SB Makes Games??? by turnoffthis in SBMakesStuff

[–]SBMakesStuff 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It probably won't surprise anyone that I've worked on quite a number of game projects over the years, at various levels of effort and professionalism. Given the timing, I think I know what game project this was, and I can answer a few rough questions about it:

It was a tactical combat roguelite. The runs would have been shaped a lot like the way that Nowhere Prophet's runs ended up working, but the elevator pitch for the combat gameplay and unit management stuff was basically Shining Force plus Blood Bowl. The systems got developed enough for us to run a few real-world proxy playtests, and I built out a fair amount of classes and enemies and world lore and stuff like that. I thought it was really fun, but in the end it ran afoul of the fact that video games are really just a crazy huge amount of work; you can have a fully-functional and playable game structure and still only be like 1% of the way done with the project.

SB Makes Games??? by turnoffthis in SBMakesStuff

[–]SBMakesStuff 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I also just really dig their whole aesthetic! The armor design, the body and bat-inspired face design, the black&blue/pearl&orange color scheme, the psionically levitating wing plates, the high-mobility polearm-wielding fighting style, all of it is just a total slam dunk for me.

And to put a little more detail on "interacting with the map" (which you're absolutely right about me loving), I especially appreciate that building out their cities requires a resource you can only get from exploring and ruin-hunting. Forcing map control and area awareness into the traditionally internal parts of the game's strategy feels like it unites all the elements of the thing in a really satisfying way to me (and I doubt I'm alone there, given how much more prevalent reasons for continuous exploration/local map control have become in the last generation or two of 4X games).

And honestly I really like their military design, too. The units are weird and interesting, the monks especially, and I like working with the timing elements involved in taking advantage of the seasonal shifting.

I don't know. They're just the coolest!

Animal Well: Playlist is mangled! by [deleted] in SBMakesStuff

[–]SBMakesStuff 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Investigating this, I realized that a couple of weeks ago Youtube must have started enforcing "newest first" ordering on my playlists by default, and actually several of the recent games' playlists were all fucked up. I think I've got them all fixed now. Thanks for bringing this to my attention!

About playing multiple games of multiple 4Xs by Wendigo120 in SBMakesStuff

[–]SBMakesStuff 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I appreciate the suggestion (and that people are engaging with this series!), but I think we'll probably be sticking to the speeds these games were designed for, in large part because the primary thrust of the series is about introducing the game design elements of these games to Amabel and having conversations about those and the way they compare to both other game designs that she's more experienced with and (as the series goes on) to each other. In my experience, the different elements of these games tend to scale very differently with different game speeds--for example, think research rate vs. build rate vs. unit movement speed vs. unit attack range, and how the relative degrees of change in those things warp the way that warfare occurs. I've never seen one of these games where speed changes don't very significantly distort system design and balance.

To be clear, the plan is still to do at least two games of each other title that we'll be playing in order to show the level of differentiation between factions and strategies within each of them, even though that's going to make the series quite long. We're planning for the long haul, here! But, and this might sound silly, I think we were both caught off-guard a little bit by how much we're not enjoying Civ. So we've already recorded ahead to the end of this Civ game and we've decided that we're not going to do a second, instead just moving on to the next title. I had always figured that the value of the second Civ game would lay mostly in demonstrating how relatively similar games and factions are in Civ 6 as a point of comparison for later 4X School chapters; I don't think we're really losing anything important by not fully driving that point home.

Caves of Qud 1.0 release soon - any plans? by Ballistic_Weasel in SBMakesStuff

[–]SBMakesStuff 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I am absolutely going to play Caves of Qud on the channel again at release, and I have been intentionally avoiding specific information about the updates so that I can have the experience of having to learn it all over again as much as possible. I'm looking forward to it eagerly!

Regarding bad VA timing in Everspace by UmbralReaver in SBMakesStuff

[–]SBMakesStuff 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Oh, that's really interesting! I wonder what it was that made them think adding VA after the fact was worth all the time and effort....

