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Balatro on PS4/5 store for $15 with a 1 hour demo. (And the credits mention Xbox porting as well) Also, there's a PS demo of The Land Beneath Us, which has directional weapon equips ala Magpie, and also abilities based on movement patterns, so a lot of spatial reasoning/positioning puzzles. The enemies telegraph their attacks as well, which plays into the puzzling nicely. However, I'm not a huge fan of the current weapon variety, though that can easily change (and I can see how it benefits from a more limited selection due to how upgrades work) - however there's a lot of apparent overlap in the weapon niches, though that might change with upgrades/meta-progression (of which there's is a moderate amount, though it feels playable without it if you're really good at not getting trapped by unseen enemy patterns) It has a lot of potential, but may need some success to fill out the detail/variety. RubberBands Hurt fucked around with this message at 17:57 on Feb 29, 2024 |
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Feb 29, 2024 17:51
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I enjoyed Griftlands and cleared the story for all 3 characters. That said, playing Griftlands was an exercise in frustration because of two things: 1. It's slow as balls 2. The game is actively hostile towards you removing your generic Strikes/Defends, so it's difficult to build a focused deck that does something interesting. It gets even worse when you try to juggle the two deck types at the same time instead of focusing on either combat or negotiation.
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Feb 29, 2024 18:11
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Jack Trades posted:The second screen is the node-based map screen that's also ripped straight from Slay the Spire, just like the "choose one of three things" screen. I am pretty sad that the StS map system has become ubiquitous while FTL’s has barely ever been used again - it’s much more fun planning routes around the latter.
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Feb 29, 2024 18:37
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Osmosisch posted:To me this mainly shows that you've not encountered a lot of what's out there. Which makes sense, a lot of games that do cross-encounter things just plain aren't as good, because each added dimension of complexity makes the overall design harder. The simple fact that life/HP is a resource pertinent to both the tactical and strategical layers falsifies the basic premises from OOP's post quite a bit.
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Feb 29, 2024 18:38
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Pigbuster posted:I am pretty sad that the StS map system has become ubiquitous while FTL’s has barely ever been used again - it’s much more fun planning routes around the latter. FTL's map was kind of a drag, most of the time you were flying blind (and at best were just making a kind of informed guess) and it was mostly just a source of gotchas if you weren't obsessively checking connections on every node and counting pixels to figure out if later jumps would be safe. The time pressure mechanic was interesting but other than that StS's routing is way better.
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Feb 29, 2024 18:46
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the holy poopacy posted:FTL's map was kind of a drag, most of the time you were flying blind (and at best were just making a kind of informed guess) and it was mostly just a source of gotchas if you weren't obsessively checking connections on every node and counting pixels to figure out if later jumps would be safe mystes fucked around with this message at 18:50 on Feb 29, 2024 |
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Feb 29, 2024 18:48
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Path of Achra has functionally the exact same map layout as StS but at least it looks different. That's the least I can ask for. Just stop copy pasting, please.
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Feb 29, 2024 18:49
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what is the point of a map screen if it doesn't look like the tree of life
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Feb 29, 2024 18:52
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The one that always unreasonably irritates me is StS clones that also copy the "arrow pointing between selected card and selected enemy" UI element. It's so incredibly specific! Everyone knows what you did!
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Feb 29, 2024 19:21
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I'm a fan of monster train's pared down map mechanic where you just choose between two sets of benefits by going either left or right. The decision feels meaningful because you know broadly what you are going to get and can apply that towards your build, and the risk/reward aspect feels more intentional when you are choosing between resources like health or long term benefits to your deck like the chance to duplicate a card
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Feb 29, 2024 19:40
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mystes posted:Perhaps the implementation in FTL made it slightly more complicated than necessary but I think it was interesting to have to weigh the tradeoff of distance (and risk) vs possible rewards, unlike StS where you will go through the same number of nodes no matter which way you go I don't think the fixed length is a necessary component of the formula and wouldn't mind seeing clones mixing it up a bit more, but I also don't think that it makes all that much difference. It's not like StS has any shortage of risk vs. reward decisions to make in pathing. Of course, the same is not true of all of the clones, so I agree with the original complaint that games need to stop slavishly imitating it. Luck Be A Landlord dispenses with the routing layer altogether, trusting the deckbuilding portion to provide enough risk/reward decisions to stand on its own. Balatro reduces pathing to a decision between a standard encounter + reward versus an unusual reward that skips directly to the next encounter (which is going to be considerably harder because Balatro is designed around a very steep difficulty ramp.) Both games would be much worse if they just copied & pasted the traditional StS routing.
