mauve

Good luck? I'm fighting for my life out here.

yes, i know, it's a LITTLE behind lol life has been a lot

well, current focus is on piecing all the content I have together so I'm thinking in terms of, if I can figure out where to leave myself some leeway on that side, i can do it that way, but otherwise don't go too far out of my way

the initial design for addlemoth was very low on meta stuff. it's just a lot of puzzles with a narrative story. very linear.

Been wondering if I should step back from that a little and reorganize a bit.

i've kinda been coming to the conclusion that the while the actual mechanical step by step gameplay is fun and enjoyable, it's the meta layer that keeps people coming back over and over; whether it be in games with base building or metapuzzles to solve.

so I should think about that a lot.

void stranger made me wonder if i should go _even more_ for sickos for addlemoth than i already have

I think that as an indie game dev without a large publisher, your target audience is not gamers in general, it is sickos.

It's hardcore sickos that will be diving the depths of your genre and finding your game, and it is sickos who will be spreading it.

Please the passionate, not the masses.

i've found the relative simplicity of the fights (in the sense that they are extremely memorization heavy) makes people competitive about really, really stupid things instead

like, your numbers ain't that important. just screw up less.

on the contrary, i would recommend hexen a hundred times over

it's weird and interesting and mysterious. there's a lot of ideas packed in there, even if they don't all work, and it's honestly fascinating to explore and unpack it all

a few days of work on the tilesets later, i think this stage select fits the Spooky Cave aesthetic nicely #Addlemoth #gamedev

i've been working on tileset art a bit, trying to get through the (enormous) backlog i left myself here. been in a mood to get that done so getting through as much as I can while I'm there.

I do apologize for how long everything's taken, life has been doing life things

Addlemoth · Thinky Games Wield your blade against hellhounds and skeletons in turn-based battles.

Wield your blade against hellhounds and skeletons in turn-based battles in Addlemoth, an upcoming game also inspired by DROD!
thinkygames.com/game...
10/12

right. these days i tend to define programming tasks by what they're _not_ supposed to do.

eg, a progression system shouldn't even allow it to be broken at any point. a loop shouldn't be able to go infinite. malformed data should not cause a crash. etc.

the thing a lot of beginning programmers don't understand is that writing the code to do a thing is the _easiest_ part of coding

maintaining it, making whole programs glue together? that's the hard part.

a well written codebase is a maintainable one

This is the single best piece I've read on "replacing coders with AI," it fully dispells the myth from the perspective of a software engineer and does so in a calm, reasonable way.
colton.dev/blog/curing-...

random youtube recommendations possibly being ai gen nonsense really makes me value uploads from the pre AI radiation days more

not really interested in rolling the dice on that stuff anymore

The me who struggled for way too long to get decent looking pixel art hearing "oh you're so talented!" makes me want to scream, ahaha

You can learn to do it too! Become the person who can and will learn it!

I really push back on use of the word 'talented' when I see it.

"Talented" implies a predisposition towards a skill that is required to do the thing, which... it really isn't. Practice and learn.

90% of learning to do something is just having the right mindset to keep at it with.

so disappointing how many ppl I see preemptively convincing themselves they can't learn a thing w/o giving it a real effort over time bc they think natural aptitude is the defining factor of skill acquisition. the only diff btwn them & the ppl who can do the thing is that the latter just kept trying

wf is a game that is honestly far better tonally than it has right being

it swings for the moon a lot and it doesn't always hit it, but when it does it really nails it good, and i respect that

yeah not even the tiniest bit surprised ahaha

what i'm learning from my feed today:

- i kinda miss fighting games
- i should learn to draw boobs

good quality procgen is curated by humans in a way LLMs fundamentally cannot be.

when we design the heuristics for these we actively design to prune the infinite branches for interesting variance, instead of simply variety for its own sake.

LLMs can't curate, they do not work like that.

why is yuzo koshiro's etrian odyssey music so good

yeahhhhhhhh unfortunately

I would love to be able to spend more time on doing game design things instead of cleaning up code.

Please hire me do this lol

Okay end rambling thread. Overall, I'm really proud of how the battle balance stuff came out. Just wish we hadn't been bogged down by technical problems for way, way too long.

Overall, I think that we did a really good job with battle balance if you were 'on level'.

(Though, if you outleveled things, we did kinda make it a bit easier than intended... but that's another story.)

There were actually situations in DQ1 where if you upgraded a defender, the new skill would do less damage over its active time than if you simply disabled it. (Almost all aoe skills!)

I made sure that there is no skill in DQ2 which does that. A new upgrade always does at least parity over time.

The balance I ended up on was that fast characters would weight more heavily towards their stronger skills as they were upgraded, while slower characters would beef up their overall damage.

I also wanted to make sure that a new skill would never be WORSE than a prior one.

Spreadsheet-like output simulating damage rotations for a tower defense game.

This also meant I had to balance the DPS of every defender. This turned out to be a bit of a problem too, because we had skills with active frames and cooldowns, that would ALSO scale based on their character stats.

Balancing these required making another tool, to simulate the DPS rotations.