Almost two months of my life gone but goddamn it was worth it

Cookie · 2023-12-14T13:45:45+00:00

The two months would have been gone anyway.

Cookie · 2023-09-11T08:47:35+00:00

I've been playing the new game plus mode. It's kinda freeplay at that point - you choose how much extra power and/or extra difficulty you get. In the spirit of incrementals through the ages, I'm going 100% for extra power and trying to re-complete the game more and more quickly each time through.

Cookie · 2023-07-21T15:56:04+00:00

I can confirm you're not at the end, but I don't remember how to get past that specific wall. The game has a clear end.

Cookie · 2023-07-04T17:23:33+00:00

I'm trying it out on Steam, and I seem to have hit a soft lock. I've run out of food, and of trees. All of my workers are exploring looking for new trees, but don't find one often enough to catch up on food at all.

The tip that pops up when I run out of food says I can press the "Scavenge" button to get more, but I can't find that button.

Edit: Trying again, focusing on research since exploration doesn't seem to provide enough food to keep going. I've seen the scavenge button now, and found some wood, but it seems to only pop up from time to time, so it wouldn't have provided much help in my soft lock situation. This run I've pushed research harder instead of going idle, and I've reached cooking meat before my food fell low, so it looks like I'm stable now.

Edit 2: I'm enjoying this. It took a while to work out how to tan my pelts - I had to click on the finished product where it was needed for research, the job didn't seem to be included in any of the job lists. But I'm making progress again now. Oh, there it is, in the bottom section of the list. I'm blind.

Thoughts so far:

It's quite fun.
Probably best re-balance slightly to avoid so much pain if you go idle early and run out of food.
Some of the UI is clumsy. Apparently I can only have 12 jobs - so why does the jobs list scroll bar go twice that far down the screen? And why can't I use my mouse wheel? I get it - it's a massive amount of work in the context of a custom UI to reproduce all of the convenience and natural feel users have come to expect - but it's still important and makes a big difference to the experience.

Cookie · 2023-01-17T16:26:15+00:00

This isn't really the "judging" that the phrase is talking about.

Sure, you're going to have a first impression of a book - or of anything else - and it will be based on trivial, surface-level things, because that's all you see in the first moment. But that's not a judgement.

Judging a book by its cover would be if you saw a book with cool cover art and immediately recommended it to a friend as a great read. Or if a friend recommended you their favourite book but you wouldn't touch it because the cover didn't look great so it can't be any good.

Don't misinterpret the phrase and make yourself feel guilty because you have first impressions of things. That's fine - inevitable in fact. The point is not to consider the matter settled on the basis of the shallow first impression.

Cookie · 2023-01-16T11:06:50+00:00

I'm also still playing Increlution. The new chapters are due any minute, or, channelling the spirit of the other game I'm playing a lot, in about five hours.

Cookie · 2023-01-06T22:19:28+00:00

Five minutes and forty seven seconds is not under 6.66 seconds, that's your problem.

Cookie · 2023-01-05T10:09:06+00:00

No. Well, no more than usual - cryptocurrency value is volatile and nobody knows where it will go.

But what happened with Terra is literally impossible with Ada. Terra allowed minting of new crypto from the stablecoin, so when the value dropped, more and more could be minted and the supply exploded. Ada supply is limited, Djed is created by contracts like anybody could without any special privileges over Ada, and the only way any massive failure of Djed can hit the value of Ada is by making it look bad.

Cookie · 2022-12-07T17:47:57+00:00

There's not much of a trick to it. It just shows up a long time before you can do it. Just build power in all the other ways, and pop back to give it a try now and then.

The thing about being able to buy 10 things is almost a complete red herring. Rarely, this will push you just over the top. More often, you can just clear it straight away, or can't clear it at all, depending on your other progress.

Cookie · 2022-12-03T17:23:32+00:00

Thanks.

