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Ichabod Sexbeast posted:Just out of curiosity, what were you using to scratch this itch before? Honestly? One of the better games that’s hit it for me is Snowrunner, lol. It has a progression on a lot of maps that’s “use a circuitous route until you rebuild the bridge.” Not many games lean on it heavily - but I can get some of the itch from just general creative builders, which is maybe cheating to say “map as progress” but if I pave a path in Vintage story and make a foot bridge to a mine, it counts.
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May 2, 2024 19:02
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Not trying to dissuade Portia/Sandrock chat at all, just pointing out there is a Portia/Sandrock thread filled with good content. I tried to make a character in Sandrock yesterday. Just as I finished, the game crashed before starting the game. :|
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May 2, 2024 21:26
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I don't know if this is the right thread for this type of game (it seemed the closest!) but I'm looking for games sort of along the lines of PC Building Simulator. I don't care so much about the hyper-realistic aspect of that kind of sim, I'm not attached to a game where you actually wander around a little shop in first person or handle 3D modeled versions of realistic components, I mostly enjoy games like that where you can kill a lot of time building, troubleshooting, refining a process, making money and getting better tools, etc. and rinse and repeat. Any standouts for that kind of thing? I remember there being a couple of car mechanic simulator type games that looked like they might be in the same wheelhouse. Also I feel like Powerwash Simulator sort of scratched an adjacent itch for me, but I kind of hit a point where I just... forgot I was playing it, lol.
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May 3, 2024 18:48
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My Summer Car has a wild car building aspect to the game, but it's also a general survival and driving sim. It's not exactly what you're describing, but have you tried games like Dyson Sphere Program? You can get real fiddly with that in terms of designing, refining, rebuilding more efficiently, etc.
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May 3, 2024 19:00
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also sort of adjacent (less building), but Thief Simulator?
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May 3, 2024 19:01
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MockingQuantum posted:I don't know if this is the right thread for this type of game (it seemed the closest!) but I'm looking for games sort of along the lines of PC Building Simulator. I don't care so much about the hyper-realistic aspect of that kind of sim, I'm not attached to a game where you actually wander around a little shop in first person or handle 3D modeled versions of realistic components, I mostly enjoy games like that where you can kill a lot of time building, troubleshooting, refining a process, making money and getting better tools, etc. and rinse and repeat. Landlord’s Super, maybe? It’s not so much “troubleshooting” but it has a nice vibe of slowly building and you get new tools and things. It feels like it’s only about 80% of what it could be and is done being developed - but that isn’t to say it isn’t an experience that, if you enjoy it, you can’t get a hundred hours out of (if you go really nuts.) It’s a game with great vibes. I’d also second My Summer Car if you really enjoy the tinker and troubleshooting part. Mon Bazou is My Summer Car Lite if you find MSC is too crunchy for you.
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May 3, 2024 20:00
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The Tenants might be a good one. Its basically sims but you are only doing the house stuff.
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May 3, 2024 20:02
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MockingQuantum posted:I don't know if this is the right thread for this type of game (it seemed the closest!) but I'm looking for games sort of along the lines of PC Building Simulator. I don't care so much about the hyper-realistic aspect of that kind of sim, I'm not attached to a game where you actually wander around a little shop in first person or handle 3D modeled versions of realistic components, I mostly enjoy games like that where you can kill a lot of time building, troubleshooting, refining a process, making money and getting better tools, etc. and rinse and repeat. This thread might be pretty relevant to your interests.
