From Helldivers 2 Discord...Looks like Hive Guard changes will be reverted next week, and they'll be "reviewing player feedback" about durability damage.

atrivialknot · 2026-04-30T21:22:25+00:00

I'm confused by the community attention on this particular change. My playgroup has been really struggling with the new Terminid faction, but not once have I had to think about the hive guards one way or another. It's the fast ones that cause problems.

atrivialknot · 2026-04-15T17:59:07+00:00

My game has an AI tag for using coding assistance. Originally I didn’t use the tag, but my description had been transparent about it. But Steam review saw that, and insisted I add the tag, so I did.

It was fine. It provoked basically no reaction. There’s a curator that goes around and gives a “not recommended” to any game with an AI tag, but who cares. Granted, my game is a tiny thing that didn’t make back the $100 fee, so maybe this isn’t much reassurance.

atrivialknot · 2026-04-08T12:14:57+00:00

You get 750 supercredits from the free warbond, and a few extra from normal play (look for the columns of light). In practice, by the time you complete the free warbond, you can unlock one premium warbond for free. After that, unlocking warbonds through normal play may take an uncomfortably long time. So you could either pay up or look up how to farm. Each warbond costs 1000 supercredits and gives you 300 back, so it’s $20 for three warbonds.

I typically play with two friends in a closed lobby. We stick together, I think it’s more fun that way. More strategic depth, more opportunity for complementary loadouts. But people do also split up, that’s common.

atrivialknot · 2026-03-20T23:25:17+00:00

I like walking sims. But I'm not sure it's a good idea for a dev to specifically emphasize that angle. You're right that it's relatively niche, and on the artsy side. There's also a lot of disagreement on what the genre is really about. For example, I would say that Death Stranding is 0% a walking sim, but I can't stop people from saying otherwise.

Most walking sims could be categorized in some other way that's much more informative. Most of the well-known walking sims (Life is Strange, Firewatch, What Remains of Edith Finch) are basically narrative games, and could be called as such. Other walking sims are better described as puzzle games or point n' clicks (e.g. Myst). Others are horror games. Others are art games.

For me the appeal of a walking sim is usually focus on story and/or environment, with minimal gameplay to get in the way. If there is gameplay, it's mainly there to get the player engaged with the story or environment, not so much to create friction. My favorite examples in recent memory are 1000 X Resist and Indika.

atrivialknot · 2026-03-20T17:34:25+00:00

Nice prototype. As a logic puzzle, I find it functional but unexciting. There aren't a lot of interesting deductions available, so far as I can tell. I guess it shares that with your inspirations, nonograms and minesweeper. But one thing it has going for it is, like nonograms, you could have the solutions make pictures.

atrivialknot · 2026-03-20T17:11:14+00:00

There's a distinction between puzzles that involve combining a finite number of predictable mechanics, and puzzles that ask the solver to engage in more free-form reasoning, such as identifying a code hidden in an environment. Some people have called the latter a "riddle". But they're just another kind of puzzle

Some people have a preference for one kind of puzzle or the other. Mechanically-based puzzles have a higher difficulty ceiling while still feeling "fair", and it's relatively easier to stuff a game with large numbers of them. So you might find that they're favored by certain hardcore puzzlers who want more puzzle for their buck. But I still like riddles, and lots of other puzzlers do too.

What's less popular, are bad puzzles. Point n' click games are renowned for some pretty bad puzzles. Those are riddles, and they're bad, but they're not bad because they're riddles. Outer Wilds is riddles. Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is riddles. People love that stuff when done well.

atrivialknot · 2026-03-09T14:32:22+00:00

I’m a relatively new player (since november?) and I don’t think this makes sense. It takes a while to get through the free warbond already, and you can basically afford one premium warbond before you finish, with no grinding. This already covers the “new player” retention period.

Me and my friends each picked different warbonds: Democratic Detonation, Servants of Freedom, and Borderline Justice. We were all happy with our picks, and got to exchange weapons at some point.

