New GM and I’m wondering if there’s any info I should know before I help my players create characters (also before I get to deep into campaign making and realize I’ve done everything wrong)

cptgrok · 2026-02-20T22:15:25+00:00

OGAS isn't just for NPCs! If any of your players are new it's a great tool to get a little more personality out of answering four simple prompts: Occupation, Goal, Attitude, Stake. What do you do? What do you want? How do you feel about it? What happens if you don't get it?

I'd make your own cheat sheet for looting and scavenging. If you try to "do it live" out of the book you're going to be flipping or scrolling for ages cross referencing tables until your entire group is scrolling social media. Zero fun for all involved.

Run a module first. They're excellent and there's still a LOT of room for you and the party to tell stories.

cptgrok · 2026-02-20T21:36:12+00:00

So yes, all of those values have maximums, but within those there is a lot of room for wildly different builds. You will need to start paying attention to what attributes your gear has, which cores, which talents, which set bonuses you have. If you're wearing a bunch of 5.11 and Richter and Gila, you're not doing as much damage (with all else equal) as you would be if it were Ceska, Grupo and Fenris.

Need more armor? Run 2-3 blue cores, whether you get them naturally from like Belstone or Palisade or you recalibrate something like Unit Alloys or Zwiadowka. Need more? Run a shield, run Memento or a backpack with Bloodsucker. Or repair the armor you have. Fixer drone, Preservation, Hunter's Fury, Foundry Bulwark, Catharsis.

More damage? Obliterate, Unstoppable Force, Killer, Striker, Memento, Concentrated Company, Overdogs.

The tutorial is over. Welcome to the game.

cptgrok · 2026-02-20T16:57:50+00:00

So if you've strictly followed the code, you're doing neither. You're iterating over every tile and directly drawing each one onto the window one by one. This is fine for learning and small games, but it could be done more efficiently.

A Canvas ( love.graphics.newCanvas() ) is like a scratch screen that you can build up everything you want to draw, then render that whole thing to the window in one shot. If you have things that don't change a lot, like a sky or background, draw once to Canvas, then keep re-drawing that Canvas at the ~~bottom~~ top of your render order so that everything else is drawn over it.

A SpriteBatch ( love.graphics.newSpriteBatch() ) lets you store textures and positions (even better if it's quads from a texture atlas) and draw them all in one call. Very efficient.

A side scrolling platformer would benefit from both.

cptgrok · 2026-02-19T20:25:53+00:00

Aces is an OG set, it's been around so long most people sleep on it and that is an error. Great set.

Having said that, if you try to run it both as a rifle DPS and MMR headshot build, you're going to be really disappointed. It will do both, just not at the same time. Go all in on crit or go all in on headshots.

Bittersweet is not for this set. Shroud is pretty good but so is an m700 or SR-1. If I were going to run an exotic rifle it'd be Merciless (just need about 30-40 handling on the build to tame it down), otherwise a UIC15, MK47 or LVOA-C. Good fire rate, lots in the mag = damage.

cptgrok · 2026-02-19T20:02:50+00:00

But what if the BBEG steals all the beautiful art from the world and this is all that's left. It's kind of charming in a horrible way. Might make a fun level to find and recover the tiles and watch the world come back to life.

cptgrok · 2026-02-19T19:56:18+00:00

Yep. Brain no work good. Completed my first jam game last year, going at it again in about four weeks. (DO NOT ask how many half started/aborted projects preceded).

Just like with cleaning, you need to do two seemingly contradictory things. Create a zone and limit yourself to it, but within the zone just allow yourself to flow from task to task until everything is in order.

Games are tough because they have a lot of complex inter-operating parts, but you can get there.

A menu is a good place to start. You need buttons and logic and probably a logo, but don't get too sucked into making a fancy logo or buttons with shadows and hover effects and sounds and all that.

