tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8987037890694811012024-03-18T12:29:12.191-07:00Mighty VisionHold Z to feel emotions.Broghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14185464573529387638noreply@blogger.comBlogger192125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-898703789069481101.post-32060484393421104702023-05-13T05:25:00.003-07:002023-05-13T05:25:54.430-07:00Zaga-33 reborn(This is the same as I just posted on <a href="https://www.patreon.com/smestorp">Patreon</a> but I'll put it here too.)<br>
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This took way longer than I expected!<br>
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In early March I decided to just spend a week rewriting an old game in Godot to help learn the engine while at the same time making it work on iOS again since I hadn't kept up with updates, and finally releasing on Android. Of course that week I got a bad case of covid. I still got the game largely working that week, but then needed a lot of recovery. I'm feeling great now though: not gonna have any bad long-term effects because I really did take the rest I needed at the time.<br>
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And then yeah just the details of getting it working on everything dragged on. It's not what I'm best at. There's still issues with the "google play store" - they cancelled me because I didn't update Glitch Tank often enough and now won't verify me because I live in a different country. Hopefully that gets sorted eventually, but thankfully you at least can distribute software on Android without official approval, so I've released it already on itch.io.<br>
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So! Here it is on android platform, eleven years late. And here it is back on iOS, four years after being taken down for not being updated sufficiently frequently.<br>
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Incidentally I did add a new mode! I thought about making it secret but that doesn't really make sense after such time, so all you have to do is complete the game once and then tap the moon.<br>
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<a href="https://smestorp.itch.io/zaga-33">itch.io link for android, windows, macos</a><br>
<a href="https://apps.apple.com/au/app/zaga-33/id516903940">appstore link for ios</a>Broghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14185464573529387638noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-898703789069481101.post-30859728253879931672022-09-12T15:25:00.002-07:002022-09-30T06:33:33.443-07:00patreon / videosI started this blog 13 years ago (not quite to the day) with an exercise of writing a post about each power in the game I was working on at the time. I got about half-way through the exercise and it served its purpose of opening the channel for me, getting me habituated to writing here. I've written a bunch of different things here: little diary entries, reviews of games I like, game design theory, assorted nonsense don't even know what. Most consistently I've posted when I release games, usually with some analysis of the development process.<br>
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There's a part of me here, a voice I'm comfortable speaking in at certain times about certain things. For a few years there I was coming to that voice quite often, this was a fruitful channel for the ideas I was thinking through at the time. Other ideas haven't fit as much. Maybe because I assume a certain audience; I restrict myself based on what I expect people who might read this to be interested in. Maybe because I developed the habit of writing here at a certain time when I had particular interests. Writing right now feels a little like channeling my past self rather than being the same person currently I am day to day.<br>
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Similarly my twitter was somewhere I posted a lot for a while, dropped off for a bunch of reasons, but still sometimes I have a thought that feels like a tweet to me so maybe I post it. When I look at what I've posted there recently I see "feels like a tweet" means a limited style and set of topics. I'm filtering through the lens of who I was 8-10 years ago when that was more part of my life. Not intentionally it just happens. Cognitive archaeology. We're built of accumulated layers of self and the older ones are still there but less active and less important to where we are now. I wasn't filtering myself then, and perhaps if I'd consistently kept posting there unrestrictedly it would be full of thoughts about massage, foraging, homebrew, childbirth. Topics that until one sentence ago you had no idea I'd taken an interest in.<br>
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So how do I communicate now? My voice of the moment, to speak my present thoughts, unfiltered by assumptions of past selves. I saw some tweets from <a href="https://twitter.com/visakanv" target="_blank">@visakanv</a> about how he was finding it good to just video himself talking and it unexpectedly resonated. People had suggested videos to me before and I'd never felt any impulse to do it but this time I just thought: okay. (I haven't watched any of his videos yet so I don't know if the direction I've taken has any relation to what he was actually talking about but it's not important.) Video has all the complexities of voice and body language, deep subconscious embodied communication, so much less controlled than text where you can write and rewrite until it's exact. So I've started making videos where I talk spontaneously to simply see where it goes. I'll do it as an exercise until it feels comfortable. I intend to talk about various topics not exclusively games, to aim for this sense of not feeling restricted by my idea of who I'm talking to. Maybe I'll try that here too.<br>
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I've done a few talks here and there, conferences and stuff, and I have varying satisfaction with them. Public speaking: it's a skill worth getting better at. The talk that felt best to me wasn't recorded and was about a game I didn't actually release yet (Smesport); I just spoke passionately from right in the middle of thinking about it rather than trying to distill lessons afterward for an audience. I want more like that. People have told me through the years that I should promote my games better, talk them up. I've always been reluctant to, preferring to let the work speak for itself. Well, sometimes it can, but it really deserves the best I can give it. The specific ways that people suggest talking about them don't gel with me, but that doesn't mean they're not right at the root, I just have to develop a way that's authentic to me.<br>
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I haven't released a game for a long time, I've been sick for a long time, I was about to have another child, and I was really worrying what to do about money. <a href="https://www.patreon.com/smestorp" target="_blank">So I've started a patreon.</a> If you want to and can afford to donate money to support me keeping going I really appreciate it. It's been really nice to feel that people value what I've done. I wish I had a new game to sell but I don't; when I do I'll show you but it's really slow right now. I wish some of the games I already made had sold more. Anyway I'm promising to make a video at least every two weeks. There might be other things too, maybe I'll write more or post some drawings or something.<br>
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(About my illness: when I posted here previously I'd had some improvement and was feeling cautiously optimistic that it would continue. It's similar now, maybe a little better overall but it fluctuates and some days are still pretty hard. When I do too much one day I take several days to recover, so I have to keep being careful. But I'm way way better than I was through 2020.)<br>
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So in typical Michael fashion I'm trying to kill multiple birds with fewer than the usual number of stones. A creative outlet, a source of income, a self-improvement practice, a quiet forest time. Here are the videos: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBvMDMPWJYhRF03oWjJKld-k4fKsHUuC2">michael in the forest</a>. They're not much but there will be more. From my experience with games I know well that it's very effective to first just make things. I'm not trying to make the best video or the best talk, I'm just doing it and then doing it again and eventually some of them will be quite good.Broghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14185464573529387638noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-898703789069481101.post-86579129452000093072022-02-07T05:01:00.003-08:002022-02-07T05:02:08.310-08:00plagueI haven't posted here for a long time.<br>
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In 2020 I got sick. I noticed in May that I'd been very tired for a while and it was getting worse rather than better, and by June I had severe fatigue, needing naps every afternoon - sometimes just falling asleep in the middle of the floor, muscle pain, mind unclear, difficulty concentrating. I think it was most likely the Long Covid; I had a friend in my house in March who was sick with an unidentified disease that could plausibly have been COVID-19 (though at the time we believed it wasn't based on the information currently available), and after that we had mild cold symptoms - of course this was before testing was widely available.<br>
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The doctor wasn't much help. He ordered a bunch of tests and told me I did amazing on all of them. Blood, ECG, chest X-ray, apparently everything showed that I was in very good shape. Which is like, kind of nice; as someone who used to just do computer and books all the time I've worked hard on turning that around and getting fit and it's nice to have that measured. But it didn't do anything to solve the problem.<br>
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My symptoms fluctuated over time and I more or less learnt to live with them. Learnt not to suddenly try to catch up on everything when I had a good day, because then I'd just collapse again the next day. The one thing that did help, weirdly, was the COVID-19 vaccine. I say weirdly because it's not what it was designed for, but there's anecodotal evidence of other people experiencing this, I don't claim to know what's up. Even if it's just the good old placebo effect I'll take it.<br>
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Whatever the reason, I've been feeling a lot better for a few months now. I'm getting my strength back: I can lift things again now that I could lift three years ago but I couldn't lift last year. I don't want a relapse so I'm still being careful and trying not to overdo it. I'm tentatively working again. I still find it hard to make games without the long focused periods of time I used to have pre-parenting, but I feel there's no rush. I guess one lesson I've taken from this enforced break is to stress less about trying to keep up with the indie games scene and trying to make the right thing to make money out of it, or to live up to some fake expectation of being a "genius" game designer. I'll just make something I want to make, when I can manage to. Meanwhile I've been also learning new things and looking into work I can hopefully do in a flexible way around potential fatigue spikes and also still making some games and stuff. I reckon it's good for me as an artist to not just do games games games all the time anyway.<br>
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Even though I haven't been releasing new games, people still buy the ones I've made before. It's consistently been a few hundred euros every month which, while it doesn't cover the rent it's not bad for not being able to work at all. It's unfortunate that a couple of the older ones have dropped off from my not having managed to keep up with system updates, and it feels bad how that kind of ties me down - if I just went to work on something completely different for ten years everything I've done would be lost. Or if I got permanently sick. So ephemeral. But anyway, thank you everyone who's bought my games and kept supporting me in these times.Broghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14185464573529387638noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-898703789069481101.post-6439546223426713972020-05-10T04:35:00.001-07:002020-05-10T04:35:45.335-07:00definite plan<a href="https://itunes.apple.com/nz/app/imbroglio/id969264934?mt=8">Imbroglio: Mizzenmast</a> is now unambiguously released and working. This was a stressful few days. Yesterday I completely crashed and spent the day in bed with sore throat, I guess my body recognised that it was time to take a break. Need to be more careful about keeping the immune system up. Difficult balance to get priorities right, some amount of productive creative work is good to have in there for overall well-being but I can overdo it.<br>
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I started making Imbroglio in late 2014, maybe earlier depending how much you count different prototypes that led in its direction, released in 2016 but kept working on it as a minor side project with expansions in 2016, 2018, 2020, so it's been a long ride to being complete. Feels good, I took the time and accomplished my vision for the game, especially with Draft Mode it really gets the chaotic combo-building feeling I was looking for. For personal satisfaction I'm glad I saw it through rather than just releasing an initial version and moving on. Probably I would have more money if I'd put that work towards more new games instead, but it's never clear.<br>
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But it's not quite done yet since it's still only on iOS! Of course I've always planned to release it on PC but I decided a while back to simplify things for myself by delaying that until I'd finished expanding it. Making the choices that simplify things is a critical part of managing to work as an independent artist. I also intended to release it on Android, I even developed it in a <a href="https://www.raphkoster.com/2014/05/13/monkey-x/">cross-platform framework</a> to simplify that, but then when I tried it didn't work and didn't seem worth the effort for 31 sales. Maybe I'll try again sometime. No promises.<br>
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<a href="https://mightyvision.blogspot.com/2019/11/current-projects.html">I wrote last year</a> that for the moment with a wild baby I was finding it worked better to be building on old things rather than trying to muster the attention to make something new. Well I'd hoped that would have shifted by now but then this whole pandemic went down so we've all had a lot on our shoulders. It's hard to plan a new project that might take years at a time where the future is so blatantly uncertain. So I'll keep fixing up old things.<br>
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<i>TOTALLY LIKELY PLAN OF THINGS TO HAPPEN</i><br>
Imbroglio: ports<br>
Cinco Paus: update/mini-expansion<br>
<i>(redacted)</i>: finish up and release<br>
868-HACK: fix the few bugs that have come in over years<br>
Zaga-33: get it working again on iOS haha<br>
Smesport: it's not the time to release it now but I can fix the bug that was holding it up<br>
Quinzena: it's still not a baby phase where I can work with it but this will come<br>
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If I can't work on anything new maybe I can at least get a clean slate and not have random crap I mean to get around to someday hanging over me since years. Or maybe inspiration will strike and I just make something new anyway, it tends to have a way of doing that when I make other plans.Broghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14185464573529387638noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-898703789069481101.post-80232971834905558822020-05-05T09:58:00.000-07:002020-05-05T09:58:04.123-07:00imbroglio - expansion & crashThe update to Imbroglio with new expansion went live. It's crashing the game on launch. This didn't come up at all during testing, sometimes things work differently with Game Center (the API for high scores on iOS) when applications are released, it's annoying but I'm working on it and will figure it out. Sorry everyone!<br>
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For now you can just not download the update, but if want to play on an updated copy you can by disabling Game Center (Settings, scroll down to Game Center, slide the green bar in top right to off) and the game doesn't crash, but can't access leaderboards. (If you're running an old version of iOS you might not be able to access IAPs without Game Center active, but on current ones you can.)<br>
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Okay thanks for your patience and keep looking after yourselves!Broghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14185464573529387638noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-898703789069481101.post-13239958291936903702020-05-02T08:37:00.002-07:002020-05-02T08:37:39.372-07:00preview for Imbroglio: Mizzenmast<b>Imbroglio: Mizzenmast</b>, the third expansion for <a href="http://mightyvision.blogspot.com/2016/05/imbroglio.html">Imbroglio</a>, has been submitted to the appstore and will be released in a few days. It takes the epic adventure to the high seas! But still in a tiny dungeon. Just with sea-ey things. Don't worry games don't have to make sense. Sea-dungeon. Something.<br>
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It's a jumbo sized expansion. I was originally planning four expansions each with two heroes for a final 4x4 character-select grid. In the end I didn't feel I had enough good weapon cards for two more sets; it's better to keep a higher density of interesting stuff. So there's 16 new weapons, same as the other two expansions, but all 4 new heroes because they're all good. It's mostly a jumble of effects that interact in novel ways with what's already in there, not really a common theme apart from mostly being things you might find on a pirate ship. And then there's Draft Mode, which is a new way to play the game with a more "roguelike" scoring system that encourages playing out every game (instead of restarting 10x to try for the perfect opening) and using a variety of weapons.<br>
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So now of course it's time for EXCLUSIVE PREVIEW CONTENT:<br>
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<img src="https://i.imgur.com/tjVzaA7.png"><br>
You might never have thought about it, but weirdly all the other heroes have the ability to see through walls. Or at least, when controlled by the player they act as though they had this ability. I guess maybe the walls are just chest-height? Anyway, for maximum realism meet: <b>Cruel Pirate Rodney</b>, a powerful villain with the ability to throw his weapons about. To play him evokes something of the classical dungeon crawl feeling, exploring a dark place not knowing where you will find monsters or treasure, honestly it surprises me that even this works on a 4x4 grid.<br>
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<img src="https://i.imgur.com/3D2Dgea.png"><br>
The <b>Lightkeeper's Candle</b> gives something different to everyone who holds it. Harry restores an extra hit point, Susannah and Masina do double damage, etc. And then it gives a couple of extra runes to help to use that ability, but also to help survive the first few turns of the game before you've built anything else up - especially important in Draft where restarting isn't free.<br>Broghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14185464573529387638noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-898703789069481101.post-60061997972075355762019-12-28T10:04:00.000-08:002019-12-28T10:04:22.793-08:00small progress updateThe Imbroglio expansion is coming together well, it's become my main work focus for now.<br>
Draft mode (maybe I need a cooler name for it) is working great, it's more "roguelike" than the other modes in that you're trying to make the best of what you find rather than execute a perfectly planned combo. Using similar ideas to what I've been developing in 868-HACK, Cinco Paus, P1 SELECT to make every game count, moving away from this way of playing by restarting a dozen times to try to get a good start. It's fun, I'm just enjoying playing it for fun again which is quite neat after what, five years? I hope others will find it to be a big enough new thing.<br>
