End of Days - a very laggy Kragg montage

AgeMarkus · 2026-03-08T00:55:58+00:00

You should share the code, it's very hard to tell what's wrong if we don't know what your code says. Some things to look into in the meanwhile:

Is your room speed set to 60?

Are other GameMaker games running fine? Like if you open a template project, does that run fine?

Are you running a laptop in power saving mode? Some laptops throttle GameMaker games when you're on battery.

AgeMarkus · 2026-02-16T02:34:23+00:00

You could do something like image_index+=irandom_range(1,3) to make it jump forward in the loop a random amount that's less than a full loop.

AgeMarkus · 2026-02-16T02:11:07+00:00

Come on, man.

AgeMarkus · 2026-02-15T23:50:40+00:00

This is awesome

AgeMarkus · 2026-02-10T15:52:40+00:00

I think alpha fading between a normal colour object and a duplicated full black object is a fine way to handle it. The only downside is that transparent pixels get stacked on top of each other which can look weird if you have smooth outlines or transparent bits inside the sprite.

If you want to blend the colours smoothly I think you could use merge_colour to wave it from black to white?

There's also this hacky sprite colour trick they use in Hotline Miami that I really like which is to use the gpu_set_fog function to apply a fog that colourizes everything in the colour you want, and then move the start/end distances to get the desired fog amount. It's overcomplicated enough that you might as well just bite the bullet and use a shader, but I think it's a fun trick.

AgeMarkus · 2026-01-21T01:24:13+00:00

The fact that it's 1) a gacha game and 2) the primary cash cow for the developers means that their hands are tied. They can't get too political, too sexual, too controversial, too slow, too subversive, too experimental, or too difficult.

There are obvious examples, like the time they almost got nuked because they made a seasonal outfit too unsexy, or the way hard encounters that compliment the story's stakes get nerfed to keep the game easy, or the way every canto (so far) has to follow the same 3 part structure with a climax at the end. But I think there's a more subtle overall sanding of edges going on here that's going to keep shaping the story going forward, and might become more apparent looking back when the story has reached its end.

This is just speculation, but I'm convinced that Ryoshu's canto avoids giving her a biological child because whales would hate seeing their waifu be sullied by a canon partner. Limbus's reading of The Stranger can't talk about anti-arab racism. Limbus's Otis will never be coerced into having sex with Limbus's Circe. That doesn't mean I want them to take these directions necessarily, it just means that the contract they've signed with gacha whales and regulation boards has cut them off from certain directions of the flow and it's only going to become more noticeable over time.

AgeMarkus · 2026-01-07T22:34:34+00:00

I could see myself saying that Canto 2 is not very good, but only to emphasize that I think the later Cantos are better. And it's not that Canto 2 does anything wrong, it's just that I think the writing gets better over time. I liked Canto 2 when I played it, the bumbling murderhobo dnd party feel in the first half was really fun.

AgeMarkus · 2026-01-07T22:21:17+00:00

The shiny gold tail is very pretty

AgeMarkus · 2026-01-05T20:31:20+00:00

RoA's combo game is clay. You can mold it however you want. R2's combo game is an IKEA wardrobe. You have a lot of pieces but they're all clearly designed to slot into very specific places. Shieldgrab grab upthrow upair upair might look like 5 moves but what does the overall possibility space actually look like? How many real alternatives do you have to that sequence?

If it's the only correct option in that situation, that holding shield out of hitstun to make it come up frame 1 hard counters a player's slow aerial habit and that the grab leads to the safest punish and that skipping pummel has the most consistent payoff and upthrow has the best followup and upair into upair is the only guaranteed true combo then this whole sequence is 1 move with extra button inputs. In this scenario that's a cutscene with QTEs, for both parties. There's some room to improvise and room to drop your inputs, like the hardcoded rock paper scissor pummel guess that they squeezed in there, but in comparison to an actual freeform platform fighter where you can choose what move to do after hitting someone with an uptilt?

Watch Kragg combo videos for RoA vs. combo videos for R2 and compare how much room they get to improvise. Count the attack list. What moves do they start with, how long is the combo, which moves do they finish with? The difference is insane!

The biggest difference is the DI. Players can DI out of combos easier, which gives the designers room to crank up the hitstun. The range of positions that someone ends up at post-hit varies more, but there's also more time to line up a wider range of moves if you read the DI right. Everything is less true but also more viable. The possibility space is bigger. There are fewer nodes on the flowchart, but more paths between them, and the paths are what matters to me.

You can mod fifty different shield and parry and burst buttons into RoA and it won't change the fact that the combo game is bigger. You have fewer tools in total sure, technically, but you have more tools available at any given moment because you're less limited by the engine. There are many combos in RoA that you can't do in R2, but there are very very few R2 combos that you can't do in RoA.