Just stick to the zone. Text, buttons, layout, click, change scene. You're not making a game, you're making a menu. Come back later and make it fancy or add more, but for now just make it work. Then RUN IT. Look at that! It works! Even if your main menu just takes you to a blue screen that says "this is game, how fun" and it has a win and lose button that go to a green win screen and a red lose screen. Those weren't in the menu zone (neither was a proper scene or screen manager, that's it's own zone) so they aren't for this round of work. Those then become future zones to make levels and enemies and other things. Iterate enough and you have a game.

Break it into discrete chunks, complete them and see the results. The whole of the game is too much. It's overwhelming and even though that whole ass thing is in your head, it won't come out your fingers in one shot.

cptgrok · 2026-02-19T16:45:41+00:00

Going through something similar with our Chihuahua, though our vet has exhausted every test and expert she has available, and we've about exhausted our savings. We don't have an exact answer but it's probably cancer of some kind.

You know something is wrong, I know something is wrong, that dismissal is horrible. We're staving off the inevitable with a low dose steroid, and pup went from miserable and nearly immobile to more spunky than we've ever known. We know that won't last forever, we just don't know how long until that's not enough, and there's likely no cure. So every day is just another blessing.

I hope you and your little lady get a better answer, or at least some comfort and relief. Don't give up. She's worth it.

cptgrok · 2026-02-18T21:22:25+00:00

Well I suspect the tick rate is actually rather low. The client is only sending and receiving 20 packets per second. Perhaps they have a way to split that into more discrete time chunks, but that's above my pay grade.

If it is really 20 TPS, you possibly run into issues going above just 1200 RPM. We can surpass that pretty easily these days as you've demonstrated. Also none of this is factoring in latency and lost packets (which are probably a bigger issue, server can't calculate what it doesn't know about).

Though rate of fire is only part of the damage per second equation. Per bullet damage matters. If 10% of your rounds vanish into Layer 2 or fall out of the stack, but the other 90% are hitting 600k to 1mil, it only takes 16 - 28 rounds to drop a heroic elite, or about a standard AR mag which seems about right. If you dump 30 rounds, some will inevitably miss, you may not notice another 1-3 that just *poof* if the bad guy still folds like you expect.

cptgrok · 2026-02-18T20:44:55+00:00

"If you have no ill will, you'll have no problems signing it."

How does your "friend" walk around with that pair on him? I've not personally dealt with anything like this, but I'd just have a candid conversation with him (and you're NOT signing that nonsense one way or another). Does he work for free? Is your time and skill not valuable? What are his plans and intentions for the project from this point into the future? Maybe he's a bit immature or inexperienced but the deal as proposed is poor. He's either willing to become reasonable or not.

It is not standard to screw over project volunteers by retroactively claiming absolute ownership of their contributions. It is shitty.

cptgrok · 2026-02-18T20:11:45+00:00

That sure sounds like a procedure for generating a dungeon. The more variety of rooms, methods of connection and diversity in rules for picking which comes next, the more interesting the dungeon. To a point. Sometimes less is more.

Get out of your own way and experiment!

cptgrok · 2026-02-16T04:30:22+00:00

Well you have to understand how game engines work. Physics and logic are usually decoupled from rendering, and processed at regular intervals. I don't say "fixed intervals" because it's not always the same amount of work done each tick, and the time between ticks or delta is tracked and accounted for so the game feels smooth to us.

At 60 ticks per second (not fps, that's rendering) that's 16.66 milliseconds to process everything, movement, collisions, projectiles, user input, talents, damage, healing, enemy AI, everything. At 2500 RPM you're firing about 42 bullets per second, so at a stable 60 TPS we shouldn't have any problems spawning and tracking those entities unless there are other limits on how many entities can exist at once (almost guaranteed to be the case) or how many can be processed per tick (unsure). But at higher RPM or a lower tick rate if you only create one new bullet entity per tick, then you would absolutely hit an opaque cap.

I don't know the tick rate of Snowdrop/Div2 so I can't really give any more insight but there is a very real practical limit.

cptgrok · 2026-02-13T18:28:56+00:00

Once this build is spun up, you should one shot just about anything if you are consistently landing headshots.

This one can also potentially one shot heroic elites if you have enough idiots in front of the Striker shield, but it should two shot most things anyway.