One of the new heroes is an absolute mess to program, requires a whole bunch of special cases, but in a way there's something nice about having built up all this complexity and then just being free to trample all over it because it's not important anymore to keep it organised. Anyway you'll see.<br>
New weapons are coming together well. Thought about doing a "new mechanic" like charging to theme several weapons around but it's turned out more individual weird things. There's a lot can be done just by recombining what's already there, the basic framework of event triggers "when X occurs, do Y" is so flexible, most combinations aren't interesting or fun to play with but it's easy to try out lots of them. But some ideas still require quite a bit of code and I'm finding it harder to throw them away when I've spent more time on them, something can be clever and take work but not actually be <i>good</i>. Limiting myself to 16 weapons in the set is good practice for throwing away the ideas that aren't good.<br>
I'm also revising some previous weapons that were less useful, I had hoped to "fix" them by adding things that combined well with them, but that hasn't happened so here we go. Not sure exactly how far I want to go with this, it's good to apply what I've learnt from having more time and having it out there but also maybe some things are just part of the game's texture now and should just be left to be.<br>
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Cinco Paus update comes slower. Playing with new artifacts I decided most of them weren't good, I think I have two good ones, that's probably a nice number to not overcomplexify anyway (of course I was aiming for five for numerological reasons). Trying also some weirder ideas, probably won't stick but you never know.<br>
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Quinzena, I haven't found a good version of the new idea I was trying out so maybe I drop it. Working on testing some changes to the deck but baby has become very mobile and is no longer content to quietly watch, gone are the days of playtesting while breastfeeding, so it will take time.Broghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14185464573529387638noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-898703789069481101.post-84483281543457998502019-11-22T13:41:00.000-08:002019-11-22T13:43:03.415-08:00current projectsGeneral update on things I'm working on. Being a parent takes a lot of attention and I don't have the focus to make a big new thing. Making new game takes an intense burst of work to get off the ground and then it evolves more leisurely. I think there's another of these roguelikes brewing up inside me but it will have to wait for its time. I can make something small like <a href="https://mightyvision.blogspot.com/2019/07/p1-select.html">P1 Select</a> but even that required a week of doing much less than my share of housework and childcare, only possible because mother-in-law staying with us at the time. But overall things are great, our baby is absolutely incredible, I think it's reasonable not to expect to achieve much other work while you're bringing a new human into the world.<br>
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<img src="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EIErzC5WsAApPvC?format=jpg" width="100%"><br>
(photo by <a href="https://twitter.com/uglymachine">@uglymachine</a>, source <a href="https://twitter.com/NYUGameCenter/status/1189281020144734208">@NYUGameCenter twitter account</a>)<br>
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I made Quinzena for <a href="https://gamecenter.nyu.edu/events/no-quarter/no-quarter-2019/">No Quarter</a>. It's a tabletop game of secret bids and dramatic reveals. I'll write a fuller post about it at some point. Basically every year they commission four artists to make new games, they throw a big party and lots of people play, and often the games are developed further after the show. I was a bit iffy about taking on a project with a deadline given new-parent constraints but we agreed that if things didn't work out then I could do the same as with P1 Select and jam out something while neglecting responsibilities for a few days, in the end it was pretty busy getting all the pieces painted. I'm happy with the game and it went down very well at the event. It was great to be paid to make a game for a specific setting where people could play it with each other - when I've made local multiplayer videogames they've been very hard to sell and often the people who want to play them have trouble finding someone with whom to do so. Now I'm continuing to work on the game, tweaking a couple of cards and trying out adding a new element that carries between rounds, little bit more complexity but not too much, once this is settled I'll work out how to publish it (people mostly seem to do kickstarters for board games?). I found it really satisfying to make and I can see myself doing more board games in future.<br>
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I'm working on a final <a href="http://mightyvision.blogspot.com/2016/05/imbroglio.html">Imbroglio</a> expansion, I had planned to do four but it'll be better if I just put the best ideas I had for two together and make one really good one. If you want to count four things, include the original game. I wrote in <a href="https://mightyvision.blogspot.com/2019/01/quiet-blog-year.html">January</a> about how these are not so much worth working on from financial perspective, but the thing right now is it's something incremental I can do because the groundwork is already laid. It's a good expansion: the new heroes all do weird things that make it feel like a quite different game, and I think I've finally worked out how to make a draft mode decent. New weapons are a bit all over the place at the moment; some neat ideas but with there being so many cards already and not many parameters to balance them with it's hard to make them make sense.<br>
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I'm working on a big update to <a href="https://smestorp.itch.io/cinco-paus">Cinco Paus</a>. People on the <a href="https://discordapp.com/invite/xVwDAjZ">brough games discord</a> have been exploring the game very thoroughly and finding all kinds of little edge case bugs and game-breaking combos, so I'm gradually fixing those, plus I'm balancing the artifacts to make their choices more interesting. Also trying adding some new artifacts to increase late-game variety, these are cool ideas but need a bunch more testing to see if they'll go in. Feels almost like a mini-expansion, but probably not enough to justify making it separate, I'm not going to add new enemies or wand effects. The game is very complete and doesn't strictly need more stuff at all but again this is the kind of thing that's easiest for me to work on at the moment so I'm doing it, hopefully it still adds something and if I don't feel it does I won't keep it in.<br>
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So actually I'm working on three projects in parallel? Somehow that doesn't seem efficient for limited parent's work time but that's what's happening. I also have a fourth that is kind of paused, it's a word game, I think I mentioned it on here before, it's mostly done but just needs finishing off, finishing projects can require a focused period of work the same as starting them, so I'm putting this off until I can concentrate on it, no doubt it will benefit from having had time to sit.Broghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14185464573529387638noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-898703789069481101.post-91555784735920148072019-07-13T10:22:00.000-07:002019-07-13T10:22:40.666-07:00P1 SELECTSome folk from the <a href="https://discordapp.com/invite/xVwDAjZ">brough games discord</a> organised a <a href="https://itch.io/jam/broughlike">7 Day Broughlike</a> jam last month. A bit confusing but an honour. Heart emoticon.<br>
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I'm never sure how much people are joking when they call things broughlikes? Like roguelike was already a silly genre name so whatever (& whatever meaning it once had has been totally lost and sometimes reversed), I guess I just have to embrace it at this point but I still try to remind people I <a href="http://mightyvision.blogspot.com/2010/03/subcondition-j.html">don't</a> <a href="https://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/2268">just</a> <a href="http://mightyvision.blogspot.com/2014/10/helix.html">have</a> <a href="http://vertexdispenser.com/">one</a> <a href="http://mightyvision.blogspot.com/2012/06/kompendium.html">genre</a> <a href="http://www.smestorp.com/scarfmemory.html">ok</a>. And also I'm far from the only person making smaller-scale roguelikes, e.g. <a href="http://www.zincland.com/">Jeff Lait</a> has made way more.<br>
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But obviously I do like them whatever we want to call them.<br>
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I made a game for the jam, what else could I do? I flirted with the idea of doing something completely utterly different from anything else I've ever made just to show, but honestly that would take too long, I have a baby now (who is amazing) so doing a jam would have been unrealistic if I hadn't been able to reuse a lot of work. So I just did the obvious thing of making a game like the games I make for the jam about making games like the games I make. And it turned out okay! In fact it was really good for me, I haven't released a game for a while and I found it really freeing to just make the kind of thing I've made before and not worry about pushing boundaries or whatever. I realised how much that feeling that I ought to do something new isn't really inside me, it's about what I think other people are going to perceive as being worthwhile. Fuck that. I can just make whatever. It's the apocalypse and sometimes we feel a lot of pressure to be doing something meaningful, heal the world or go out in glory, but that's too much to take on, stress doesn't help anything, and anyway doing meaningful work isn't something you can quantify like robots maximising utility to create something 5.1% more artistic and 33.4% more effective at melting the corrupt hearts of rich men. Just like things that you like and make things you like because you like them. Imagine your lungs filled with soft moist earth, green roots growing through them spreading out along your arms reaching towards the horizon.<br>
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And celebrate achievements even if they're not like the maximum best thing you ever hope towards. My baby is so determined to get to crawling and walking that they'll keep trying and getting frustrated and crying but still trying, and if we pick them up to stop them overstraining themselves they just struggle to get back down and try some more, so we throw a parade in their honour and all dance around the house in a conga line to help them celebrate what they have already done instead of being frustrated at what they can't do yet. I try to remind myself the same. There's a real technical craft in making these games, making them actually work as game, and having mastered an aspect of that it's worth exercising it with joyful making and not always having to be expanding to try encompass more, there's still plenty I can do with variations within the space I've already explored. Appreciate small differences, maybe they look the same if you look from distance and squint but actually playing them is a different game, minor concept variation expands into bigger differences when you grow it into full soul, like every person or tree is the same basic structure with the same types of features but it's worth getting to know individuals. And trust, trust that if you grow in self then what you create will express more and be worthy without frantic trying to make sure it is. Just be and make and making will be. Do art for the artist not for the art, art will take care of itself.<br>
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Now in my usual way with jam games I got a bit sucked into spending more time on it. But now it's done, for good, I think. So I release an iOS version:<br>
<a href="https://apps.apple.com/us/app/p1-select/id1470639614">P1 SELECT on ios appstore</a><br>
<a href="https://smestorp.itch.io/p1-select">P1 SELECT on itch.io</a><br>
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THE REST HAS SPOILERS.<br>
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It's basically a variation on concept of Imbroglio: grid of different weapon types and moving through the maze also moves through different weapons. Main difference is that attacking in a direction also moves on the weapon-selection grid, so it's not equivalent to maze grid. This is "glitch mechanic" too, I tried to tick as many boxes as possible in what someone listed as characteristics of my games. I try to create the fiction that it could be a real game without this "bug", it sort of works, with luck (and the hp banner) every hero except MIDAS could conceivably complete the game, and MIDAS could get a higher score, maybe I should have just made that game instead of trying to be fancy haha.<br>Broghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14185464573529387638noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-898703789069481101.post-51850037541334368902019-01-16T16:20:00.001-08:002019-01-16T16:47:19.676-08:00quiet blog yearsomeone asked on twitter a few weeks back if i was planning to update this blog ever. i guess i have been pretty quiet on here, last year had the fewest posts since i started. well i've usually written some kind of "summing up" post for the start of each year, so here we go.<br>
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i released <a href="http://mightyvision.blogspot.com/2017/12/cinco-paus-dev-notes.html">Cinco Paus</a> on iOS at the end of 2017 (<a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cinco-paus/id1249999336?mt=8">appstore link</a>), and on PC in May (<a href="https://smestorp.itch.io/cinco-paus">itch.io link</a>). since release i've been continuing to update it, fine-tuning the balance and fixing rare special-case bugs people find, there will be another update soon and it will be even better than it already is. i'm really proud of it, i'm still playing it quite a bit, i'm glad i made it. it's sold 2185 copies on ios and 163 on pc.<br>
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imbroglio: i released another expansion pack, <a href="http://mightyvision.blogspot.com/2018/04/phlogiston-preview.html">Phlogiston</a>, it has sold 606 units which is in line with expectations of diminishing returns (the game itself sold 13184, first expansion 2059). the game design is very flexible for adding more stuff and i still have a bunch of ideas implemented and partially tested which i'd like to get into releasable form sometime, the expansion model might not be the best way to fund this, probably there's no way, anyway i'll just do it sporadically when i feel like working on that game at times.<br>
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so, a quiet year financially. watch my career as a game developer grow from total obscurity to the merely quite-obscure 868-hack, then gradually sink further back toward nothingness with each subsequent release. but somehow i'm still here? it's actually slightly confusing, my partner is also earning significantly less than at her previous jobs but somehow we are not running out of money. like it would be nice to have more but we have everything we need. i try not to question this too much.<br>
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vivafringe started a discord channel for discussing my games: <a href="https://discordapp.com/invite/xVwDAjZ">brough games discord</a>. there's some really nice in-depth discussion there, particularly of imbroglio and cinco paus but a bit on 868-hack and others too.<br>
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i went through several prototypes that showed initial promise but had fundamental problems and didn't quite come together. this happens, sometimes an idea just works but there are a lot of things that you try and they just don't come through, for every game i've released there's several failed attempts; but here there were many in a row and i've been working more slowly than i did a few years ago so there weren't as many successes to keep me motivated and i got a bit demoralised. but now i've solved the problems in one of them and so i'm building it up into a complete game, it's not very complex so it shouldn't take too long. it's different from what i've done before so don't go expecting another deep roguelike thing, but i think it's a good example of what it is and i hope people will like it. for a while i wasn't playing a lot of games by other people (trying to reduce my screen time) but recently i played a few (i won't name them) which are popular and successful despite having fundamental problems and never quite coming together, so maybe people don't mind if you don't solve these problems if you just polish things up anyway? maybe i should reclassify some of my failed prototypes as "good enough". anyway i have something to work on for now.<br>
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when i was feeling bad from prototypes not coming together, and maybe some other things in life not being clear, i decided to just take some time out for self-development and not feel any pressure to produce work for a while. this didn't stop me producing work (during this time i came up with this new game) but it let me feel good about spending more time doing things that don't directly lead to work. i felt that a lot of the things i was making were just variations of what i've done before and maybe i need to grow something new in myself to be able to really make something new again, but i have deliberately not set this as my goal - i'm expanding my self for my own sake, not so that i can be more productive, this might be a side-effect but it's also okay if it's not. making games is just a part of my life, and its place in my life can shift over time - it would be very surprising if it ever went away completely.<br>
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since i got into dancing a few years back my relationship with my body has changed a lot (even that phrasing doesn't seem right anymore - i identify myself as a complete organism, rather than as a mind who inhabits a body). dance has for me been a powerful window into self-awareness and growth (different people find different windows work for them, find your own). i never before was able to keep a sufficient exercise practice, but now i'm continually becoming fitter, stronger, softer, suppler, now i'm effortlessly running and climbing just for the joy of it too. i'm changing shape, my posture is completely different from five years ago and it's still improving. some change is slow and gradual but for me more often it's sudden insight, the visualisation of how things want to be aligned becomes clear and then they shift very quickly and overnight i move completely differently. and with this there's sometimes emotional release, i am my body and how it feels to be me is a reflection of who i am, tensions in the body correspond to tensions in the mind and opening either one will open the other. some things very weird but i trust; maybe for a few moments i can't walk or i can't breathe because something deep realigns itself but always it comes back and everything functions better than before. and the freedom of working by myself lets me exercise when i need to without having to conform to office convention, i'm balancing on a ball right now, if i'm stuck working on something maybe i roll on the floor for a bit or i get up and dance or just shake it out, if people see me maybe they think i'm strange but it feels a much healthier way to be than always looking normal. and i realised when i was living in scotland i was walking the coastal path every day without thinking about that as being an important part of life, it was just something i did without needing to think about it, and then it went away because i wasn't there anymore. now i've implemented this again in my life as a deliberate daily practice: i go over the road into the abandoned property and climb trees, walk, make noise, sometimes i balance on a branch and do tai chi. overall i feel amazing, i take joy every moment in the simple experience of movement, the everchanging sensations of embodiment, even a couple of weeks ago when i got food poisoning and felt awful i was still able to find some delight in the uncommon experience of my gut wisely doing what it needed to do to cleanse itself.<br>
