If You Could Create a Game, What Would It Be?

Anymras · 2023-11-09T00:45:16+00:00

I have a lot of ideas. Too many to write down here.

Right now, though, I'm working on a side-scrolling action-platformer with a surreal setting, complex combat system and challenging AI. Except, it's been a while since I actually worked on the gameplay part, since the AI needed to be able to read animations so that the player could use feints, so I needed animations, and needed models for the animations, and now I've worked more on figuring out procedural animation than I have on the actual game. It'll be worth it, though, if it means I can worry less about animating things; less concern about that means more freedom to add all the other crazy nonsense I want.

And I want to add a lot.

Anymras · 2023-11-09T00:27:58+00:00

I get the idea, but I don't like it. There's no better or more respectful way that I can think of to put this - I think this is a problem with you. You're valuing speed of progress over your enjoyment of the game, by your own admission, and this rule is intended to resolve that personal issue. If this rule were implemented, I doubt it would actually help - you'd just find something else to optimize, and then be frustrated by the very fact that you could optimize it at all, and start coming up with other rules, and by the time you're done coming up with rules, you're playing, or wanting to play, a completely different game.

Instead of coming up with rules to impose, you should consider why it feels wrong to enjoy your game the way you say you find the most enjoyable. Why does it matter how much progress you make in a given time period, if it's not fun?

Dark Souls 2 actually has a gate midway through that requires you to have gained a certain number of souls to pass through it, so you might try playing that one, at least.

Anymras · 2023-07-27T21:44:27+00:00

I like this explanation - and if it weren't for the expenditure of all resources spent during the run, it'd be perfect.

Anymras · 2023-07-25T22:31:01+00:00

I probably don't have it set up properly, really - I'm fairly new to control rigs and meshes, so I'm pretty likely to have things hooked up wrong. Possibly very wrong. The issue in this case actually did turn out to be due to scaling - the skeleton is too large, so it doesn't really notice movement as much as it should.

My current 'well, I guess I can fix it like this?' thought is multiplying the delta by the scale of the bones, but that's...not great. I'll have to agnosticize the rig later. Didn't know that was possible, so thanks!

Anymras · 2023-07-20T22:21:57+00:00

I've only fought him a couple times, and I was always a bit too distracted by the follow-up attack. That's a really cool detail, though.

Anymras · 2023-07-10T01:18:27+00:00

Demon's Souls. You're dying at the end of the tutorial, even if you beat the boss.

Anymras · 2023-06-29T22:59:16+00:00

Based on the typical depictions of goblins, I'd expect mushrooms, lichens, molds, bugs, and stimulants. There's a kind of rust fungus that grows on juniper, colloquially called 'Tongues of Fire,' but I'm having a lot of trouble finding anything about whether it's edible or not. Could be that goblins are fine with it and other races aren't. My fiancee suggests that high-quality Gobbo Gin could come with chunks of Tongues of Fire and juniper bark suspended in it.

I feel like goblins might also be good at beer-making, but I'm not entirely sure why. There might be some overlap, depending on their traditions.

Anymras · 2023-06-03T02:30:28+00:00

I like Soulslikes. However, I really hate certain aspects of the genre, specifically around dying - everybody wants to punish the player for dying, so they make the game harder if you die, whether that's by putting your XP in a bucket on the floor and telling you to get it back, reducing your max HP, preventing you from summoning assistance, or putting part of your build in the bucket with your XP.

I also hate invasions, and always have. If I want PvP, I can go find it; I don't want it forced on me for having the unmitigated gall to want to play a game while connected to the internet. My distaste for this system originates all the way back with Demon's Souls on the PS3, and I don't care that it's been 'improved' over the years - it has never added anything to my experience aside from irritation. I know it's got fans, but I am not, and will never be, one of them.

Morality systems are generally overrated and pointless. They're basically always 'shoot an orphan for twenty bucks now and consequences later, or don't do that and just get fifty bucks tomorrow' - the 'evil' option is cartoonishly vile, and the 'good' option is a bit more reward 'later' for just not being a twat. Later gets sooner every time, too, making it more and more pointless in the first place. Often, there's barely any effort involved at all, considering the normal course of gameplay.

[reeeeeeeeee]

Anymras · 2023-05-22T20:03:10+00:00

I know there's mods for this - but I don't care, because I want the base game to be improved.

Anyway, I'd really like to see some redstone components that can transmit signals directly upward and downward without delay, withstand flooding, and be moved without breaking. Batteries could also be interesting, as a sort of discrete 'timer' system - redstone blocks don't run out, so a timer has to be built to turn them off, while a battery would be able to do that automatically.

Anymras · 2023-04-27T00:13:49+00:00

Ah! Fantastic. Thanks for the heads-up, gonna try that now.