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May 5, 2024 06:02
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So I was looking through Steam about a week ago and I was reminded I almost got Palia for my Switch but was scared off because the reviews were not that great. But it's free to play, either on a Switch or on PC via Steam so I figured "Why not? I'll download it on my PC. If I hate it, no skin off my back." Well I've played 30-something hours in game and I love it. The premise is, you materialize out of nowhere and the lady you see first is like, "Oh another human! Well, go here, and you'll get a home plot." Turns out humans all completely disappeared from this world a long time ago, but now you and other humans are appearing and these people are more than welcoming, happy to give you your own home plot, and teach you all the skills needed to build a house, garden, cook, fish, hunt (bow and arrow), mine, catch bugs, chop down trees and gather herbs. You can then sell stuff you've gathered at your shipping box, and buy more stuff at various shops or "guilds" in town. You develop your friendships with the people (and also one dog) and with a high enough friendship, you can then give them their most-wanted items, in return, they'll then give you back a present. Apparently you can romance some (or maybe all) of the NPCs too, but I haven't gotten that far yet. It's an MMO, in that you will see other players running around and doing stuff, and apparently you can create parties to do stuff together, although I don't know if you really need other people to do anything (I haven't come across anything that isn't doable solo yet but maybe I just haven't found that thing yet). One of the complaints however is every time you leave your home plot you are dropped into a different server, so you might not see the same people at any given moment. However, you can friend people, and there seems to be a way to visit other player's home plots, but I don't know how that function works. It's still in beta, so it's buggy and glitchy at times, but there have been no game-breaking bugs so far. I've gone through walls in the mines and gotten stuck there. You can just teleport back to your home plot via the map, there's also an "Unstuck" command in the menu for getting you back into the world proper. The only "dying" is if you fall when you're doing the main campaign and the worst it does is zips you back to solid land and you try again. There's no swimming, so you'll "die" if you fall or jump into water too deep too, meaning it'll just zip you back to a nearby piece of land. It really scratches that Animal Crossing itch for me, in that you can develop friendships with everyone around you, gift them stuff and they'll gift you back. You can build up your home or build stuff for your home, even add rooms to your home. There's no combat, other than you shooting creatures with your bow and arrow. There is an in-game shop, but as far as I can see it's only for buying more clothes for your character. I don't care about that stuff, so I've completely ignored it so far. There is also a (very difficult in my opinion, but I've never been good at puzzles or platforming in games so your mileage may vary) main quest line in which you help the researchers figure out where all the humans disappeared to, and why you've all returned now. I've just avoided those quests after I wasn't having fun and it hasn't blocked me from the "developing friendships" or "leveling up skill x" parts of the game. I like that there's nothing you have to do, I've spent hours just building stuff for my house, or fishing, or hunting the wolf-like creatures. There's no end of stuff you can do, it's very relaxing and at free to play I think it's an easy recommend.
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May 6, 2024 19:22
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Okay, so I’ve put a dozen hours more into Echoes of the Plum Grove, and… eh. It’s not bad, but it sure as hell isn’t good. So, at heart, it’s a legacy survival farming game. You have to sleep enough and you have to eat enough to get through the year, and after a couple of in-game years you get old and then a little later you die and pass the farm down to another family member. There’s nothing wrong with either of those concepts, and at least the accelerated timeline keeps it from falling into Kynseed’s trap where you’ve done everything before you’re done with your first character. Crops rot pretty quickly (given the whole pre-refrigeration setting), so no throwing turnips in a chest and keeping them just fine there for years. But the survival elements are more *grindy* than interesting. You need to sleep enough, which just limits how much farm you can actually care about, and you need to eat, which just means choosing which crops are set aside for that rather than selling, but there’s not much danger, because foragables are loving everywhere and replenish every day, and if you don’t like that, everyone is always offering quests all the time which are easy to solve and reward you in good food, and if you don’t like that, wood is an incredibly expensive resource you can find everywhere and trade for food. You have to actively ignore what the game is pushing at you to not eat like a king. Instead, the game goes in weird directions in terms of what it actually makes hard. Farming is slow because the controls aren’t always responsive, sometimes the game wants you to interact with the farthest away part of an object, and worst of all, you can only water one space at a time no matter how much you invest in your watering can. Also, you can only buy a few seeds a day and you have to learn in game which characters sell those seeds. Storage space is limited, but you very quickly skill up so that you’re getting three different levels of crops or forage which of course makes the limited storage space even worse, and when it comes to building lots of extra storage, again, wood is one of the most valuable resources. Also, everyone has money, and