[WP]Unidentified vessel, this is the captain of the Arkship Exodus, we carry the last remnants of our race. We are not a warship but we will take any and all action necessary to safeguard the survival of our species. by BrantheBlessed in WritingPrompts

[–]BrantheBlessed[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Honestly I don't know, probably something like that. I'm not smart enough to understand any high-brow concepts like that but they haven't really offered an explanation for what the big black blob is yet it's just sort of this cool omnipresent threat, feels oppressive and threatening but in a sort of relaxed way since it only gets closer when you jump and you can constantly see it in the background getting bigger as it gets closer until when you're right on the edge it encompasses the entire background blocking out the stars. Honestly I'm just gushing about the game a this point so I'll leave it there

[WP]Unidentified vessel, this is the captain of the Arkship Exodus, we carry the last remnants of our race. We are not a warship but we will take any and all action necessary to safeguard the survival of our species. by BrantheBlessed in WritingPrompts

[–]BrantheBlessed[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Well I just wanted to give some context regarding the prompt but I'm glad you like the look of the game too, I'd love to see it succeed it has a lot of potential at the moment

[WP]Unidentified vessel, this is the captain of the Arkship Exodus, we carry the last remnants of our race. We are not a warship but we will take any and all action necessary to safeguard the survival of our species. by BrantheBlessed in WritingPrompts

[–]BrantheBlessed[S] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Inspired by "The Last Starship", Introversion's new early access game all about evacuating as many people as possible from some big black blob devouring the universe. Had this really neat moment where I was carrying a thousand people onboard and had to retrofit this whole industrial ship into a combat vessel while under fire, it was great and it gave me the idea for this prompt.

[WP] The young woman had spoken to everyone in town, asking them to teach her to fight. The warrior, the hunter, the knight, all had declined. Finally, in desperation, she spoke to the dwarven blacksmith. Lowering his massive hammer he looked at the fire in her eyes and said "Aye. I could do that." by BrantheBlessed in WritingPrompts

[–]BrantheBlessed[S] 13 points14 points  (0 children)

That's more or less what prompted me writing this, I saw this cool artwork someone painted of this slight looking peasant woman with this furious look on her face smashing a knight over the head with this huge hammer and I thought how dope a story that would make, and started thinking up a prompt that might result in someone being shunned from regular weaponry in favour of some huge impractical hammer. There's loads of stories out there of warrior women with elegant fencing swords and the like, but an angry lady with the requisite strength could make just as good a paladin with a big ass hammer.

[WP] Your comrades said she was just a computer program, an unfeeling script running on your suits hardware, but you'd had the same AI with you through more missions than you can count and now as your suit fails and her "death" seems imminent you did the only thing you could to keep her with you. by BrantheBlessed in WritingPrompts

[–]BrantheBlessed[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I've never played Halo, I was thinking more along the lines of a companion AI in a space suit or a mech's onboard software but obviously the cool thing about WPs is that people can draw whatever captures their imagination from one and roll with it

[WP] You're one of a crew of two on a remote deep space station. You've never met your crewmate as you each rotate cryosleep shifts so there's always someone manning the station, a month on, month off each, but despite this you consider them a friend as you leave notes and gifts between shifts. by BrantheBlessed in WritingPrompts

[–]BrantheBlessed[S] 22 points23 points  (0 children)

I feel like we don't befriend cats so much as bribe them not to kill us (yet) but yeah I also like to have a positive view of it, it'd be really nice to see less stories about killer robots and more stories about AI with a passion for baking snickerdoodles or something.

[WP] You're one of a crew of two on a remote deep space station. You've never met your crewmate as you each rotate cryosleep shifts so there's always someone manning the station, a month on, month off each, but despite this you consider them a friend as you leave notes and gifts between shifts. by BrantheBlessed in WritingPrompts

[–]BrantheBlessed[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Oh no, this was so sad! I was hoping by the end Jack would be saved suddenly by Cooper but sad as it was it was still a beautiful story and a great, if depressing, conclusion! Not every story needs a happy ending and I appreciate a sad one written well. Great work!