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Feb 29, 2024 19:42
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deckbuilding games are what happens when someone comes up with cool worldbuilding and aesthetics for a game but can't come up with a plot or any game mechanics
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Feb 29, 2024 19:47
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I never found slay the spire's map mechanic engaging. Intellectually I understand it's giving you agency over what path to go down and reap its benefits (bosses, fires, stores), but in my opinion the paths don't diverge or intersect enough to feel like a meaningful choice. It feels more like I'm required to manually confirm that, yes, I do want to continue to the next monster encounter which is the only node in front of me.
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Feb 29, 2024 19:48
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cock hero flux posted:deckbuilding games are what happens when someone comes up with cool worldbuilding and aesthetics for a game but can't come up with a plot or any game mechanics As someone struck with lameness I'm all here for it. I love feeling like I'm doing a lot by just pressing A five times and watching an animation of a big number happen. My favorite aspect of persona 4 was the way that it would let me open up a menu and teleport around without having to manually make my character walk around. My joints want killer, no filler
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Feb 29, 2024 19:54
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Dicefolk and Tamarak Trail are out https://store.steampowered.com/app/1591220/Tamarak_Trail/ pic related  https://store.steampowered.com/app/1996430/Dicefolk/ Is there a deckbuilder/games with dice and cards thread somewhere? victrix fucked around with this message at 20:03 on Feb 29, 2024 |
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Feb 29, 2024 20:00
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victrix posted:
If there isn't there should be, although from what I can tell most of the rogue-like ecosystem is taken up by deck builders lol.
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Feb 29, 2024 20:07
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Tea Party Crasher posted:As someone struck with lameness I'm all here for it. I love feeling like I'm doing a lot by just pressing A five times and watching an animation of a big number happen. you can have game mechanics that are not dependent on being physically difficult to execute but also aren't just a 1 to 1 recreation of slay the spire. some days I awaken to find that my hands have been replaced with deformed crab claws and are not capable of controlling any game where the enemies do not politely wait for me to kill them but i am fortunate enough to have access to innumerable distinct examples of such games that do not involve playing cards Funnily enough the only deckbuilding game I played and liked was One Step From Eden and that was, if anything, one of the most hand-obliterating games that I can think of
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Feb 29, 2024 20:08
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cock hero flux posted:deckbuilding games are what happens when someone comes up with cool worldbuilding and aesthetics for a game but can't come up with a plot or any game mechanics I think deckbuilding is lots of times what happens when someone has cool idea but no budget at all. If you make your game in a genre where lots of stuff is seen as 'acceptable' to be cards, like weapons, attacks, items, even events, locations, etc, your budget for art and even systems goes considerably down. It's the board game philosophy applied to video games, you can abstract anything to a card or token. (see also, Sunless Sea and similar games) Turin Turambar fucked around with this message at 20:18 on Feb 29, 2024 |
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Feb 29, 2024 20:13
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That's fair flux. Even as someone who likes a good deck builder, I think we're about to reach the point where the bubble pops because there's only so many ways to iterate on a style of game that is inherently about limiting player input by compressing options into a hand of cards. I eagerly await the perfect compromise between ergonomic low drag gaming and the high player input of something like dungeon crawl Stone soup which was my favorite rogue like before my crab hands. Golden Krone Hotel came kind of close, but I found it kind of boring because loot was limited to just being stat buffs to armor and damage, or some sort of temporary effect from a potion. Shiren also seemed good but all of the menuing made my thumbs go What the gently caress, what the gently caress is this
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Feb 29, 2024 20:16
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:That said, I personally only really dislike the second one ("select 3 things randomly drawn from a pool instead of having full control over character progression!"). The first one just looks like a skill or tech tree that limits your overall choices at any given moment (while remaining deterministic) which is a nice compromise between the homogeneity of totally free-form point buy on one hand and linear progression on the other. This is actually one of my favorite things about this style of game. If you have full control, then the game can very quickly become 'implement your build, ignore bad options and pick good ones' - this is fun, I like ToME for example, but I really enjoy having to roll with the luck and build with suboptimal options because that's all I'm getting. To me it's one of the foundational benefits of the genre, and it's something I appreciate in Magic the Gathering Limited/Draft, for example.
