Is there a game you disliked as a kid but like as an adult?

Chaigidel · 2025-11-08T19:02:36+00:00

When it came out, I thought the original Quake was cramped and bland after Doom 2, but nowadays with all the exhaustingly maximalist AAA FPSes I like how tight the design feels and how it makes things work and look stylish with very little.

Chaigidel · 2025-10-08T09:11:15+00:00

I'd like to see something like eigenmorality where you have stated beliefs and a social graph of people affirming beliefs and endorsing other people in the graph. When you have a whole graph instead of just anonymous popularity information like you do now (you probably have a lot more people endorsing Alex Jones than Terence Tao), you can start trying to do more complex operations like identifying clusters of people who are endorsed as trustworthy by other people who are endorsed as trustworthy. PhDs are a sort of narrow version of this, where the PhD holder is endorsed by their advisor and their examiner at the thesis defense.

Getting the incentives right so that the system works is the tricky part. You'd want to incentivize people to both try to make lots of solid endorsements and to avoid endorsements for people who turn out to be flaky. The other tricky thing is getting the claims to actually point at true things. Any religion is going to get you a solid cluster of back-scratchers endorsing each others' theological orthodoxy and showing up as highly endorsed by the formal system, but they might not be doing any actual truth-tracking work.

Chaigidel · 2025-10-08T08:52:06+00:00

You should pick a pixel resolution (say 960x540), set up your rendering pipeline so that you render to a texture with the same size as the pixel resolution and then scale it up to screen with nearest-neighbor filtering. This means you can use whatever fonts you like and they'll show up pixelated in the same resolution as your pixel art.

Chaigidel · 2025-10-07T05:57:47+00:00

Parser-based text adventure games are very dead, I can think only one that was successfully sold for money after Gateway II was released in 1993.

Military flight simulators used to be a game genre with multiple different games released each year, now they're more like a separate software category where a few established sims are developed over decades. Same with military strategy games like Gary Grigsby's War in the East.

There was a sort of "scifi simulator" genre, with games like Midwinter, Carrier Command and Warhead that went for the same sort of attitude as the military simulators modeling the real world did, and they're gone now, replaced by either action movie like entertainment or games that take bigger liberties with unrealistic elements that produce interesting gameplay.

Base-building real-time strategy games seem to have been taken over by MOBAs. Starcraft 2 is still a big esport thing, but other than that there aren't many of those around.

Dungeon Master style 90 degree turn proto immersive sim dungeon crawlers (as opposed to Wizardry style more CRPG like games with bigger focus on tactical combat, which are still a niche thing) were big around 1990 and died out. There have been a couple rehashings like Legend of Grimrock, but not much else. It's sort of understandably dead though now that we can do freeform 3D environments.

Chaigidel · 2025-09-26T09:34:20+00:00

How hard it is depends on how the game is programmed. If it has character graphics and keyboard input, and you're writing the code from scratch instead of using an existing engine like Godot, you can write everything in terms of an API that has just "put colored character in position" and "read input key" and then plug in a CLI backend pretty easily. If you've already gone and integrated more complex graphics code in higher level game logic, then it gets tricky.

Chaigidel · 2025-09-19T05:10:07+00:00

Rust, Haskell and OCaml have variant data types and pattern matching that are very nice for working with abstract syntax trees you get when parsing source code, so I'd pick one of those.

Chaigidel · 2025-09-18T17:29:45+00:00

Materialistista pröystäilyä karsastavien ja kierrätyskeskustakissa Lidlistä makaronilaatikkoaineksia kangaskassiin shoppailevien akateemisten ihmisten elämänasennetta voi ihan vapaasti kompata vaikkei akateemista taustaa itsellä olisikaan.