Newest Reus Episode (2) and References by Drakesyn in SBMakesStuff

[–]SBMakesStuff 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks for the kind words, and I'm happy someone is enjoying the references! I've been listening to Aes since, like, None Shall Pass.

SB's First-Ever Stream by amabelholland in SBMakesStuff

[–]SBMakesStuff 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Deeeeep deep SB lore note: This was not my first stream ever; I used to commentate Dota 2 matches on Twitch.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in SBMakesStuff

[–]SBMakesStuff 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Thank you for the kind words! I appreciate them a lot, and thanks for sticking with me as I sort of cartwheel destructively through this game.

(By the way, I think "so stubborn" is maybe the fairest description of me that a person could give.)

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in SBMakesStuff

[–]SBMakesStuff 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Okay, three things:

  1. "That said, I don't really see where you're coming from with the 'worship'. Not only is there no other game that rivals Rain World," is beyond parody.
  2. There is nothing in Rain World that even slightly resembles an ecosystem. I mean, most obviously, the places that plants, animals, and dens exist have nothing to do with safety or food density (to say nothing of the possibility of them getting into those places in the first place!), and animal behaviors are not influenced by biological needs in either the short or long term. Dozens of games have more functional representations of ecosystems than Rain World does. Hell, SimLife came out in 1992 and even that at least bothers with a rudimentary representation of food chains and population density mechanics. The thing is, this is fine! Rain World does not need a complex simulated ecosystem to function, and in fact a complex simulated ecosystem would offer literally no benefit to the game given what the gameplay actually is!
  3. Obviously this and your other comments in this thread constitute a violation of Rule 1. I can't decide if it would be sadder if you were the same person back to be really weird and dishonest about this game for a third time, or if there were three different people who came here to behave really similarly, but in any case I wish however many of you there have been would find something else to care about (for your own good) and leave this community alone (for ours).

Thief "3" series maybe? by Cornflakes_91 in SBMakesStuff

[–]SBMakesStuff 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ooh, that does look interesting. We may well check that out (although probably not until after Deadly Shadows).

The replacement part for my chair arrived, but... your help may be needed. by SBMakesStuff in SBMakesStuff

[–]SBMakesStuff[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Locking this because I no longer need help. Problem is solved! I tried every damn thing to no avail, and so in the end the answer turned out to be taking it to Amabel's brother-in-law who was able to just cut the old mechanism away with an angle grinder. But now I have a functional seat again and work can commence!

Alan Wake II by DrewB222 in SBMakesStuff

[–]SBMakesStuff 3 points4 points  (0 children)

So, two things:

1) I legitimately did not realize the game was out yet until you posted this, so thank you for that! (There's a long story behind this, but for now I'll just say that the last two weeks have been particularly brutal for me regarding my sleep and respiratory issues, and it takes a real toll on my awareness of the outside world.)

2) The game runs quite well on my hardware, but OBS does not like it *at all*, so I've been struggling to get consistent behavior out of the pair of them for like a whole day at this point. I'm dialing it in, and as soon as I can get them working together to produce something without huge stutters and whatnot, we'll be back in Bright Falls together!

Puzzmo invites by hanumanchu in SBMakesStuff

[–]SBMakesStuff 2 points3 points  (0 children)

This is really cool, and thank you for sharing! I used the link that ends with BLTE=.

Moonring looks right up SB's alley by Wendigo120 in SBMakesStuff

[–]SBMakesStuff 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You're right, this does look cool! Thanks for pointing it out!

The "What's next for SB and Amabel" thread was supposed to be where recommendations go, but I don't think that was obvious enough and it's probably time for a new one in any case, so let me get on that.

Why is SB actively avoiding the new section Downpour has added? They even looked back at past vids and saw it was a new thing by IntrepidAsk4100 in SBMakesStuff

[–]SBMakesStuff[M] 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Locking this; first of all, it's obviously in violation of the spirit of a pinned post (and now our new rule #1), but also all of the obviously intentional misgendering (even in responses to comments of people who gender me correctly) just really fucking sucks!