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in some ways a difficult year, but a year of internal growth and becoming always more myself. not sure what comes next but good processes are continuing so i trust good outcomes will eventuate.Broghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14185464573529387638noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-898703789069481101.post-22233144141591350962018-05-24T08:55:00.000-07:002018-05-24T08:55:45.336-07:00imbroglio notes 13 - phlogistonI discussed the genesis of "charging" in <a href="http://mightyvision.blogspot.pt/2016/06/imbroglio-notes-4-when-this.html">episode 4</a> - it was originally a status attached to the player which some weapons would spend for an extra effect. But it was more interesting to attach a status to enemies to create more variety of possible situations, so it went away. (Plus it overlapped a lot with the concept of spending hit points for an extra effect.) Working on expansion, I came back to the original thought and hit on the idea of attaching the status to <i>weapons</i> instead - also creating more possible situations than the binary player charge. And the basic charge effect can be extra damage, which is always good so we're not dependent on a whole suite of weapons saying "if charged, do this". But it still takes up a lot of space so I dropped it from the first expansion so there was more room to build on the elements already in the game.<br>
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Bennett felt that extra damage was a boring effect and suggested bouncing to hit multiple enemies instead. I don't agree that it's boring - it's the difference between needing 1 action or 2 which is massive, not like RPG where it's 20 or 21 - but I did need more ways to hit multiple enemies to deal with end-game situations and this gave a nice general solution which could fit on lots of different weapons. I kept both effects because the multi-hit is very rare through most of the game but the extra damage is always relevant. Went through a few different versions: at first it just hit all connected enemies with extra damage but this was too strong and also meant the weapon's base damage didn't matter very much. So I went instead for a hitting a path through enemies losing 1 damage each time, adds some unpredictability when there's multiple possible paths (incidentally giving Molly something extra to control). This felt slightly too weak so the final version hits the first for +1 damage then all the rest at base damage.<br>
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I had a whole mess of different charge weapons with different effects, thought about separating out the different kinds of effect to organise them a bit more. Maybe the first expansion only has self-charging weapons, then a second one can charge other weapons, a third one has combo effects. Ended up dialing back combo effects because charging any weapon already allows a huge number of interactions, and any extra side-effects stacked onto charges end up insignificant because mainly you're damaging them to kill them anyway. Only self-charging weapons felt a little limited, and realistically "wow you thought weapons could only charge themselves but now -" is too obvious to be a surprise. So I went with red weapons self-charging (because red weapons do more direct damage; charging themselves is a way of doing that) and blue weapons charging others (combos). Self-charging still felt a bit plain so I brought back some of the charge combo effects as one-off effects for these weapons - rather than "all charge attacks arc diagonally", "all weapons can hold an additional charge" we get individual red weapons that interact differently with charges.<br>
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<b>Thunderbolt Jade</b><br>
Obviously I wanted a charging hero so the first power needed little consideration.<br>
The disadvantage comes from a separate design branch. I'd been trying to think of more central systems (like "cursing", "charging", "spending") that could power a whole group of weapons, I had this idea of event cards that maybe change every gem or so and give an ongoing effect - like weather, seasons, environmental conditions, astrological phases. Maybe that's too much like hero effects, maybe we just roll a die for a symbol that modifies some weapon effects. Simplest version - only two states, maybe day and night, alternating. So for a while I had several weapons with distinct "night" effects, they can have bigger effects than usual because they only apply half the time, but ultimately they felt too arbitrary because you need to be standing on the right tile with the right configuration of enemies and have the right parity of score. But the "night hero" effect was worth keeping because you have to constantly take it into consideration. I really like the different tactics it brings out with trying to race for the gem in the "night" phase and preferably deal with the enemies during "day". It shifts the equation of when to collect the gem - usually you prefer to take a hit first to get the most out of healing, but taking a double hit just to heal one is no better than skipping the heal and only taking a single hit.<br>
It wasn't obvious that these effects went together because I was thinking of them as separate systems - the "night hero" and the "charge hero". But since both give extra damage (to hero / to enemies) it ended up making sense.<br>
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<b>Oko the Gnome</b><br>
In early design I thought each enemy would have a special ability like 868-HACK, and one idea was a ranged attack with mana cost. And one idea for hero disadvantages was to boost specific enemy types, like Dominic's serpents, so I came back to this: one enemy gets range. But it didn't come up often enough because it relies on specific positioning (unlike Dominic's which almost always matters), so I extended it to all enemies. It works differently for each type anyway because they have different amounts of mana to spend. (And then the "one enemy type gets range" ended up back in 868-HACK for the <a href="http://mightyvision.blogspot.pt/2017/07/868-hack-planb.html">PLAN.B</a> expansion!) This one also makes some really interesting shifts to the tactics.<br>
The "delay spawns" power doesn't have much thematic connection, they're just two weird effects I wanted to include that didn't fit on anyone else so I mashed them together. I think it ends up okay, he's the weird guy with weird rules? In principle it can deal with any enemy situation - you just need the foresight to use it before the situation actually occurs so there's a nice skill challenge there. At first I didn't have it blocking enemies that have already spawned but not entered and it was even more challenging to use well but I think this is better - if maybe a little too strong now.<br>
One bug that came up: enemies spending mana would trigger Ixxthl's Ring, which would then heal the player. One side-effect that came up that I decided wasn't a bug: enemies spending mana can charge Cosmic Battery.<br>
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<b>Storm Hammer, Quicksilver, etc.</b><br>
All of these charging weapons went through a lot of different versions, I'm not going to record everything here. Mostly a matter of trying to figure out which charge triggers were strongest and shuffling them around with damage and side-effects so that each weapon has its own merits.<br>
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<b>Cosmic Battery</b><br>
See Repercussion Drum: that was a red weapon that spends blue mana to enable Ring combos with less pressure on the blue weapons. Now here's a red weapon that's activated by spending blue mana next to it; same principle.<br>
I considered storing unlimited charges but it turned the combos with Eye and Alembic from something cute and interesting to something boringly strong.<br>
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<b>Sacrificial Altar</b><br>
Had the concept of an altar taking a blood sacrifice when moved onto for a while. Initially it gave a rune, this seemed a nice trade-off, lots of extra risk from the lost hit points but runes giving a lot more ways to get out of bad situations. Ended up way too strong with some heroes, so many runes. What about scoring gems - obviously "spend #r to gain #g" is too much because the gem heals you right back but maybe fractional gems? Attracting them like the Dream Wheel (i.e. giving 1/N of a gem when the gem is N steps away) feels too much like just a copy of the Wheel. Giving them on level-up (so each experience notch is a 1/4 gem) could work, you'd have to loop it so it doesn't just give up after 4; but ends up feeling a lot like a Wheel again because kills advance it too. I didn't want to add a whole new tile property just for this one effect. What about using charge as a way of counting half-gems? If uncharged: spend hp to charge, if charged: spend hp to discharge and get gem. This scores too fast so I just dropped the second part and had a self-charging weapon that was interesting on its own. It's a bit like a red Claws except you pay in advance. It stays charged until used so it wasn't murdering you all the time just for walking around like earlier versions did - probably a good thing.<br>
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<b>Esoteric Prism</b><br>
Basic charge combo, paralleling Witchpact Blade's curse-counting. Also after Altar stopped gaining runes I wanted some other alternative source.<br>
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<b>Transformer</b><br>
Polymorph is one of my favourite of the classic Roguelike effects; it's a huge part of Nethack, it became a significant ability in 868-HACK, and it's now a significant effect in <a href="http://mightyvision.blogspot.pt/2017/12/cinco-paus-dev-notes.html">Cinco Paus</a> too. So of course I tried it in Imbroglio, one of the early weapons was a polymorph wand that transforms what it hits. But often it would transform into something that couldn't survive the damage it had already taken, so rather than an interesting polymorph effect it felt more like a random kill effect. I tried a version with 0 damage but that was an awful trap. It made more sense as a hero ability; this ended up (in simpler form) being Ixxthl's power. But making an alchemy-themed expansion I came back to the idea of a "proper" transmutation effect and realised it would work better applied to other enemies than the one you're attacking. It fit well with other concepts in this set too: charges arcing around make distant enemies more likely to be damaged and thus vulnerable to being killed by the transformation; plus I named it after an electrical component (though Leon really doesn't like that I've used an electrical name for something that doesn't directly mention charges).<br>
It's a highly random effect so like Blink Dagger I level it up by giving some control over the outcome. It felt weird when there was only one other enemy because it would always automatically select that one so I gave the option to select none. Also felt weird when it killed multiple enemies in one turn (e.g. if it was charged) because it would transform everything, pause to let you select something to transform, and then invalidate that by transforming everything again, so I made the first effect "once per turn".<br>
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<b>Extension Cord</b><br>
Leon's suggestion (note the electrical theming matched with a charge effect). It's a fairly minor effect but I thought it was cute and I gave it early damage to compensate. Might buff this later.<br>
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<b>Golem Gauntlet</b><br>
Unapologetically the charge version of Blight Broadsword. Originally it only leveled up when you charge it but I thought the text "only devours charges" was ambiguous and people might interpret it as eating charged hits too - and maybe that's better anyway because it gives it more flexibility. It's nice that Susannah can use this version without needing a blue weapon to charge it.<br>
The IV effect was "every turn, charge this" but because in general it's faster to level than the Broadsword I reduced it so "when you collect #g" so it's not at 4 damage all the time (plus that was too much of a combo with Alembic).<br>
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<b>Lightning Rod</b><br>
When I classify red weapons as self-charging and blue as other-charging, what should happen to this that does both? I didn't want to get rid of it because I'd really enjoyed playing with it, setting up an engine where something gets charged then I step-by-step position my battles to bring the charge down where I want it. I could have skipped the middle step: discharge above to charge below; but that wasn't as fun (and also didn't give separate tiers of effect as it levels up). Eventually decided it was acceptable for blue because the intention is clear that it only charges itself in order to charge something else.<br>
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<b>Spark Plug</b><br>
Simple charge effect.<br>
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<b>Agony Fuse</b><br>
Hit on this idea by thinking through a list of electrical components to see if any of them inspired effects. A fuse made sense, stopping a circuit if the current exceeds a reasonable limit = stunning enemies if too many are attacking at once. Losing levels to save your hero makes it a bit like a mini-Amulet, but it's a sufficiently different implementation that I think it's okay. Added the second effect to appease Leon.<br>
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<b>Ectoplasm Capacitor</b><br>
Wanted something to tie charge combos into curse/ghost combos. Originally the first effect cursed but it was very minor; killing is better.<br>
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<b>Alembic</b><br>
Someone suggested a hero that benefits from overhealing, so they wouldn't feel like the gem heal is wasted when they collect it at full health. That doesn't really fit into the model the heroes follow, as it's neither a disadvantage nor a rune effect, but it works as a weapon. Made the trigger blue because it's most likely to overheal with the common enemies being red.<br>
I wanted more different ways to charge weapons so I went through each weapon thinking "is there a way a charge can fit into this concept" and came up with an effect that mirrors the healing - too much blue hp overflows into red hp too much red charge overflows into blue charge. Nicely broadens the red weapon charge effects that only charge themselves, also works with other blue charging effects if they're aimed at red weapons.<br>
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<b>Alchemist's Eye</b><br>
I go through every effect I can put in the game to see if it makes sense to have a version that spends mana. Spending to charge was an obvious effect, I tried several versions - charging self, charging random, charging target. Charging the target works well with range because it gives more possible targets. This proved too strong a way to charge things, especially in the early-game because it didn't need to be leveled up (I don't like to put mana spends after leveling up because then you have to keep track of whether a weapon has acquired a disadvantage).<br>
I also tried a weapon that spends mana to level up other weapons - like a blue Blacksmith's Tongs. This also works well with range. One problem with it was that after those weapons have leveled up it stops doing anything interesting. So I combined the two! Putting the charging at level 4 stops it being overpowered early on without having the weapon acquire a disadvantage later on - you start spending on charges when you stop spending on levels.<br>
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<b>Cauldron</b><br>
In an early prototype I was looking for ways to make different combos, I thought of some weapons generating an enemy type that acts as a resource and other weapons using that resource in different ways, so right away I put in Cauldron as the simplest way to generate those enemies and Mask as the obvious way to make them useful. This combo dominated early versions, several playtesters became obsessed with it - I think because it was easy to spot and obviously strong, it was quite fun but also frustrating to get started. I wanted it in there but I didn't want the frustration to be people's first experience of the game so maybe I move it to unlocks.<br>
It's nicer if a component can be used in multiple different combos, and that wasn't true of Cauldron. Most of the other ways of creating ghosts were useful on their own - converting an enemy into one that's easier to kill. And the Mask is useful with any ghost source. But the Cauldron on its own is mostly a disadvantage - you kill the ghosts to feed weapons or for on-kill effects, but these interactions weren't good enough to be worthwhile alone. I tried giving it extra effects to make it worth the risk of dying to ghosts, but that just made it even more overpowered when the Mask inverts that penalty. In the end I kicked both items out of the game in the hope of maybe solving their problems later. Making Mask only affect one ghost at a time made things a lot better so I put that in the first expansion. I decided to split them up so people would explore one without getting fixated on the particular combo. Cauldron first could be intriguing, it poses a question - why make ghosts? - and then you answer it later. But the first expansion really needed good possibilities to build different boards with, not bad cards that might get made viable later.<br>
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<b>Philosopher's Stone</b><br>
For expansions I wanted to enable more weird combo builds, and alternate win conditions are a classic way of creating those, so I thought about different methods of scoring points. The initial game focused on the one method of moving around to collect gems, with cards that might help with survival (so you have more turns to collect gems in) or speed (so you get more gems per turn), and one special scoring effect with the Wheel.<br>
In early design before I'd pinned down the main scoring system, I had the concept of weapons being worth points as they level up. Like Dominion where victory cards take up space in your deck, maybe Imbroglio would require trading strength against scoring in board construction. So I tried a bit of this again, maybe a basic red damage weapon with points on top, this was functional but ultimately not very exciting - it's easy enough to level that it couldn't be too major a component of scoring, and for weird alchemical combos I was really looking for a Magnum Opus that would have a significant effect.<br>
Looking for more mana-spend effects, I tried cards that trade hit points for real points. This doesn't really work because scoring a gem heals back what you spent on it straight away, but maybe it could cost 2 mana? Or what's worse than spending mana - how about spending it <i>permanently</i>?<br>
The maximum score is 256, so with 4 copies of a card that's 64 each, or 16 per level. I really enjoyed making the card text display ♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦; it feels proper big. Of course you're not going to level 4 of them, even leveling one of them all the way kills you (but it stills count as a win if that gets you to 256; dramatic!).<br>
I think this version is slightly too strong, but the other versions I had were slightly too weak and in general I've come to feel like it's better to err on the side of the player. If I release something overpowered then people have fun breaking the game but don't mind if it gets nerfed later, if I release something underpowered people complain that it's useless and then complain again when I buff it later - I don't understand why. I particularly think of Festerfang Venom which I spent a long time testing different version of that were all too complicated or ridiculously strong until I found a simple version that's on the edge of being useful but doesn't play itself and automatically kill everything - and nobody likes it, probably I should have just released one of the stronger versions and let it be a bit broken, why not?
Broghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14185464573529387638noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-898703789069481101.post-33635559903892382292018-04-04T05:21:00.002-07:002018-04-04T06:15:27.064-07:00Phlogiston preview<b>Imbroglio: Phlogiston</b>, the second expansion for <a href="http://mightyvision.blogspot.pt/2016/05/imbroglio.html">Imbroglio</a>, will be released next week! It is an alchemical laboratory filled with strange experimental equipment and dangerously mutated creatures.<br>
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The main "shiny new thing" to be introduced is the concept of <i>charged weapons</i>: a weapon tile can become electrified to empower its next attack with bonus damage and chaotic energies that arc through adjacent enemies as well. This is like a new resource to gain and spend, but instead of a number that goes up and down it's stored on the tiles on the board. It creates a whole new range of possible board constructions. With the extra damage it's kind of an alternative to Whetstone; hitting multiple enemies it's kind of an alternative to important board-clearing weapons like Echo Harp and Witchpact Blade; and with a variety of effects triggering off it it's kind of an alternative to curses for building combo boards.<br>
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What kind of combos? Time for some EXCLUSIVE PREVIEW CONTENT oh no!<br>
<img src="https://i.imgur.com/t3lERdk.png" width="80%"><br>
The <b>Lightning Rod</b> basically moves a charge from something above it on the board to something below. (You might as well put it in one of the middle rows.) What goes on top? Something has to create a charge in the first place; this is strictly a combo weapon. What goes underneath? Pick any weapon, maybe there's something you think will benefit especially well from becoming charged. And in the middle - it charges itself along the way so that's a bit of extra damage too.<br>
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And of course we have also a new alchemist hero who can manipulate charges, empowering her weapons for extra damage:<br>
<img src="https://i.imgur.com/Z4tnmB8.png" width="80%"><br>
"At night" is just a fanciful way of saying "every second screen". Remember how the walls are darker sometimes? That's night-time. At one point I thought this was going to be a whole big thing, I was designing all these cards that had special night-time effects, but honestly "this doesn't work half the time" isn't a very exciting hook so forget it. But for an enemy bonus it's solid, it creates a rhythm alternating between business-as-usual and fleeing-in-terror, it totally changes the tactics around when you want to score a gem. And with both the hero and the enemies boosting damage the stakes are high; this is a challenge for skilled players.<br>
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Most of the new stuff revolves around charges, but there's a few other weird little toys to play with too. Alternative ways to score gems, to level up your weapons, to play it safe or to gamble everything. Broghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14185464573529387638noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-898703789069481101.post-34245363985581107272018-01-17T10:19:00.000-08:002018-01-17T10:21:16.682-08:00<a href="http://mightyvision.blogspot.pt/2017/12/cinco-paus-dev-notes.html">Cinco Paus</a> has been incredibly well received; a lot of people are saying it's my best game yet, reviews are consistently highly positive (nobody on the appstore has rated it less than 5 stars), everything I'm hearing from players is great. This has not translated into many sales; it doesn't seem to have spread much past the circle of people who are already following my work. Weirdly there have been quite a few new people buying 868-HACK - it might be that people are hearing good things about the new game and then buying the old one instead because it's somehow seen as an "entry point" to my work? I guess I can't complain about this but they are very different games and I suspect for a lot of people Cinco Paus would serve as a more accessible entry point - it's more immediately fun, with less technical resource management, also it might be a better game. For similar reasons I'm a little surprised by the lack of recognition from the IGF - 866-HACK and Imbroglio were both design finalists and I'd hoped that with this one having a bit more immediate accessibility it might be the one to have a chance at actually winning - but I don't really know what's going on there now that Design, Nuovo and Grand Prize have all merged into the same category. Anyway, not to worry, I'm very happy with the response from people playing it and it's okay if sales are a slow burn.<br>
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I <a href ="http://mightyvision.blogspot.pt/2017/12/thinking-about-what-to-prioritise.html">discussed</a> my thoughts around expanding/porting Imbroglio. I've had an expansion just about ready to release for months but kept delaying it because I felt like it should wait until after the PC release. But I've realised part of what's been getting in the way of me porting it is that updating it with expansions becomes a bigger task the more platforms it's on, and I want to keep being able to do that in the background while working on new projects. So I think the answer is to keep it just on iOS for now, expand it there, and then eventually do a full PC release with all of that content included once I'm done meddling with it. Sorry I know that's not an ideal solution for everyone but it's one that works for me.<br>
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Started messing with a prototype that might turn into yet another tiny roguelike, not sure yet if the concept works, it's a slightly awkward one that needs quite a bit of stuff built up first before I can really test it. This might just be a bad sign; I usually get the best results from ideas that I can prototype super-quickly, but I don't want that to be a limitation on what types of things I can ever make so I'll sometimes try the tricky ideas anyway. I'll hopefully be able to reuse some things even if the main idea doesn't work out.<br>
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From thinking about what's seen as an "entry point" to my games, I'm wondering if I really ought to prioritise making something that might establish a new entry point, and I think the way to do that is to make something that is perceived as somehow "bigger". It's really nice that 868-HACK continues to sell and reach new people but it won't be enough to keep sustaining me. I'd very happily continue making games on the same kind of scale that I have been, but I know part of why they're hard to get attention for is that they're "small". Imbroglio was really quite a large project but a lot of the work was paring the design down to essentials and making it work in a tiny space, work that is unappreciated in an industry obsessed with BIGGER and MORE. So the challenge for me now is to find how to make something that will fit that perception of being "bigger" to get that attention on it, without completely throwing away the design principles that make my games good by making them small. Let's see what I can do.Broghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14185464573529387638noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-898703789069481101.post-74601985720978929892017-12-27T07:13:00.000-08:002017-12-27T07:13:18.200-08:00Cinco Paus - dev notes<img src="https://i.imgur.com/GnkFnAK.png" width="75%"><br>
<a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cinco-paus/id1249999336?ls=1&mt=8">Cinco Paus (iOS appstore)</a><br>
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The idea came out of a conversation with <a href="http://apps.stfj.net/">Zach Gage</a> about item identification in roguelikes. Got me thinking about partially-identified items: how can you use a tool without finding out all of it's effects? Situational effects that don't happen every time, you have to try them in different conditions to discover them. Randomly generated so it's just not a matter of spoilers.<br>
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I have this approach to design of taking a few elements from a genre and giving them enough detail to carry a whole game, maybe eventually I'll have built a game about every element of Rogue. I've done single-use scrolls/potions (<a href="http://mightyvision.blogspot.pt/2012/04/zaga-33.html">Zaga-33</a>), reusable spells that cost resources (<a href="http://mightyvision.blogspot.pt/2013/08/868-hack-ios.html">868-HACK</a>), weapons/leveling (<a href="http://mightyvision.blogspot.pt/2016/05/imbroglio.html">Imbroglio</a>), what else? I want items that you can use more than once (with increasing degrees of identification), but probably a limited number of times so you can't spam them and learn everything; in Rogue these are <i>magic wands</i>, they shoot rays affecting every enemy in a straight line path. This fits well with the idea of multiple situational effects because different conditions could apply to different points on the path, let's use it.<br>
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Decided to work in Portuguese because everyone else in my Portuguese course was working here so they get more day-to-day practice than I was sitting at home working on English-language games. More of an immersive learning environment if it's my working language too; obviously I'm not at a level yet where I can use it for everything (I'm still blogging in English!) but I'll do what I can. And it worked, for expanding my vocabulary at least - I started by using words I know (the basic enemy is a shrimp because I've eaten them here so I know how to call them) but then later I was having to look up more and more words, and now often I run into words outside that I recognise because I looked them up for the game.<br>
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I've been interested for a while in making a game in an invented language but just using an existing one that's not English still invokes the kind of textural quality I was aiming for.. less so for people who speak it (the sixth biggest language in the world) but for them perhaps there will be the "all your base" kind of badly-translated flavour? (Because, yes, I'm just a beginner in the language so not everything is correct!) Also a lot of people who play my games are in the USA where Spanish is the second language so I expect they'll get some clues from the similarities there, and a lot of people speak some other Romance language and so will pick up something at least. There's a sense of relinquishing control here; in English I know exactly what I'm doing when I misuse the language, exactly what effect it has, here I have to accept more uncertainty (and at the same time realise that this diversity of understanding is there when I work in English too even though my own command of the language is strong).<br>
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Knowing that the majority of my audience won't be able to read everything made an interesting design constraint, gave me extra inspiration about how to make everything deducible through reason and experimentation - not a bad goal anyway (as every game designer learns - players do not read the instructions)! From a few reactions I've gotten it seems like for some people it is much more upsetting to encounter a genuine foreign language than gibberish symbols or no text at all; I don't quite understand this but I find it a valuable experience to spend time in an environment where things aren't made for people like me, and if I can share some of this to challenge others then I'm happy.<br>
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I had to pick some default numbers for the first prototype. How many charges should a wand have? At least 4; use them a couple of times experimentally to learn about them and still be able to use them in earnest a couple of times. No more than about 7 to keep it a challenging constraint to balance learning about them and using them. How many effects should they have? Maybe a couple that are easy to discover and a couple that are more obscure. How large should the grid be? There needs to be space for a ray to carry and meet a few different configurations; Imbroglio's 4x4 would be too small. So to go full numerology again I just set everything to 5 to see how it went. The name came straight away here too, "Cinco Paus", it felt like it had a good sound to it, I had this already before I committed anything to paper. A few months later I found <a href="https://twitter.com/smestorp/status/909038997980303360">the Tarot card</a> I'd been using as a bookmark some time before this, I was spooked for a moment before I remembered that this was the direction that makes logical sense for time to work in - I'd been using this card, I didn't consciously remember it but then the words felt like they went. And I had known that the Tarot suits were where I'd gotten the idea to use the word "pau" (literally "stick") for the wands.<br>
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So we have 5 wands with 5 effects and 5 charges, 5x5 grid, 5 hit points, 5 enemy types, 5 zones with 5 enemies on each. The grid size matching the wand array lends itself to connections, but this started echoing Imbroglio too closely so it's only on a couple of minor things. There's a progression as you gain wands / information so it makes sense to face stronger enemies later, so we need a progression of enemy strengths instead of like 868-HACK where the enemy types are differently equal. As with Imbroglio I expected they'd have more abilities - jumping frogs - but hit points turned out to be sufficient to differentiate them. 1,2,3,4.. 5 hit points is too many because then you can't take it barehanded, so the fifth enemy needed to do something different; I went for another 1-hp enemy with an ambiguous ability (not strictly advantage or disadvantage). Effects to kill a specific type were obvious, but I didn't want effects that were strictly inferior to each other and killing a 1-hp enemy is worse than simply doing 1 damage to any type, so the kill effects for those needed an extra rider.<br>
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Starting with the full set of wands instead of collecting them as you go made for a powerful simplification, put the focus on acquiring information, neat feeling to have full capabilities from the start and be able to trigger powerful effects but not be able to use them wisely yet. But then having 5 charges from the start meant you had to think about how to ration them through the game, you'd never lose on the first levels because you could blow through all your charges but then have nothing left, or if you didn't have trouble on the first levels you'd save up all your charges for the end, either way it felt a bit off. So I tied charges to progress through the zones, the extra constraint makes each discrete zone a richer puzzle and losing the possible long-term resource management didn't hurt much.<br>
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Took some time filling out different ideas for wand effects, a lot of these were very natural, some standard Rogue wands (sleep, polymorph, teleport away). At first I had more negative effects but they weren't so important, all the negative-ish ones I've kept have some occasional positive value too. Thought about whether the same effects can apply both to the player and to enemies; Nethack goes into a lot of detail with this, you can zap enemies with polymorph to hopefully turn them into something easier to kill, or yourself to maybe become a dragon or something, or your items to have a chance at getting better stuff. It's neat but it really puts a lot of constraints on the whole design that everything has to work like this. For most simple effects there's little ambiguity who you want to use it on; heal me hurt them, and with each wand having several effects I wanted to keep the effects themselves very direct. So there's no self-zapping, that will have to be a different game.<br>
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For the levels I went with an idea I've used a few times before: getting the most out of a small space by making you cross it more than once from different directions. Started with a simple version from an early Imbroglio prototype: the exit door is locked, there's a key somewhere on the level, you have to get through to the key and then back through to the door. To add score variance there's also another treasure and maybe you cross the level an extra time to collect that too. But requiring the key to exit the level put a restriction on how wild the wand effects could be; no disintegration rays that destroy everything including treasure, no polymorph rays that would turn the key into another kind of treasure, no fun. Tried just opening the door when you destroy the key; boring. At one point I had a complicated set of rules to make sure you could get another key after you'd destroyed one - the next treasure created is a key so any treasure-creation wands will get you out, otherwise the next enemy spawned is a rooster so that will drop a key if you can kill it. It got really messy so in the end I simplified it: the exit is always open and you can just go through without any treasure, it's easier to survive and the system is more resilient to silly wand effects, it's better. I still liked the way the key forces extra traversal so I locked up the other treasure in a vault, maybe you have to backtrack for it.<br>
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Other treasures, of course there are 5 kinds (including keys); at first I made them each give 1 point and 1 of something else.<br>
* Potions (healing) felt pretty weak, I was finding I usually had enough life unless I got into a really bad situation where one hit wouldn't make the difference, then I thought of removing the rule of "heal 1 when you reach a new zone" and suddenly they became super relevant, also made it a lot riskier to grab extra treasure, more of a tension between scoring and surviving rather than just being able to solve every level. I'd started using that rule in Zaga-33 as a simplification of Rogue's healing over time to account for the lack of bad timers in that game, it became more important in 868-HACK with fewer total hit points, then fundamental in Imbroglio where there's no way to avoid some damage so the whole game is about balancing damage taken with progress/healing. So I'd just included it out of habit, I had a blind spot about it for a while but once I properly examined it I realised it had no reason to be here.<br>
* Tomes (identification) seemed basically fine all along, helpful but not essential.<br>
* Gems (charge) were a bit much; recharging a wand that creates or duplicates treasure maybe lets you create another gem and recharge it again (similarly I had to ban wands that recharge + generate treasure). But other times you'd get a recharge after you'd cleared a level and it was now of no use to you. So I switched to them being saved up; 5 gems gives a recharge at a time of your choice, this seemed basically okay. Later I introduced artifacts (see <a href="http://mightyvision.blogspot.pt/2017/09/streak-scoring-redux.html">this post</a>) and instead 5 gems gives a lamp that can recharge a wand once per game - or something else of similar value; now gems feel like definitely the most important treasure but I think it's okay.<br>
* Chests (point) felt unimpressive because points have no actual value in the game, everything else tangibly helps you survive and progress. So I just tried making them worth more points (5) and it felt like it solved the problem even though it's still just a number going up that doesn't do anything? Games.<br>
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(spoilers maybe?) For the artifacts, collecting many of them or having more than one copy of the same made them feel mundane, so I put a maximum of 5 and no duplicates. It felt appropriate to give some choice about artifact progression to help deal with all the random stuff that also happens. A choice means at least 2 options, so to choose 5 artifacts there must be a total of at least 10. Could be more but I think it's good to get a chance to pick up any given artifact; you might think that a particular one is essential and a streak is worthless if you don't get it, I don't know. You can't guarantee getting any two because they might be offered as a pair to choose between.<br>Broghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14185464573529387638noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-898703789069481101.post-29238955287120810442017-12-24T10:17:00.000-08:002017-12-24T10:18:39.608-08:00Thinking about what to prioritise working on next:<br>
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I've been saying i'll release Imbroglio on PC for a while. This hasn't been a high priority for me; 868-HACK has sold 11% as many copies on Steam as on iOS and Imbroglio has only sold half as many copies as 868-HACK in the first place; basically I don't know if it's worth spending much time on. Does anyone actually care? I could just skip this and save myself some time and an ongoing support burden. (p.s. don't talk to me about android; ratios there are even worse.)<br>
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I have more ideas for expanding Imbroglio, there's quite a bit of stuff that I started trying out during development but I didn't fully pursue because I needed to get some kind of finished version out. But the numbers are saying it's a lot more worth my time to make a new game than to add more content to an existing one; the Ossuary expansion for Imbroglio has sold 1600 copies and PLAN.B for 868-HACK has sold 900. So unless these take off a bit more somehow, expanding Imbroglio further is just selling to a diminishing fraction of really earnest players; I guess the question is whether I can charge a bit more to make this worth working on? This is something I actually really do want to do, I feel like the game isn't quite complete yet, there aren't enough options to make a really varied possibility space, and I know what to do to get there, again it's a question of whether anyone else cares.<br>