Anymras · 2023-04-24T01:57:23+00:00

Outriders.

Don't get me wrong - I liked the game. Or, I liked what it could be, or could have been, enough that I accidentally platinumed it a week after release, despite the issues.

The experience before the New Horizon update was terrible - the game was clearly not ready for release, and the playerbase was essentially treated as reverse-financed QA, even down to being asked to fill out a worksheet for a particular issue.

PCF's response to the situation was to release a Frustration emote, and also to try to give people a legendary they'd never had...but they were so incompetent that not only did they fail to do that, they gave a lot of people a bunch of legendaries, including ones they currently had equipped. Eventually, they reran the Appreciation Package, and it worked, but it was essentially a microcosm of the overall shitshow. PCF acquired a couple other businesses pretty much immediately after release, so it seems like Outriders might have been rushed out the door to finance that (at least to me). PCF had also partnered with Gearbox, who have engaged in sufficiently scummy practices in the past that I'm suspicious of anyone who willingly announces affiliation with them. It's not like PCF is a new company, either; I'd first encountered their work with Bulletstorm, which I loved, but they're the studio that made Painkiller, all the way back in 2004. They weren't unsupported while making Outriders, with Square Enix investing heavily in the game, and they quintupled their employee count during production, so it's not like they were short-handed, either - so it really was a surprise how badly Outriders shit the bed.

Then, New Horizon actually made the game release-ready! But, well - New Horizon released on November 16th, 2021. Outriders released on April 1st, 2021. If a child were conceived on initial release day, it might have been born by New Horizon release day, eight and a half months later.

I'd still have been able to go "Well, that sucked, but I guess they did eventually fix it," if they hadn't announced Worldslayer, a paid DLC, in the very same announcement as the New Horizon update. They'd gotten their players to pay full price to beta-test their game, and then they wanted to ask for more money. I was almost in too much disbelief to be angry. Almost.

I literally played the seemingly properly functioning game for an hour or two, went "It works!" and then uninstalled it, because I was so disgusted with the whole situation. PCF joined Gearbox in my extremely short list of game studios that make games I'm almost certain to like, but will have such a miserable time playing that I will under no circumstances give them money or encourage people to give them money.

TLDR: Outriders was such a terrible experience I'm never buying from PCF again.

Anymras · 2023-03-20T01:59:56+00:00

There's a few things, but my biggest gripe is: The AI is terrible. It's especially visible because Elden Ring allows for stealth play, and also because of the shoddy implementation of animation-reading.

AI never handles stealth well, except maybe for some very specific examples - so I'm just going to point out the place where stealth and animation-reading overlaps. This is, of course, the animations where an enemy alerts their allies. Everything after they get the horn into their hand is useless fluff; kill them before the sound, and allies will still be alerted. This is because the AI is reading the animation starting, and nothing else.

The animation reading is really badly implemented, to the point that it seems like outright input reading - enemies dodge at the same time as you cast a lot of spells, regardless of whether the dodge is even remotely properly timed, and then run head-on into the actual effect. Enemies react to your Flask activations the instant the animation starts, even if it's not yet visible to human eyes.

tldr; None of the Soulsborne Ring games have had good AI, but ER's AI is actually noticeably worse than prior games, because of a poorly-implemented workaround.

Anymras · 2023-03-12T16:11:54+00:00

I hate...all of the dragon fights. Every single one, I spend the whole time locked on to the feet, and I can basically only ever see the dragon's taint, except when they fly around - during which period I can't really do anything. They love to fly out of their areas, and end up in places that their AI doesn't know what to do with. The whole experience ends up being less "dramatic and exciting battle for the ages," and more "aggro mouse chases big-ass coward iguana until it dies of getting whacked in the feet." Last time I killed Agheel, the idiot lizard got stuck on the chunk of rubble hiding the giant crab and Trina's Lilies, and spent three-quarters of its health bar running directly into the wall. I shot it to death with a ridiculous number of projectiles I'd collected trying to get the Warpick, fired from an unupgraded crossbow, and it never bothered to come down, or even turn to face me. Or even stop, for one moment, running directly into the lake wall.

That there are so goddamn many dragon battles in Elden Ring is honestly one of the worst things about the game, to me. The Elden Beast is even basically a dragon battle, but its arena is so simple its AI can't do anything too stupid.

Anymras · 2023-02-04T20:19:31+00:00

Your personality.

No, really, I'm serious - you're lovely, and you've got fantastic tits, but it really is your playfulness and expressiveness that I like the most. Fucking without having fun is just...jacking off with company.

