If they go off to form their own studio, they probably have to take out a business loan to pay themselves for the time being. Interest rates are high right now, and rent and food are both expensive. It’s a huge gamble to make a game and put it out on the assumption you’ll be able to pay back 6%+ interest on whatever you took out. Games are not a reliable money maker. Especially from new studios.
Even if you get some sort of deal with a publisher to fund your first endeavor, there will still be strings attached to that, and publishers are pretty tight with the purse strings right now.
Which means really the only viable option, assuming you’re not already independently wealthy, is that you have to work another job to work on the game in the meantime, which means it will take even longer to come out.
the only viable option, assuming you’re not already independently wealthy, is that you have to work another job to work on the game in the meantime, which means it will take even longer to come out.
So many Indie developers are making the mistake of thinking they’ll be the next [insert currently successful one-man dev here] and banking their careers and life savings on it. 99.999% of them are not.
Ain’t no way a brand new game studio is getting a loan at 6%. If they can even get a business loan at all (good luck!), it would be at a much higher interest rate due to the risk, and/or require assets to be held in collateral (only an option if you’re already wealthy to begin with…)
The themes, camera angle, and method of delivering rewards (loot) don’t really affect something being an action RPG or not. The focus on action over storytelling does.
I haven’t played Morrowind, but I hear that you can connect to an enemy with a hit, and then a die roll determines whether that actually happens. It seems to me that while such a feature would be good for making a character with their own unique strengths, it would be damaging to the immersion required to inhabit that character. Thus, immersion building features that make the character do what the player does, can easily be considered roleplaying features.
Shattered Pixel Dungeon is a roguelike, well suited to the touch interface and small screen. Offline. Constantly expanded. Free, open source, and on F-Droid.
Developer also appears to have a presence on the Threadiverse, think he came over when Reddit went to hell. Lemme find the community.
Unciv is a reimplementation of Civilization V for Android. Obviously, less-elaborate graphics, but same gameplay. Free, open-source, available on F-Droid.
Catacalysm: Dark Days Ahead is an open-world roguelike. The good news is that it is deep, has ridiculous amounts of functionality. Very free-form – you can build camps with NPCs, mutate your character, acquire bionic implants, construct buildings and vehicles, etc. Some extensive mods to do things like add fantasy content. The bad news is that it also has a very steep learning curve – think Dwarf Fortress, say. The UI was also designed for a PC, and while the Android port dev did a reasonable job of adapting it for a touchscreen, it’s still awkward compared to a keyboard – not like Shattered Pixel Dungeon. If you’re willing to carry a keyboard – you say that you’re okay with a controller, so I assume that you’re okay lugging some kind of gear bag – then it becomes a very good option. There are some folding keyboards aimed at phone use that can be pretty small, certainly smaller than a game controller, if you don’t want a more-traditional keyboard. CPU-intensive, though – in heavily-monster-infested areas, it can load down a PC, and it’s probably less-gentle on less-powerful Android devices. Offline. Free, open-source, but nobody has packaged it for F-Droid.
Download links for both the stable and experimental builds here:
There’s an essentially-inactive community on the Threadiverse at !cataclysmdda
There is a whole genre of older text-based interactive fiction games that are free and offline for simple virtual machines; the major ones here are glulx, TADS, and Inform/z5. Android has such virtual machine ports; it looks like https://f-droid.org/packages/io.davidar.fabularium/ in F-Droid can run them. These involve a lot of typing, as they were designed for the PC, and IMHO are not well-suited to a virtual keyboard, but if you’re willing to take a physical keyboard, they can be pretty good. You’ll need to learn the (English-like) syntax that the game engines understand. I personally enjoyed https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=z5xgyw0jbt9r3ah1 and https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=op0uw1gn1tjqmjt7. Two sites that have large collections of free games made by volunteers for download:
I’ll be honest, though – when I first got an Android device, I was pretty disappointed with the game situation. This is greatly-exacerbated by the fact that I’m not willing to get a Google account and let Google more-readily monitor me, which rules out most commercial games…but I wasn’t blown away by even commercial game availability in the Google Play Store, and the open-source situation is kind of sparse compared to Linux, what I’m normally on. Linux is IMHO generally a preferable gaming platform, unless one specifically wants to do touch-based games (which can be important).
