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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. The time pressure mechanic was interesting but other than that StS's routing is way better. I think you could definitely improve on FTL's map, and that's why I'm particularly upset it hasn't really been iterated on; I don't think we've seen its full potential.
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Mar 1, 2024 01:35
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Cogmind is a brilliant, masterfully crafted game that feels completely tedious and demotivating to actually play, even as the sort of masochist who normally enjoys the trad RL genre.
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Mar 1, 2024 01:38
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Cogmind is designed for an audience of, like, 30 obsessive weirdos at most. I'm not even really one of those 30 -- I hate item destruction -- but I think that's beautiful.
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Mar 1, 2024 01:42
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i like everything about cogmind except playing it
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Mar 1, 2024 01:46
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Tuxedo Catfish posted: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. There's a categorical difference between bonus content and increased difficulty. If you look at the best Slay the Spire players, they play on Ascension 20 unless they're doing something gimmicky to create content. If you look at the best DCSS players, they do tons of 3-rune games. My point is that content beyond an "ordinary win" tends to be less well-designed, and the scale of the game tends to break down. This is especially obvious in a game like One Step From Eden (whose looping mode is basically for meme runs) but in my experience it is almost always true. (Well, actually in my experience it's always true but my experience is limited and I probably haven't played a few games where this doesn't apply.)
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Mar 1, 2024 01:51
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Isn't ftl and starfox just Darius map?
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Mar 1, 2024 02:00
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Upsidads posted:Isn't ftl and starfox just Darius map? I don't entirely remember Darius maps, but aren't they pretty interconnected? Like, it's a build-your-own-route thing. Star Fox routes are more like "pick which level set you want to play", with a small number of ways to switch routes mid-game. FTL and Darius are closer to each other, but FTL adds the wrinkle of trying to plan out a route that will hit as many nodes as possible before the Rebel Fleet catches up with you. I do wish the game just marked how many jumps away the Rebel Fleet is from each node, to remove the "using a ruler on your screen" minigame.
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Mar 1, 2024 02:04
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cock hero flux posted:i like everything about cogmind except playing it this is not an empty quote i swear
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Mar 1, 2024 02:13
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Cogmind is designed for an audience of, like, 30 obsessive weirdos at most. I'm not even really one of those 30 -- I hate item destruction -- but I think that's beautiful. it's this and cock hero flux posted:i like everything about cogmind except playing it also this I went on a cogmind bender some years back to beat it unspoiled the font/ui was actually a big issue back then (I distinctly remember asking the dev about it directly and the answer was basically "there's lots of font sizes!" - yes, small and tiny), so it's cool they've been addressed now ... but that doesn't change my fundamental issues with the game it also doesn't help that it's basically in meme beta/EA territory where it just keeps getting tinkered with normally that's good! new stuff! but this thread is very familiar with when it can be bad too (dcss), and for me at least, cogmind is in that area - there's so many obscure alternate objectives and mechanics that you're not going to intuit just by playing and I'm kinda over wikiing all the things just to have a good time for comparison Caves of Qud is the other meme tier in dev forever roguelike game, but they have a clear finish line in sight for this year, and playing Qud leaves me feeling full and happy despite my missing tongue from the sewer dungeon and three arms getting removed by a pissed off tadpole (they're also doing huge work with accessibility, not just fonts, full on mkb, controller, steam deck, alternate non perma death modes etc) generally I wiki something in Qud (and it never felt mandatory) and chuckle at yet another absurdity, whereas with cogmind I felt like "are you kidding me?" with the obsessive details present there's probably a way to play cogmind aggressively that doesn't feel like a failure spiral every time, but I never hit that point also legit, whatever is classified as a trad roguelike is a niche of a niche these days, so exploring whatever else is out there that has common DNA is how I spend my energy on the genre - I think the last semi trad roguelike I played through and really enjoyed was Juputer Hell (which btw is getting 1.8 soon) deckbuilder/dicebuilder stuff probably deserves its own thread given the volume and passing resemblance to roguelikes, but like... if that's the case, what about action roguelikes, and if you remove those three, what's left? go check the steam roguelike tag for top selling  or listen to any current roguelike content creator "it's a roguelike, so it has metaprogression" is a direct quote, not just the thread title joke generally what I'm looking for is the bite of permadeath in whatever form (some meaningful stakes, literal in the case of Belatro eh?), and procedural gen being used to create an interesting sandbox, whether that's from ability, deck, enemy, stage, etc variance I don't really care what form that takes because I'm equally happy playing something like Returnal as I am Caves of Qud or whatever deckbuilder or Warriors of the Nile or Dead Cells - I realize that's absolutely not true for everyone, and it muddies the thread not because people are rude about inclusion but because it's hard to find a common topic when there's people playing a lot of different games