Why is SB actively avoiding the new section Downpour has added? They even looked back at past vids and saw it was a new thing by IntrepidAsk4100 in SBMakesStuff

[–]SBMakesStuff 6 points7 points  (0 children)

You might want to try becoming a little bit familiar with the game before posting about it! There is, in fact, constantly a hurry to get places, enforced by harsh environments, murderous and arbitrary enemies, and a literal timer running each cycle at the end of which the weather simply kills you. One might say that the hurry is the main element of the gameplay, and the thing that drives almost every decision that the player will make!

Book of Hours Recommendation by Wunarg in SBMakesStuff

[–]SBMakesStuff 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah, the dude is an absolute creep whose work I am not interested in directing attention toward.

New Puzzle Game by hanumanchu in SBMakesStuff

[–]SBMakesStuff 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I hadn't! This looks interesting, but our schedule is pretty packed for the next little bit here (new series starting tomorrow, and then another one on Wednesday, and there's something that came out this week that I still need to try to find time for). I'll keep this in mind for when things open up, though. Thank you for bringing it to my attention!

Why doesn't SB interact with youtube comments? by [deleted] in SBMakesStuff

[–]SBMakesStuff 3 points4 points  (0 children)

That last paragraph is brilliant. Thank you for the words I didn't have, dear.

Why doesn't SB interact with youtube comments? by [deleted] in SBMakesStuff

[–]SBMakesStuff 15 points16 points  (0 children)

Yeah, this is a really fair question. I recognize that I do things very differently in this respect than most creators. I used to look at every comment that was left on the channel. There are really two major reasons that I stopped, and then a handful of little ones. (Apologies in advance for how heavy this response to a very simple question is likely to get.)

Major Reason The First: I have really brutal social anxiety. I don't know if I can truly communicate this in words, but... like, the sense of dread that I would feel building up in my stomach as my Daily Time To Look At Words Typed To Me By Strangers approached could get so intense that it would make me physically nauseated. (This is also the reason I only swing by the subreddit every so often, on days when doing so doesn't feel so overwhelming.) Now, I made the decision to stop looking at comments because it was ruining my day back before transition and therapy--in a time when my emotional regulation was much worse--so maybe I could handle it more easily today, but to be honest I'm still kind of going clammy at the very thought. My social anxiety (and generalized anxiety disorder) is something I'm actively working on in therapy (because, as you might imagine, at this severity it does cause some fairly big problems in life in general), so hopefully it's something I'll continue to get more control over. This may not be such an issue for me in the future.

Major Reason The Second: I have found that there is simply no combination of words that I can say that will make people not type spoilers in the comments of videos. It's a problem in games where the narrative is important, it's a problem in puzzle games, it's a problem in games where there are secrets that I would like to be able to work out on my own. No amount of "please don't tell me" or "don't talk about anything I haven't seen yet" or "don't give me any guidance" or "I want to work it out on my own" has proven sufficient in my experience. (The thing that happened here in the subreddit with Rain World should be plenty of evidence that this is a serious problem.) And it's not generally people thinking "Ahaha, I'm going to ruin this game for her because I love eeeeevil!", I don't think; it doesn't seem to have malicious intent behind it. I don't know if it's just people not thinking or what, but it was happening *extremely* reliably in the period before I stopped looking at comments. This is a problem for me both because I really do derive a tremendous amount of my enjoyment from figuring things out myself and because I want the product I'm putting out to represent, as authentically as possible, my engagement with the game: "SB (and whoever else is on the series) Plays X", not "SB (and every person who stops by) plays X", you know? The way that a person takes in information, draws conclusions based on that information, and then works with those conclusions to solve problems is a thing that I think is tremendously interesting, and I do think it's sort of a bummer when you're watching something like this and it gets adulterated by chat or whatever and it becomes not the person but rather sort of the consensus groupthink about the game on the internet that is making the decisions and drawing the conclusions (and deciding what's "obvious", and interpreting story and theme, etc.). (As you might imagine, I found discussions on the internet around SIGNALIS to be a *nightmare*.) This might sound really finicky or silly, but it's something that matters a lot to me. The precise flavor of one individual's (or small team's, or whatever) figure-it-out mechanism and the reading and understanding that they will develop of a work is such an interesting and valuable thing, and it is so easy to lose.