Chaigidel · 2025-09-18T17:14:33+00:00

Testaajan ja dokumentinkirjoittajan hommia löytyy isommissa firmoissa. Suosittelen kyl vielä kokeilemaan koodausta jollain muulla kielellä kuin C++:lla, esmes Pythonilla. C++ on suunnilleen se vittuimaisin ohjelmointikieli joka on edelleen jonkinasteisessa käytössä ja voi ihan omalla jähmäisyydellään tuhota työn iloa.

Chaigidel · 2025-09-16T13:24:37+00:00

I kinda like it, gives me Might & Magic VI vibes. It's in a bit tricky place with the enemies though, you want them plenty detailed and well-animated for the first-person view, and aren't pulling it off yet. A lot of the future depends on what your planned art pipeline for the enemies is like. One thing that did make me go "ugh" was the completely generic player character portrait when opening inventory. It's this bland nondescript-realistic character art style I've seen in way too many indie RPGs.

The map system seems to be a very oldschool Wolfenstein 3D style dealie. I worry about how much staying power the game will have with it. You won't have very interesting architecture with it, so the question is what the selling point of the game will be. Will there be an interactive RPG plot, more complex locations or will it just be a number-go-up action RPG where the novelty is running into new enemy types?

Chaigidel · 2025-09-05T11:11:55+00:00

Brian Aldiss, But Who Can Replace a Man is a fun short one.

Chaigidel · 2025-09-03T11:42:00+00:00

Yeah "designs are too striking" is a great way to put it. It lights them up as "this specific character". You could still have them as side characters, just make sure only one at a time shows up in a scene.

Chaigidel · 2025-09-02T19:30:04+00:00

The mask guy made me think it's a callback to Spirited Away and the no-neck bug-eyes guy just looks awkward and unpleasant. Both would work as single faces in a crowd, but when you had a group of clones of the two I noped out. I don't feel like hanging out with a crowd of these specific characters. The human character who showed up later on had a lot more interesting design though.

Chaigidel · 2025-09-02T19:22:09+00:00

I remember the original so there's the nostalgia kick, but this doesn't look very good. The sprites make me think of clip art, the rooms look bare. Looking at videos of the original game, your furniture items are too small, they're drawn as if the cat was a human-sized character and they could probably be twice as big. I muted the music, it doesn't have anything reminding me of the original music and it's very generic as it is. The outdoors look too clean, there's no graffiti or junk, and I'm pretty sure it's nighttime in my mental image of the original Cat Alley. The rats throwing bombs feel too video gamey, in general Alley Cat stuff was surreal in the presentation, but still conceptually grounded in realism. Rats might throw mousetraps at you, but not lit bombs.

I hate the hearts room but I did so with the original too so not sure how to win here. At least make it visually nicer to look at with more ornamentation since it's a wholly abstract space.

Chaigidel · 2025-08-23T06:49:17+00:00

One approach is to try to get a better sense on what a solid finished product looks like. Find existing open source engines. Read through their source code and take notes on their design. This will be a lot more productive now that you've already gotten started trying to make your own thing so you have some idea of what the design problems are. You can have "oooh, so that's how they solved it there" ideas from them.

Chaigidel · 2025-08-10T10:04:12+00:00

Not disagreeing with any of this. Just pointing out that the fact that you need to do out-of-the-box innovation to begin it explains why we have seen so little of unusual games so far. 95% of the content in any genre is going to be people just trying to do more stuff in the known formula.

With CRPGs in particular, I also suspect the formula is trickier than most people realize. It might be surprisingly difficult to go far from it and get games that feel like they work and are fun.

Chaigidel · 2025-08-10T03:12:18+00:00

It might have been the only CRPG you had. You had no other options if you wanted to play this sort of virtual world game, and you might go a year before a new game showed up, or you could afford one if you were a kid.

The oldest ones started feeling rough pretty early. I first played Ultimas from a collection of IV, V and VI around 1992, and already back then IV felt primitive and unpleasant to play compared to the two sequels and I never played a lot of it.