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Mar 1, 2024 02:37
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Admitting up front that I've never beat Cogmind (although I made it to the final level once, only to realize you needed, at least in that patch, either high levels of hacking support or an explosive weapon, and i had neither) it strikes me as a game where good play is about finding a happy medium. It's true whether you're talking about a (relatively) combat-heavy run, a stealth run, whatever. There are no actions that are categorically correct. This makes it difficult to learn and even harder to teach, because teaching usually takes the form of generalizations that you only later learn exceptions to. By contrast, Caves of Qud is a game that has a fairly steady difficulty curve, and being good at the game is basically just knowing how to get ahead of the curve and break it. Once you understand CoQ's systems, it's easy; you pick the good options, you accumulate stuff that lets you solve problems before you actually have the problem in question, and you win the game unless sheer hubris kills you first. Feedback is much more immediate than it is in Cogmind, it's much easier to generalize what good play looks like, and the hardest part of the game is ironically at the beginning because that's the point at which you're most dependent on roguelike fundamentals and careful, conditional play. e: The biggest factor in feeling "satisfying," I think, is the immediacy of feedback. Execution-based challenges tend to be much deeper than knowledge-based challenges, sure -- but the population of people who will tough out "oh yeah, you fatally screwed up a thousand turns ago" long enough to even be able to recognize that as feedback is even smaller than the number of people who will accept instant death, game over, would you like your items identified? in the first place. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 02:52 on Mar 1, 2024 |
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Mar 1, 2024 02:48
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I like the idea of a card game thread because they are still making single player card games that aren't roguelites sometimes... so it would be nice to have a thread for that stuff too when it comes up
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Mar 1, 2024 02:49
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I'm working on a real time deckbuilder. I'm choosing deckbuilding mechanics because it's the best way I know of to ensure that early game build decisions are still felt at all the way through a run. https://twitter.com/IndeedRyan/status/1734180536057213245?s=20
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Mar 1, 2024 02:51
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incidentally one of the reasons that Risk of Rain 2 is so brilliant (and the first game too, i guess, but i hate how it plays as a platformer so i've barely touched it) is that it's a "balancing act" type of game, but along one and only one axis -- time. everything else in the game either makes the player stronger or makes the player dead, the only question you ever really have to think about it "how long will it take me to obtain this benefit / how much time will i save by taking this risk" -- and moreover, if you do gently caress the balance up, it'll generally kill you within 5-10 minutes, not hours later. just unbelievably elegant in every respect
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Mar 1, 2024 03:01
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Ror2 is very good! But after a while, I feel like every run becomes involves shooting everything and getting huge proc chains. It doesn't feel like the classes are differentiated that much once you're towards the end.
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Mar 1, 2024 03:07
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:just unbelievably elegant in every respect it staggers me how well that game turned out, I was totally expecting it to suck, instead it took the essence of the first game and made everything else better (to the point that I don't even want to play returns) it works in coop too hell it even makes the "I have broken the game" part fun for awhile, compare with deckbuilders where that's usually the point where you just want it to end (coop is also a very funny personality test for your friends)
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Mar 1, 2024 03:07
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eonblue174 posted:Ror2 is very good! But after a while, I feel like every run becomes involves shooting everything and getting huge proc chains. It doesn't feel like the classes are differentiated that much once you're towards the end. it doesn't generalize perfectly but honestly i think the test of skill in RoR2 is usually how few loops you can win in, not how many 
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Mar 1, 2024 03:09
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:it doesn't generalize perfectly but honestly i think the test of skill in RoR2 is usually how few loops you can win in, not how many Hmm, an interesting consideration!