I was also kind of disappointed by the lack of choose-your-own-adventure/gamebook-style games on Android. These would avoid the typing in interactive fiction by just having a few choices to select from, which I thought would be a good fit for a touchscreen. There’s the large collection of text-based mostly-commercial games at Choice of Games – you can get their client on itch.io; Android has an itch.io package manager on F-Droid in the form of Mitch that can download it. Heh, though that’s downloading a package manager with a package manager to get a package manager. If I had to recommend a few, I’d try Tin Star, maybe Choice of Robots, and the Heroes trilogy; those are commercial, though they have a few free games, and IIRC their client keeps a few normally-commercial games for temporary free play.
While I like the Choice of Games writing, I find that a lot of the gameplay in the games fall flat, more-or-less trying to optimize for playing one character “type” or another; I feel like they’re written by novel authors and could benefit a lot from more game elements, and that new authors kind of copied the existing style.
There’s a once-commercial series of gamebooks, Lone Wolf, which I can’t really call a fantastic example of a gamebook and doesn’t have the most-amazing artwork, but which was a real 1980s/1990s series whose author said “go ahead and freely distribute them”, so various open-source and commercial projects have gone and done up clients to play the books, do stuff like the dice-rolling and hit-point tracking and so forth. I haven’t used Android clients, but they exist. One such project.
I still don’t have an open-source solitaire implementation that I’m blown away by, which seems like another surprising limitation. My guess is that you can probably find something non-open-source – though probably spyware – on the Google Play Store. PySolFC is on F-Droid. It…works, and it gets me my Eight Off fix (a particular solitaire game that I like but isn’t as widely-played as Klondike or Freecell) but it was really designed for desktop computer, and the Android adaptation could be better, IMHO. Small cards and such.
There’s a choose-your-own-adventure engine called Twine; games written in various languages – the most sophisticated such language is SugarCube – can be converted to Web-based games. That seems like it’d be ideal for Android, and the games are playable on Android, but authors don’t always create games that work well on the small screens of many Android devices. I don’t know of a single Twine-oriented game archive in the sense that the Interactive Fiction archive and the Interactive Fiction Database serve for interactive fiction games. However, many people who have made Twine games seem to distribute them in packaged form on itch.io. There doesn’t seem to be much of an open-source culture around these, unfortunately, so I don’t see people doing a lot by creating patches and such. I rarely play these on Android, mostly use the PC. Here’s a list of Twine games on itch.io packaged for Android:
There’s also a pretty extensive number of adult games for this platform, if that’s your cup of tea.
There are emulators for various old game systems for Android. I’ve used Retroarch on Linux, and it looks like they also have an Android build on F-Droid. I’ve never spent time using these on Android, because I just always would prefer to play on a desktop platform, but I’d imagine that if what you have is an Android device and using that is a constraint, they’re probably fine. That might be the more action-oriented sort of game you’re looking for, given that you’re talking about a controller. Not much by way of legitimately-free stuff there, though obviously piracy of old console games is widespread, and some people – such as myself – will sometimes just buy the game on another platform and conscience assuaged, go pirate it on the platform that we want to play it on. I think my favorite emulated games were probably the most-popular 2D ones on the Super Nintendo, stuff like Super Metroid or and Legend of Zelda 3. Oh, and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night for the PS1. I imagine that a current Android device would have no trouble with any of those, if you’ve a controller.
Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup is a traditional roguelike that has a build for Android on F-Droid. This, again, is designed for a PC and is gonna be better-played with a keyboard. It’s not beautiful, nor as well-suited to the Android platform as the designed-for-the-platform Shattered Pixel Dungeon. But it has a game that is famous for being refined, with the developer constantly going back and cutting out cruft and grind/busywork, resulting in a very polished game from a gameplay sense. The author, Linley Henzel, has some famous quote about how any action that the player has to make in a game should be an interesting decision, and if it isn’t, it should be removed from the game.