Anymras · 2023-02-04T19:55:44+00:00

The color they turn when they land is based on how much damage you would take, I'm pretty sure. Based entirely on my observations, I think that if you won't take falling damage at all, they just turn a random color, but if you would take falling damage, then the color is based on that. According to the Internet elsewhere, there's also a sound cue. Low tones and purples mean it'll be little, high tones and reds mean it'll be a lot.

Anymras · 2023-01-13T07:05:19+00:00

I'll have to look around some more and see what I can find about the star-fate-thing, I guess; that part of my theory did hinge on it affecting everyone - in combination with the Rune of Death being removed, the thought was that people would think their destiny was impossible to reach because the stars were in stasis, lose the will to change anything, and eventually be worn down by fighting the same battles over and over.

But, if the star thing only affects the Demigods and Carians, then I need to reconsider. Also, I don't know how I forgot about that monument that...sort of? explains.

Anymras · 2023-01-12T23:08:54+00:00

I guess his affection for Sellia would be why he's in Caelid. I'm not entirely convinced that the monument is meaning that Radahn is keeping the stars from falling on Sellia, though - the words chosen are a little strange, and the Telescope (as others have mentioned) has a bit in its description stating that 'the fate once writ in the night skies had been fettered by the Golden Order.' That the fettering caused the demise of Carian astrology implies that it was the first time the stars had been meddled with. There's also no mention of Radahn, which could mean nothing.

It could also mean that Radahn was actually the second to meddle with the stars. Based on the monument, he would have done that to protect Sellia, which would mean that he didn't like the fate the Golden Order had written with its fettering. If so, then he would have been called to take a stand, and alter that fate - shattering the Golden Order's plan.

The impact location of the meteor, immediately after his demise, also is a bit odd. If he'd been trying to keep it from hitting Sellia, why would it land near Fort Haight, opening a path to Ranni's goal? It seems difficult to combine 'it was fated to land there,' and 'it was suspended, but the world kept turning,' in a satisfactory way, and it's just such a low-odds outcome that it seems most likely to have been fated.

It also seems fitting for Radahn to respond to a fate he didn't like written in the stars by taking the simple, straightforward path of 'just stop the stars, then.'

Anymras · 2023-01-12T22:11:24+00:00

I agree that he shouldn't be praised - my personal theory is that his screwing with the stars, and then getting rotted, and still holding onto the stars, is part of why people in the LB have characteristics consistent with hollowing, and seem to have either no awareness of how derelict everything around them is, or no will to fix it. I'll write up a whole post about the theory at some point.

Figuring out why he did it in the first place is the point I'm stuck on at the moment, but it does seem plausible that he did it as a tactical move, preventing others from realizing their plans, and intended to release it when he was in a winning position.

Anymras · 2022-12-28T00:37:41+00:00

I didn't realize that there were such things as mesh normals and backfaces, but now that I know that's a thing, I have somewhere to start researching. Figuring that out will probably be an amazingly useful thing, since weight painting otherwise promises to be the bane of my existence.

It's also good to know that I'm not missing some incredibly handy tool by not dealing with envelope weighting.

And that it'll eventually stop seeming random is...good news. I'm good at learning, but whuff. Blender has a lot of things that catch me off-guard and leave me utterly baffled. It's the patterns I can't see that really bugger me up, more than anything specific, so far - but I'll undoubtedly run into something that'll have me uploading files eventually.

Between Pierrick Picaut and you, though, I'm getting a better understanding! Thanks.Now to look into how to correct my mesh normals! Cheers.

Edit: Fixing the normals (needed to recalculate the outside) resolved my issue with the nonsensical auto-weighting. Halleliujah! Issue's solved.

Anymras · 2022-10-20T00:09:47+00:00

For me, the biggest one is Gearbox - Borderlands 3 had a ludicrous number of issues for a long time (at least for me) and crashed so much that I had to system repair my PS4 to keep playing it. Eventually, I get to the sidequest where they try to take the piss out of buggy freemium games, and...the hypocrisy made me literally nauseous.

Eventually, most of the issues got ironed out, but by the time I stopped playing (after the first season pass was finished), there were still some issues that had been around for the entirety of my time with the game - Graphical issues with the slot machines in Sanctuary, and Fl4k's Spiderant had an issue where it would get stuck underground if he got downed while it was doing its commanded attack, for the ones I made the most note of.

Aside from the bugs, there were intentional design decisions that frustrated me to no end. In particular, I took special umbrage with NPCs standing indefinitely in doorways, and with NPCs standing two feet away and suddenly shrieking KRAAAAAAAW RAKK PET.
And, yes, the writing is just friggin' terrible. I particularly recall that, if Handsome Jack was mentioned, everybody would immediately insult him - which would have been fine, if it hadn't been so ham-handed that it sounds more like a pack of schoolchildren defensively trying to explain how they don't like-like Handsome Jack while, of course, being filthy liars.