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Aside from these, I'm definitely starting on a new game soon and, well maybe there's not too much sense trying to plan that because I'll go ahead and make whatever I end up making regardless, but still I'm curious what people would want to see from me next? I know everyone thinks of me as tiny roguelike man now and hey I have sketches for a few more of those I could definitely try to build, but I'll make anything. Imbroglio selling less than 868-HACK makes me wonder if I shouldn't keep going in that direction right now, but I don't want to read too much into it and I'll have more information on that trend soon anyway. I think I'm going to try for at least a couple more smallish games next before getting stuck into a big project, we'll see. But yeah I'm interested in (non-trollish) thoughts on the matter!Broghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14185464573529387638noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-898703789069481101.post-81240394009577820542017-09-21T06:36:00.000-07:002017-09-21T09:49:58.544-07:00streak scoring reduxHard at work on new game! Sorry if I'm behind on other things but making new is good. It was meant to be a really quick project, under 3 months, but it grows. Now it looks like it'll take about 6 all up, that's not too bad, I'm quite determined to not let it sprawl out past that.<br>
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This is another entry in my roguelike series (YABR), I'm feeling better now about doing that and not pressuring myself to have to do something flashy and different every time (<a href="http://mightyvision.blogspot.pt/2016/11/status.html">ref</a>). But still when I encounter similar problems I try to take enough of a different path that I will be discovering different things along the way.<br>
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It's a very short and random game (what a surprise), it's quite successful at generating an entertaining variety of situations, but the luck element makes some scenarios easier than others. I already know how to solve this: give the option of increasing the difficulty by taking more risks in exchange for some kind of reward. 868-HACK's score walls that generate N enemies for N points are a very direct version of this, here it's a bit messier but the outcome is similar: getting to the exit is usually not too hard, figuring out how much treasure you can pick up along the way without dying is hard.<br>
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One problem solved, but it creates another one: how to meaningfully compare scores between games? Maybe I got 30 points because I correctly estimated that I could safely cast Duplicar on some treasure chests and still get to the exit, and you got 5 points because you correctly estimated that it wasn't safe to pick up the treasure and instead cast Teleporte to get straight to the exit - we might have both found the best solution to the scenario we faced but the first one gets a bigger number. One option would be to calculate the value of every path the player could have chosen and normalise their score appropriately - what percentage of possible points did they purloin? This is takes a lot of computation and I feel it is unintuitive, and still it's not necessarily "fair" because the distribution of difficulty can also differ - in one scenario it might be trivial to get 90% and very hard to get the last 10%, etc. My preferred solution is to take scores across multiple games and combine them into some kind of average.<br>
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I wrote at length <a href="http://mightyvision.blogspot.pt/2013/05/score-conditions.html">here</a> about how I arrived at the "streak scoring" mechanism for 868-HACK, striking a balance between the over-cautious play demanded by streaks and the over-risky play demanded by high scores. In a way it is less "perfect" than taking a simple average - it allows you to play throw-away games where you take silly risks and have them not be counted. But in exchange it creates some space for play in tuning the balance between average score and streak length to optimise the product; in HACK there have been substantial swings in opinion over time about where this balance lies. Also to me it feels more intuitive and fun; average score feels like a very technical statistic, "keep exploring caves and accumulating loot but try not to die!" fits naturally into game world. So my thought was that maybe I could simply slot this same mechanism into a new game? Basic survival is a bit more difficult than in HACK so maybe it could work without needing difficulty escalation (which HACK had with "bonus powerups" becoming more numerous across a streak), it could be a minimal proof-of-concept to explore how it worked to just tack this system on to any game without extra supporting infrastructure.<br>
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But once it was structured as a connected series of games, the natural thing to do was to use that connection. I had given up on a spell effect that affected the next level because it was undefined on the final level but now it could simply apply to the first level of the next game. There was one treasure effect that had turned out to be much too powerful, now I could balance it by making it require accumulating several before you can use it - possibly across multiple games. This became a resource you could save up to use in an emergency to save your streak, it made some bad luck feel more fair. This was a neat possibility for streaks that I hadn't really explored with HACK (there is just .SAVE in the PLAN.B expansion). But even with these small connections I realised it didn't feel right; even though each individual game could be very different to the last, each streak was a similar soup blended from the same random ingredients. Something changes in the first level of the next game but then you move on, you save something up but then you spend it all and you're back where you started, there's no sense of getting anywhere. It'd be better if each streak could somehow have its own distinctive flavour at a macro level, some sense of permanence or progress to your actions.<br>
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Thought about somehow leveling up the hero character. The resource that you accumulate across multiple games: instead of being spent for a one-off effect, maybe it's spent towards permanent upgrades. But it's not so interesting if you just get stronger and then the game is easier and it just snowballs - hence HACK's "bonus powerups" powering up the enemies and obstacles rather than the player, so in the end I've found myself going down much more of a similar path than I'd hoped to. I can still veer off in a different direction! The enemy powerups stay for the whole streak instead of changing each game (thanks Droqen for helpful discussion); one streak the lizards will level up and now all the time you're fighting LIZARD WIZARDS, another streak it might be QUICKENED CHICKENS instead, and then you'd make different choices in how you level up your character to deal with them.<br>
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So now I have two separate progression systems that span multiple plays of the game and I'm wondering how my simple quick project managed to increase in scope.Broghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14185464573529387638noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-898703789069481101.post-11895064459467728212017-07-24T06:22:00.002-07:002017-07-24T06:22:46.241-07:00plan.b notesnerdy detail / spoilers.<br>
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Since making 868-HACK I've kept a list of ability ideas that might fit if I was ever working on it again. (Some might fit in other games in the family too - I think I used some for Imbroglio.) At one point I started planning a parallel-universe version with alternate interpretations of all the progs - could rotate some of the enemy counters, .C_BOM instead of .D_BOM, .ANTI-G instead of .ANTI-V - but a lot of the other ones there weren't interesting alternatives for so it felt weak.<br>
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In April I had to update the game which got me thinking about it again, I also happened to revisit the village where I'd lived while making it which got me thinking about my process again. A few days later I woke from a dream in which I'd been playing a new version of the game which featured a prog called .PLAN.B and an upgrade tree where across a streak you can improve progs of your choice (e.g. .WAIT gets a shield to block attacks while you're waiting, .WARP damages adjacent enemies as well as killing the one you teleported onto). The prog idea at least seemed good so I started coding it up straight away, one thing led to another and I guess I made a whole expansion pack.<br>
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A central principle of 868-HACK's design was to fit in as many different interactions between abilities as I could. An idea I didn't get working was a prog that directly referenced your other progs - maybe double the effect of the next one you use, maybe trigger another one at random, I tried several ideas along these lines but none of them worked very well. What dream-PLAN.B did was trigger a random prog from the sector you're on, and on waking up I was shocked that I'd not thought of it four years ago - it's way more interesting to play an ability that's not even in your hand than to play something in your hand cheaply but unreliably. The dream version had a fixed price but this made for some horrible interactions; at 4 or less you're getting the big effects like .ATK+ and .SIPH+ far too cheaply and at 3 or more you're paying too much for the small effects like .WAIT and .PUSH. Simpler just to use the cost of the prog itself - you're still getting a discount on it by not having to fight its enemy spawns. Aside from that it was perfect. The limited pool on each sector is manageable but always varied, and restricting it from selecting something that has no effect right now gives you a lot of control (also using .CRASH to remove unwanted options is a very niche interaction but cute). Plus it gives a use for the prog-walls on later sectors which usually you're never going to siphon.<br>
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The idea of upgrading progs wasn't practical since it required designing and balancing new specific effects for every prog; I would have had to make them with this in mind in the first place. But I got to thinking more generally about building something across a streak. I tried simply having your credits and energy carry over to the next game, but that just made all of the openings less challenging. So I went to a prog effect: .SAVE transfers a siphon to the next game (less of a direct advantage than resources because you still need to use it). Cue everyone suggesting more such progs to save different types of resource, but this doesn't add anything distinct and they start to get in the way of the immediately useful abilities you need to survive the current game. It's a problem that .SAVE isn't very situational - you want to use it at the last possible moment, when you know how many resources you'll have left. I tried some different limitations to avoid this, mainly using the same trick as .SCORE to get more out of it the earlier you use it, but that created the exact same dynamic as .SCORE so it wasn't worth the complexity, eventually I just went with the simple version. Even though you want to actually use it at the end it still influences your earlier choices about what to hold onto, and there are a handful of situations where you might have to use it earlier because you'll lose access to it.<br>
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Implementing .SAVE meant allowing progs to have siphons in their cost, so then I started thinking about what else could use that. I could just make a big attack that's extra expensive but it seems more natural to try to do something actually related to the usual siphon effect. I tried .3X3, spending a siphon to access all 9 tiles around you instead of the usual 5 - this sometimes made for an interesting choice whether to spawn more enemies to get more stuff, but also often just allowed you to pick up silly amounts of resources. Making it expensive to obtain wasn't enough to balance this. I could give it a resource cost as well but then it becomes kind of bad in the situations where you'd be spawning extra enemies, and more balanced but not any more interesting when you're getting extra resources - you just look if you're getting more than you're spending, nbd. So I ended up with .X, conceptually an ordinary siphon rotated 45°. It's cheap to obtain because it's not giving you any extra tiles, but it can let you get more out of your siphons depending on the board setup. Somehow I'm really bad at counting how many resources it'll get me, I'm so used to automatically reading good spots for the regular siphon and I don't notice when .X would get me more.<br>
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.QUIT is a suggestion Leon made ages ago that didn't make it into the original game, but with trying to put a bit more focus on streaks here I tried it out and was happy with it. It got a siphon in its cost too for symmetry with .SAVE (they're different effects but they're both operating outside of the usual game boundaries), this worked nicely for making it kind of "hard" to quit, you have to hold onto a resource that you'd prefer to use to keep that option open. I know for some risk-averse players the "obvious" choice will be to always siphon .QUIT if you can and always keep the ability to use it, but usually you can get a higher score if you go against that.<br>
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At the top of my list of parallel-universe progs was a mirror to .EXCH, converting energy to credits, this was in the game for a while (back then .EXCH spent 4 credits for 3 energy and .CASH spent 3 energy for 2 credits) and I took it out to make room for more interesting things, there's only space for so many effects that aren't directly dealing with threats, but maybe an expansion could bring it back? It was hard to find a version that wasn't sometimes ridiculously strong, usually almost useless, or both, I tried tacking on various side-effects, but in the end gave up on it feeling like a boring-but-strong resource exchange didn't fit in a set of exciting weird new abilities.<br>
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The hacker's basic attack does one point of damage and stuns the enemy for one turn; this stun is really important for being able to deal with large numbers of enemies tactically. I tried a .STUN+ prog which increases the length of stuns (like a mirror of .ATK+), it was okay but not good enough. But then I was trying to find the right price for .TRAP, which marked a tile to kill or maybe hit the next enemy to move there - I wasn't sure whether to make it cheap so you could lay down a wall of them or a bit more expensive - some of the tactical uses seemed good enough to pay 3+ for. I also needed a more computer-y name for it and when I hit on "firewall" the idea came all in one piece to also rename .STUN to .ICE (from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrusion_Countermeasures_Electronics">classic William Gibson cyberpunk</a>), price them both at 1, and have .FIRE just do damage without a stun so they each have one element of the basic attack.<br>
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Tried a whole bunch of different ideas for medium-sized attack progs, ended up with .MOSH .CULL .SORT, I liked making new ways that different situations could matter - whether enemies are next to each other, whether enemies are already damaged, whether you have a variety of enemy types, and I was glad to fill some of the gaps in costs (now there's a prog for every combination of 5 resources). I changed .CALM's cost to be symmetric with .SORT at 6 resources even though their effects aren't related. I had wanted .CULL cheaper so that .ANTI-V/.CULL would cost less than just using .ANTI-V twice but that made it way too strong with other combinations, these three all have to quite expensive because they can affect all enemy types, but that means they don't need as many other progs to go with them so you can focus more on collecting resources - at least that's my theory.<br>
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The main "secret" in 868-HACK is the bonus powerups that show up in streaks, these end up being really important to keep the difficulty high enough to be interesting for expert players so I thought for the expansion it would make sense to include them from the start, loses the secret but most of the people playing will know about it already (and for those who don't I guess it means the expansion adds even more content). I thought about putting in more of a metagame, maybe a map of the network giving some choice about which powerups you'll be facing, coming back to those ideas about accumulating a currency between games - something you could spend to avoid a particular effect you dislike. But in the end I felt like .QUIT accomplished most of this - some portion of the time it allows you to quickly skip an unfavourable combination. Choosing a class at the start of each game helps too with smoothing out bad luck, and the end-of-streak stat screen with records of "most used prog" etc. ties things together conceptually. The idea of choosing your powerups still made it in in the form of "USER-SELECTED POWERUP!", a metapowerup which accesses other powerups the same way that .PLAN.B is a metaprog which accesses other progs. I wasn't planning on adding many new powerups but having them every game makes them feel more repetitious (somehow worse than repeatedly having no powerup) and I ended up with 8.<br>
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An effect I tried for viruses was for their attacks to damage your resources, but across a game you don't get hit many times anyway and only a quarter of those will be from any specific enemy type (or even less, since usually being hit means you've been flanked by two enemies and then you can pick which one to attack while the other hits you), so I'd have to make the damage really high for it to be relevant and then on the occasions it does happen it ruins your game. So I switched it to a general effect where any hit also drains resources; this still didn't feel important because you can often spend resources to not get hit. So I thought about what else it could cost you, came up with MEMORY LEAK! losing you a prog when hit. This was really exciting, made it really worthwhile to spend resources to avoid hits, and sometimes to siphon extra progs just so you could afford to lose some. But it was super difficult, especially when combined with some of the other powerups that make it hard to avoid damage; you'd get into a downward spiral where once you've lost a prog that was helping you avoid damage then you're bound to take some more hits; over a quarter of my total losses in this version came from this one powerup, it was terrifying. So I made it only trigger the first time you get hit on each sector, it's very much domesticated but it's still a bit challenging in combination with other powerups.<br>
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I did want <i>something</i> that affected your resources though. Back in the day I'd tried some kind of "resource scarcity" powerup but it was pretty terrible, removing your ability to do interesting things. Also finding the right effect for Cryptogs was very difficult, because CRYPTOG TELEPORTS! is already so terrible that anything else combining with it is just really really bad. For a while I was just going to not have new powerup for each enemy type (because why should I?) but people kept asking about the mising ones so then I thought about cheating by having a "Cryptog" effect that conceals something else instead - what about your resources? So CRYPTOGCURRENCY! was born. Eventually I dropped the G, it was silly, I wasn't going to get away with pretending this had anything to do with the enemy type, but it got me to the idea. Just credits because hiding both removes agency - picking between certainty and uncertainty is a real choice, but picking with no information is arbitrary. I wanted .SHOW to interact with it but it was too much to just give everything away at once so I made it local - you have to spend turns (risking enemy spawns) to reveal all the credit values on floor tiles. It's a bit of bookkeeping to keep track of your range of possible credit values but it felt way too friendly to have the UI handle that for you, I want hostile alien perils not a cosy spreadsheet.<br>
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Tried making Cryptogs immune to progs but it was too much of a grind. Thought about how their real strength is their movement avoiding lining up with the player to be attacked at a distance; the invisibility is just icing; so I tried strengthening them with AI improvements - making extra efforts to avoid being attacked, a "shy" version that avoids the player unless enough enemies are on-screen to flank them. These were challenging but they were kind of <i>too</i> smart so there's no solution where you can avoid damage, also with the invisibility you don't get to admire their clever tactics, you just don't see them for a while and then they show up in an annoying corner; the game is about being smarter than your enemies, it doesn't work if they're both clever and numerous. So eventually I thought about making the invisibility itself stronger and got the TRUE CRYPTOG! Tara claims she thought of the idea first but didn't tell me because I'd probably actually use it and she didn't want me to, well I got there anyway. They're super annoying.<br>
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A major part of the game is executing several progs in one turn to pull off a big combo, instantly clear the screen, so I thought about having a powerup that made this more difficult. Maybe you have a limited number of points ("CPU cycles"?) to spend on progs and then it takes several turns to build them back up. Tried a bunch of different numbers but eventually settled on the simplest: one and one. So the SINGLE-THREADING CPU! can only execute one prog per turn, this is much harsher than my first idea (where you could use a combo but then have to wait) but it seemed like the most interesting twist.<br>