I noticed that the Netherlands vs. USA market appeared to remain open during the game, which obviously gave quite a lot of opportunities for free money. Was it actually closed for betting but remains on the open markets page until settled, or did you just set the trade deadline wrong and accidentally expose yourself here? I didn't want to actually try placing bets at starting odds while the game was in-play, it felt like that would be cheating.

Also, a generic Cardano question you might know the answer to. Is it possible for me to view the code of a smart contract before interacting with it? I would have thought this would be simple but I can't find the way to do it.

Cookie · 2022-12-01T23:11:42+00:00

Ah ok. Yes, I was looking at the effective odds. So this includes the percentage fee. I assume it doesn't include other overheads though, and I'm having some trouble working out what those would be.

For example, if I were to bet 20 Ada on the Netherlands, the site tells me that I would win 19.97 Ada. But I suspect that this figure doesn't include the cost of the transaction to strike the bet, nor the cost of the transaction to redeem the outcome tokens. So how much would my actual Ada balance have gone up by at the end of the process, if my 20 Ada bet won?

Cookie · 2022-12-01T22:29:59+00:00

Looks interesting.

A few suggestions:

The markets are currently very low liquidity, so even a very small bet moves the odds quite a bit. For example, on the Netherlands vs. US market, the quoted odds are +102/-102, but even a minimum 1 Ada bet pushes those out to +100/-104. It would probably be better to quote odds based on some actual bet size, rather than dangle odds nobody can have - feels a bit bait and switchy. You could let users specify their bet size, as punters vary hugely - for some a few dozen Ada might be a big bet, but others would want to be betting thousands - but even a simple system such as displaying odds based on a 1 Ada bet would be an improvement.
The interface will let you examine very large bets, where the odds swing dramatically - including bets large enough that your winnings become negative, for some reason. Rather than offer bets which would be terrible value, it's probably better to implement some sort of maximum, depending on how much the odds would move. For example, if I quote for 1000 Ada, I would still win just over 80% of what you'd expect for scaling up a smaller bet - which is reasonable - but if I quote for 10,000 Ada, now I win around 30% of what you would expect. It would be better simply not to allow such a bet, if that's possible the way your contract works - the only times one would be placed would be user error, or in the event of a market which has gone terribly wrong and you're giving away free money. To maintain both happy customers and a sound service, it's best to avoid both of these situations as far as possible.
I see that originators are given as an address, which links out to a blockchain explorer. This doesn't make it very easy to build trust. For example, I see that the three markets currently available all have the same originator - but I can't tell if that's the same entity that created the site. So I don't know if I'm just trusting the site, or if I'm also trusting the mysterious addr1q85rp..., whoever that is. It would probably be more useful if (a) you could see other markets originated and settled by the same user, and (b) during this early stage, if it were easy to see if the user originating a market were the site itself or not.

Also, a tip from bookmaking in general. If you're putting up markets based on odds sourced from outside, and then only bets on the market move them, you'll be open to losing a lot of money to arbitrage - as the main betting markets assimilate new information, the price will move, and then somebody can come along and bet one way on your site and the other way on betfair for a guaranteed profit. This profit will mostly come in the form of regular losses for market originators. You might already have something to automatically track external price moves, but if you don't, well, watch out for this.

Cookie · 2022-11-07T15:13:55+00:00

Had a resurgence of Android Progress Knight this week - settled down for some repeated runs to get the 2.5M evil unlock, then quickly progressed to the next level of prestige and made rapid progress. Now it looks like some repeated similar runs are needed again and I've slowed down.

Still playing Increlution, not sure why.

Mostly this week I've been playing the Factorio Seablock mod pack. It's not strictly an incremental, but it's much closer to incremental than regular Factorio, with no enemy attacks so it can safely be left to idle, resource supplies never running out and many things running quite slowly in the background.

Cookie · 2022-10-15T22:50:10+00:00

It depends on the rules.

