herself stopped in time having a conversation with some strange, crystallic being. The being teaches her to control the flow of time, and Kipuna is able to go back to before her fall and avoid it -- although somehow a shard of the rock remains with her, stuck through her torso. The shard also gives her fire magic, turning her into a combat mage to be reckoned with. Kipuna soon runs into the only other villager still alive, the town's blacksmith, and together they fight their way through the mechanically-augmented Northlanders to Kipuna's family fishing boat and escape. Soon, Kipuna will find herself reluctantly tasked with gathering other magic shards in the quest to defend against the Northlander army's aggression...
Unlike most tactics games, where the movement spaces and possible actions are clearly and rigidly defined, Iron Danger is rather loose and ad-hoc. When you go to select a spot to move to, the cursor will show how many 'heartbeats' it will take to reach that spot, but that will be part of a range of space that will take that same number. The exact timing with which things happen is finicky and important -- if you tell a character to make a melee attack against an enemy for example, whether they succeed or get hit themselves depends mainly on just when their swing begins and when the enemy comes into range. The game gets away with this because if things turn out poorly, you can rewind time and try again in a slightly different approach. Of course, the enemy may act differently in response to your new movement. It becomes a matter of feeling things out through trial and error as much as coming up with a plan and executing it. The controls are a tad awkward -- it's easy to forget whether you're currently controlling Kipuna or her companion (she always has exactly one with her, but who it is varies by chapter), and the camera is always locked to rotate around the currently controlled character, so it's sometimes hard to look at things that are far away. But so long as you don't let the action flow forward too far, you can always fix any mistakes, so the awkwardness is tolerable...just annoying.
Bottom line? Intriguing mechanically, though it gets a little frustrating having to fiddle your way through combats by trying stuff until something gets you through without killing you. Pick it up if you like experimental gameplay, in both the sense that it's something unusual and that it requires you to experiment. X)