JackbyDev

JackbyDev, wczoraj

Damn, Preston. This one really is different.

JackbyDev, 19 dni temu

Jak and Daxter as well as Ratchet and Clank are both fun series. Jak was always weird in emulators for me, but maybe it works now.

JackbyDev, 19 dni temu

I think I need a band aid.

You want me to throw my shoe?

JackbyDev, 19 dni temu

I loved it, and don’t take this as a dig because tons of games had this problem. It was one of the first games in played where environments were fully destructible. Trees? Nah. Trees are invulnerable to everything, including literal bunker buster bombs.

JackbyDev, 25 dni temu

rolled

Accurate

JackbyDev, 24 dni temu

If I’d known that I would’ve bought it years earlier.

JackbyDev, 26 dni temu

I don’t think about that stuff. If it’s a game or movie involving killing I suspend my disbelief. It’s only annoying when they suddenly do care about it.

JackbyDev, miesiąc temu

The point is to make camping harder. Please be joking.

JackbyDev, miesiąc temu

The games with kill cams aren’t trying to be realistic.

JackbyDev, miesiąc temu

Prior art exists of that though so you wouldn’t be able to. I know you’re making a joke though lol.

JackbyDev, miesiąc temu

What’s frustrating is that the thing that is arguably questionable (the art of some of the characters) isn’t what is the subject of anything. Nope. Ball throwing.

JackbyDev, miesiąc temu

I thought this was about the ball throwing to capture monsters

JackbyDev, miesiąc temu

I fucking hate Nintendo.

JackbyDev, 2 miesiące temu

It was the last battlefield I played, and only the open beta. Because it was only during the open beta I remember the absolute blinding flashlights lol. Like a portable flashbang gun.

JackbyDev, 2 miesiące temu

Except there are consequences for failure. See the timeline split stuff.

JackbyDev, 2 miesiące temu

Tears of the Kingdom was amazing. The only thing BotW did better was how it felt riding on horseback through Hyrule field dodging lasers. But that was the high point, the average experience in BotW was less fun that TotK for me.

TotK really might be one of my top 5.

It’s too hard to really rank every game. I spent a ton of time on Minecraft over the years but haven’t recently. Like over a decade ago I liked gmod and still spent so much time on it but haven’t played recently.

Lately colony management games have been scratching the itch. Do id probably say Dwarf Fortress, Rimworld, and Oxygen Not Included.

JackbyDev, 2 miesiące temu

Plus with games never explaining how some of their mechanics work and not giving you any realistic way to experimentally determine it, why wouldn’t I look it up online?

A big one that comes to mind is stuff like attacks, armor, and HP. Games handle them differently and very rarely tell you exactly how they work.

JackbyDev, 2 miesiące temu

I’m gonna push back on this idea. Take Rimworld. It’s also a “have the wiki open” game. The game tells you how long plants take to mature, but there is a mechanic that plants “rest” a certain amount of time that isn’t mentioned anywhere, so the figure is just flat wrong for all plants by some factor (same factor for all plants). I love these types of games, but it’s not an excuse for relying on wikis to explain things.

JackbyDev, 2 miesiące temu

Nothing wrong with buying on day one, but don’t pre order. I get your point, they don’t make bad games, but we’ve seen this pattern often where beloved devs fall from grace. It’s just not worth it. Like they said, they don’t run out of digital copies.

If you really really wanna preorder something physical, maybe I can understand that, but I really only do PC gaming as of now, console gaming for me is pretty rare, so I don’t have much of an opinion on it.

JackbyDev, 2 miesiące temu

Especially if it’s a console game. If it’s PC I can typically manually edit things to fix them, but consoles are locked down. I still remember Fallout 3 when I finished the Operation Anchorage DLC it also marked some other random quest I never started as complete. Realizing I could fix that bug with a console command on PC (ironic lol) made me not wanna play on consoles unless I really have to.

JackbyDev, 2 miesiące temu

Let me arbitrarily change the difficulty whenever I want. I hate games that don’t let you do this. The worst offender was Resident Evil Village. It let me lower it but wouldn’t let me increase it back without starting over.

JackbyDev, 2 miesiące temu

It’s hilarious to me when people whine to devs that changing the difficulty is bad, because what, do we really want to view beating a single player game as competitive? It’s single player. Who cares.

JackbyDev, 2 miesiące temu

Just give me explicit visual cues on when I’m supposed to party and I’ll be happy. I hate when devs assume I understand what “just about to hit” means.

JackbyDev, 2 miesiące temu

Yeah. Like… Uh. Major spoiler. Don’t open if you haven’t finished.