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Feb 29, 2024 20:19
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Falcon2001 posted:This is actually one of my favorite things about this style of game. If you have full control, then the game can very quickly become 'implement your build, ignore bad options and pick good ones' - this is fun, I like ToME for example, but I really enjoy having to roll with the luck and build with suboptimal options because that's all I'm getting. To me it's one of the foundational benefits of the genre, and it's something I appreciate in Magic the Gathering Limited/Draft, for example. I like Achra's method as a compromise, where you can control what abilities you take fully but equipment can also be extremely impactful and your control over what you get is pretty limited.
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Feb 29, 2024 20:25
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Falcon2001 posted:This is actually one of my favorite things about this style of game. If you have full control, then the game can very quickly become 'implement your build, ignore bad options and pick good ones' - this is fun, I like ToME for example, but I really enjoy having to roll with the luck and build with suboptimal options because that's all I'm getting. To me it's one of the foundational benefits of the genre, and it's something I appreciate in Magic the Gathering Limited/Draft, for example. Agreed. That's one of the tenuous connections these games have with old school roguelikes, the onus on the player too roll with the unexpected or suboptimal and see how far they can take it. That's the advantage a random perma death having game can have over a longer single player experience, it's more permissible to saddle players with negative consequences ot require them to adapt because it pushes them to experiment, and instead of being required to do it over the course of an entire campaign it's just for one run and then the context is reset
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Feb 29, 2024 20:26
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Archa looks cool as hell and I would be willing to provide the developer many unseemly sexual favors for built-in controller support
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Feb 29, 2024 20:28
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cock hero flux posted:some kind of compromise between the two is best I think. Total control does make things a bit samey and overly straightforward but too much randomness just makes me feel like I'm not even really making decisions Oh, I agree. I prefer a sort of guided randomness. On that topic actually, if y'all haven't tried the Packmaster mod for Slay the Spire (or just StS mods in general) you absolutely should - IMO I think it's one of the mods that really shows a clever design space. The basic idea is that the character has a large pool of packs of 15 cards, and when you start, you're assigned three by default and draft four more, then those form your card pool for the rest of your run. It means you have some control over it, and you can build for some synergies, but you also have to make some stuff work that wouldn't normally work. The Animator is another one - same general idea, different implementation, the packs are all Anime series, but IMO they got really up their own rear end with the design space on that one.
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Feb 29, 2024 20:30
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Falcon2001 posted:This is actually one of my favorite things about this style of game. If you have full control, then the game can very quickly become 'implement your build, ignore bad options and pick good ones' - this is fun, I like ToME for example, but I really enjoy having to roll with the luck and build with suboptimal options because that's all I'm getting. To me it's one of the foundational benefits of the genre, and it's something I appreciate in Magic the Gathering Limited/Draft, for example. Yeah this is very specifically why I like this setup and why Pick 3 is the meme but accurate denominator in an asston of rogue<whateverthefuck> games. It's in action roguelites, it's in deckbuilders and dicebuilders, it's in vampire survivor clones, it's all over the place. I think it can be really lazy and sloppy, but if it's done well, it gives you a constrained decision space that forces improvisation.