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Mar 1, 2024 03:13
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:it doesn't generalize perfectly but honestly i think the test of skill in RoR2 is usually how few loops you can win in, not how many this would be true except for the fact that the final boss has a phase in which he steals all your items. it's my biggest problem with the game because it is just shockingly bad game design localized to exactly one phase of one fight per run, with the rest of the game being excellent. if you've been looping and now have a ton of items, you are hosed, but if you've just plowed through and gotten there on the first loop he's a pushover. You used to be able to skip that phase by just killing him really fast but I think at some point they patched it so that he's now invincible until he's finished taking all of your poo poo so now the game is essentially unwinnable if you don't go get him on the first loop or two.
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Mar 1, 2024 03:23
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Turin Turambar posted: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. This got ignored, but is objectively true. I see a lot of pitches come at me and discussions on how to achieve X but under a Y budget, and deck/cardification is a fantastic way to get your art budget under control from a time/money perspective, especially if you're working under tight constraints (budget, talent, time, etc.). You see it the same reason you see a lot of RPGMaker RPGs - it solves a very specific set of problems a number of indie devs face. How creative a dev can be on top of it is what makes the magic work, or it just looks like a "meh" clone.
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Mar 1, 2024 03:32
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  Hate it when this happens
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Mar 1, 2024 03:46
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Just found out Rift Wizard 2 is planned for the end of March, not the beginning of March, and I am devastated
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Mar 1, 2024 03:59
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:I do wish the game just marked how many jumps away the Rebel Fleet is from each node, to remove the "using a ruler on your screen" minigame. there is a mod that does this and it's essential imo
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Mar 1, 2024 04:33
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Cogmind is designed for an audience of, like, 30 obsessive weirdos at most. I'm not even really one of those 30 -- I hate item destruction -- but I think that's beautiful. I'm actually really normal
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Mar 1, 2024 04:53
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Cogmind is rather devastatingly hard, and a since it hit 'done' status the dev has been cheerfully polishing bizzaro more-is-more, aimed-for-the-elite-minority elective content thanks to not wanting to give up his patreon stream (most recent update is a very notable exception). Difficulty settings are kinda unheard of in traditional RLs, but ever since Cogmind put them in I really think the game would be more accessible if the default was down a single notch. Item destruction is a very controversial foundation for a RL, but if the dudes you're shooting drop more items than they take from you, fighting can become a net-gain up to a certain point. Tthat, and the most important mechanic in the game - alert - needs to not be a lore discovery but rather be browbeaten into new player's heads, verisimilitude be damned. --------------------- Thinking about it, is anyone out there making new traditional RLs with high production values? Like the last I heard of was Tangledeep, which I might not have liked but I certainly bought and supported and was happy to have done. edit: and RiftWizard2, but that's a foregone conclusion lol Serephina fucked around with this message at 05:09 on Mar 1, 2024 |
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Mar 1, 2024 05:07
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nrook posted:There's a categorical difference between bonus content and increased difficulty. If you look at the best Slay the Spire players, they play on Ascension 20 unless they're doing something gimmicky to create content. If you look at the best DCSS players, they do tons of 3-rune games. Balatro's endless mode is pretty perfect because it gives powerful builds a few extra antes to gloat with, then ramps it up absurdly dramatically not too much later, at ante 12. Generally the problem with endless modes is that the game ceases to be a challenge and the run just becomes a test of how long the player is willing to watch a particle effect simulator. Balatro goes "think your build's hot poo poo, huh? Then why don't you crush this 300-billion ante with your bare hands" and gets it over with.
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Mar 1, 2024 05:13
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Exploring a very alien feeling, bustling ant colony full of robots of varying hostility was cool, but Cogmind wanted to make it much harder to just enjoy doing that than it needed to be.
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Mar 1, 2024 05:20
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:incidentally one of the reasons that Risk of Rain 2 is so brilliant (and the first game too, i guess, but i hate how it plays as a platformer so i've barely touched it) is that it's a "balancing act" type of game, but along one and only one axis -- time. everything else in the game either makes the player stronger or makes the player dead, the only question you ever really have to think about it "how long will it take me to obtain this benefit / how much time will i save by taking this risk" -- and moreover, if you do gently caress the balance up, it'll generally kill you within 5-10 minutes, not hours later. I never understood Risk of Rain 2 despite beating it several times with different characters. The game seems to tell me that I should be striking a balance between looting and moving ahead of the difficulty increase but I've tried actively spending different amounts of time in a level and literally the only strategy that leads me to a win is to clean up every single level, taking all the time I need. Every single win in RoR2 had me be way into... I think it was called "I see youuuuu".