Frost Punk 1 spoilerThe sheer length of the end game freeze was crazy. Of course, if you knew just how long and how intense it would be then it wouldn’t really be fun to encounter. The fun of that is the surprise of how long and intense it is, even with the game telling you that you need tons of food it’s still crazy.

But even apart from that, there are times when you make decisions based on limited information only to realize there is something that gives you more options soon after, and if you’d pursued that other thing you wouldn’t have needed the first thing. These was a bit of that in FP1 and FP2. I liked 1, didn’t finish 2 but I still liked it. My main complaints about 2 were the UI being wonky and a few mechanics not being very clear.

I appreciate the devs of FP1 making it so buildings didn’t need to be smushed. There used to be this way you could trick the game into shoving more buildings in than it typically allowed, but they just made that happen by default. Changes like this deserve praise. Pointless micromanagement should always be eliminated.

JackbyDev, 2 miesiące temu

Edit: Also I proved my gaming prowess back when easy games had not been invented yet.

This is so true lmao. Every time I play old NES games I’m dumbfounded. It’s like half because they’re hard and half because the design is wonky. So much has changed since then.

I guess part of it is because arcade games were meant to drain your quarters and older games sort of followed that style to an extent.

JackbyDev, 2 miesiące temu

I like to set the difficulty high enough to where I don’t feel the game is too easy, but low enough so that I’m not getting frustrated and feeling like the challenge is bullshit.

JackbyDev, 2 miesiące temu

Banished is so nostalgic but replaying it is so bad lol. I love colony management games. Probably my favorite genre. Rimworld is my favorite at the moment.

JackbyDev, 2 miesiące temu (edited 2 miesiące temu)

Creating a d&d campaign is difficult, and publishing it in a way that communicates what needs to be known is tricky. It’s almost the opposite of a novel. In a novel you need to save twists and turns until the end. In a d&d campaign the DM needs to know them all from the start. But you also don’t want to overwhelm someone with too much information. But you don’t want someone who is following the module closely instead of using it as inspiration to “write” themselves into a corner because they didn’t know something would happen in a specific way later.

The main published modules for 5e are all a little different in how they present everything. Some may be better than others for certain DMs and certain groups.

JackbyDev, 2 miesiące temu

Evil Genius 2. I loved Evil Genius 1 as a kid. It was far from perfect and had a lot of bugs, but it was a blast. I’m fully aware there’s a lot of rose tinted goggles going on for it in my mind. But I thought the new one would fix problems and be more enjoyable. It did improve on the first in a lot of ways, but it was so so grindy.

In EG1 you could send you minions into the world to steal money and complete missions (that gave points or loot, like stealing the Eifel Tower). I’m EG2, they kept this mechanic, but anyone you send to the world map is just gone. They cannot come back. This leads to just an annoying constant flow of recruiting more minions, training them to upgrade, and them being sent to the map forever to never return. It would perhaps be slightly better if you could increase the rate you recruit minions like the first game, but instead they always come at a constant rate and there is a button to recruit more but it’s buried in a menu. So many things in this game are buried in a menu.

Another frustration, they added a feature to automatically tag enemy agents that come to your base (to be killed, captured, distracted, etc) but they’re all under different research tiers. Why require the research at all? Right clicking agents and saying “tag for capture” is just pointless busy work. Even in the original you could hold control when you did it and it would flag the whole group. Not anymore. You can only tag one at a time.

There are just so many little things like this that made the game so annoying to play. I wanted to like it. But I just couldn’t enjoy it. The new art style is worse, too. It keeps the spy fi aesthetic but it’s much more cartoonish. The game is more diverse which is nice, the original was like all men. I also liked what they did with John Steele, the main antagonist more or less. Canonically you beat him and killed him but they pass on his mantle to new agents and train them to be like him. And they’re relatively weak, but like a constant threat.

JackbyDev, 2 miesiące temu

It was one of the few times I really got hyped about a game as an adult.

JackbyDev, 2 miesiące temu

Would’ve been cooler if N didn’t use pokéballs. Just a minor flavor change.

JackbyDev, 2 miesiące temu

Okay?

JackbyDev, 2 miesiące temu

Yeah, remember how big of a stink Internet Explorer on Windows was in the 90s? Imagine if Internet Explorer blocked you from downloading other browsers. That’s basically what Google Play Store has been doing. Why it’s taken this long to get fixed is beyond me, but I’m glad it’s happening.

Hits the griddy with Thanos or something, idk, I don’t play Fortnite.

JackbyDev, 2 miesiące temu

Swap the () and []! 🩵

JackbyDev, 2 miesiące temu

All of them.

JackbyDev, 3 miesiące temu

Payment processing should be treated like a utility.

JackbyDev, 3 miesiące temu

It doesn’t necessarily mean it needs to be ran by the state.