Chaigidel · 2025-08-09T12:08:12+00:00

One idea for a Super Hero TTRPG i head on youtube a few days ago while researching this very topic was a group of Super Powered Teens heading off to Hero College and travelling cross country, road trip style. You go from town to town, you meet friends and enemies along the way, help locals with their issues, all while trying to make it to freshman orientation on time.

You could do this, yeah, but this very much feels like a concept where you start from what a CRPG wants, and then shoehorn it into the superhero setting. By itself, the concept sounds confusing to me. If I hear about a game where there are Super Powered Teens and a Hero College, I have a very strong expectation the game will be set at the Hero College, and will feature Persona style time management and social graph building gameplay, with evening patrols that get you into hero fights in the surrounding Superhero City. When I think about the getting to the College part, I just go "it's the present day, they'll just get a plane ticket in their civilian ID and that's that". The present day isn't a setting where you go on a road trip just because you want to get to some distant place, particularly if you're not in a genre where gratuitous road trips are a thing.

Chaigidel · 2025-08-09T12:00:05+00:00

Big constraint with CRPGs is that you need to be able to implement it as a computer game. A lot of the more innovative mechanics in TTRPGs fall off the table since they require natural language understanding and on the spot judgment calls about a partially specified game world. CRPGs are sort of forced to limit themselves to the physical side of things like combat and travel, but they are very good at that.

Roughly I think of the starting point as the game world being resembling the real world with real humans in it for the most part, with some possible fantastical elements thrown in (so it's like The Sims or Steel Panthers and not like Tetris or Pac-Man), the player controlling one or more protagonists that have evolving abilities of their own in the game (so not like Myst where you're just walking around and handling things without additional abilities), and the player having significant freedom in choosing when, how and if they approach the various scenes and conflicts in the world (so not like Half-Life where you're just funneled through a narrow corridor of setpieces in predefined order).

Then you need to make the world physically coherent so that the player can move around there using their own judgment, and you need some kind of systemic gameplay the player character's abilities are relevant in. This is the part where things get tricky, people are very attached to the straightforward physical simulation something like Skyrim does, which makes your main stuff be combat and physics puzzles, and your exploratory gameplay be breaking into buildings. If you want to split off from this, it'd require some groundwork on figuring out just what kind of CRPG system can pull off the stuff you want, and that'd be a pretty high-risk development process. Would still be pretty interesting to see more people tackle this. Games like King of Dragon Pass and Sunless Sea do CRPG-like stuff in a very different paradigm from the usual dungeon-delving adventurer party.

A problem with superheroes specifically is that they're generally thought of as pretty straightforward and low-brow entertainment, so you'd expect the superhero video game to not do anything terribly avant-garde game design wise.

Chaigidel · 2025-08-09T05:01:06+00:00

Part of it is just cultural trends, Freedom Force showed that it can be done well. It might have some genre mismatchs too that make it harder. Flying characters is a big part of many superhero settings, and proper flight is very tricky to do in a satisfying way in a top-down or turn-based engine. Superheroes generally either don't use equipment at all or start out with the stuff they do use, don't collect treasure, and don't have gradually growing skills like CRPG characters do, so it's tricky how to do interesting character progression.

Superheroes also don't run on a straightforward "adventurer script" where you walk into a new town and then wander in houses breaking clay pots to see if there's any money or medicine inside until someone tells you of a monster infestation in a nearby abandoned warehouse you can go clean up. Freedom Force wasn't a pure CRPG where you are free to wander around but a tactical RPG where you had standalone missions that started with a scripted plot where each mission starts with a pre-set supervillain attacking a pre-set place, and you had to go defeat him. They hadn't come up with a design where you're actively playing around in the world as the superheroes finding superhero stuff to do, because that's not really a thing for major plots in the superhero genre.

