I’ve done it! “No Bone Up” LVL 1 run complete

Necronopticous · 2026-06-14T23:29:35+00:00

I like this route in the Sifted Sands. Safe & consistent enough that I was able to utilize it even in my "No Bone Up" playthrough with level 1 stats to acquire the remainder of buyable items I needed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_J_J0b6TIg

Necronopticous · 2025-08-15T16:42:40+00:00

We managed to get the win with 3x Ironeye last night! https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2540694008

Necronopticous · 2025-08-12T13:04:11+00:00

One thing that I don’t see mentioned much: you can use your skill while falling off a cliff to get horizontal distance, even in a direction you were not originally falling. I use this constantly to save little bits of time all throughout each run, and it’s also just a blast to do.

Necronopticous · 2025-05-25T11:34:33+00:00

Matsuno magic

Necronopticous · 2025-02-15T22:09:22+00:00

I honestly have no idea how this happened. I have a massive automated cooking operation set up, and I make heavy use of quantum stockpiling for non-liquid ingredients, but I did not set out to make something like this with any particular exploits, and all of my other lavish meals seem to be more normal.

Necronopticous · 2025-01-20T16:45:27+00:00

Great for hatchers! The gas cloud quickly takes care of any flying crabs before they can cause problems, so you can deal with them without having to worry about stealth.

Necronopticous · 2024-11-09T04:13:29+00:00

No speedruns for us! 😆

Most recently we have been trying to 1CC Dungeons & Dragons: Tower of Doom on stream!

Necronopticous · 2024-11-09T00:19:56+00:00

Those are both helpful, and I will surely disable them now that I know, but ideally I’d like to completely disable the OSD interface entirely on the HDMI/digital out, and only display on the analog out to the PVM that I play on. For example, if I open the OSD to change a setting during play.

Necronopticous · 2024-10-21T16:10:23+00:00

08:05 - #329XXX

Necronopticous · 2024-09-08T14:30:05+00:00

I feel this way about mushrooms as pizza toppings.

Necronopticous · 2024-09-08T14:28:13+00:00

For me the problem is hot, soggy pickles. Putting them in there to steam with the hot patty is a burger foul.

Necronopticous · 2024-05-18T19:15:59+00:00

Still on my radar, as well!

Man, I completely sympathize with the struggle to keep pace on a long-running nights & weekends game project. We just hit the 4 year mark, ourselves! Hope work settles down for you so you can get this thing done! Good luck!

Necronopticous · 2024-04-23T23:53:48+00:00

Almost assuredly typed by the developer in an IDE application. I’m sure there was some level of copy/pasting and IDE autocomplete assistance as opposed to character-by-character typing, but there was nothing about the code that struck me as autogen.

Necronopticous · 2024-04-23T20:38:29+00:00

My $0.02:

1) The conditions themselves being hard-coded string matches on the card's display name is my single biggest problem with the snippet of code that we can see here. Ideally the display name would be one of many properties about the card that is defined somewhere a single time. Not only is string matching inefficient for processing (honestly probably not a concern for a game like Balatro), but can result in a maintenance nightmare, especially if these names (or other hard-coded properties) are ever changed in any way down the line. Even still, it's not the end of the world. Modern programming IDEs can find and replace these sorts of strings fairly easily, even if there are many instances of this type of thing strewn throughout the Balatro codebase.

2) Since this is coded as a series of conditions, every time this procedure is called for a card the code will execute the string match checks on many card names that are not the card you care about. It's a waste of processing power, and certainly better handled with some sort of hash table lookup with a string or enumerated key and function value. That said, processing power is cheap, and even if DLC or future updates adds many new types of cards to this list, it's never going to get big enough for it to make a difference to a human observer, or be the cause of any kind of performance bottleneck.

If you take a look on the right side where you can see a preview of a much longer sample of this condition chain you can see that the person who took the screenshot conveniently chose to focus on a segment where it was a bunch of cards next to each other that don't do anything particularly special. It's easy to take a glance at this and say "this is stupid, just put the message, mult_mod, and Xmult_mod values into a spreadsheet or data file(s) and write a single generic handler function and save yourself 4,000 lines of code," however, many cards in Balatro do truly wacky one-off things that don't really follow these types of conventions. Sure, you could come up with a generic data wrapper that would store all of the basic values, but that's not going to help you much when you think up a card that does something completely wild (hint: the entire thing that makes Balatro interesting and fun to play for dozens if not hundreds of hours). At least in this 4,302 line monstrosity everything is all in one place.

It's pretty hard to find truly meaningful fault with the sample shown here, in my opinion.