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Feb 29, 2024 20:41
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victrix posted:Yeah this is very specifically why I like this setup and why Pick 3 is the meme but accurate denominator in an asston of rogue<whateverthefuck> games. It's in action roguelites, it's in deckbuilders and dicebuilders, it's in vampire survivor clones, it's all over the place. see I don't like it because the decision space is constrained to the point where the actual decisions in it either end up losing meaning or become excessively frustrating with this setup the developer has some issues with making the available possibilities both interesting and functional. If the options you can pick come with substantial downsides, then any reward carries with it the risk of being run-ending. This very much goes against the idea of a reward. If you allow players to refuse rewards, then the problem instead becomes that players will just turn down anything that isn't beneficial to them. So rather than encouraging improvisation all it does is make it so that some percentage of the time the player is rewarded with nothing. This was actually a big problem in One Step From Eden for runs intended to loop: you could only carry a limited set of items and could refuse but not discard them, so it was optimal to turn down any reward that wasn't super strong. So the way a lot of the games that use this system solve this problem is by making rewards purely beneficial, because then a reward is always a reward. But this carries with it its own problems: either the player rapidly stacks big rewards and the game becomes too easy, or the rewards are beneficial but too minor to actually be interesting. You either become ultra strong and coast through the game, or every reward is like "here's some stats" and the resulting decision is "well this one is a stat that I want so I pick this one".
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Feb 29, 2024 20:53
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cock hero flux posted:see I don't like it because the decision space is constrained to the point where the actual decisions in it either end up losing meaning or become excessively frustrating I don't think this really tracks with my experience, at least in most games I'm familiar with like Slay the Spire or even most action roguelikes. In StS, almost every card offered to you is better than your starting deck, and you really can't beat the game with your starting set, so you basically don't have the choice to turn down everything or you'll lose pretty fast. Eventually you'll have the flexibility to skip some options, but that's later on. In Hades, you have some limited ability to influence your choice "choices for next rooms are Poseidon, Pom, Gold -> Choices for Poseidon are X,Y,Z" but there are downsides to the choices sometimes, as they may modify your gameplan or use up a slot you otherwise don't want to use. I think the trick is that there needs to be enough consequence that you can't just skip every choice, but they also need to be functional enough that you don't regularly shoot yourself in the foot. But I don't think that's an impossible balance to reach. Certainly I also don't think this is a hard and fast rule that it's always good - for example many games have a shop or something similar that gives you more direct control over your choices, and I think that's a generally good idea - I also like systems like Castle Morihisa where you have a talent tree/etc that is partially randomized per run but you then have full control over your selections.
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Feb 29, 2024 22:11
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Slay the Spire is a good implementation of "pick three." On the opposite end of the spectrum you have something like Nuclear Throne where there are basically 9 mutations you want no matter what, maybe 8 if you're playing one of the top-tier characters who functionally get one of the good mutations for free, and if you get forced into more than 1-2 of the lovely ones at max then you might as well start over because if you don't, looping is going to be 10x harder than it should be. e: basically if you're using it to solve the "look-ahead" problem you might have a point, but if you're just using it to try and enforce "variety" that's the game design equivalent of sweeping dirt under the rug. you haven't made the game any deeper you've just hidden the exact same set of no-brainer decisions behind a temporary veneer of novelty Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 22:52 on Feb 29, 2024 |
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Feb 29, 2024 22:42
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Slay the Spire is a good implementation of "pick three." On the opposite end of the spectrum you have something like Nuclear Throne where there are basically 9 mutations you want no matter what, maybe 8 if you're playing one of the top-tier characters who functionally get one of the good mutations for free, and if you get forced into more than 1-2 of the lovely ones at max then you might as well start over because if you don't, looping is going to be 10x harder than it should be. While this is true if you're going for score attack, it's not necessarily true if you're trying to win or unlock characters. There's a good number of mutations that add safety or just make the game play differently (especially Throne Butt), which are good for helping newbies get going, but aren't needed by more skilled player.