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The other big secret is the secret level (now titled "root sector" in the stat screen), originally this was a bit of a throwaway thing that I didn't expect to matter much, mostly I had a graphical glitch I wanted to use somewhere. It did take quite a bit of thought to find a way that made sense to access a secret within such a tight game - there wasn't room to be like "oh there's a door behind that rubble" or something, but I found a way of embedding it in the mechanics that made sense. I thought people might find it a fun challenge to visit it, I put some points there but in my testing it was too expensive to reach to make much difference to scores. I was fairly wrong! Once people discovered it, and some extra hacks to reach it more cheaply, some really high scores were achieved, they're playing at a level I'd never anticipated when making the game. To me this is pretty interesting, it's added an extra layer of complexity over top of the game I intentionally designed, but still in a way that makes sense within it. I've been making little changes along the way to try to balance it - I'd like it to remain a risk/reward decision whether to try for it in any given run, not be something that can reliably and profitably be done every time. Some of the changes to progs making them not repeatedly trigger in the same turn to make them play nicer with .PLAN.B also make them harder to use in secret level trickery, this is a bonus. Also I dropped the maximum number of progs in hand to 8 which makes it a bit tougher too (it was only 10 in the first place because number keys, but that limited the number I could encode in 64 bits on the ios high score tables, dropping it to 8 was necessary to add the new progs in the expansion - arbitrary technical limitations are great).Broghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14185464573529387638noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-898703789069481101.post-72699766493387889912017-07-11T02:48:00.000-07:002017-07-11T02:53:22.919-07:00868-HACK: PLAN.BI have released an expansion for 868-HACK, get it on iOS as an in-app purchase or on Steam <a href="http://store.steampowered.com/app/646930/868HACK__PLANB/">here</a>.<br>
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<iframe width="100%" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/OMH-yDR35lI" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br>
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It adds a new mode which introduces "bonus powerups" from the first game of a streak (these are difficulty modifiers that would previously only show up after winning a few games in a row), with 8 more powerups added to the 12 from the original, so there's more variety from the start. Also 9 new progs (for a total of 32).<br>
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These changes make the score of an individual run less meaningful - because it's always affected by random powerups and because some of the new progs interact with run streaks - so high scores in this mode are only for streaks (total score across a series of consecutive plays without dying).<br>
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The maximum number of progs held is dropped to 8 (from 10), which makes the choice of what to pick up a little tighter, and also adds a little more variety because you're less likely to be able to pick up the same combinations by the end of a game. The new mode also allows a choice of "character class" each game, which determines starting resources (previously this was randomly assigned); this choice gives an extra chance to respond to the random initial conditions so there are less "unfair" deaths at the start of a game.<br>
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There are a few minor changes to some of the original progs, mostly to clarify their interactions with the .PLAN.B metaprog which executes random other progs: it was annoying to have it repeatedly apply an unwanted effect when you were hoping to randomly trigger something specific. In particular .DELAY and .STEP can no longer be used repeatedly in the same turn - you can still .STEP across a distance by applying it after each move so it isn't any weaker; .DELAY is slightly weakened but it was very strong in the first place so that's okay. Some other progs could be used with no effect when there were invisible cryptogs around, on the grounds that you don't know where they are so maybe it's affecting them - even though in practice you often have enough information about their position that you might know; now these can only be used when they will definitely have an effect, so their availability might give a clue about a cryptog's position (e.g. .CRASH becoming available might tell you there's one diagonal to you). I think it's quite interesting to get these clues and I'm not at all sure why I ruled them out in the first place?<br>
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-conversation="none" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">ok set a good score now. i should release this? <a href="https://t.co/ftiqkRuFZD">pic.twitter.com/ftiqkRuFZD</a></p>— Michael Brough (@smestorp) <a href="https://twitter.com/smestorp/status/874642272620621825">June 13, 2017</a></blockquote> <script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>Broghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14185464573529387638noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-898703789069481101.post-90652401944537409532017-05-18T09:21:00.001-07:002017-05-18T09:22:11.653-07:00old timesNot long after my previous post (in which I was updating 868-HACK) I went back to Scotland for a few days. As well as seeing friends and dancing we made time to visit Pittenweem, the little village where we used to live, where I hadn't been for a couple of years. It's a gentle, relaxing place; perfect environment for making art; I did a lot of good work there. Spent some time reflecting on the things I made there and how I haven't made any new games since leaving; I started Imbroglio towards the end of my time there. I want to recover some of what I had there, but at the same time I am in other ways healthier now, I wouldn't just jump back in time, but I can think about the things I was doing right then and try to find a way to have those as well as the other things I do better now.<br>
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A few days later I woke up with a solution to a problem I hadn't thought about for four years, an ability I'd tried while making 868-HACK which hadn't quite worked. Coded it up over breakfast, played with it, it fit perfectly. Opened up the file where I'd written down ideas for alternative progs that I'd had over the years and started trying those out too. Most of them were bad, but some of them had seeds that could be improved on.. one thing followed another and I guess I'm making an expansion now.<br>
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It's been refreshing working with this game again, feels very natural to be back. I like working in low-res, it's very quick to build things up, less inertia. Feeling inspired to do more of this, it good. Realising I'd been going through a bit of scope creep which was getting in the way of making new things, but now I'm remembering how to keep them contained.Broghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14185464573529387638noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-898703789069481101.post-23038333240707475632017-04-04T06:12:00.000-07:002017-04-04T06:12:27.233-07:00868-hack updateApple have imposed a new requirement that applications have "64-bit support" and are threatening to remove ones that don't from the store. So I'm forced to go through and update all of my older games, even though in reality they still work fine and there is no reason that Apple could not maintain backwards compatibility; they've deliberately chosen to put extra work on developers instead.<br>
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Isn't this just a matter of opening up the project, changing one line and recompiling? Should take five minutes, it's not really a big deal? Yes and no. The 64-bit change itself is small but they change enough other things every few months that recompiling against new versions of the libraries doesn't simply work. You get a few linker errors and have to look up the new names for a couple of functions. Or there's a new element in one of the libraries with the same name as one of my variables so I have to find+replace to change its name. And then you run it and find that it's in portrait mode, squished into half of the screen, so you have to look up what changes they've made to how screen orientation works and change a few more lines. Or the graphics are scrambled or just blank because they changed something in how shaders work. Then test everything to make sure nothing else has changed. Then upload it and it comes back with an error, you need to add two more lines to the info.plist file to say that no, you're not going to be using the device camera or location. Upload again, the build is accepted, you go onto the store backend and try to submit the update and it turns out now you need screenshots in three additional sizes. It adds up.<br>
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I made a few balance changes too since I was updating it anyway, so I've also updated the Windows build on Steam. I haven't updated the MacOS build because that is throwing me a completely different set of new errors from the iOS ones and forget it.<br>
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A while after 868-HACK was first released, I updated it with some changes to how the scoring worked (see <a href="http://mightyvision.blogspot.pt/2014/01/868-hack-update.html">this post</a>), mainly making the .SCORE prog worth one less point, which made it less dominant for single-run scores. Now the single-run scores are dominated by scores achieved with the secret level, much higher than what could be achieved with either version of .SCORE. Of course single-run scores are not very important and the game is about carefully surviving for multiple runs in a streak, but it turned out that also nobody wanted to use .SCORE in this context either now. A few months ago moabbe (who for a long time held the top score, and still holds the top single-run score) wrote to me saying "please go back to the original .SCORE, you had it right the first time". And he's probably right? So now I've switched back and hopefully the slightly higher reward for the risk will mean it gets used sometimes; I want every prog to have some practical use. The other changes I made in that update still hold; increasing the rate at which BONUS POWERUPS modify the difficulty was definitely the right choice.<br>
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A few other changes. I wrote in <a href="http://mightyvision.blogspot.pt/2014/06/868-hack-prog-costs.html">this post</a> about how I was slightly dissatisfied with the .ROW and .COL effects; they had been more fun to play with when they only hit once and only cost 3 resources but they overshadowed everything else. Whenever I went back and played the game again I was feeling this more and more. The big silly combos where you .PULL all the enemies in towards one spot and then hit them all at once are a fun part of the game but I was feeling like they were possible a bit too often and so there weren't enough situations where you have to find more specific solutions. So I thought about putting .ROW and .COL back to just hitting once, which makes for more complex tactics; you think more about the fact that they stun as well as damage, and you less often want to use .PULL to set them up because it's too expensive so you're more looking for the right moment when enemies can be tricked into lining up through their own movement. This makes them much more situational abilities, their resource cost is quite expensive for the effect, so I reduced their acquisition cost to try to compensate. I'm not completely sure about this change but let's try it and see!<br>
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I found that .WAIT was an ability I almost never use, it's just not very good. Which is kind of funny given how often people are asking for a wait button in my games! So I dropped the acquisition cost to just 1 enemy; it's not a big difference but I didn't have anything at 1 before so it's maybe nice if there is one?<br>
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OK time to see if I can compile the rest of my games again.Broghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14185464573529387638noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-898703789069481101.post-21388610545621229052017-01-31T06:14:00.000-08:002017-01-31T06:14:24.378-08:00imbroglio update 1.04A bunch of little tweaks here. May take a few hours to show up in the appstore.<br>
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<i>- Arcane Hourglass: now displays the number of turns until an enemy will reappear.</i><br>
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The previous update added a "telefrag" effect to Hourglass whereby the time-travelling enemy replaces other enemies in its space rather than waiting for them to leave. This made it a lot more important to keep track of when enemies will reappear so now the number of turns is displayed to make this less hassle to deal with. Should have had this all along really.<br>
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<i>- Forged Sigil: extra rune per level, damage dropped to 11111.</i><br>
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Felt like the extra runes weren't significant enough, especially for heroes with a 2-cost power, so now there's heaps and it definitely makes a difference. Seemed pretty strong; dropped the damage to compensate. Now I've broken the rule that 1/4 of blue weapons get to 2 damage, might have to do something about that?<br>
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<i>- Rusty Caltrops: damage profile to 11122, stun moved to IV.</i><br>
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The Caltrops/Rope/Wheel board turned out a bit too strong, I already dropped the Rope percentages to make it less reliable but it's still been dominating. Also I was noticing people often were surprised by Caltrops stun because it's a big effect that turned on at level 2, which is just somewhere in the middle of the progression, not a point people are keeping track of. It's more intuitive for a major effect to either be always on or to activate at level 4 when the weapon is fully leveled. Moving the stun to level 4 makes a Caltrops combo harder to get into play but doesn't change its strength once it is.<br>
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- Whetstone: now only affects adjacent weapons in the same row.</i><br>
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Whetstone has been showing up in almost every build; increasing damage is a very strong effect and its disadvantage of leaving a tile with 0 damage isn't significant enough to compensate for it. This nerf breaks a lot of existing boards, which is not ideal because they're still in the scoreboards and someone might get confused, but it leaves the weapon still very usable just hopefully a little less dominant.<br>
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- Brainspoon: controlled enemies may use Skeleton Key to move through walls.<br>
- Brainspoon: fixed crash when controlled enemies attempt to attack through a wall.</i><br>
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Surprisingly many people reported the bug of Brainspoon-controlled enemies crashing the game when attempting an invalid move (towards a wall the other side of which is occupied). I didn't think it was a priority to fix because it's not preventing any actual moves in the game, but the reports just kept coming in. Why is everyone trying invalid moves?<br>
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- Dream Wheel: changed interaction with Simon Rainbow Jester's second gem; now neither gem will move further away.</i><br>
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Wheel is quite effective at dealing with Simon's disadvantage because it moves both gems. Because they can't move into the same spot there were some odd interactions; sometimes one would move into a chokepoint and then the other one would avoid that spot in its path-finding and start taking the long way around, or if there was only one route then both gems would refuse to move. This latter case seemed like a nice balancing effect to Wheel's extra effectiveness - the gems get stuck and you have to leave your Wheel more often to fetch them - but it didn't come up very often. Now that gems refuse to take a longer route it will occur more often.<br>
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- Jeska Nomad Witch: power changed to "curse a random enemy" (was "curse nearest enemy").</i><br>
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I oscillated between these in development but ended up feeling she needed the slightly stronger "nearest" - gives more control over the outcome and sometimes gives extra curses when multiple enemies are equidistant. But then she was the first hero to ascend, with a very reliable board. Being able to reliably curse attacking enemies combines very favourably with Confusion Cloud. So I no longer feel she needs the extra strength.<br>
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- Chaos Oracle Molly: enemies are now more likely to spawn at their usual gate.</i><br>
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I just kept feeling disappointed that board orientation didn't matter. Now it selects a random gate and there's a 50% chance it produces its usual enemy, 50% chance it'll be random. (So actually a 62.5% chance of the usual enemy, because that could be the random one too.) Feels okay to me; it gives you slightly more to work with but still throws plenty of surprises. I may end up tweaking these percentages later on.<br>
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<i>- swapped unlock order of Dice of Omens and Arcane Hourglass.</i><br>
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Several people found the final set of weapons jarring because it added a lot of complexity all at once, so I've spread it out a bit more. Dice add variety to possible curse builds by giving an alternative source but that's a fairly subtle decision so it makes sense to reserve it for more advanced players; at the same time the text on the card is very simple. Hourglass has a lot of text but is a simple enough concept.<br>
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<i>- Amulet of Immortals: with multiple instances, a random one is triggered (Chaos Oracle Molly can spend a rune to choose).<br>
- Bonesnare: multiple instances trigger in random order (affects Masina Rebel Queen; Chaos Oracle Molly doesn't choose).<br>
- Wicked Thorns, Ixxthl's Ring: percentages adjusted to 12/25/37/50 (were 10/20/30/50 and 15/25/35/50).<br>
- Dominic Twice-Bitten: no longer stuns friendly ghosts or enemies controlled by the Brainspoon.<br>
- Ossuary title image displayed sometimes on startup not just when purchased.<br>
- arrows displayed for controlled ghosts's ability to move through walls.<br>
- fixed a bug in scrolling weapons at bottom of screen.<br>
- hit effects say "after" to clarify some interactions.<br></i>
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Just a bunch of things coming up between working on PC release and another expansion.Broghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14185464573529387638noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-898703789069481101.post-17403689238719725582017-01-12T07:25:00.002-08:002017-01-12T07:26:17.913-08:00self expectationover the last few years i have worked at making some changes to my lifestyle. spending more time with other people. getting more exercise & generally having a better relationship with my body. spending less hours in front of a screen, remembering to take regular breaks when i'm working to stretch & avoid rsi. learning new things. i am just in a way better place now in terms of physical and mental health.<br>
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i make games more slowly than i did a few years ago. seriously like in 2012 i released Game Title, Lost Levels, Zaga-33, Kompendium, VESPER.5, O, Corrypt, various smaller jam games. in 2015-16 i released Imbroglio. sometimes i feel pretty bad about this, i miss being more productive and i feel inadequate for not making a dozen more games at the same time and also porting to more platforms. i feel confused about why i am less productive. plus i feel bad about not keeping up with other game makers, like i never played all the latest games everyone talked about (half of them are console exclusives anyway) but i used to at least follow all the work of people i know personally and now i don't.<br>
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i just put these trends together and went "ohhhhhhhh". it is obvious when i think about it but as these have been slow trends and changes of habits it is not always easy to see. i am spending less time sitting at a computer, so i am getting less done in that time. i think somehow i expected to be so magically productive that i could do a bunch of extra things without anything else diminishing. but i actually have limitations and i have to make choices about how to allocate my time. i have to recognise that while i enjoyed being so productive back then, part of what enabled that level of productivity was constantly overworking myself, lifestyle habits i've realised were unhealthy for me and that anyway were unsustainable. i could still just sit down and jam out a game in a few days i just can't expect to do that while also doing what's best for my body. i still am able to make things now, it's not like i am unproductive, i am just comparing myself to a standard that i feel like i can achieve but is not realistic over the long-term. & if game-making time is a more scarce resource than i thought then i guess it's reasonable that i am not spending it on the little jam games?<br>