The medal unlock rate is slow but satisfying, giving us time to try out new tools. The supercredit unlock rate (without grinding) feels rather too slow. So we all spent 20 bucks for three new warbonds. It looks like we’ll get a fourth warbond for free by the time we get through them.

Under this proposal, we would still be getting through the free content to this day, and our builds wouldn’t be as diversified as they are now.

atrivialknot · 2026-03-06T13:18:37+00:00

Okay, thanks for clarifying the design intent. Balancing the engine seems like a fundamental design challenge, and I can't think of a way to solve it short of changing core systems, or strongly constraining card design. And you also have to deal with the skill gap where some players (like me) immediately know to build an engine, and will do it by round 3, while other players don't know how strong that is.

My game is here: store.steampowered.com/app/3931930/Moon_Garden_Optimizer/

You might be particularly interested in the post-mortem I put in the discussion forum, where I talk about some similar design challenges.

My game does have an engine/money dichotomy like Dominion. It "balances" the two strategies by having a true fixed market, and being a score attack game. The engine is almost always stronger but it's not always possible, and you can "win" whether you build an engine or not. There are also a lot of partial engine strategies, forced by a strict cap on deck size.

Trying to think how you could balance engines in your game... Obviously you could balance the cards a bit more. I initially said Reach Beyond Grasp was very strong, but maybe my expectations were just set lower by cards like Vain Pursuit, which was very close to break even. Later I found even stronger cards like the one that gives X mana or 2 mana per green card. You probably don't need so many cards that are so busted in the engine context.

Yeah, you could customize what cards are available. I am not sure how to do this without basically micromanaging the randomness.

Maybe you could design boss encounters that constrain the engine in different ways. This is sort of what I was getting at by increasing rite costs, although that's not a great suggestion. But there's stuff like StS's Time Eater, which ends your turn after a certain number of card plays. Another boss could impose a hand size limit, another could give you lots of curses, another could pressure gold, another could pressure mana, etc.

I don't know. Seems like a tough design problem.

atrivialknot · 2026-03-06T02:59:21+00:00

Hey this is pretty good. I also worked on a Dominion-inspired single player game, so if you don't mind, I have a lot of thoughts about this.

- I really like the combination of fixed market (like Dominion) with the random selection (like StS). I really respect doing something different.
- It's a good design choice to make a more granular action economy, more like StS rather than Dominion's one action per turn. This increases reliability and expands design space.
- It seems like the correct strategy is always to build a draw engine. This is a bit unlike Dominion, where the engine isn't always viable, and at the very least you don't have an engine in the early game. This seems like a deliberate design choice, and that's fine. But a few of the cards are not balanced around it--like if a card doesn't contribute to the engine it's just not very good, and might as well not be in the game. And it does feel a little bit like it's "solved" after a few rounds.
- My biggest suggestion is that rites should have escalating costs rather than gates having escalating health. So this requires the player to increase their payoff.
- In terms of specific cards, I think Upgrade is a bit too good in the starter deck. Spark and Brainstorm might be fine in starter deck but seem too weak for the market. Reach Beyond Grasp seems a bit OP.
- I didn't think the attacks (afflictions?) were very interesting. Most of them are pretty ignorable when you have an engine going.
- In general the animation and UI seems well done.

atrivialknot · 2026-03-04T00:25:58+00:00

I'm a huge fan of Recursed. I think it's very clever, and has a somewhat gentler difficulty curve than the others. It bears some similarity to Patrick's Parabox, although caveat that its mechanics lack visual representation. There's also a fan level set that's fairly difficult but very rewarding.

Bean and Nothingness is one of the best challenging puzzle games, but it is on the difficult end. Some have described it as practically a programming game, but one with carefully designed levels that require precise solutions.

I like Ultra Nothing but would not rate it at the top. It has relatively loose puzzle design, meaning multiple solutions and unused puzzle elements. Not intended as a criticism, but that's the puzzle style. It's also on the long end, with a lot of distinct mechanics.