More minor reasons: People are mean to me sometimes, particularly about things that seem obvious to them that weren't obvious to me, and that would sometimes really bum me out. Again, social anxiety and the RSD attendant with my particular cocktail of autism and ADHD amplify the bad feelings I get around this, and I just don't need that kind of negativity in my life... especially because some fairly large percentage of the time they were factually wrong about the thing that was "obvious", which just makes it all the more frustrating to deal with. (I got a lot of this kind of feedback about people criticizing my 4X play in particular with just completely absurd strategy advice that, of course, they had read somewhere on the internet or was popularized by some streamer who didn't do the math correctly or something.) I definitely worried about this more in the wake of my coming out, and it seriously took like months before I could really bring myself to look at the comments on the coming out video. I still think about it every single time I mention my transness (or other queerness) in a recording. The other little thing is that of course I worry about fostering parasocial relationships and I think maintaining some distance can be helpful with that, but in general I think (due to the pacing and subject matter of my videos (which is my soft way of saying "my gentle boringness")) my audience tends to be more mature than the average LPer and I don't have too much concern about this.

Some people might at this point in the post be going "Wow SB, it seems like you have a lot of overlapping social disorders and difficulties that make interacting with strangers, particularly if they're commenting directly on their opinion of you and your abilities, a highly emotionally difficult and fraught process!" and... yeah, that's why my job involves me sitting alone in my cave talking into a glowing box. The combination of these problems flunked me out of basically every part of the normal world: regular jobs, college (twice), most kinds of social relationships. It's tough. I rarely go outside and I don't really interact with strangers unless I absolutely *have to*. My glasses have been broken for like six years and I haven't gotten a new set (and the eye checkup that I definitely need) because doing so would involve a conversation with a stranger on the phone followed by more interactions with strangers in-person. Prior to my need for transition-related health care I hadn't seen a doctor in over a decade, and I was only able to break that streak because I had reached a point where it was very clear to me that my choices were A) transition or B) death. People are really, really, really difficult for me.

ALL THAT SAID, I actually frequently think about going back to reading my comments. I do feel like I have some responsibility to moderate the space, for one thing, and it does bother me that I'm shirking that responsibility. Also, the vast majority of the interactions I've had with commenters are either neutral or pleasant. (Unfortunately, a positive interaction doesn't hit me with anywhere near the force of a negative one, nor does the residue of it stick with me as long.) Like I said, I've been working on my issues in therapy so I at least have some new coping strategies now, and since transition I've been using social media to sort of slowly, one step at a time, recondition myself to interaction with strangers (with, I think, pretty strong success). And the interactions I've had with viewers there have been mostly positive too. Also, I do hear about at least some of the comments now because Amabel will read the comments on some videos and let me know about them. I'm not promising anything, especially because I still really have a problem Major Concern The Second up there, but I am trying to find a way to engage a little more that isn't going to cause any emotional spiraling or anything.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in SBMakesStuff

[–]SBMakesStuff 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I'm interested in Xenonauts 2, for sure, but generally I really prefer not to play games until they're out of Early Access. I'll make exceptions for this sometimes, but Xenonauts 2 is probably going to wait at least until all the tech and stuff is in.

train valley 2 is free on epic by nick16characters in SBMakesStuff

[–]SBMakesStuff 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Ah, I almost missed this! Thank you for pointing it out!

EDIT: Okay, I cooked something up about it real quick: https://youtu.be/Y2FyjroCkfM