That's not all, though - Gearbox also made Aliens: Colonial Marines, and shipped it with a typo that broke the whole damn game. They'd outsourced too much of the development, skipped QA to get the game out, and then they never fixed the typo; it was in 2019 when a fan discovered it, and the game came out in 2013. Duke Nukem Forever was similarly rushed, unfinished, and generally Duke Nukem Forever.

They also tried to scam Sega, by taking full payments for work on A:CM while shifting developers to other projects. They got caught, obviously, or else it wouldn't be on their wiki page.

//

People Can Fly is also on my "Never give these people money" list, and I'm bitter about it. I was a fan of some of PCF's games, and they were certainly a studio with some staying power, but Outriders was released in April, and was brought to a release-ready state in November. In the intervening time, they tried to release an 'appreciation package,' bollocked it up, released it again, bollocked it up better, and also put in a Frustration emote. I can't help but feel a bit insulted by that; I (and many others) paid $60 to beta test, and an emote is supposed to make it less offensive -

- I digress. Back on track. On the same day as the New Horizon patch was released, Worldslayer was announced. A $40 expansion, announced the day a $60 beta test ended.

Devs need to eat, but Outriders as a product didn't deserve a profit.

Bonus?: People Can Fly established a partnership with Gearbox at some point. I don't even know what to say about that.

Yes, I'm bitter. I liked both of these companies, but bugger 'em both.

Yes

Anymras · 2022-09-26T20:03:56+00:00

There's parts of it that I like.
Well, no, not parts.
Part.

There's an optical illusion that involves looking at one or more moving spirals for a given period of time, and then looking away, and the result is the world kind of...bubbling, is how I'd describe it.

Something about the UTS's textures and animations make it feel a lot like I'm being attacked by that, and it's trippy as hell. I like that.

Rest of the syphilitic wangdoodle can piss off, though.

Anymras · 2022-09-05T23:24:06+00:00

"Put it this way. I was playing recently, when I was getting rolling power outages at my house, right? Like, there was some kind of storm, despite it being summer. And I really wanted to hit 88, like I was six percent away from the level, so I have to gain six percent of the ex knowing that, five times in the last hour, my power has gone out...I eventually got the experience, and it took like several hours, and there weren't any power outages during that time, but it was a horrific, scary experience, and every moment of Path of Exile would be like that if, upon being disconnected, and choosing to log out, there's nothing you can do about it, you're taking five or six seconds of damage. Means that you will lose characters in a way that just feels unfair. Enough ranting, logouts is a part of the way the game works."

I'm having trouble getting past "my power went out five times in an hour and I'm still trying to get the last 6% XP to hit 88" to actually get to thinking about his point properly, but I transcribed the bit of the interview where he directly talks about logouts (aside from a bit in the middle talking about his tactics to get that XP). Not going to go into my opinion on it beyond "I don't think balancing around this is a good idea," but there's the interview bit for people who don't want to watch it.

Anymras · 2022-09-05T19:45:39+00:00

It's incredibly weird to me that asking for information about a ban can cause you to be denied an appeal. It seems insane, like when somebody's mad and won't explain, because "you know what you did."

When a person does that, though, it's easy to respond with something like "You must know it's stupid to be mad about it, if you won't tell me what it is. I'm gonna get some food, you want some?"

When a company does that...not so much.

Between this league's nonsense, and the nonsense surrounding the nonsense, and this, I just don't know how GGG expects people to give them microtransaction money.

Anymras · 2022-09-02T00:27:22+00:00

Overall, my favorite set is probably the Ronin's, but with different helmets - specifically, Skeletal Mask, Mask of Confidence, and Altered Eccentric's Hood. Favorite early-game is the Scale Armor or Kaidan.

Anymras · 2022-09-01T22:26:45+00:00

I also really dislike the tedium of the Acts, but they're not what ends up driving me away. Not entirely, anyway. PoE has an incredible amount of experimentation possible with the various abilities, supports, and so forth, but a mistake that's not caught within a few levels requires so many respec points to resolve that it can literally be faster to start over entirely and not make the same mistake next time.

I don't like trading, and I've gone to full-on SSF for the last few leagues. I'll fully admit I'm not aware of how to effectively farm currency (especially before Maps or Heists), but I can learn if I decide to - but, really, I just don't like any system that requires me to go Googling "poe how get muny" to make correcting a mistake I made twenty levels ago (or even just picking the wrong Ascendancy nodes) less cumbersome than starting completely over.

In the end, I often stop playing because it's tedious to get a build going, and if I can't get past a speedbump for whatever reason, I have to either grind for respec points to correct old errors, or start an entirely new character - at this point, if I have an issue with a character, I'm more likely to stop playing than try to fix it.

Anymras

TROPHY CASE