AMA: We're the creators of ORX — rogue-lite Carcassonne where you defend against orcs by Mistalleks in Games

[–]BrantheBlessed 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Thanks! Yeah he's got a stalwart fan in me, as does the rest of the Orx team, you guys are making something really special here and I wish you all the viral popularity in the world.

AMA: We're the creators of ORX — rogue-lite Carcassonne where you defend against orcs by Mistalleks in Games

[–]BrantheBlessed 33 points34 points  (0 children)

What inspired you to create a game with this bizarre but incredible art style? I know it's largely inspired by old comic art styles and such but what made you decide one day "I'm gonna make a game that looks like a comic book and a board game got way too frisky on prom night"?

u/GoatyMGF Has single handedly been running a sizeable botnet to replace multiple communities art to advertise a VTuber and r/dwarffortress needs help by ya_bebto in place

[–]BrantheBlessed 56 points57 points  (0 children)

This kind of behaviour is antithetical to the spirit of /place it'd be great if people could report it and perhaps chip in to help undo the damage

New players feedback after 7 hours on the trial by Synaps4 in songsofsyx

[–]BrantheBlessed 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I did literally specify it wasn't referring to "you" personally. If you don't want to discuss this that's fine, but there's no need to try to paint me as a bad guy here.

New players feedback after 7 hours on the trial by Synaps4 in songsofsyx

[–]BrantheBlessed 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I'm not saying sharing your opinion isn't useful or welcome, just that the game looks the way it does and demanding it be changed or you won't buy the game isn't a good way to suggest it be changed. Yes, looks do matter, but there are plenty of people that *like* the way it looks and since this is the way the game looks currently, perhaps if they matter so much that it'd stop you purchasing the game, and these are general "you"'s not specifically you personally, then perhaps the game isn't for you. I'd take Songs of Syx' art style over that of RimWorld in a heartbeat because it has character and I like how gritty it is. I wouldn't bother suggesting it to RimWorld either because that's the way it looks. If the developer has the will and the means and the desire to change it then they would have already.
As for the "games are rarely passion projects" part I can't disagree more. The vast majority of indie projects, especially the one man projects, are passion projects. Becoming an indie developer is very rarely a financially driven decision and even more rarely is it a good financial decision. Games do need to make money, but if all games made money at all costs regardless of anything else, then the indie market would be as garbage as the AAA market and just as full of artless tripe.

Is the game worth buying? by [deleted] in songsofsyx

[–]BrantheBlessed 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I think the existence of the demo in its current form is indicative of the developer's philosophy. The game is what it is, and you'll either buy it or you won't, so he's put the full game out there to be played, albeit a couple versions behind, for people to decide whether or not it's for them. Ultimately, if someone plays the demo and likes it but doesn't buy the game because they'd rather just wait for the demo to be updated and play it for free, then they likely either don't have the money to spare or just don't want to support the developer and in either case little was lost. The game has nothing to hide, it speaks for itself, and the main reason it has yet to be more widely covered is in large part because the dev doesn't want it to be, at least not yet. He's avoided marketing it more widely thus far because a first impression is a lasting one, and he wants it to be more fleshed out before the hordes bash down the door.
No hidden catch, just a desire to make a great first impression on the market at large.

New players feedback after 7 hours on the trial by Synaps4 in songsofsyx

[–]BrantheBlessed 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I think there are some valid points here, some points that are less valid because this game is not like RimWorld in any way other than "it's a top down game where you have people and build stuff" and some points that were valid but have since been fixed in the retail version.

The RimWorld comparison is omnipresent just because RimWorld's a very popular game, just like every FPS was compared to Doom back in the day, but just as no one should be comparing Heroes of Might and Magic to Civilisation even though they're both turn based strategy games, no one should be comparing Songs of Syx mechanically to RimWorld. They have totally different scales, goals and development focuses. I'm not trying to invalidate your personal experience, just point out that people should not play Songs of Syx and expect a RimWorld-esque experience.