JackbyDev, 3 miesiące temu

I worked a little bit for a company that worked with payment processor networks. This is my understanding (and don’t view this as a defense of them, I don’t necessarily think they’re good). There are a ton of banks. Every bank having their own POS machines would be difficult. Imagine going to one that doesn’t support your bank. So payment processors sort of provide that bridge so devices only need to know how to talk to one (or a handful) of networks and the same for the banks.

JackbyDev, 3 miesiące temu

There are standards already for the format of some of the messages. These options being subpar is how we got things like PayPal originally, so who knows.

JackbyDev, 3 miesiące temu

I thought it was obvious you meant Collective Shout.

JackbyDev, 3 miesiące temu

There was a question about Daedric Princes in a trivia game I went to recently. They gave four of them and you had to match what they were the prince of. I felt confident about two but only got one right. Of course I got Shegorath right.

JackbyDev, 3 miesiące temu

I feel you, but imagine if a game dev trained their own LLM exclusively on their own content. Only their own dialogue and lore. Could be fascinating then. Not something I wanna see a lot of work out into at the expense of other things, but could be interesting.

And to reiterate, I genuinely mean only trained on data the studio has a copyright on already.

JackbyDev, 3 miesiące temu

I thought Sanguine or whatever was the murder one but I remembered wrong. They gave the four categories and we had to match them. I thought Malacath might be based on Malakith from War Hammer and that seemed pretty hedonistic but it was a 50/50. (Well, I thought it was a 50/50 lol.) The last was Mephala who I thought might be lies. And if you know the lore well you probably already knew Mephala was the fourth they mentioned lol.

JackbyDev, 3 miesiące temu

I don’t know, I may have transcribed from the wiki wrong.

JackbyDev, 3 miesiące temu (edited 3 miesiące temu)

Yeah, I think people look at that criticism and think I mean I want super explicit bright glowing objects with a Skyrim style HUD that points me directly to where I need to go to get blue prints. Nah. Some ideas:

1. Some way to tell if there aren’t any more in an area so you don’t waste time looking when there isn’t anything.
2. Some sort of device that tells you how close some are, but not where they are. Like the classic “beep … beep … beep beep beep BEEPBEEPBEEPBPBPBBPBP” thing that gets more frequent as you approach. But make the max range relatively small.
3. I think they were called life pods? Like the other crashed emergency escape pods. For things you’re expected to get like the sea bike (I don’t remember the name), sea moth, and moon well maybe always put some blue print fragments on life pods you find later. This way you can’t miss them (unless you’re really really not paying attention). You can still make it so you get them earlier on, but this way in case you missed some somehow you can always “catch up” to where the devs expect you to be. Like if they expect you to get them ~10% in, then make it so the life pods you find ~25% in give you what you are missing for the sea moth.
4. A bit of a map system. This one is controversial, so I’m putting it last. A huge appeal of the game is not having a map. But even just a blank screen showing you all your way points, but not showing you where you are or what biomes are around would be useful. Then do something like show where blueprints are in an area. Maybe something like once you get two of three it shows you the general area where the remaining ones are, but doesn’t put a marker on the HUD.

Because with games like this where progression isn’t gated behind actually having some of these items, you can get in weird states where you get further in and didn’t get them. But maybe >95% of players did. The other <5% just missed something somehow. And then there’s no real clue on where to.go to back track to get it. And you can get in these annoying situations where it seems like you should have it but you aren’t sure, and you don’t want spoilers so you don’t look it up. Then when you look it up maybe you see a spoiler and it turns out you shouldn’t have it yet, that’s common. Other times you missed something super obvious in some very random area you only needed to go to once and never checked again because it seemed empty.

But it’s just so infuriating when people say things like “you’re not playing right” like, I’m getting frustrated because I’m playing right! If I wasn’t checking everywhere I could miss things. So I have to check everywhere to make sure I don’t. But then you can still miss things because there’s no real way to guarantee if you actually checked everything.

JackbyDev, 3 miesiące temu

I don’t think I had scanner room blue print.

JackbyDev, 3 miesiące temu

I don’t need hints because I’m not playing the game and I’m not planning on continuing. I’d gotten further than you think. But for context I’d already begun to explore the deeper areas when I ran into this conundrum. I built a stupidly long oxygen tube to get down there. I think the game expects you to have the sea moth first. That was one of the first moments I thought something was wrong. Then I think once I got it I couldn’t take it down there without an upgrade because I also didn’t have the moon pool unlocked. You’re talking about life pods, I never had a problem finding life pods. Those were easy and fun. It was going deeper without the sea moth and upgrades that was troublesome.

JackbyDev, 3 miesiące temu

I explored around the wrecks.