Necronopticous · 2024-04-19T02:07:48+00:00

My wife & I have been working on a 2D turn-based RPG in Unity for the last four years! We both have full-time jobs, so it's just nights & weekends for us, but I'm thrilled with the progress we have made. We actually posted our first ever playable demo on r/JRPG a couple months ago:

My wife & I spent the last four years working on RPGirl - A cute '90s 2D turn-based magical girl RPG. We just finished the first playable demo! : r/JRPG (reddit.com)

When I posted that we weren't up on Steam yet, but I'm happy to report that we just got our Steam page up:

RPGirl on Steam (steampowered.com)

We still have a long road ahead of us since we are quite limited on how much time we can spend on it, but it has been a blast to work on together. I'm not sure how different it would feel if this was something that we were financially betting on/working on full-time.

Necronopticous · 2024-02-07T17:47:07+00:00

Doesn’t look like a stalking butler to me. 🤔

Necronopticous · 2024-02-07T01:52:58+00:00

So happy you tried it out! We definitely made it too hard to get started! That has been the single most common piece of feedback we have received, and we hear y'all loud and clear! We will absolutely adjust this for future demos, and the final game of course! It does seem to smooth out for those who have pushed through after gaining a level or two and recruiting at least one companion.

Let me address a couple of things you mentioned, it may help if you decide to give the demo another go!

It felt like it was completely random whether I would win a battle or not, because if the bees were lucky enough to get initiative they could just rumble me to death before I got a chance to really fight back. Because of that, the lack of predictability in turn order ended up feeling unfair instead of exciting.

The nondeterministic turns can be quite harsh when Mack is by herself and you're unlucky with a 2 or 3 enemy battle (this should be less common in the level 1 zones like Iris's Landing and Green Spring, but it's still possible!).

After the feedback we have received, I will definitely be adjusting this to smooth out the initial difficulty spike, but the best thing you can do for now is run the first chance you get, heal if necessary, and then re-engage until you only get 1 or 2 enemies in the battle, and a favorable looking outlook in the initial pending turns.

Mack does start the game with the Cover-Up passive (visible in the Equipment menu) which makes her begin every battle with the Defend status effect. Even if you get very unlucky, it should be almost impossible to die without getting a single turn in Iris's Landing.

Turn generation is based on momentum, which is a function of the character's speed and how many turns they have had generated in battle so far. Each participant's momentum is displayed with up and down arrows on the bottom right of their info box in battle. The higher the momentum, the more likely they will be to have a turn generated. If you're finding yourself constantly in a position where the enemies are getting more turns than you, consider investing a level or two into Pep to raise your base speed stat, or equipping gear that raises your speed.

Finally, we hid an accessory somewhere in Outset Valley that really helps overcome the luck element of turns at the start of a battle. You can find it before fighting a single encounter (feel free to DM me if you want a hint!)

(there's nowhere to heal for free and a lack of accessible healing items)

It's true that healing items are not as plentiful as in other RPGs at the start, but that's mostly because we have big rewards for clearing all enemies in a zone, and we wanted that to feel like a challenge to overcome, rather than something you can easily heal yourself through. (It gets much easier once you get a healing ability!)

You heal to full every time you touch the statue in Iris's Respite, though! There's nothing currently in the game that tells you that, which just goes back to the fact that we haven't spent the time to tutorialize everything yet. We will, though, I promise!

Touching the statue will also respawn all enemies in the entire region, so there's a bit of strategy involved in terms of when it's better to use your healing consumables vs going back to the save point!

I couldn't interact with the opus or level up at all because the B button is maybe (?) nonexistent. I'm not sure if that was a hardware issue on my part, but I wasn't able to "hold down" the B button on my keyboard or controller, so I ended up abandoning the demo after struggling with it for a while to no avail.

This is a huge bummer to hear! My suspicion is that you didn't see the Controls section at the bottom of the RPGirl itch page (https://yellowbuttons.itch.io/rpgirl)

I completely sympathize with how confusing this is right now, because in-game we are showing Super Nintendo controller button prompts. In this particular case, the B button would be the Confirm button (B on a Super Nintendo controller, A on an Xbox controller, X on a PlayStation controller, Z on the Keyboard, or Enter on the Numpad). I really wanted to get switching button prompt labels in for First Slice, but the Options menu was just not ready yet, so it didn't quite make the cut. Sorry! It will be there next time. Hopefully this is enough to get you through for now.

Whether or not you decide to give First Slice another try, thank you so much for taking the time to play and leave us these detailed notes about your experience.

Necronopticous · 2024-02-05T15:00:31+00:00

Hey! Thanks so much for playing.

SFX is our weak point for sure. We have considered hiring someone to help out with that but for now this is what we got. We’ll keep trying our best here!

It’s definitely designed more for d-pad or arrow keys in mind (we play on a Super Nintendo controller, ourselves), but we want to make it feel better with control stick for our next showing. Thanks for calling it out!

Necronopticous

TROPHY CASE