everyone buys everything for the same price, so making money is boring and straightforward, just find people and push turnips on them. Technically there’s a Market Day event but it just means the merchants you usually have to walk across town to get to are now all in the same location. Feeding yourself is pretty easy, but actually cooking things is really hard because all recipes are extremely specific (you cannot even think about cooking Salmon if you don’t have lemon and cream for sauce!) and most of them require animal goods or crops from different seasons which means you can’t make them until after you’ve become successful enough to own a barn and an icebox. Also, the legacy/survival aspect of the game hurts it in another way, which is the NPCs. Because they all get older and die, too, they’re designed to be generic and with random traits pasted on but they’re not written well enough for those traits to make them interesting or distinctive. It doesn’t help that the cutesy art style they’re all drawn in has variations only in the shape of the small nose, and about 60% of the clothes and hairstyles are interchangeable enough that about half the people on the island are indistinguishable from each other. There’s a main plot. It’s not interesting enough to comment on; it’s your standard “do your Stardew Valley bundles” except rather than specific objects to force you to encounter all elements of the game, it’s a huge number of high-quality objects so that you have to grind a bunch. There’s an entire magic system to go along with that, but said system requires you to walk to the complete opposite end of the island to interact with it and so I just could not be bothered. Maybe once I have a family that will run the farm for me, but right now it’s just me watering a hundred crops one square at a time. If you want a zen podcast-listening game where stuff doesn’t really happen but you can chill and slowly turn a wild field into a farm, this is probably a good game for you. If you want an engaging, interesting setting or compelling mechanics to be solved, this is not it.
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May 7, 2024 00:52
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Coral Island on sale. Grabbed that, but I'm thinking I'd wait for the next update or two. edit: Also, Portia is on sale for 6 bucks. It's a great deal. I put 200+ hours into it. Zesty fucked around with this message at 23:11 on May 13, 2024 |
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May 13, 2024 21:05
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Sandrock is on sale on switch so I grabbed it. You all better not have let me down about how good it is!
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May 20, 2024 02:44
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I've put
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May 20, 2024 02:49
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MockingQuantum posted:Also I feel like Powerwash Simulator sort of scratched an adjacent itch for me, but I kind of hit a point where I just... forgot I was playing it, lol. I'm giving serious thought to Mind over Magic; I'll let y'all know if I dive in.
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May 20, 2024 04:53
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Don't think this was posted here yet. Little Known Galaxy is out! It's more or less 'Stardew in Space'. There's a demo! https://store.steampowered.com/app/2521600/LittleKnown_Galaxy/  
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May 20, 2024 21:32
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how's the polish as compared to stardew?
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May 20, 2024 22:38
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Playing through it now. It's not a bad little game, and it is finished, for what it's worth. I think there's some balance passes needed for some materials (sand is weirdly hard to get, for instance). The equivalent to fishing is microbe hunting, which... isn't great? It's not terrible, but it could also stand a bit of polish. There's also a lot of unnecessary deliberate pauses in between areas. All that being said, the gameplay loop is fun. The "town" is your space ship, and each planet you visit gives you access to certain resources/seeds. That changes up what you plant based on where you are, which is neat. At each planet, you take your shuttle down to the surface to harvest resources via shooting rocks and aliens or digging up dirt. Maps are pre-generated (area 10 on planet B will always be the same map), but the resources and enemies are randomized each time you visit. When you go between planets, you focus on talking to folks, hunting down microbes, and cleaning up the ship in the captain's area and the hull. There's a main quest for each area that involves collecting resources from that area to solve the problem there, which gives you the thingy to go unlock the next planet. There's also side quests for each area, and a number of tutorial quests. The NPCs are pretty reasonable so far. Dialogue does repeat, but their designs are memorable enough that I can tell them all apart, and they do react to what is happening in the story. They added in a little locator feature where you can find out what deck folks are on, which is super helpful when trying to turn in a quest. I do sorely miss the skill system from Stardew Valley, as it feels like progression can be a bit slow. On the bright side, there's a lot of processing machinery, so you do have progression there. There's also ranching, and the different Xenos that you ranch seem like they might have some potential. I would absolutely recommend Sandrock, Rune Factory, or Stardew Valley over Little Known Galaxy, but it's got a good, solid 7/10 or so from me. It's not bad, but it doesn't really pop in a way that makes it amazing either. The setting is definitely unique though, and I think with a bit more polish and some more work, the game will be able to come into its own.