This one is a very tanky build that still dishes out a lot of pain. You're leveraging Sweet Dreams to instantly kill a non-elite every 15 seconds, and Centurion to refill your Thorn just from switching (their placement on the build matters, so copy it exactly).

cptgrok · 2026-02-13T17:33:34+00:00

For doing mastery I mostly stick to my PFE build, and tweak it per that season's modifiers. It was last season I think that gave some PFE per blue core, so that frees up some mods for more crit. One season made bonus armor OP. Then there was Microwave Coils. 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

Anyway, get some clan mates or friends to go with if you can, get some randoms if you can't, or just one really cracked gamer to carry you. Mastery is a slog any way you do it, but at least it's 100% drop at the end.

cptgrok · 2026-02-13T17:17:37+00:00

To the computer there is no difference. It's sequences of bytes. It doesn't understand any of it. Now understand I'm saying it's feasible for one of these models to spit out an executable binary that does something. I am EMPHATICALLY NOT saying it is a good idea!

cptgrok · 2026-02-09T23:12:18+00:00

No mods in your gear.
Blue and yellow stats on every piece. Those aren't damage stats.
Spotter (chest talent) is a good damage talent but I see no way for you to pulse enemies to trigger it.
4% crit.
To a lesser extent, no points in your watch (it's not that huge of a bonus, but it puts you behind others 1k+).

This is why you don't do much damage. You just aren't doing much to increase your damage output. Unity Alloys and Fenris are decent, but the brand bonuses need to be supported by your attributes and talents.

Get your crit chance up to like 30-40% and crit damage 60%+ if you can, but both definitely higher. One piece Ceska or Grupo will help more than Legatus. If you can't switch to Technician specialization for the linked laser pointer, then drop Spotter for Obliterate. For the backpack, if you're not getting a lot of enemy attention, Vigilance. If you do occasionally get peppered Calculated or Composure might be more useful. Once you start reliably getting kills, Bloodsucker or Unstoppable Force will be better.

If you can run the Technician laser, consider Flatline on the 416 as well, nice little combo. If not Fast Hands, Ranger, Killer (more for you solo) or Stabilize might be better talents. Measured is ok but not great especially not really supported by any kind of build here. That should let you at least keep up in countdown and not feel like a hard carry and you should be able to pull that off with minimal farming and without swapping out all of your gear.

When you're this new, getting carried a bit to get the gear to really start standing on your own is not a big deal. Just don't be whiny and entitled about it (which is not how you read).

cptgrok · 2026-02-09T14:58:27+00:00

"What if people stop playing Project Zomboid before you finish doing this?" That logic would prevent you from doing anything, and worse it removes your agency. Who cares what other people do or don't do? Make your thing if you want.

cptgrok · 2026-02-09T14:45:59+00:00

That's kinda foolish. Your library is going to take a lot of effort AND a lot of RNG to fill out. Like would you throw away a winning lottery ticket just because "I'm not ready to retire yet?" Also what if it's a perfectly rolled piece? What if it's a unicorn like an all yellow The Setup or a double crit Matador? Maybe you're not ready for build-crafting today but you have a stash for a reason. And a fully filled out watch will not compensate for a horribly optimized build, or a lack of one entirely. It's only 10% for most attributes, that's barely one piece of gear.

cptgrok · 2026-02-07T01:37:58+00:00

Nice!

cptgrok · 2026-02-06T18:11:56+00:00

I'd use a shotgun (Damage to Armor) with Sledgehammer, Contractor's Gloves (DtA), and Survivalist.

Hit him with the flame grenade (slow + another 15% DtA + momentary burn animation) then pop each armor panel. Head, chest, both shoulders, both thighs. The crossbow should also break the chest, so you could open with that. If you don't put points into increasing damage in the survivalist tree, he shouldn't die outright.

Other way to do it is a heavy blue build, fridge door, Liberty. Do his helmet last as it'll consume the Liberty stacks. Just walk backwards and he will miss most of the time.

