Your character doesn’t speak per say, so you usually are limited to gestures for interacting with other players.
The stone refers to a series of items thatve been around since dark souls 1 where you drop a magic stone and a voice comes out saying the line. In dark souls 1 and some others it was a rock you dropped and it broke open making sound, so the “stone” term stuck.
In elden ring it’s called a “prattling pate: ‘voice line here’”. Your character blows into it like a flute kinda and the line is spoken.
Basically the guy showed up, said “damn ur fashion is on point” then left :)
In the game, there are stones that you can find, and when you use them, they say something. There’s no voice chat in the games, so these can be used to communicate
Aside from Microsoft selling it as one, there’s a reason the 360’s contoller design is basically the de facto basis for most PC controllers. It’s the most comfortable one I’ve used for 3D games by far. Everything you need is easy to access. Nintendo lifted essentially the same design for their Wii U and Switch Pro controllers.
The d-pad on the 360 controller was garbage. It was the only thing holding it back.
I think they’ve found a great place with the One/Series controllers.
I also really appreciate that with the jump to the Series X/S they didn’t change controllers. They had one that worked that people liked, so they kept it. And it works via Xbox’s proprietary wireless protocol, USB, or Bluetooth, so it works on pretty much anything but a Playstation or Nintendo.
I couldn’t care less about the D-pad. All that matters is how it feels in my hand and access to the primary controls like joysticks, triggers, and face buttons.
where does AAA even come from. Is it like michelin stars and the american automobile association started it. If not why don't I hear about the AA or just A or B or C or D games. They should do like the recording industry and have categories based on amount sold and I would limit sales for full retail price. Once they set the price as what they think of it then they only get credit for those who pay full freight. Just to limit deeply discounting to pump the numbers and maybe to encourage a reasonable starting price.
My understanding is AAA is literally just a buzzword in the vein of AAAA. It doesn’t relate to budget, team size, publisher/no publisher, kind of same as indie at this point.
It maybe made a little more sense when it was a publisher descriptor? EA, Activision, Ubisoft were publishing games at a different scale than Midway, Acclaim, THQ, etc. But still, as far as I understand is more of a marketing term as opposed to designating anything specific.
It comes from the publishers in the 90s. They needed an easy way to tell stores/distributors how popular they thought each of their games would be, to help them decide how many of a certain title the distributor should order. The games expected to be GotY contenders would be marked AAA, AA for otherwise decent games, A for more niche games and B for “this is a starshot, we’re hoping it will sell enough to justify production costs”. That then lead to more and more games being marked as AAA due to budgets getting increased, and the whole system became a bit redundant.
he games expected to be GotY contenders would be marked AAA, AA for otherwise decent games, A for more niche games and B for “this is a starshot, we’re hoping it will sell enough to justify production costs”.
Is there any evidence of this being the case? Personally, I don’t remember anything other than “AAA” back in the day, with other variations coming about much later as budgets grew and people wanted more specific delineations.
It’s pretty hard to make levels of difficulty that actually change things enough outside of either giving the enemies more damage and HP or simply adding more enemies, or in scored games having higher score thresholds for higher ranks (these can be anything from an actual score to the speed you finished and everything in between that’s basically just a number that you can compare to another number).
It certainly can be done, though. I can’t help but think about the bots in counter-strike. They range from braindead drooling moving targets to Terminator machines that can 1 tap you with a pistol from across the map. They actually have a difficulty scale that’s more than simply being tougher to kill and hurting you more. It affects how they move around, the speed they begin shooting, their accuracy, etc. I don’t know why these kind of bots do not extend to pretty much any game with enemies. Just give them 3 sets of behavior that makes them easier or harder to deal with.
It depends on the genre of course because of the mechanics in play. Sure, FPS with bots are hard but a lot of genres are as challenging because the mechanics usually surround mostly running and gunning with bots (if you’re playing with bots). Making the ‘AI better’ is going to be extremely difficult, especially when balancing resources out for your minimum requirements.
But for say an 3D action game, enemy ambushes, tougher environmental challenges, harder puzzles, more platforming, increase gear rarity for ‘normal’ gear and stuff can add a real challenge. Bullet sponges seems like the path of least resistance to development time. Especially if the 3D action game is single player.
Counter-strike specifically is a tough one because what other mechanics can be involved in it? In the original CS:S there were actual environmental concerns like you could shoot off boards on the rope bridge denying that path. When it released, the rope bridge was static and was always there. I’d imagine this was due to resources on the physics vs. 31 other players having to have a reasonable sync with the server and their updates.