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Mar 1, 2024 06:50
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There are mods that make the FTL map show the fleet advancement for later jumps in advance, and frankly this should have been in the original game already. Too bad I learnt to play without the mod  What grinds my gears about FTL's map generator is that you kind of need to make sure the nodes are all connected, because it will generate dead ends and if the player stumbles into one without noticing, they can wind up in a situation where they have to rage-quit or try and escape N iterations of the rebel gently caress-you-fighters in the red zone to get back on a track to the exit node. This is awful design.
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Mar 1, 2024 07:45
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Pigbuster posted:I think you could definitely improve on FTL's map, and that's why I'm particularly upset it hasn't really been iterated on; I don't think we've seen its full potential. I mean, Slay the Spire's map is an iteration on it, it's just that most games now use that version to start with. I don't miss the cruft that got removed, but definitely would also prefer games to come up with different overworld mechanics. That said, there's plenty of games that do so, Trials of Fire, Vivid Knight and Roguebook are some recent examples I enjoyed.
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Mar 1, 2024 07:45
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TaintedBalance posted:This got ignored, but is objectively true. I see a lot of pitches come at me and discussions on how to achieve X but under a Y budget, and deck/cardification is a fantastic way to get your art budget under control from a time/money perspective, especially if you're working under tight constraints (budget, talent, time, etc.). You see it the same reason you see a lot of RPGMaker RPGs - it solves a very specific set of problems a number of indie devs face. How creative a dev can be on top of it is what makes the magic work, or it just looks like a "meh" clone. There are some interesting "games with cards" that are not deckbuilders, like Ring of Pain or Card Survival. But it's not the majority. I love card games, but not if it's exactly StS but with a skin.
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Mar 1, 2024 08:38
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All this discussion makes me want to make a deckbuilder. Is there even a good one other than slay the spire?
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Mar 1, 2024 09:23
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:3 runes is a real win... for a clown! at the circus! 1, it is absolutely true that Nuclear Throne has wildly imbalanced mutations, the only reason that trigger fingers wasn't picked 100% of the time by every player who ever saw it is because the game doesn't communicate the effect well 2, I would also still agree with the take that pre-loop the imbalance is not as bad, and I don't think it's fair to disregard that. That is where most of the meat of the game is, with little truly 'new' content coming post loop, and I strongly doubt the devs of the game planned for people to loop as long or as consistently as they do. 3, DCSS 3 rune vs 15 rune(or whatever) is a funny example to use given how for most of that game's lifespan, extended was basically a long victory lap full of free xp chaff enemies and it has only fairly recently become challenging. This was probably why you used it per the exaggerating your own position but I felt it worth saying regardless. LazyMaybe fucked around with this message at 09:40 on Mar 1, 2024 |
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Mar 1, 2024 09:25
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Unormal posted:All this discussion makes me want to make a deckbuilder. Is there even a good one other than slay the spire? Touhou: Lost Branch of Legend
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Mar 1, 2024 09:52
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Unormal posted:All this discussion makes me want to make a deckbuilder. Is there even a good one other than slay the spire? I find all of these good and different enough from StS: Vault of the Void ; Breach Wanderer ; Chrono Ark ; Lost Branch of Legend ; Trials of Fire ; Monster Train ; Wildfrost If you include dice: Slice & Dice ; Circadian Dice Lonestar is great, but I'm not sure I'd say it's a deckbuilder.