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May 24, 2024 01:38
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Been playing this myself, and it's got its hooks in me pretty thoroughly. Still, I agree with the assessment above, it does have its flaws compared to Stardew. I do actually enjoy the microbe hunt mechanic more than most fishing mechanics - it's the same basic minigame that fishing in Fire Emblem Three Houses was, and manages to not make the difficult microbes feel unfair. Obviously you're not a farmer, and you can't just till the floor of your deck - you have to build growbeds which are limited by your power so overall you're doing much less plant growing, although it's still a significant activity. Instead your primary activity is exploring the planets' surfaces, which is the equivalent to cave diving. You end up needing a lot of metal ores for all your constructions so you'll be going down there pretty much every day. My biggest criticism is that it's wedded itself too hard to being Stardew Valley In Space. Almost all the mechanics are direct analogues to things you do in Stardew. You get a (sci-fi equivalent of a) watering can to water your growbeds, that you fill in from a cistern you can build, when it would make far more sense for the growbeds to just be irrigated. Microbe-hunting is so much an equivalent to fishing that it gives you size ratings for your microbes and notes when you catch new records. This is pretty cute, although they're all on the same scale, so you can easily find Common Cold viruses that are bigger than Dust Mites. Exploring planets plays out exactly like mine floors, where you break open rocks hoping to find the route to the next area - a little co-ordinates beacon rather than a ladder but mechanically works exactly the same way. It just feels like a missed opportunity to really take advantage of the spaceship setting. You have your deck, which is in all respects your farm, and you build your machines on it to do your production. Even though the vast majority of these jobs are things someone else on the ship is already doing, and they probably gave you the blueprints to build these machines in the first place. The spaceship doesn't have an equivalent to Stardew's forest, which means once you've used your repair tool to clean up all the wear and clutter on your deck and the hull, there's not a lot for you to use it for except the occasional new bit of wear popping up like a weed. I think the game could have benefitted a lot by really thinking about how your role as captain fits in with the rest of the crew's jobs. Rather than building growbeds on my deck, maybe I could be going to help the botanist in a garden deck. Maybe I could be working with the mechanics and the engineer to refine ores and starship fuel. Sure, give me a space of my own to customise and maybe put some extra production in, but it's strange to be so self-reliant when I supposedly have a crew. And it would present opportunities to vary up the gameplay more - as it is, gameplay consists of harvesting/refilling your machines, exploring the surface, and hunting microbes, probably in that order each day. The character writing does live up to this potential better. Your crew includes robots and aliens and clones, and they all feel suitably sci-fi. The mundane characters are often pretty fun too - I particularly like Kendall, the little girl, whose dialogue really stands out as genuinely childish and it's very cute. I would have liked to see more lines written for day-to-day check-ins, but everyone has something to say for pretty much every story event, even quite specific periods like after you've arrived at a new planet but before you've set foot on it. There aren't heart-level scenes the way Stardew has them, but for the romanceable characters you can invite them on dates and get scenes with them that way, and there are still character cutscenes even if I don't know what triggers them. Overall, Little Known Galaxy is definitely worth the price and if you like this genre generally then you'll enjoy it. Other than not having quite as good a balance of activities as Stardew or Sandrock, its main flaws are more in the potential it doesn't quite reach rather than things that feel bad to play.