If you really want a timesink and have a keyboard and you don’t mind online play except insofar as you don’t want some commercial company trying to data-mine your activity, there are a bunch of MUDs out there; these are run by volunteers who wanted to create and run their own worlds, and they’re always looking for more players. These are text-based, usually-but-not-always fantasy games. It looks like there are Android clients. I can’t specifically recommend any of the clients, as I haven’t tried them. Many combat-oriented MUDs allow one to configure a character to essentially fight on its own, so if your concern is being constrained to needing to be glued to a screen in a multi-user world, it does provide some ability to get up and leave.
I’m going to place the big caveat there that I haven’t played these in ages, and I don’t know if the gameplay has advanced much over the years – they tend to be grindy. But they are free, and there’s a lot of stuff out there, if you’re looking to spend time exploring. MUD clients tend to have features to help alleviate latency, like having a local buffer for editing the current line one is typing, but I don’t know how annoying a cell link with poor reception might be. They don’t send all that much data, but it is a real-time world, not turn-based. And they aren’t gonna impose ads on you, or have software that runs on your system, or data-mine you, or try to figure out how to sell you anything; they’re games where the people who make them just like playing them enough to set them up for their own enjoyment.
Battle for Wesnoth is a good turn-based hex wargame with a number of campaigns…think, oh, the kinds of games in the “Tactics” genre, if you’re familiar with those. However…it was designed for the PC. It’s definitely playable on Android, but the UI clearly wasn’t designed for Android; it benefits from some kind of pointing device. If you’re willing to haul a pointing device of some sort with you, I’d recommend it without reservation. Free, open-source, available on F-Droid.
Re: The MUD situation, I know from personal experience that Iron Realms has still been cranking out a few of them in the last few years. I was a big fan of Starmourn but that one just got demoted to Legacy recently, I guess because of lack of players. Shame because it was really neat and polished. But they’ve got a triumvirate of Lusternia, Achaea (my personal favorite) and Aetolia as active MUD worlds.
Now granted Iron Realms is a whole ass company, not just some nerd hosting a game off his basement server rack strictly out of love for the game, and open source self-hosting enthusiasts may not be super jazzed about that. But as far as I can tell they’re about as harmless as a company can be and do seem to still be in business more as a labor of love than anything else. At least as far as I’ve ever been able to find out. They mostly exist on donations so far as I know, I’ve never had to buy anything from them or been served an ad. And I do really, really like their Nexus client, the interface is really slick and it adds a lot of features and conveniences that I found lacking in other older MUD clients (though, granted, the only non-Iron Realms MUD I ever put any significant amount of time into was Aardwolf and I think I had to use a third party client for that).
All that said, MUD is a dying genre and any influx of new users would help revitalize many of these worlds. If it sounds interesting to you don’t hesitate to go check it out. Veteran users have always been universally helpful in my experience, unless they have an actual lore appropriate reason to be hostile to you - then, watch out! Although even most of those guys won’t stomp on a brand new noob without warning. Players who enjoy social roleplay will find themselves at home in a MUD. Players who enjoy social roleplay and have, or gain, a little bit of scripting knowledge will find themselves especially at home in a MUD. Give one a shot, they’re free and fun and it’ll raise your typing speed a lot.
Slay the Spire is the gold standard for me, at least. I haven’t played Monster Train – it doesn’t look that appealing to me, but I’ve heard good things.
It’s very similar in some ways in the surface, but pretty different in essence. I like both. STS is more hardcore and “strict” and choices matter more, MT is more chill, relying on a single good combo usually, but with very high ceiling for broken fun things. I prefer MT more to unwind.
You say that, but I never made a spreadsheet to optimize my Slay the Spire runs. Balatro is way harder and more random.
Still fun though. I’m 50 hours into Balatro and loving every minute of it. Just made a hand calc spreadsheet last night as I’m pushing into blue stakes and need to optimize every move to keep the numbers going up.