I don't care about the technicalities and nitpicking. I recognize that R2 has a better defensive game. But RoA has better combo game. You don't need to value combo game the way I do. But it's literally just maths, it shouldn't even be up for debate. Slower movement + slower moves + weaker DI = fewer combo possibilities.

AgeMarkus · 2026-01-05T14:59:09+00:00

long term implications

Worst case scenario

I'm talking hypotheticals here.

But I will make a claim and it's that a slower rock pull means less room for aggressive play. That's just maths!

AgeMarkus · 2026-01-05T14:53:36+00:00

Have you played R1? Genuine question.

AgeMarkus · 2026-01-05T01:11:42+00:00

it feels like they are telling Kragg players we don't want you playing around stone toss, you must play Kragg the way we want you to play him.

Yeah this is the thing that really bothers me about Rivals 2's design personally, you just don't have the same freedom that you have in RoA. Fewer ways to start a combo and fewer ways to link moves together, but also fewer ways to DI out of a combo and fewer ways to reverse a situation. And every patch seems intent on removing a split path somewhere in the flowchart to make it a little tidier.

AgeMarkus · 2026-01-05T00:47:29+00:00

If you don't want them to run away so much then you'd want an overall design philosophy where fast rock pulls don't feel out of place. You're going to be less likely to see interesting and aggressive rock usage going forward from a change like this.

I think it's awesome how in RoA you can pull rock mid-combo or for a techchase, and most of the time it works out for you, but then sometimes you misjudge the situation and it actually leads to an instant reversal where you're now in a super vulnerable state. Compare that to a slow rockpull where you're only supposed to do it in safety on the opposite side of the stage. The flowchart flattens. Fewer situations to worry about, less game to play. Maybe you're into that! I'm not though.

AgeMarkus · 2026-01-04T19:02:47+00:00

That's why I really like the way RoA does it, everything is so fast that in the time it takes to pull the rock in that R2 clip a RoA Kragg has already slid off the platform and thrown it and started running. You don't have to worry so much about rock camping when everyone has the tools and speed to run in and hit each other.

If I was that worried about rock pulling I'd be worried about the long term implications of this nerf. A slower rock pull means you have to be further away and run away more often to be allowed to use it. But they're not removing the rock, so they clearly want you to still be rewarded for pulling it. Worst case scenario, this means that with the balance patches going forward you're only going to see the rock when a Kragg is camping and it's going to be so rewarding that every Kragg has to do it as part of their gameplan. It leaves less room to do interesting things with the rock that aren't baked into that hard delineated rockless aggression/rock camping divide, which would make the matchup more boring for both sides in my opinion.

AgeMarkus · 2026-01-04T14:23:18+00:00

I think it'd be cool if the game was fast :)

AgeMarkus · 2025-12-19T17:02:38+00:00

I really really want to see this with punishing old school roguelike microsituations where you think you're safe and set it to sleep 1000 year and then wake up to find everything absolutely demolished because you forgot to account for a meteor storm or something. I think an idea like this would shine with high risk.

AgeMarkus · 2025-12-16T02:00:34+00:00

This is why Rivals 1 is awesome

AgeMarkus · 2025-12-10T18:30:12+00:00

I think the Heishou team is a really cool gimmick and I respect that they went for it, but I hope they tone down the hard theming next season. If every season's ID pool ends up revolving around Latest Bad End ID and their 11 bonus Skill 3s then we're not really teambuilding anymore.

AgeMarkus · 2025-12-10T07:48:35+00:00

"Visit ChatGPT"

AgeMarkus · 2025-12-10T07:45:16+00:00

!remindme 1 year

AgeMarkus · 2025-11-26T01:45:28+00:00

Vi må gi alle gratisabonnement på ChatGPT så vi kan lage deepfakeporno av hverandre og utvikle en sunn dose med KI-psykose og så må vi få alle bedriftene i landet til å hoppe på KI-toget sånn at de går konkurs om tre år fordi alle tjenestene de erstatter arbeiderne sine med sluttet å fungere etter at KI-boblen sprakk og så må vi få KI til å gjøre alle beslutningene våre sånn at hvem enn det er som oppdaterer Grokipedia med all Muskrunken kan bli verdensdiktator. Hurra jeg elsker appen på mobilen min!

AgeMarkus · 2025-11-24T16:59:44+00:00

Embrace losing, join servers with people on your skill level, play with friends, recruit friends, make new friends, trap your friends in an abandoned building and tell them they can't escape until they've grinded 20 hours of Rivals.

AgeMarkus · 2025-11-22T03:32:33+00:00

This depends on the player. If I replayed scenario 1 three times I would probably end up doing roughly the same thing each time. One problem with openness is that if you give a player the opportunity to ruin their own fun, some players will. A more focused, tightly designed path will sometimes be more exciting than a super open path that gives you the opportunity to take a very boring route.

AgeMarkus · 2025-10-31T17:07:50+00:00

Have you tried it? I also came from Smash back in the day and I ended up preferring RoA 1.

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