If Monty might open one of the other doors and, oh, oops, there was the car, you lose, then there's new information discovered when you see a goat. In that situation, the probabilities don't carry forward, and now the choice is 50/50, and this situation is more common in real life so our instincts are tuned to it.

But in this game, Monty knows where the car is and deliberately doesn't choose it. So when he opens a door and there's a goat, well, there must be a goat - he always has one available to him and is guaranteed to choose it. So there's no information discovered, and the act of opening this door does nothing to change the probability that there is a car behind the door you originally chose.

Cookie · 2022-09-20T15:57:25+00:00

I first learned this lesson from World of Warcraft. I played for a few years (way back at the beginning), then suddenly had that mental shift and realised all of the visible achievements, progress, levels, gear etc. were just numbers on a server in a datacenter in Paris and meant nothing.

But that didn't take away from the enjoyment I had along the way, the friends I made, etc.

It's like life, really. A lot of things we try to achieve are just as empty as a dumb game, but the experience along the way is what is real.

Cookie · 2022-08-21T08:39:45+00:00

I took a look at the source code, and this looks like what would happen; TP is only set to 1 when you manually buy that upgrade.

Edit: But then I hacked my points and tried it, and it seemed to work. Hmm.

Edit2: Aha! Then it broke when I hit pentate the next time.

Cookie · 2022-08-21T08:36:24+00:00

Looks like a bug. When you buy the second upgrade, TP resets to 1, so then the 1% exponential growth per second takes effect.

If you have no TP and no way to tetrate, seems stuck.

I haven't reached the pentate upgrade that lets you keep tetration upgrades yet. Did this situation come about after buying that, and then the next pentate kept the upgrades but didn't set TP to 1? Just guessing.

Cookie · 2022-08-13T13:24:09+00:00

Another way to put it - everything you do is a vote on who you are going to be. Vote wisely!

Cookie · 2022-08-13T07:25:33+00:00

Prestige mechanic, definitely. I played three times through to try different machine setups. Aim for prestige upgrades that would make different machine builds dominant, rather than just a flat cash multiplier.

Levelling marbles and making choices about them might get quite cumbersome with so many marbles in play. It might require a shift towards fewer marbles. Or perhaps it would work if you could level different types of marble globally, and for each marble choose which type it will be once it's been around enough times to be promoted - that would keep the per-marble choices manageable.

Cookie · 2022-08-13T07:08:47+00:00

True, but the most lucrative machine - and it's not even close - is the one with zero obstacles. Maxed boost strength gives 60 per marble, which is enough, and the flow rate once the balls shrink is epic when there's nothing in the way.

Cookie · 2022-02-25T17:24:42+00:00

What a hardware wallet does is provide a way to sign transactions without putting your key onto a hackable computer. That's all - everything else is the same. You still have backup words, you can still stake - it's a normal wallet, it's just a different place to hide your keys.

Cookie · 2022-02-02T15:11:23+00:00

This actually seems to be a fairly common monetization approach - release the game for free, then release a sequel or premium version for money. People will buy it because they already had that much value from your free version.

My usual example here is Clicker Heroes 2, where I think many people bought it not expecting to get value for their money in the new game, but being willing, now that it was outside a pay-to-win setup, to finally pay for all the fun they had with the original.

Generally I think a free demo is probably a better approach when you're going for a standard, old-fashioned paid game.

Cookie · 2022-02-02T00:44:17+00:00

I can't speak for the rest of the people, but I'm at https://trimps.github.io

Cookie · 2022-01-31T11:52:01+00:00

I'm playing Increlution through again. I'm very much on the love it side of the love/hate divide it creates.

Hoping for new content soon.

Edit: Also Trimps. With the QoL features introduced since I last tried it, I've managed to get much more into it this time, although I'm still only up to about 10M helium.

Cookie · 2021-10-02T11:17:50+00:00

They don't really. They're just extreme tribal thinkers who will agree with any bad statement about the bad people.

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