Playing on the gold stake, I think I don’t make it past the first ante like 80% of the time. I might be too greedy or just bad at the game, but in StS I can make a decent run on ascension 20 at a much higher rate.
You should be able to play Flushes, Straights, or Full Houses and win in the first Ante without any buffs. Does the -1 hand size from Gold Stake really hurt that much?
Supergiant might not be 3 dudes in an apartment, but it’s still an indie studio. They do put an impressive amount of effort into their games though, I agree on that
Elden Ring for me. The kids have all played the shit out of it and killed literally everything in the game. I hopped on for about two hours, wandered around aimlessly, died a few times, avoided everything to prevent dying, died a few more times and decided I never needed to do that again.
Elden ring is the hardest of the soulslikes imo. A company that treasures not telling you shit and loves to kill you for mistakes also giving you too much freedom to make them imo.
Not really a critique on it, just ruminating on why i think it’s the toughest one of the souls games I’ve played.
I found it to be the easiest. If you’re having trouble with a boss, you can just go somewhere else and level up or upgrade your weapon before coming back. Unless you’re at the very end and explored nearly everything, there should be plenty of other bosses you could be fighting instead. Other soulslike games tend not to have as many options and I would often end up stuck on a particular boss that I had to best because there were no other areas available.
Also spirit ashes. I know a lot of people refuse to use them, but if the game gives you something that makes the game easier and you choose not to use it then that’s on you.
It’s funny cuz you think it’s easy and i think it’s hard for the same reason haha. Dark souls games being what they are, I could never decide if i should move on or keep trying to git gud. A few times i gave up on a challenge only to find another challenge just as difficult, causing me to wonder if i could have given up on that first challenge, etc.
The comparitive lack of options in DS1 for example made it easier for me to decide how to move forward.
Anyway, just two ways of looking at the same thing. :D
Same exact experience. Then someone from Reddit messaged me some non spoiler wary game tips and I went back in and played 130 hours. It was my first souls game since PS3 Demon’s Souls. I ended up loving it. But I fucking hated it at first, and I don’t blame anyone for being turned off.
Oh gawd I wish I still had access to my Reddit account. The biggest things were how to do stats—just pumpIG to like 30 after getting enough STR and DEX to use what ya want.
Another huge thing for me was getting a weapon I actually liked. The twinblade is obtainable super early on and carried me through a loooot of the game.
Another hint was for when I felt really weak but didn’t want to grind forever, there’s a portal to a place where you can just run up and down the map, sneaking and backstabbing dudes for 1k runes each. It’s behind the Third Church of Marika, in the bushes.
I think what blocks me is doing a strength build like I always used to and not trying out things. It seems that things can be tried out a lot easier due to the many ways of buffing
My steamdeck makes me feel like I’ve gone 3rd party. It’s affordable and can run about 90 percent of releases. Plus indies and it’s not locked down by anything.
I’m usually ranked either 3rd or 4th in FFA deathmatch matches, so if they’re hiding it so well that they’re not pushing the non-cheaters down, what is the point of cheating? And if they’re hiding it so well that they’re not actually even winning, how are they causing so much grief?
Maybe it’s a bigger issue in Ranked/ competitive, but if you’re not actually on an esports team I just don’t get caring about rankings and playing ranked (is it just for the ranked season profile badge? I did that one year to get to Gold Nova 3, and then never bothered again).
It’s basically luck of the draw with trust factor and region
I regularly run into cheaters who I watch the demo afterwards and they just sit there aim locked onto someone and tracking them through the wall for 10s before blasting them without ever seeing them, or react to things they can’t see (e.g. suddenly flick to a corner someone is walking up to in a panic wo seeing or hearing a thing). Basically every other game has someone suspicious if not blatantly cheating from the start. If was bad in CSGO and it’s 10x worse in CS2
I remember back in like 2016~2017 seeing one of those spinning aimbots with a wallhack, just sitting at CT spawn in Dust 2 and killing everyone on T. We all watched it for 5 minutes until it got VAC-banned. That one was hilarious.