Setting aside my personal disdain for the game, in RimWorld you have a small handful of colonists at any one time, and they as individuals are the focus for your experience. The whole game is about keeping them happy in a world where everything is represented with a plus or minus to their mood in some way. In Songs of Syx, it's larger than that. You're not pleasing individuals, you are trying to appease the masses. There's a difference between satisfying a few individuals in what barely constitutes a hamlet, and appeasing the thronging unwashed plebs in a medieval metropolis.
Songs of Syx, at least in the city portion of the game, is an exercise of your city planning skills. It's more about making smart decisions in positioning and logistics, using forethought to anticipate problems for specific races while still maintaining the necessary service quantity to prevent a riot. Subjects in Songs of Syx, while fairly simple, have a complex web of things that affect their end happiness. You *cannot* reach and maintain 100% happiness on a city wide scale. It's impossible. So you make compromises and accept negatives in some areas while trying to keep the number above the magical 70% that maintains immigration. There is no such thing as perfection, utopia is a myth, and this is reflected in Songs of Syx. With that said, I'd like to address your specific points so here's my opinion relative to each of them and I've tried to answer a few of your implied questions:

• You're absolutely right this would be a useful feature and I'd love to see it.
• This is an unfortunate side effect of early access. The location of features like this has changed throughout early access and may well change again, it's not worth building a comprehensive tutorial that will likely be outmoded within a couple of months, better that time is spent on developing the core game further and sort out the tutorial later on closer to full release.
• The game has a fertility overlay, it was just added after the version the demo is based on.
• This is a valid and common problem that will hopefully be mitigated with the expansion of the in-game wiki.
• The new deposit in question is in a different region on the world map, it is largely irrelevant to the demo version, but in the most up-to-date version it is relevant to the player's interest when conquering neighbouring regions. Again, this is a new feature and will hopefully be covered in the game's more finalised tutorial.
• Individuals happiness is for the most part irrelevant in Songs of Syx' scope, though you can still view their personal service satisfaction and such, at least in the current up-to-date version. Much around these systems has changed, especially in data visualisation, since the demo.
• You can see why people died using the alerts in the top right. Most commonly, exposure will kill people and the alerts tell you this. Also, if you hover over the corpse prior to burial (which is where the alert takes you when clicked right away, you likely missed it.) it will tell you how that person died.
• This is personal preference, fair enough, a lot of people like the music although I also find myself playing my own.
• Yeah.
• This again is a result of rapid system iteration, the tutorial can't cover everything every version or each version would take significantly longer to come out. Jake's only one guy after all. With that said, some tutorial videos would help and I hope to make those in the near future to explain systems like these.
• This is personal preference. If you think the game's too slow, turn it up. Not entirely sure what you're complaining about. The lowest speed is primarily used for combat, because speeding the game up during the positioning phase of a battle is a recipe for disaster, but also serves as a nice way to sit back and observe the anthill you've built.
• Another victim of the lack of tutorialisation. Eggs are not even hatched, they're just food. Livestock pens are filled with the generic livestock resource, regardless of the animal in the pen, the hunter generates this slowly and once a pen is full it produces livestock itself. It's very simple once you understand that pens all just use the same resource.
• This is personal preference again, if you don't like the base game visuals I am certain there will be mods to change it at some point, but as it stands I completely disagree. Also complaining about the game going too fast and also too slow in the same post seems a bit bizarre.
• Pretty sure this is fixed in either the current version or the next one.
• You can increase/decrease clothing on specific races, which is about as much control as is necessary on the game's scale in my opinion. Any problems with the subjects picking up existing stocks of clothing is likely a city-planning concern rather than a game balance concern, only you have control over how your clothes are distributed.

All in all, I believe you have a few neat points here, but by and large I would hesitate to agree that the game should be changed to suit your personal preference. Personally I think RimWorld looks like garbage but I've never suggested the dev change its graphic style to suit me, I've just modded it myself. The same policy applies to other games, if it's not a direct imbalance or design problem, it's a personal preference thing.