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Mar 1, 2024 09:56
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Unormal posted:All this discussion makes me want to make a deckbuilder. Is there even a good one other than slay the spire? This prompted me to check my library, this is everything tagged as deckbuilder and roguelike deckbuilder by steam:   (also I have zero recollection of ever buying LbaL and I thought I refunded at least two or three of those others so this is a very Steam thread kind of post) Now which of those are actually good? Uhhhhhh... that's a lot of personal preference. If I was going to say to some random friend, "hello random friend, you should play these roguelike deckbuilders", which is not something I would ever say to a friend, I would probably say Alina of the Arena, Card Quest, Monster Train, Warriors of the Nile 2, Wildfrost I think that's it really, and I don't get how Warriors is a deckbuilder in any sense other than it has the Pick 3 and the StS map and the metaprogression that are hallmarks of a true roguelike And I probably shouldn't recommend Card Quest because it's kinda crusty, Warriors isn't even a deckbuilder, Monster Train is right on the edge, so 3 out of 34 I guess, ignoring Belatro and Slay the Spire (which are probably good but everyone knows about them both rn) Looking at this, it looks like the common thread for me is deckbuilders/games that use cards that really aren't like StS much at all, Alina and Wildfrost are tactical games using cards as your options each turn (Trials of Fire is like this also, so is Midnight Suns), Card Quest is a borderline puzzle game and has constrained deckbuilding (each piece of your classes equipment is a set of cards for your deck), and Warriors is just an odd duck all around, it's like what if Final Fantasy Tactics but bite size roguelite. I say Monster Train is on the edge because it's very close to Belatro in being 'Slay the Spire but mostly about making a totally broken deck/build/thing', I give it points over Belatro or LbaL for having some fun theme and charm, something a lot of these games lack badly. Almost all of the 'pure' deckbuilders are cloning StS really closely and have really bad balance. They're kinda fun to dick around with while you learn their take on things, but they often fall apart under any real pressure if you're familiar with the genre (Beneath Oresa, Indies Lies, Dawncaster), or they teeter under the weight of their own overcomplexity (Vault of the Void). ... gdi I just realized Griftlands isn't in there so I checked and 'card battler' is a slightly different list, steam tags are weird man. Steamworld Quest (card based rpg in the steamworld dig universe), Deepest Chamber: Resurrection (lol name), Tainted Grail, Nowhere Prophet, Midnight Suns, Arcanium and a few others I wouldn't consider card/deckbuilders at all show up under that tag, plus the multiplayer competitive stuff like Magic and Duelyst (rip). Honestly I don't even love Slay the Spire, but I recognize it for both its efforts at making a challenging run based game and blowing up like Hades and Dead Cells did for the action roguelite. There's so much cross dna at work here across these games it's hard to pick the threads apart and I'm too lazy to do so. So yeah, tldr: for me a good deckbuilder is one that uses cards as decision constraints in whatever genre (hello Hand of Fate 2), and probably isn't actually a pure deckbuilder at all because those are typically degenerate idle engine builders disguised as games :hottake:
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Mar 1, 2024 09:59
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Snake Maze posted:
shiren 6 might be kinda really loving good. time will tell but so far, i'm very impressed.
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Mar 1, 2024 10:01
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Unormal posted:All this discussion makes me want to make a deckbuilder. Is there even a good one other than slay the spire? Arcanium, Indies Lies, Breach Wanderers and Astrea (technically a dice builder, but it works the same) are ones I keep coming back to and they all do something different with the genre. Arcanium gives you a team of three independent heroes and lane defence; Indies Lies is also team based but gives the option of not building your party in exchange for greater personal power; Breach Wanderers is as far as I know the only true constructed format deckbuilder, where you define your starter deck and the pool of cards you play with; and Astrea uses a tug of war system instead of traditional HP. However, you might want instead to consider looking at games that do things wrong, like the Chinese knockoffs Castle Morihisa and Yao-Guai Hunter. They're both decent games and I enjoyed my time with them, but Morihisa has issues with badly scaling difficulty, and Yao-Guai Hunter has very narrow successful strategies and an insufficient number of encounters.
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Mar 1, 2024 10:18
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We need metal gear acid-likes to really shake things up
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Mar 1, 2024 10:20
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Jack Trades posted:I never understood Risk of Rain 2 despite beating it several times with different characters. I don't claim to be an RoR2 expert or anything because I didn't vibe with the game and dropped it after a couple dozen hours, but this is honestly where I landed on RoR2. Of the like ten times I beat it, the hardest times were the ones where I was rushing through stages and paranoid of the timer and the easiest ones were the ones where I roomba'd almost the entirety of each map without really giving a poo poo about time. It always felt like adding pieces to the build dramatically outscaled the timer enemy power boost unless you were going AFK or just getting the worst drops possible and no way to cash them in for something more relevant. I never tried any crazy rear end "loop 5 times" or anything, so I don't know if that changes things.
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Mar 1, 2024 10:21
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victrix posted:And I probably shouldn't recommend Card Quest because it's kinda crusty Yes you should, Card Quest owns
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Mar 1, 2024 10:37
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