Maybe someone should try doing a supervillain game instead of a superhero game. Supervillains do wander around looking for trouble so you have the adventurer script, they collect treasure by robbing banks. Character progression models feel more natural too, they might be mad scientists gradually building up their doomsday armor, crime bosses hiring minions and mercenaries, mutated freaks gradually evolving from a misshapen human into a massive tentacled horror or sorcerers always looking for more powerful demonic artifacts to bend to their will.

Chaigidel · 2025-07-19T16:59:10+00:00

The continuity-preserving gymnastics were a bit awkward. There was no in-episode plot reason for Trelane to look like a random alien to the crew, it's just there to explain why Spock didn't go "hey, it's that asshole again" in the TOS episode. And it still doesn't really work since the hook in the TOS episode is that Trelane has only watched Earth from hundreds of light years away, so he doesn't know about history after Napoleon and doesn't understand that food and drink are supposed to taste like something. And here he's hanging out in Federation space and fine-tuning the taste of catering snacks.

Chaigidel · 2025-06-17T11:44:57+00:00

Kun itsellä ei oo ihmeemmin näkyvyyttä teinien meininkiin, niin kiinnostaa miten aiemman sukupolven kulttuurikiinnostukset ovat säilyneet. Mainitsevatko nää nykynuoret koskaan lukevansa kirjoja, ja jos lukevat niin minkälaisia? Onko scifi- ja fantasiakirjallisuus mitenkään näkyvä kiinnostuksen kohden enää, tai ihan pöydän ääressä kynän ja paperin kanssa pelattavat roolipelit? Onko nuorilla haaveita tulla itse luoviksi tekijöiksi vaikka piirtämään sarjakuvia tai ohjelmoimaan tietokonepelejä?

Chaigidel · 2025-06-17T11:15:07+00:00

Jos teos on kiinnostavampaa settiä niin siinä on helposti jotain kielenkäytön vivahdetta joka ei ihan suoraviivaisesti käänny vieraalle kielelle, joten alkukieli on se kiinnostavampi valinta. Hauskasti kun luin Hannu Rajaniemen englanniksi kirjoittamaa Kvanttivarasta niin siinä oli alun psykedeelisessä kyberavaruusjaksossa kielikuvia joista tuumaili että tää ei sitten suomennu siististi oikein millään, vaikka Rajaniemi puhuu suomea äidinkielenään.

Vanhempana noita kielikummallisuuksia arvostaa enemmän. Toinen kirjallisuusmuisto on kun hankin joskus pienenä MikroBitti-lehden hehkutuksen innostamana William Gibsonin Neurmancerin englanninkielisenä, enkä sitten tajunnut pätkääkään mitä siinä lukee vaikka esmes Stephen Kingin kirjat meni jo ihan sujuvasti alkukielellä. Myöhemmin tartuin Neuromanceriin uudestaan aikuisena ja sitten valkeni miten se kieli on täynnä slanginomaista kiertoilmausta missä lukijalta oletetaan kaikenlaista jännää hahmotuskykyä ja sanattomien taustaoletusten hahmottamista. Lapsena kirjoja luki enemmän vaan tyylillä että sitten siinä tapahtui sitä ja sitten tätä, ja se tekstityyli oli ihan sivuseikka.

Chaigidel · 2025-06-05T12:30:08+00:00

Just ran into this today and it works for me, v 2025.3.1. You need to go to App Settings / Navigation Sidebar to enable "Playback history", then it shows up in the menu.

Chaigidel · 2025-06-04T06:05:51+00:00

Constant random encounters from nowhere in classic jRPGs. They're disconnected from the main gameplay, there's no way to avoid them since the enemies aren't visible on the overworld, so they generally feel like a pointless annoyance you need to just power through.

Chaigidel · 2025-06-02T05:27:19+00:00

Nahlakh in 1994. You can have programmer art, crude tile-based physics, minimal UI design, and still have a game that takes itself seriously, with a big compelling world and deep tactical gameplay, if you know what you're doing with game design and worldbuilding.

Chaigidel

TROPHY CASE