I do wonder if West Coast US (where I am) is more heavily policed than other regions. That would make sense if Valve is doing some kind of post-match automated analysis of player behavior, which would probably be too compute-intensive to run everywhere.
You are either using hyperbole or you are lying. VAC is an incredibly good AC for CS. To have a cheater every other game is not possible unless your trust factor is in the basement/you are at 20k+ (which I doubt)/ or you are really low like <3k (most likely).
Game sense is a big thing in CS and it can be the reason for a lot of decisions that people make, which can be thought of as cheating. Go watch professional LAN tournaments of 1.6 especially on Nuke and see all the wall bangs that happen that’s not wall hacks it’s game sense.
I have been playing CS since 1.6. I know a cheater when I see one and I know wallbangs can happen. You mean the guy with 100% headshot rate, shoots exclusively at people thorough walls before seeing them, and puts their face into a wall to stare at the enemy and track them walking through the map on 1v1 is playing legitimately? Unless I’ve done something to tank my trust factor and it hasn’t changed in something like 5 years, then there’s no reason for me to have low trust factor.
The cheater problem was not like this before and has been getting steadily worse. Just because you don’t see them doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Besides that wallbangs are nothing like in 1.6.
On the flipside of this, I've been kicked from games because I know how to prefire, and a lot of players see that and just assume you're wallhacking. Nobody pays attention to the 70% of the time that you prefire at air, but when you guess right and instakill someone holding an angle, it's easier to say "cheater" than "i've been holding this same angle for the past 5 rounds, perhaps I've become predictable"
Yeah I haven’t even made an account on Epic to get free games from there. Valve almost single handedly made Linux a viable gaming platform and I’m grateful for that (I know wine has existed far longer than proton, but the difference before and after proton is day and night).
Even before Proton Valve was heavily invested in Linux gaming.
SteamOS has been around way longer than Proton, and the Steam Client had a native Linux version for such a long time, I don’t even remember when it was published. Also, the Steam Linux Runtime is something worth mentioning - it is a common base that game developers can target instead of the various different distributions.
Final Fantasy XVI’s Active Time Lore. Being able to pause the game and have a list of relevant characters, places, and concepts for the scene you’re in is so helpful for my ADHD, for when I take a break from a game and come back not knowing what’s going on. I want to see this in every story heavy game.
39.6% of players have beaten the final boss of Elden Ring. Considering how huge the game is, and how difficult it can be, I found that to be a surprisingly large number of people. I'm not sure how that compares to dark souls 3, but Dark Souls 2 has about 33% completion and dark souls 1 (prepare to die edition) has less than 25%
I started feeling this way a while back and eventually realized it wasn’t the games that had changed so much, but me. Getting older really does change your interests and how much you have fun with different playstyles.
I used to not want to play games if they didn’t have some form of multiplayer, but these days if I get to game at all, all I want is a quality single player experience.
Indeed. While many years ago I was playing almost only League of Legends with friends every evening after school, now I’m more enjoying the quality in note/totk, Celeste, and co. I also feel like online games aren’t anymore the places where you could get to know strangers and make online friends. LoL has gotten too toxic and competitive. And Minecraft servers have a 5oo young demographic for me
Likewise, as one ages, different components of games become more or less important.
Example - used to hate sitting through cutscenes and dialogue (it was just reading back then, but I was a big reader so that wasn’t the issue), would skip whatever I could and get frustrated when I couldn’t. But these days I actually like a good story-focused game (botw, horizon), and don’t skip through it in any game unless the story is garbage… although I love largely story-free games as well (dysmantle is the current passion - there’s very minimal story that you have to piece together, and most of it is obtained through exploration rather than quests or interaction)
I also haven’t played online in years - since my wow days (vanilla and first expansion, then gave it up, so like 2008). Other people ducking around tends to detract from the game for me, and I strongly dislike PvP because I’m terrible against humans who don’t follow specific patterns… now I get frustrated when I accidentally buy a game that doesn’t have offline/single player content. If I could host my own servers for them though……
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