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May 26, 2024 01:21
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Tenebrais posted:I think the game could have benefitted a lot by really thinking about how your role as captain fits in with the rest of the crew's jobs. Rather than building growbeds on my deck, maybe I could be going to help the botanist in a garden deck. Maybe I could be working with the mechanics and the engineer to refine ores and starship fuel. Sure, give me a space of my own to customise and maybe put some extra production in, but it's strange to be so self-reliant when I supposedly have a crew. And it would present opportunities to vary up the gameplay more - as it is, gameplay consists of harvesting/refilling your machines, exploring the surface, and hunting microbes, probably in that order each day. I agree with this. Mechanically you don't really interact with the crew as much, and it would make a hell of a lot more sense to assign tasks to different crew mates, maybe help them out or provide resources or whatever. Playing the game more, I think the microbe minigame suffers from the same issue as a lot of minigames do - it's great the first few times, but eventually it's just a chore, especially when you are expected to do the minigame hundreds or thousands of times. With Stardew Valley, catching the early game fish is over in a couple of seconds, but even with the later game tools, the microbe minigame still takes a long time, and you have to go through the hot and cold game to find the microbes in the first place. I would like it a lot more if the minigame were much less frequent (fewer instances, more reward per instance or something). As it stands though, you can play the game dozens of times in a day, which quickly wears thin when it's one of the few things you can do while in flight.
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May 26, 2024 03:57
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Well, I made a mistake and played the other space game that is comparing itself to Stardew Valley: Starstruck Vagabond. And oh holy gently caress is it not Stardew Valley. It's a trading game, but it's not really trading because there are too many sectors and too many goods with no in-game tracking and very very little profit given how little you can fit on your ship. Really, it's a fetch-quest game, because you get a comission to lug good from point A to point B. And the lugging is decent enough: set your course, twiddle dials that make it feel more like you're planning something and working rather than just selecting from a menu, and then a small mini-game to avoid obstacles and collect goodies as you traverse space. And as you fail to avoid obstacles (because you can't avoid all of them all of the time) your ship takes damage and you have to find the place in your ship that is damaged and pull out the right tool of three or four. And that all feels like a fun, "I'm really a captain of a lovely cargo ship I'm holding together with duct tape while I try to make the big score" game. But cargo management just sucks, partially because it's designed to suck because apparently that's the game? You don't have actual cargo space, you just have nooks and crannies where your ship doesn't have equipment, and so when you get cargo - or when you find stuff on a derelict, or you take an assignment to do surveys, or pick something up from an uninhabited planet, or add extra fuel to your ship, or just take a loving scene photograph - you get a new item that you have to shove somewhere. Which leads you to end up making your own sokoban hell when it turns out that your ship is damaged and the piece you have to fix is behind six boxes that don't have anywhere else to go. And you'll only realize how bad it can get when you run out of oxygen because you couldn't move boxes fast enough, and you get penalized an hour's gameplay of money to get resurrected (or go back to a previous save... which turns out to be the autosave where you have to fix the oxygen before you die, so that doesn't help). Also, each time you pick up a box or put it down, that's a button click, and loading goods onto your ship is "pick up box from ground, drop box on cargo platform, interact with platform controls to move to ship, pick up box from cargo platform, drop box in ship, so that's five clicks per good assuming you don't have to move good around within your ship (in which case that's another two clicks each time)). It doesn't help that so much of what the game claims it has turns out to be underwhelming. You can customize your ship!!!! (You can buy a new coat of paint. You can choose what order you build ship upgrades in.) You can have neat dialogues written by Ben "Yahtzee" Crosshaw! (Cities are mostly empty and in three hours of play I had no dialogue options, and my character only responded in conversations maybe six times.) You can find a bunch of neat weirdos to join your crew! (Again, in three hours of play, I found no one, and no hints of how a crew would join or what they would do.) It's Stardew Valley in Space!!! (There is literally nothing Stardew Valley like about the game, unless "Stardew Valley" is now the term for all games with 8/16-bit graphics.) And to top it off, the UI is clunky and frustrating. Choosing tools is PageUp/PageDown, but for some reason they decided that the menu should go left and right rather than up and down so good luck remembering which button does what. Hit ESC for menu (it never explains that), keep in mind that the in-game menu is two menus (it never explains that) and that you have to right-arrow from the left menu to the right menu to choose an option on it (it never explains that). Your in-game map has helpful icons next to each planet which are never explained. Maybe once you get out of the first sector, the game expands a bunch? I don't know, I didn't get even close to it after three hours of playing and then got stuck in a place where I had to lose most of my savings due to dying and I just cannot convince myself that it was fun and worth my time.