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ok moving forward i try to have more realistic expectations for myself. keep working on all of life and also games. really important to keep learning and trying new things, i don't want to be stuck in a loop of only making the kind of art i was capable of making five years ago (but integrating new ideas takes time too, i shouldn't expect to be able to express them straight away). accept making games at a sensible pace. not sure what this means for the equation of "can i continue to make a living from this", but i try. next game when it's ready, no rush, ok.Broghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14185464573529387638noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-898703789069481101.post-19640742319519943322016-11-29T19:09:00.001-08:002016-11-29T19:09:49.542-08:00statusso far sold 600 units of ossuary expansion which is around what i expected (~10% of people who bought the game in the first place), but it means this isn't a practical approach for me. but hey i'm going to do what i want you can't stop me, so i guess i'm still fiddling with imbroglio and trying ideas for more stuff. there's still a chance it might go bigger, selling things on the internet is just so volatile - 868-hack would probably have sold less than half as much if not for that one review by Leigh Alexander.<br>
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need to do a pc release too, it's a bit of faff because the current design is for a portrait-oriented screen and a lot of the ui is hard-coded and bad, planning to spend some of december sorting that out. not looking forward to it. has to be done so it's not stuck just in the apple forever but i don't have high hope for it because even more than 868-hack it is something "pc gamers" might assume is shallow because the map is small and maybe it could be played on a telephone.<br>
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started a new notebook of game designs. i hadn't been writing down new ideas for a while, kind of got stuck in a loop of thinking about "the next project" and projecting too much into it, feeling like it has to be a financial success and also a great work of art and also Do New Things With The Medium and als<br>
and i'd sort of converged on maybe three basic concepts that i had to choose between and each of them would be a big commitment project and then each of them starts growing by accretion, like whenever i have a new idea it doesn't get to stand on its own because it has to be a big thing so it gets glommed onto one of the existing ideas and they get ever more impractical.<br>
so it's quite freeing to just plan out some designs that aren't connected to the glommy things, and then not feel any particular pressure to make one of them. i keep thinking "wow this idea is actually great i should definitely make this" and then i remember i thought that about the previous three as well and i'm not going to make all of them and then that's okay, and hopefully now the gloms just fall back to being drops in ocean and. well i'll still have to pick something and make it but i think i'm recovering a mindset good for that. not jamming but it'll do.<br>
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also there's a strand here of a thing, i wrote before about not wanting to just make another roguelike and get typecast as The Man Who Makes Roguelikes, this is part of a broader attitude i have of aversion to conformity and repetition. it is not a bad attitude in principle but i am recognising that there are times when it makes me feel pressure to perform and that creates an unnecessary stress. maybe i don't need to push myself to do Different And New Thing, if i just go ahead and do a thing at all it probably will be its own thing anyway. thinking about folk songs and stories passed through generations, everyone's version ends up different even when clearly recognisable as same thing. things only look the same when you abstract them, look at them from a distance; go close up and there is all the detail and everything is unique; abstraction is powerful mental tool but risk missing everything important. thinking about dancing, always feel like i should do something different to keep it interesting but even if you try to do exactly the same thing again you can't even, hundreds of tiny forces shift balance somewhere slightly different, spine alone has 24 bones articulating - you think a step is simple because there are just two legs but transform it to spine domain and suddenly there is intricate detail and variation.<br>
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starting to feel properly settled in Lisbon. don't know if we'll get to stay here but i think i would if so? just got a stamp in my passport a few days ago saying i can keep being here for now and the people at the loja do cidadão were just really decent. like UK immigration officals ask with big frown "and once your contract is over you'll definitely leave right? you don't plan on staying? no more applying for jobs here?" and you have to be all obsequious, whereas here they're like "oh but after that you will still want to stay yes please?". it is surprisingly far from central europe but still we have been able to see europe friends a bit, even had one america friend visit. continues to be a good city for just going out and stumbling across something interesting. started learning forró, nice group of people, the dance has a bit much of flashy fast turns for my taste but it's a good challenge to follow. some people were a bit confused at first that i wanted to follow but they accepted it pretty quickly; it is far from the ideal of anyone can dance with anyone but it is at least not a hostile environment. (unfortunately the term they're using for following is "faço dama", hey at least it's not "princesa" like i heard in kizomba omg.) might start leading soon too but i'm kind of appreciating not knowing how to, usually i'm indifferent about roles and end up leading more because other people are not indifferent, now i can maybe balance that ratio out a little.<br>
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been sleeping on the floor a lot, shoulders are happier if i can manage to sleep on my back and the bed here sinks in a bit so i can't keep straight. but i'm used to sleeping on my side so sometimes i do that and then left subscapularis gets twisted again and tugs on my neck and i'm not quite sure what is going on, but i had a massage yesterday and while working on that something on the right of neck that had been compensating let go and now stuff in there is shifting around trying to find a new equilibrium. adventure!Broghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14185464573529387638noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-898703789069481101.post-64434699050512090512016-11-13T08:35:00.000-08:002016-11-13T09:23:30.668-08:00imbroglio notes 12 - ossuaryKept having more card ideas and throwing them in, ended up with a huge pool of cards and nobody could keep track of them all. I quite liked the feeling of it, the dungeon may be a tiny grid but the possibility space of board construction is a cavernous labyrinth rich with hidden treasures. But it was too much for me to test and tune. Also other people who tested it consistently reported that they found it overwhelming to explore but I wasn't bothered by that, someone wants my terrifying death maze to feel safe and comforting they can maybe go somewhere else. Still, to practically be able to finish the game I started shifting some of the ideas that weren't working well yet off into a separate list of "possible expansion items??". I wanted the initial game to be still be big enough to create a variety of possible boards, don't want people to just play a couple of different setups and feel like they've seen it all, but it was helpful to stop feeling like I had to fit in every cool idea I had now.<br>
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So as soon as I had the game out I was right back into testing the weapons that hadn't made it. At first I just had a random mish-mash of items, I preferred to have some kind of theme to tie them together so it could feel like "here is the dwarven erotica expansion pack" or something not just "here is some more of the same stuff as before". Thought about introducing a New Mechanic (magic-the-gathering-speak for a rule that appears on multiple cards) but the things I wanted to add were mostly about filling gaps and expanding possibilities of what was already there rather than having room for a separate new thing. Then Jonah suggested that since Skeleton Festival was coming up I could tie it into that, it's not something I personally celebrate but it's big in the USA which is my main market, plus it fit several of the items I already had and some others could easily be renamed to match it. It ends up maybe not very different from the fantasy rpg dungeon setting there was already but I think it's enough for expansion identity.<br>
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Things I wanted to add were: more ways of cursing and using curses to add more variety in possible curse boards, useful effects to help survival especially in the early-game, new combo endpoints to build around, more ways to hit multiple enemies, combos to encourage using the items that weren't seeing much play (especially ranged weapons and weapons with mana costs). With more items, everything is going to see proportionately less use so there's room for some rarer situational effects. Also some new heroes, that's like adding new levels because they're different challenges to build around.<br>
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Every roguelike now gets a bunch of people saying "PUT A DAILY CHALLENGE IN IT" whether it makes sense or not. I didn't want to do this with 868-HACK because the level generation isn't determined from the start, it depends on the position of enemies left over from the previous level - this is a subtle rule you don't notice while playing but it goes a long way to making it feel <i>right</i>; it's important that enemies are carried between levels (both for balance and atmosphere) and it feels bad if they get stacked on top of walls (you can move them on top of walls with .PUSH etc. but that's because you're hacking things, it's not the natural order). Point of a daily mode is that everyone competes at essentially the same challenge, so it doesn't make sense if it's going to chaotically diverge. Some effects in Imbroglio give similar problems - a new gem's position must be at least 4 steps away, so if you've moved the gem with Dream Wheel then maybe the position it would have been is no longer valid (maybe it's even right under your hero). But these problems are less central so I was prepared to work around them; probably wouldn't matter too much if a few times Wheel lets you score slightly cheaper, or else it probably wouldn't matter too much if gem positions diverge once you start driving a Wheel - level layouts aren't as critical as in 868-HACK anyway. And arguably Imbroglio doesn't do enough to stop you restarting a bunch of times to get good luck, means weapons with an early-game advantage are undervalued / weapons with an early-game penalty in exchange for late-game power are overvalued, so this kind of "you just get one try" challenge might be a good fit. 868-HACK has streak scores so doesn't need it.<br>
I tried random boards, they tend to be really really bad. Not even entertaining challenge to play around, just bad. Tried having a limited set of items to build a board from, seemed potentially interesting: removes the option of just playing the best board anyone's found, to encourage you to play interesting sub-optimal boards. Needs enough room to still make different things, I estimated it would need about twice as many cards as a full board so you could possibly make two boards with no cards in common. So I generated sets of 32 random cards (with possible duplicates), this ended up feeling too overwhelming. Tara suggested just having 8 cards and you can put up to 4 copies as usual; doesn't work with Vesuvius Bob but otherwise plausible. I worried this would be too small a set but trying it out it felt okay.<br>
Part of the process of constructing a board is playing it out and adjusting it, so in addition to playing once with the daily seed I needed there to be an option to test-play your board. If this option wasn't there you'd still be able to test boards by constructing them in the standard game mode, it would just be tedious going back and forth. But this was a lot of extra complication, more menus, more variables to keep track of, plus you might get a good score while testing but not replicate it when you play it for real and that feels bad. So why not just let you have as many tries as you want? (Bonus: avoids any problems with having a fixed seed.)<br>
Daily challenges are too frequent for me, I don't have a reliable daily routine, usually I play them for like two days in a row and then have a few really busy days and miss them and then I never come back because I broke my streak. Also constructing a board takes time, you want to be able to test a few different possibilities. So maybe more like a weekly challenge? A week is quite long though, hey what's a number between 1 and 7? Okay so I wanted a name for a 4-day week, if it was a science-fiction kind of setting game then like "tetrad" or something would do but here it didn't feel right. I had a look for any existing calendars using a 4 day week, found the Igbo calendar, borrowed the name "izu" from there. (This could be seen as cultural appropriation; I've used a word from a culture that is not my own and that honestly I don't know enough about. My intention was to respectfully acknowledge prior use of the concept.)<br>
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<b>Chaos Oracle Molly</b><br>
Control of random selection was originally an item effect, something like "Torch: 5/10/20/25% chance to select a target for any random effect". Nice for players who find the game too random, giving them an option to take more control. Disrupts the flow of the game so it's good to restrict it mainly to one character. Her disadvantage restores some primordial chaos to keep the cosmic balance. Matching enemy types to gates was the main breaker of board symmetry, but I figure it's okay for one character to have a more limited space of boards especially with new items expanding it anyway. (Technical detail: for Molly the <a href="http://mightyvision.blogspot.pt/2016/06/imbroglio-notes-3-monsters.html">"3-in-5" rule</a> applies to both gates and enemy types.)<br>
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<b>Simon Rainbow Jester</b><br>
Changing weapon colours also started as an item. Something that changes itself, something that changes another weapon. Raised questions about whether Susannah/Ixxthl can use it, had some really strong interactions, in general was pretty wild, breaks down the careful work I've done to set the tone of red and blue weapons. Better as a character so all that weirdness is contained in one place. Super unfair that he gets the coolest disadvantage as well as the coolest rune effect, but they feel like they fit together even though they're mechanically unrelated.<br>
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<b>Runestaff</b><br>
More resource exchanges! Was almost in the original set but someone convinced me that an alternative way to spend runes was a special enough thing to save for later. Would be fine without the cursing, but I want more weapons that just curse a little bit even if you're not building around them, little pieces that can work together. I don't want a binary "this is curse board so it has all curse things" vs "this is not curse board so curses thing is useless", I want reasons to end up somewhere in between, maybe because you have a little bit of cursing you want something else that's stronger with curses, then maybe that makes you want something else that grants curses, enigma.<br>
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<b>Forged Sigil</b><br>
I was trying something that scored gems on levelup, very simple alternative scoring mechanism, but didn't feel right, I guess you get a lot of gems anyway so a static bonus isn't that great, something repeatable like the Wheel is more attractive. Plus the healing from the gems is often wasted; in general I moved away from giving effects on levelup because it's really hard to time them usefully, either you level up anyway and they get wasted or you're going to great lengths to avoid leveling and that ends up very inefficient. But runes we're getting already and the specific timing doesn't matter because you spend them when you choose, plus they're scarce enough that a few extra can be significant. Hopefully useful for heroes with a difficult opening.<br>
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<b>Bonesnare</b><br>
A version of this was the second item I put in the game (after Whetstone), it attacked enemies that stepped on it. At that point when the game was mostly in my head this seemed really exciting, I could imagine all the ways it would interact with positioning, you could combine it with a Whetstone, you could block off a gate to eliminate one enemy type. But once in the game these interactions seem more obvious, fun to play out once but not so interactive. Spent a long time trying to find a version that wasn't ridiculously overpowered, didn't find one in time so it got pushed off to expansion file.<br>
Thinking about how can I trigger a remote attack without it just always happening automatically, maybe there's a button I can press to trigger it, like maybe the button I already have right here. Nice with Runestaff and Sigil, we've got a rune sub-theme going. Really like this version, how it plays different for every character because their rune situations are different. Totally different from the old version, with that the challenge was to get a combo set up and then it would automatically deal with things, here there's a constant challenge to use it effectively during the game. Adds a lot of potential for skillful play, extra depth to decisions, you have to anticipate problems and deal with them early because the Bonesnare might not be where you need it on the turn you're about to die.<br>
Usually I prefer every weapon to have a strict improvement at level IV but I was finding this just a little weak at 11112 and sufficiently complex that I didn't want to go for 11122 and a IV rule, but I figured that since it triggers off runes it's okay if IV just gives you another rune to activate it.<br>
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<b>Festerfang Venom</b><br>
Another early weapon, the first curse combo. Curse them with a wand, and then every turn after that the venom drains their life. That's too much, maybe just whenever they move, or whenever they attack. Still a lot given that you can stack up four copies of this. Eventually hit on the idea of triggering it when an enemy is stunned, turn a defensive effect into offensive. There were a lot more sources of stuns and curses back then so ordinary damage got too strong, I made it damage an enemy's highest life total to slow it down. This made it quite wordy, and it was still very powerful, plus building a curse+stun+venom combo is quite complex so I cut it from the base set.<br>
Coming back to it for expansion, I found it could be simplified now there were fewer stuns. Letting the effect be "hit" is nice to allow combos with anything that interacts with hits. Making it only trigger once per turn removes a lot of the problems with stacking a bunch of them and instantly killing everything; I hadn't had the "once per turn" rule in the game when I'd worked on it before. Tried having it replace the stun rather than just trigger off it, so four copies will need four stuns, but went back to the simpler version. Power level might be a little low but I'd rather that than the omnipotent earlier versions; the combo still works. I haven't gotten 256 with this version but I can reliably break 200, fine by me.<br>
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<b>Skeleton Key</b><br>
Started as Ghost Sword, Blue 11222, 0: Attacks through walls, IV: Can move through walls from here. Attacking through walls turned out to be not great unless you kill them in one hit because they can't hit back so they move as usual so now they're an even number of steps away and you have to take a hit to move back next to them. But moving through walls was cool. Plus blue items stopped being explicit martial weapons and got less damage so it wasn't a sword anymore. Then I was looking for more things to stick mana costs on and this one made sense, it was a bit strong for free anyway.<br>
Ended up killing it because it had bad interactions with Bob and Masina. With Bob it's ambiguous whether you're swiping towards a wall to break it or to move through it, there were situations where you'd definitely prefer one or the other; it might seem like moving is better than breaking (because you break it to move through it anyway) but sometimes you want to break just for the wait to get in phase with enemies. Plus things can be triggered by spending mana or runes and you want to know which one you're going to get. (Eventually I made it trigger both effects because that's logical and nobody can complain they didn't get the effect they were asking for, even if it's not really the outcome they wanted.) With Masina there's the question of whether you can get into the inaccessible square; obviously it's not a desirable place to be because then you're stuck, but it feels bad to not be able to use your key anyway. And there was a high chance you'd include it when building a board for either character; Masina because she gets level layouts with more walls and it might seem like a way to deal with that, and Bob simply because he includes so many weapons. These interactions are still not great but i figure it's safer to put in an expansion because with more weapons and more characters you're just less likely to meet them, and people have more experience with the game so they can maybe deal.<br>