Battlefield has done this over the years but instead of making it really dynamic it has been fairly static, even if it changes the map, it always does it the same way. Blow up a building in BF:BC2? The walls will always fall the same way and the destruction will always be the same, so it’s like a state on or off update for that location for everyone. BF3 which was newer seemed to have even fewer instances where this could happen as just an example but they also doubled the player count. There have been other games that have done more dynamic updates but every engine, fidelity, language, updates/ticks expectations are all different.
Not every genre or game has to be focused on just your targets. The more mechanics that are offered or can be offered are going to be different but certainly, it seems like many games still do not take advantage of that even though they could.
Goldeneye and its spiritual sequel Perfect Dark (my favorite game of all time) do this varying AI skill thing along with the mission objectives expanding across difficulties. An argument can be made against it because someone playing on “easy” doesn’t really experience the whole game but it’s also cool to replay levels on a higher difficulty where the map is larger or you’re interacting with more things or you’re starting in a different location.
I remember the Command and Conquer games, namely Tiberium Wars and Kane’s Wraith. You could set the bot behavior and difficulty. Also, when the difficulty was set to brutal, the bot would have all the limits removed and would start the game with double the money the player had. Even tho this is a rts game, I think it’s a good example of how to make bots if devs are given the time and there is an effort for something more.
It’s really hard to beat a branded Xbox controller, these days. I was extremely skeptical for a long time, then I gave one a shot, and there’s no going back.
The story is pretty dumb. I wouldn’t say it’s bad necessarily, I just think it’s dumb how often we get into whole town shootouts, amd then just pay 80-90 bucks to make it go away. Oh, and fuck Micah, that guy can get lost.
Except… for the combat. By the end of the game, they need 50 bad guys to even pose a challenge to our Max Paine protagonist. But not in the cut scene, of course. By mid-game, you’ve killed more cowboys than cholera.
There is a beautiful quick-draw mechanic that’s only necessary in 2 (optional) side quests.
Wouldn’t even be in my top 10. I loved the world, I just wished the story would go away and just allow me to experience it by myself. To. Me it felt like amazing technology being wasted on a decidedly average game
I agree. Stunning. It’s not for everyone, but, those who can appreciate the slow, beautiful, revealing beauty and enjoy taking their time, this game is as good as it gets.
Those that mash buttons to skip cutscenes, may as well give it a miss and try something else
I love the idea of paying one-time to play offline, but it’s not currently very possible to do in-app purchases on a ROM like GrapheneOS, which you mentioned in the post as being something users (myself included) have. Will there be a way to pay outside of the in-app purchase dialogue to get access? (i.e. donate through bmac, then link account to app temporarily to confirm) I’d definitely like more of my money to go to you, rather than a play store fee.
Additionally, will there be a direct APK download at all, or will it only be available through the Play Store? (obviously privacy-preserving frontends like the Aurora Store exist, but it’s nice to have an APK download too 😊)
Thank you for making privacy the default setting, while still letting users share more if they want to. This is something I always love to see!
I’d 100% sign up for the beta right now, but since my GrapheneOS phone doesn’t have the ability to use the Play Store beta features, I’ll hold off on that so I don’t take someone’s spot :)
Depending on how the legislations now post-DMA go, it might be possible to also handle payments throughout our Portal instead of app stores. The app stores, especially Apple’s, has still a bunch of rules in their ToS about this where they might remove the game entirely if you’re not using their payment system. Android is slightly more lenient on this regard though.
The cuts Patreon already takes (a whopping 14% in total, after which we then play VAT) already affects us enough that I would definitely love to rather have my own systems, but also they offer a lot of convenience to the users that we couldn’t at this point.
But overall it would be great if we could provide a direct payment system straight from Portal, as we could price that one also significantly cheaper than using Google’s or Apple’s systems when we don’t need to pay their cuts. It’s something I really want to do to be able to make the pricing as affordable as possible, and everything depends on if it’s both feasible and allowed by the app stores. But can’t promise this, as there are a lot of factors in play whether it’s feasible to provide our own systems and if it’s allowed by the biggest stores.
When it comes to direct APK downloads, maybe if we can get a good pipeline for those. I think the most realistic option is that we’ll pick the one for an “extra release pipeline” that we can automate most easily to our current systems. Could be Aurora Store, F-Droid or some other depending on what kind of automation options they offer.
I’m not an expert on what automation options they might offer, but I know Aurora Store will essentially just pass through anything you do on the Play Store since it’s just a frontend, and for F-Droid you can host a repo where you place any updated APK to automatically make it available to anyone linked to your repo.
I know alternative payment options are probably a nightmare to properly set up and integrate, so it may not be worth the increased cut of revenue you’d get, but I’m really glad you’re considering it!
I look forward to trying the game when it comes out :)
Oh yeah, I wanted to recommend an f-droid release as well, but thought you had to open your source up for that.