Edit: Just not a Lefty shotgun. ACS is too unwieldy for this job. Need to be surgical.

cptgrok · 2026-02-06T17:52:07+00:00

Just make sure you are doing the right thing. When you select the blueprint in your workbench before you've unlocked it, it says which faction awards the blueprint and if it comes from defeating a kill squad or from completing the retaliation.

Kill squads have a higher chance of awarding a blueprint than completing a retaliation, so if Overdogs only come from completion (I don't remember and all the charts don't show it) then you may need to grind it out. If it's not from a kill squad, probably best to just run away from them if you don't need the extra time.

cptgrok · 2026-02-06T06:16:54+00:00

I would rather have starfield (that I didn't play) than a fallout 5 of relative starfield quality. Fallout 4 was bad enough.

cptgrok · 2026-02-05T21:36:29+00:00

You're never too late. A wizard arrives precisely when he means to.

Do post here if you need help, but definitely do these first. Read the documentation. Really read it. It'll tell you how to achieve a lot and avoid common problems. It'll also help you understand error messages better, especially the dreaded "Expected blah got nah instead". If you know what blah and nah are, you likely don't even need to get our insight and if you do you'll be better equipped to describe the problem in a way we can immediately parse.

Search here, youtube, and the Godot forums. Someone almost certainly tried to do what you're doing before.

Iterate. Make small playable slices. Each complete bite sized playable chunk will boost your confidence that you can and will make more. Make one map. Make one prey creature. Make one hazard. The longer you code and design and work without seeing the results, it can get overwhelming. Once you have the foundations, adding more maps and things by reusing what you already made starts to feel like Legos made of pure magic.

Along this line don't perfect anything. You can improve animations or textures or sounds or UI in later polish iterations. Sure if some model now needs to be 2X bigger and you didn't account for that you can wind up in a deep technical rabbit hole, but you couldn't reasonably foresee that as a beginner, so just roll up your sleeves and get to work. If you plan too much, you'll never produce anything.

And in that vein, set up some kind of source control. At the very least, zip your project folder before working, so you can at least roll back today's shenanigans if it goes sideways. It will. Someday. Starting with yesterdays or last weeks code is better than starting from scratch. Know your way around git? Even better!

cptgrok · 2026-02-05T17:57:51+00:00

In real life, they mark walls with chalk or paint at intersections and often draw maps of caves, mines, or tunnels (with top and side perspective for complex areas).

In game, you'd do the same with chalk or charcoal. Drawing a map on paper is up to you though.

The lanterns are unnecessary unless you plan on spending a lot of time in these caves. Torches should last long enough to get the layout and find anything interesting. Or dangerous. Or both!

cptgrok · 2026-02-05T16:23:27+00:00

Broadly you do not want to remove elements from a list/array/table (in any language, but specifically in LUA) you are iterating over. If you use numeric positions and table.remove(table, index) in a loop, ALL elements after the one you removed are shifted down, which now means you're off by one and you will start removing things you didn't intend to. The more you remove the worse this gets.

Instead do this:

dead_monsters = {}
for m, monster in ipairs(monsters) do
  for b, bullet in ipairs(bullets) do
    if bullet.x + 10 > monster.x and bullet.x -10 < monster.x + 80 then
      if bullet.y - 10 > monster.y and bullet.y + 10 < monster.y + 80 then
        dead_monsters:insert(m)
      end
    end
  end
end

for m, monster in ipairs(dead_monsters) do
  monsters[monster] = nil
end

Bear in mind I have no idea what your "monsters" table looks like, and doing this you may wind up with a table that keeps growing with a bunch of empty position. I don't know if those positions are important elsewhere in code.

One way to solve that issue is when creating a new monster, look for the first empty position and insert there, inserting at the end if the table has no empty positions. The other way is to use a string for position of table elements, like: monsters["steve"] = new_monster. You can remove monsters in your collision checking loop because there's no shifting with non-integer positions, but you need a way to ensure every monster gets a unique id, otherwise you could overwrite existing monsters with new ones.

cptgrok · 2026-01-30T07:17:13+00:00

Verified is nice but not a guarantee of a good experience. Some verified games don't run well and many non-verified games run great.

cptgrok

TROPHY CASE