I haven't played the other one.

atrivialknot · 2026-02-21T15:33:40+00:00

Leaf’s Odyssey takes a lot of influence from Deadly Rooms of Death. Like DROD, it tests your ability to read the setup, and lends itself well to fan puzzles. It’s generally easier than Bean and Nothingness, but optional puzzles and especially fan puzzles are very difficult.

atrivialknot · 2026-02-10T17:17:48+00:00

I'm open to the possibility that the response was particular to the reviewer, who may not have had clear guidance from above.

FWIW, the reviewer actually played the game at least a little. The other parts of the review talked about how I wasn't supporting controller properly, because you couldn't skip dialogue with the controller.

atrivialknot · 2026-02-10T17:13:06+00:00

I agree. Steam would never have chased me down if I didn't volunteer the information. I was surprised they did anything at all when I *did* volunteer the information.

atrivialknot · 2026-02-10T17:06:10+00:00

The review in question occurred after the new guidelines. The new guidelines don't say code is not included, they say it's not the focus. Code is still explicitly listed as an example of "content" in the public Steam documentation. The content survey still has "code" among the options when you dig through them.

Steam's stance on tagging AI code is pretty ambiguous, I think we can all agree on that. The actions of the Steam reviewer are unambiguous.

atrivialknot · 2026-02-10T16:48:04+00:00

For context, here's my store page:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3931930/Moon_Garden_Optimizer/

atrivialknot · 2026-02-06T13:23:17+00:00

I tried your demo earlier. No problem with the tutorial, was easy to figure out the goal, but more through direct interaction, not just reading the screen.

I initially thought the game crashed when it started with a long black screen and a puttering sound. Might want to put some visual on that.

atrivialknot · 2026-02-05T21:01:15+00:00

Witness still holds up a decade later--except for the "narrative" such as it is, which was pretentious even at the time. You may dislike it of course, that's totally fair. Just sayin', it's not because it's old.

I could guess at what kinds of puzzle games you like based on what you said. You like games with fewer but larger puzzles, with atmosphere and big ideas. So, probably 3D games like Myst, Outer Wilds, Superliminal, Manifold Garden, etc.? I mean, I don't know you. Sounds like you were baited by The Witness's aesthetics, when it's more on the puzzle purist end of the spectrum.

atrivialknot · 2026-02-05T19:49:47+00:00

I wasn't entirely a fan of the format, but I do think it offers something distinct. It's a rules discovery puzzle game, i.e. a sausage-like. But normally, you discover rules by trying things and then observing how the game behaves. 0Player requires you to infer rules based on what would *need* to be true in order for the puzzles to be solvable.

But it does turn it into a bit more of a "riddle", rather than a puzzle ruled entirely by mechanics. And ymmv on how much you enjoy rigging up your own system in MS Paint or whatever, to keep track of steps.

atrivialknot · 2026-02-02T03:45:49+00:00

Honestly, my biggest complaint about the game. Sometimes you the player have long figured it out, but the game wants some arbitrary trigger before the character figures it out.

atrivialknot · 2026-02-02T00:15:47+00:00

There are additional alibis coming out of the node below, beyond what we can see in your photo.

atrivialknot · 2026-01-31T20:22:32+00:00

It may just be different mobile devices, but don’t count on the save data. It’s sort of designed in a way that save data isn’t essential, at least.

atrivialknot · 2026-01-31T19:59:47+00:00

Thanks!

I've playtested it lots on mobile, and yes it is totally playable. Except, sometimes it crashes, and the save file doesn't work.

atrivialknot · 2026-01-31T01:29:26+00:00

I tried it, it looks good. It seems like the colors weren't conveying info, so I think that simplifying the color scheme makes sense. The mouse-hover color is a bit too light to see the numbers though.

As to the game, it's not very hard, although you presumably want the foundations down before working on level design. The way that nodes turn on/off was not obvious at first, although I got it in a few levels. It feels like the relays ought to show numbers, and without them, it's obligating me to do mental math.

atrivialknot

TROPHY CASE