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Feb 29, 2024 23:43
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:While this is true if you're going for score attack, it's not necessarily true if you're trying to win or unlock characters. There's a good number of mutations that add safety or just make the game play differently (especially Throne Butt), which are good for helping newbies get going, but aren't needed by more skilled player. The goal of tutorial features should be to catch players up to a competent level of play as quickly as possible. This sounds more like a dead end that gives you bad habits, practically the definition of a trap option. e: granted i'd say there's a lot of un-learning involved in going from beginner to intermediate at Nuclear Throne in general; i like the game overall, but this is not one of its strong points. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 23:53 on Feb 29, 2024 |
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Feb 29, 2024 23:50
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It's only a dead end if you're specifically playing for score attack, though. I would wager that the vast majority of players never even beat the game once, in which case the useful design space for mutations is a lot broader. For example: - Shotgun Shoulders lets you hit enemies from behind cover by bouncing shotgun shells at them. - Boiling Veins makes a very powerful weapon class a lot safer to use. - Euphoria makes it easier to dodge projectiles - Gamma Guts makes you immune to contact damage from several tricky enemies I'll certainly agree that Nuclear Throne's design space narrows considerably when you're trying to make a build that can beat the massive hordes the game throws at you post-loop, especially if you're using the Crown of Blood. But that is arguably the postgame. "Options become traps in the postgame" is far from a unique problem in game design, and while it's maybe a little lamentable, it is not IMO a serious flaw.
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Mar 1, 2024 00:14
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:"Options become traps in the postgame" is far from a unique problem in game design, and while it's maybe a little lamentable, it is not IMO a serious flaw. A lot of albums nowadays come with bonus tracks. Sometimes the bonus tracks are good. Sometimes the bonus tracks are bad. But universally, whether they're good or bad, the album is best without them. Post-game content works the same way. It can be enjoyed on its own terms, but the real game ends with 3 runes.
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Mar 1, 2024 00:39
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3 runes is a real win... for a clown! at the circus! if i were worried about the impressions of people who gave up before reaching the starting line i'd play literally any other genre
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Mar 1, 2024 00:47
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:3 runes is a real win... for a clown! at the circus! I wish this would fit in the title
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Mar 1, 2024 01:06
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See, I'm pretty sure Tuxedo Catfish is doing a bit, but there's just that smidgin of doubt that they're serious...
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Mar 1, 2024 01:12
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I loved FTL. I also hate deck-builders. I agree with the guy who said it's just low-hanging fruit; if you have a vague idea for fluff, the gameplay can require minimal effort (time, money, and creativity) if you shove it into the genre de jour, and roguelites and especially deckbuilding ones are currently the easiest to make. Compared to say, having a 20+ hour game where everything has to sufficiently unique throughout. I still instantly recognized what those two screenshots where complaining about, as it was such a generic thing. Also-ALSO, a prominent actually-traditional RL just dropped a major update to address the issue many said was a barrier to trying said game out, and yet there's been no chatter about it in the deckbuilding thread. It really breaks my heart.
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Mar 1, 2024 01:12
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shitposting aside i will reluctantly admit that there's probably a point in any single player game where increased difficulty scaling makes its core assumptions break down. i'd just put the cut-off a lot closer to "95% of the content in the game is irrelevant" than, like, 25%. it's the point where you're taking conventionally "bad" abilities because they shave a few seconds off your speedrun time, or hitting that one Slay the Spire seed that's mathematically unwinnable. if your ToME class/build doesn't work in Insane, it's probably a bad build. if it doesn't work in Madness, well... join the club.TooMuchAbstraction posted:See, I'm pretty sure Tuxedo Catfish is doing a bit, but there's just that smidgin of doubt that they're serious... I'm exaggerating my real position. I genuinely don't believe that "the majority of players will never beat the game / will never see X" etc. is an important statistic. That's a marketing problem, not a game design problem. I play difficult games to master them; and if they aren't worth mastering -- that is, if they become less fun or less interesting instead of more once you have a strong handle on them -- they're just bad games, simple as. On the other hand, I'm not actually sneering at a 3-rune win in a crawl. There's no shame in any particular level of skill; only in the attitude you have towards improvement. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 01:19 on Mar 1, 2024 |
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Mar 1, 2024 01:14
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Serephina posted:Also-ALSO, a prominent actually-traditional RL just dropped a major update to address the issue many said was a barrier to trying said game out, and yet there's been no chatter about it in the deckbuilding thread. It really breaks my heart. which one
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Mar 1, 2024 01:20
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cock hero flux posted:which one Cogmind has zoomable UI now
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Cogmind has zoomable UI now oh, I saw that. I didn't think it was that earth shattering, though. I thought the reason why people didn't play cogmind was because it just works in a fundamentally different way from most roguelikes and punishes you for fighting things.
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Mar 1, 2024 01:26
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