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May 27, 2024 02:48
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drat, sounds like it's back to Gazillionaire
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May 27, 2024 02:55
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Yeah I quite like Starstruck but it's *rough*. Not a Stardew at all.
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May 27, 2024 09:59
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Starstruck drags me into it's loop pretty well, but agreed. Stardew sparked the first ideas in Yahtzee's head, but the main things that stuck were the camera angle and being a dad game. Very much a "Go watch someone play it for a bit. See if it makes you want to buy it." level of recommend for me.
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May 27, 2024 12:55
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Gaius Marius posted:drat, sounds like it's back to Gazillionaire Great deal.
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May 27, 2024 22:39
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So I finished the main story of Little-Known Galaxy, and the best description I have for it is that it is very, very cozy. It's very kid friendly as well. I really enjoy the game and I'm looking forward to what they do with it in the future. They've done a week one patch to fix up some minor bugs and to help reduce a bit of the grind, and I hope with a bit more time they'll tune the numbers on machines at bit better so that it's not quite as silly as it is at the moment. But yeah, game is very good, very cozy, would recommend. I would still recommend Stardew Valley, My Time at Sandrock, and the Rune Factory series over this one, but it's a solid entry that looks like it'll only get better with time.
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May 29, 2024 09:26
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Dirk the Average posted:So I finished the main story of Little-Known Galaxy, and the best description I have for it is that it is very, very cozy. It's very kid friendly as well. I really wanted to like it, but there are so many minor annoyances that I hope they fix up. The plethora of animations between each transition got obnoxious very quickly and the distances are way too big for the default runspeed. I stopped playing when I realised that I needed a lot of planet resources, but needed to run from my cabin at the top of the ship, all the way down to the rear end-end of one of the bottom floors, only to run out of stamina way too fast for the trip to be useful by itself. There are a lot of things to like about the game, as you said, it's super-cozy and chilled with none of the pressure I felt with Stardew Valley in terms of completing the Community Centre, and I hope the devs take the feedback they get to heart and I'll try it again in a year or so.
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May 29, 2024 12:13
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I hope they improve the character art a bit. I don't like the smirk on the PC's face. Still might get it soon though!
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May 29, 2024 12:44
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Played Sandrock the past few days and it has been excellent. Started on a Steam deck, moved over later to PC which was seamless due to cloud saves. Very big fan of the inventory. Storage at your farm is usable in ~95% of situations. Can craft and turn in quests with items in storage chests without issue. When at any storage container can cycle between all of your containers, and can press a button to auto sort any duplicate items in your inventory into stacks already in storage. The various workstations/forges have a bit of "smart" logic to them, they will default to a view listing items needed for quests or components for a more complex build you have started in another station. Very strong "just one more thing" energy that makes it hard to put down. Never played Portia so can't compare it to that. They put out DLC for it just this week with a palworld style monster capturing system, it also came with some QoL updates for everyone but I wasn't really far enough in before the patch to notice anything.
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May 30, 2024 21:12
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Yes, it's great! It's really satisfying to keep seeing new people pop up here and say that they like it. If you have any questions or comments that are a bit too specific for the general farmgame thread, there's a Sandrock thread and it's pretty active: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3879828
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May 30, 2024 22:01
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