I hadn’t thought of making your own repository where you don’t have to do that \o/
I’m not an expert on the process, but anyone making a custom repo should be able to store the F-Droid repo on GitHub.
It looks like you wouldn’t need to make the app open-source either, as it should be capable of just accepting an apk file. (and possibly auto update from any GitHub releases page, not sure on that though)
Again, not an expert, I haven’t made an F-Droid repo yet myself, so I may have understood something wrong, but it looks relatively straightforward according to their guide
This wouldn’t make it available to users through the default preinstalled repo in F-Droid (which is heavily privacy-focused and limited in scale) but it would allow any user to just click a link or scan a QR code to add your repo to their F-Droid app.
As a person who hates phones, I love this game. I got accepted into the beta a week or two ago and having a game that doesn’t require me to touch my phone all the time is my favorite thing.
The only thing that would make it better is integration with other smart device step counters. Being able to play (more like progress I guess) a phone game while not even carrying my phone would be hilarious. I am sure you’re getting hounded by people about this non-stop.
That’s true, it could be procrastinative instead of actually working on the things that should be done…
I think it would come down to when and how I work on it, I can’t really spend 5-15 minutes on various downtimes learning coding or doing the art, but I could probably whip up an interaction chart and add to it with that short amount of time
Why force yourself to start something big and complicated? Just enjoy your life lol and do stuff that comes to you and feels right. Maybe that’s a game, but no need to force it.
Oh it does :) it’s a passion project that gives me some opportunities to make music and sound effects (something I like to do but don’t always record and save my work), and similarly I love making art but having a strong vision for what I want to make can get difficult.
But I have a really strong vision for the game in its entirety, which helps with the direction for my art and music :) I just need to build the pieces (obviously, easier said than done!) and so far it’s been enjoyable. Difficult, but understandable.
Basically, I save so many notes and other junk, but I rarely save my creative endeavors. This will be a good way for me to not only reach that goal, but to also create a game that is somewhat unique and that would be really fun to play :D
I’m whole-heartedly impressed with what you are presenting here. I wish I’d seen your booth at gamescom, since I am sincerely excited by the non-predatory design philosophy you’re describing in your blog posty on your website.
I have already set up an account and written an application. Hopefully I’ll have the chance to try this out. :)
Just signed up for the beta. I also have adhd and I was overweight for the majority of my life, and then in 2018-early2020, I went from 300ish to 160ish, and I felt great. Then the pandemic hit and I could no longer go on walks and runs and then I got depressed and then injured my leg permanently and now I’m back up to 235 and I fucking hate it but I can’t seem to get the will to walk again. So this game sounds like it would be really fun.
Refinement wise origins is to Fallout 3 and Odyssey is to New Vegas.
I liked Origins. Tomb exploration. History lessons. Angry hippos. It was solid.
Odyssey is my favorite of the 3. Worth it.
Valhalla was too long. They took the Odyssey formula and just did too much. Normally I completionist games, but I could not finish those repeatable side quests. Odin’s marathon runs among other things. After Valhalla I had no interest in buying Mirage and doing it again.
Imagine overcooked but where you kill and use your customers as ingredients and can raise skeletons from the dead to automate as your chefs and servers. It’s overall a very well put together game, especially for one with 240 reviews (total)
It’s a game where you are a little sheep creature that runs a cult. It’s a mix of a management game and a roguelike since you go on runs to fight the games main bosses and get items to bring back to improve your cult.
Art style kinda reminds me of Klei’s Don’t Starve and is probably one of the most impressive parts of the game
Though this one is more well known. Still, I hadn’t heard of it before so I think sometimes games with even a big following like this one can stay off the radar a bit unless they are truly massive.
It’s a cute game where you are a dog that brews beer. The game isn’t complicated and its pretty short in playtime but it’s $3.50 without a sale and its both cute and fun so I think it’s very worth.
The hell theme is cool, the cards are interesting as well as the characters you can play and overall just a really high quality game that’s underappreciated.
This game is incredible. Genuinely like probably the best game I’ve ever played. It simulates an economy fairly accurately (using the different colonies outputs and inputs to determine prices dynamically). In addition to this colonies can be hurt by you or other parties, affecting the prices of items on the market significantly so you can try to make your money on this margin.
There’s space fleet battles with a complex ship modification system. There’s colony management, it has an interesting early game and it keeps your interest as you get further in the game with new challenges.
It is $15 dollars and is technically in early access (which tbh is a steal). Though in practice my experience with it is not remotely reflective of it being early access. It’s a little like how dwarf fortress was in early access (although unlike df before the steam launch there is a frontend that’s really solid).
It’s an Bullet Heaven game like Vampire Survivor. You can play online with up to 4 Friends and every Character has it’s own Skills. The Game is still in Early Access but it gets Updates regularly.
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