Spent a while fumbling for an IV effect. Had 11112 damage for a while which was okay but an ability would be cooler. There's not a very clear rule behind which blue weapons get 2 damage, it's basically if they need a bit more strength or if they need an IV upgrade and I couldn't find a good one, but also based on what just feels right. I had a weird effect where it opens up portals in the edge walls (hey if we have bad interactions with some heroes why not bother Johnny too) but stacking all this extra mobility got too strong. Leon is constantly pressuring for more "telefrag" effects (he's responsible for the update to Hourglass) so I gave in and went with that. It's very situational so probably you won't prioritise leveling it.<br>
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<b>X-Ray Gun</b><br>
Red version of "Ghost Sword"; adding range fixes the parity problems when attacking through walls. Was almost in the original set but I realised I wasn't going to be able to design many different ranged weapons so I held it back. Fits here in keeping with the "skeleton" theme.<br>
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<b>Gravestone</b> & <b>Bog Hands</b><br>
See <a href="http://mightyvision.blogspot.pt/2016/09/imbroglio-notes-10-more-card.html">Ixxthl's Ring</a>; I wrote about finding that triggered effects tended to be preferable to rewriting weapons. I had a few weapons that attached extra rules to other weapons, like "Barrel of Tar: when this levels up, a random weapon gets 'when this hits an enemy, 50% chance to stun them'", and I wanted to find simpler versions. Here's a solution: effects that trigger when an enemy is there. Analogous to grafting an effect onto adjacent weapons. These also give a bit of a boost to ranged weapons, more things that can reach the target tile.<br>
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<b>Necromancer's Mask</b><br>
Used to be "ghosts are your friends". Back then I had more ways of creating lots of ghosts so this was even stronger, had to balance it with stuff like 0 damage at IV, maybe feeding restrictions. I didn't mind that it wasn't stackable (you could still use a second copy to convert a few waves) but actually it is nice that the current version does stack; more masks means more friends. There were problems with having too many ghosts, maybe you could get 15 of them and then the screen is full and no new enemies can enter, limiting the number of ghost friends deals with that while keeping the fun situations. Also moving into a friendly ghost used to swap places with them, now they're still treated as an enemy in most respects so you can still attack them (or sometimes, must still attack them), sort of a disadvantage but it lets you still use them to feed your weapons, in keeping with sinister BLACK SWORD BLACK SWORD.<br>
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<b>Switchblade</b><br>
Basic utility item to avoid being stuck in bad corners. I like the efficiency of getting a move and attack in one action. Maybe a little close to Blink Dagger but it has the stun and more predictability.<br>
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<b>Repercussion Drum</b><br>
Problem with Ixxthl's Ring in enabling a mana-spending board is that it's blue and all the things that spend mana are also blue, so you're pretty limited in how many you can have given that you want some red weapons too. Here's a red mana-spender to take some of that pressure off. It compares closely to Rimeclaws; has more damage at IV but that's in keeping with red weapons generally having more damage. Possibility of combination with on-hit effects. This might not be very clear in the picture but I tried to make it a little bit SPOOKY by the drum being made from a PUMPKIN and the drumsticks being BONES.<br>
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<b>Oracular Oxbone</b><br>
It made sense to me to call Molly an oracle but she doesn't actually predict anything, her power is about manipulating the outcomes which is kind of like predicting them only better. But how about a tool to predict things as well, something that ties in with her rules. Unconstrained enemy spawns can actually be pretty hard to deal with, getting some information about them helps. Then a random effect to tie in with the other half of the hero. Still useful for other heroes. Quite close in strength to Cleaver, it's like 11123 except the 3rd damage at IV is sent somewhere else (sometimes better, sometimes worse).<br>
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<b>Jagged Saw</b><br>
Really interested in what else I could make as a vanilla weapon. Cleaver doesn't leave much room for anything else to reach 3 damage, Brazier is canonical for diminishing damage, what about fluctuating damage? It's good because it starts at 2, the only other thing that does that is Broadsword and that has an xp penalty. It's good because it gets to 3, hardly anything else gets to 3. Maybe you want to stop there, and for that 3 is better than 4 because you can get Minotaurs and Cubes down to 1 and then finish them with something else.<br>
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<b>Dragon Skull</b><br>
I thought I wasn't going to do a "blue shield" after Dragons got that effect. But when I was testing Wheel versions, percentage chance of extra damage was working really well and I wanted to use it for something, spent a while trying to find a nice simple effect that would go nicely with it without feeling out of place but without synergising too directly with the damage (which was already strong). Came back to this, decided it was fine as long as I acknowledged the connection with Dragons. More mana is good anyway to encourage using the weapons that spend it.<br>
My early versions of a "blue shield" tried to distinguish themselves more from red shield by having stun/curse effects rather than just damage. But still the method of damage is different and that creates some asymmetry between them. They have similar average damage at IV but Skull's unreliability makes it slightly worse, in keeping with the principle of red weapons having more damage. Also with less enemies targeting mana it's probably less significant overall.<br>
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<b>Plague Totem</b><br>
Used to be a rule-grafting item, giving other weapons the ability to hit multiple cursed enemies. When cutting back on those and needing more basic curse sources I rebranded it as obligatory walking curse box. Weird. Tried a bunch of different curse punishments to go with it (when cursed enemies are hit here, when this kills a cursed enemy), ended up going back to the idea of hitting multiple cursed enemies at once.<br>
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<b>Brainspoon</b><br>
Thinking through alternative ways to deal with boss enemies, also more tools for Ixxthl to survive, okay the mind control thing is a fairly standard game effect for turning an enemy's strength against them. Already had the Mask converting ghosts, it'd be simple to just reuse that effect, switch their team. But what if you actually directly control them? Can't lose the roguelike single-character controls so it has to be controlling them instead, that's pretty interesting because it leaves your hero vulnerable. So I was walking an enemy around, I moved them onto the gem, it felt weird that it didn't pick it up, well maybe it should pick it up - otherwise you're stuck not scoring for a while, it might be efficient for killing enemies but it's going to leave you behind in score. Suddenly it's an alt-scoring tool. But then that was kind of bad because the enemy you're controlling would keep getting healed up by the gems you're collecting while your hero withers away in the corner. So I switch the gem healing to still target the hero even though the enemy picks it up, now there's a decent time limit on controlling any one enemy. When the controlled enemy kills other enemies, that should count as the Spoon indirectly killing them, so it levels up. When the controlled enemy dies, that probably shouldn't count as a kill for the Spoon because it was the enemies hits that did it. Needs an IV effect, how can we make controlling an enemy better, +damage ok.Broghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14185464573529387638noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-898703789069481101.post-61365359490499344092016-11-05T05:30:00.003-07:002016-11-05T05:36:00.793-07:00imbroglio notes 11 - spoiler warningOkay I saved the stuff that you unlock later for a separate post so nobody gets worried about spoil-o. If you believe in spoilers, don't read this unless you've unlocked all characters and maybe gotten a couple hundred points.<br>
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Ixxthl, fairly obvious counterpart to Susannah. I thought for a while this was too much of a restriction, written in my working notes is "only-blue hero is not viable, find replacement". But I realised the heroes didn't need to be balanced against each other, plus I got better at the game and learnt to play her. Rune effect needed to be huge and damaging enemies was too close to Susannah. Was playing with polymorph effects (because 868-HACK's .POLY was top), had a wand that randomly transformed whatever it hit and it wasn't going great, I realised this might be better as a hero power so you have more control when to use it. It wasn't quite enough as a hero power, too often you would cast it and get stuck with bad enemies - this works differently to 868.POLY because casting it takes a turn so you can't repeatedly reroll, runes are a more limited resource than credits/energy were, and there's more variance in how bad specific enemy types can situationally be - in Imbroglio even one enemy can kill you if you're fighting it with the wrong colour. So I made it transform everything into a new enemy type that's vulnerable to all attacks (and then came Scythe etc.).<br>
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I've seen people commenting that Ixxthl's weapons are pretty different from everything else. I don't feel that way because I had everything as one complete set before I arranged it to unlock, but I can see why they feel it. I put the unlocks in order of complexity, the cards with longer text and more advanced combos come later so beginners aren't thrown by them, but this means the four most complex weapons all come at once in the last block; it would maybe have been smarter to spread the complexity around more.<br>
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<b>Ixxthl's Ring</b>
<a href="http://mightyvision.blogspot.pt/2016/09/imbroglio-notes-10-more-card.html">I wrote about this already</a> but there's a few more things to say in context of the character. I was interested in foreshadowing unlocks, so since Ixxthl was probably wearing Magic Ring I renamed it after her, thinking you might be able to guess her rules from this and from noticing which weapon slots aren't filled yet. I tried various ghost-based effects with it so it would connect with both halves of the character but the main effect is complex enough that it ended up better to keep a simple version. For a while it had "when this kills an enemy, a random cursed enemy becomes a ghost" but when gems got the basic rule of curse-ghosting it seemed superfluous to have other effects replicating it. (Plus it wasn't such a good connection with Ixxthl because she makes ghosts already, would have been better to have something that triggered off ghosts.)<br>
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<b>Entangling Rope</b><br>
The stun multiplier effect started on a red weapon: "Echo Hammer, II: when this hits an enemy, hit a random enemy, IV: when an enemy is stunned, stun them again". Was going with a general theme of doubling things but apart from that the effects didn't make much sense together and both were very strong on their own. At the time there were a lot more cheap stuns - Blink Dagger stunning all enemies when it teleports, for example - so multiplying stuns got very broken very quickly. I really wanted some kind of stun combo though so I made it only have a 50% chance. Later I realised all those mass stun sources were a problem even before any combo so I cut them down a lot and I thought I could let Rope go to 100%, but now because of the dominance of Wheel/Caltrops/Rope combos I've dropped it back to 50% in an update.<br>
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<b>Geomantic Orb</b><br>
An alternate rune-source seemed like something the game should logically have, to enable builds that rely on character powers to survive further into late-game. Tried several possibilities. This used to have something like "I: when this kills a cursed enemy, gain a rune, IV: when this kills any enemy, gain a rune"; like Vampiric Spear, giving extra for curses while still having something to offer without them. This ended up far too efficient; getting extra runes early made surviving to late-game a lot easier, and then getting double runes late meant you could not just slow the inevitable dwindling of your resources but actually turn it around to get more back than you were spending, and possibly survive forever. Went with just a late rune effect and tied it to an unrelated but useful early effect that I'd been struggling to find a good home for.<br>
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<b>Dream Wheel</b><br>
Definitely wanted some kind of alt-scoring, it's a classic part of constructed-deck games, give an unusual goal to build towards and the value of everything else shifts around it. Usually you score by taking steps towards the gem, the wheel scores by making the gem step towards you; a simple inversion.<br>
First version I tried was based on 868-HACK's .PULL, the gem was dragged directly towards the player even through walls. This was simpler to implement and I thought it wasn't going to make too much difference. It turned out very powerful, I tried adding extra costs, they weren't enough, gave up on it, deleted it from the source code and swore never to use it. Later when testing Ixxthl boards I felt a need for another way to deal with wasps so I was testing a blue weapon with extra damage - percentage chance of doing a red hit as well, red damage against cursed enemies, chance of just doing more blue damage, etc. I wanted an IV effect to go with it, eventually came back to thinking about the gem pulling effect and wondered "what if I use the really ridiculously much weaker version that doesn't go through walls? i know it seems really bad but the other one was too strong so <i>maybe</i>..". Tried it and it worked great, much fairer than the earlier one because it was always an incremental movement of the gem, rather than instantly making the path much shorter (or longer), now pulling the gem to you always takes the same amount of time as to walk to it. But when I tried building a board specifically around it, it revealed itself to still be very strong so I started cutting back on the extra damage, maybe it's only like a percentage chance of doing 1 blue damage to a cursed enemy or something, stack on the limitations. Messy and complicated so I simplified it out by just letting the IV effect stand alone - seemed okay. Was a bit sad to lose extra interactions that might make you want to include it even when you're not specifically using it for scoring but that's turned out okay because there's still different ways to build around the scoring effect.<br>
I'm really happy with how Zugzwang comes into play when you're running a Wheel engine. If you could just stand on the Wheel and hit everything coming at you you're happy, especially if you have its damage upgraded and some nice protective effects to keep you alive. But parity sometimes forces you to spend runes (limited) or move off it and maybe take hits, and that's what keeps the combo non-trivial. Sometimes you must collect a gem off-wheel and then if the wall generation is unkind you can find yourself with a long journey back home. Everything has to have holes in it and Zugzwang/parity creates some good ones.<br>
I like to think of it as giving out fractional points, it's as though it says "when this kills an enemy, get a quarter of a gem".<br>
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<b>Arcane Hourglass</b><br>
This was the other ranged blue weapon. Same structure as Malign Wand; costs mana so you don't get blue range for free, gets something extra at IV just because. Delaying enemies kind of made sense at range because it's not like you're hitting them a bunch of times anyway. Just turned out really strong with Ring, you could stand there and timewarp through a whole string of enemies; slow and frustrating but very safe (similar bad feelings to heavy stuns). IV effect was something complicated like "when this kills an enemy, curse all enemies currently being sent to the future" but that was weird and too much work to set up. It's very hard to level anyway because most hits send the enemy away and then probably you kill them with a different weapon, so there was no reason for the IV to be so minor and fiddly. I was mostly avoiding the simple "when this hits an enemy, curse them" because reliable free cursing tended to throw off the balance, but it's okay here because it's so costly to level. I tried the "16 turns" effect scaling with level, "4 turns per level" or whatever, but it didn't make much sense because it often wasn't clear whether more turns was better or worse.<br>
I felt it was being a little underused (actually most weapons with mana costs are - since I weakened Ring very late in development maybe everything that depended on it ended up a little low - though of course I wanted them to work without Ring too) so for the update Leon suggested Johnny-style telefrags as a way it could sometimes eliminate threats rather than just postponing them. I think it adds a lot more nuance.<br>
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Minotaurs started at 8/8 but that was too much, it demanded either having a 3- or 4- damage weapon or being able to get the first hit with a 2-damage one. Especially tricky for a hero like Ixxthl without access to the high-damage red weapons. You could build a combo that deals with them but depending on the luck of what you'd been able to level up maybe it wouldn't be active yet, I didn't want the rule to be "you lose if your combo isn't up by turn 100" or whatever, obviously you want a combo running as soon as possible but putting a hard limit on it removes any interesting play around dealing with things going less than ideally, it would mean you might as well simply resign if you don't hit a certain milestone. So I dropped them to 4/4, anyone can kill them but they provide a little extra mid-game challenge.<br>
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Then when I started working out what happens in the super-late-game, once you've had time to almost certainly level everything you want to, I came back to the idea of an 8/8 enemy. I had combos that could deal effectively with any number of small enemies, and weren't too bothered by minotaurs either, so how was I going to manage to end the game? I didn't want it to run forever. So I threw in the 8/8 monolith and tried my combo on it and quite easily killed that too. I've toned down some of the weapons I was using there, it wasn't always clear in development whether to make the enemies stronger or the player weaker, but still it's not hard to deal 8 damage if you need to, that's just two hits from a Broadsword or Brazier. So I took it to 16.<br>
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The 16/16 endboss worked pretty well, there was a good chance you'd die to it in a satisfactorily glorious manner and get a nice score, and if you killed it you were often weakened enough for the now-vast hordes of standard enemies to take you down. It was hard to decide whether it was red or blue so I picked both; split it into two versions each with a weakness: 16/12 and 12/16. I wanted there to be ways of killing them, just "ok this spawned so now you die" feels bad. One of the ways of dealing with them indirectly was to use a Scythe or something to transform them into a ghost, but when I gave curses the extra effect of ghosting this became much too easy to bypass the bosses rather than feeling like a feat of cunning trickery; now it could happen without you even trying and it felt very anticlimactic so I reluctantly added a rule preventing them from ghosting.<br>
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It seemed good to get some kind of reward for killing a boss, a damage increase to the weapon used felt reasonable - opened up some strategic options letting you still improve a weapon even once everything is fully leveled. Both bosses had this effect for a while but it seemed more interesting for them to be different. Damage increase is a red effect so I needed something for the Dragon. Something that also applied to the weapon used would have been nice for symmetry but there were no simple options; you could level it up but at this point of the game it's probably already there, making it ranged isn't strictly advantageous because it restricts your movement (increasing damage isn't /strictly/ advantageous either because occasionally you want to hit again so as to wait in place but this is rare enough to overlook) plus it would have broken Harry's disdvantage, modifying the weapon's rules is possible but overly complex. Tried having it give out treasure; runes and gems;
nice to get some extra runes at this point of the game when they're running short (unless you're Orbing). Four runes and one gem seemed okay, except the time that I slew a dragon from a nice safe position with walls on 3 sides and the gem took all those walls away leaving me to die (my Whetstone'd Spear would have happily dealt with everything one by one). Then someone suggested the max-blue increase and it just seemed right. It's simple, succinct, makes sense in terms of existing effects. It has symmetry with the Unicorn - upgrading the weapon, upgrading the hero. I had been thinking a "blue shield" would be an obvious item for an expansion set but it seemed nicer to have the blue version exist in a very different form and avoid the straightforward symmetry.<br>
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Favourite thing about these is people's reactions when they first see them.Broghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14185464573529387638noreply@blogger.com0