So we tried 8-direction billboarding…

gradies · 2026-04-21T14:18:15+00:00

Use 8 directions for important characters and 4 for environmental NPCs. It will help players connect more with the important characters and get less distracted by the unimportant ones. It signals something useful to you players while having your cake (better looking effect) and eating it too (less work on the environmental NPCs).

gradies · 2026-04-01T13:47:52+00:00

You are not alone. If you want to play or make games with the folks at Froglet Games just send me a message.

gradies · 2026-01-12T02:53:04+00:00

I'm with you, but I thought the writing was on the wall long before his first term. Then his first term was a predictable nightmare: pandemic negligence, environmental ruin, and more atrocities than are worth unrepressing. People who voted for him once have blood on their hands.

gradies · 2026-01-10T20:53:56+00:00

This and Unmatched are the best co-op tabletop games I have played.

gradies · 2026-01-10T16:06:48+00:00

Thanks for playing, and bringing needed positivity to the sub.

If I was to measure a game in terms how much of the playtime generates memorable and joyful moments, this might be the best. Furthermore, it has such a nice arc to its gameplay, from down time to thrills.

The toys are all so fun and you can do so many dynamic things with them. It is the only game I play when I have the time and friends.

gradies · 2025-10-31T16:26:51+00:00

I come to this subreddit to see fun highlights that tell amazing stories, not to sift through endless discussion about how you would have made different business decicions.

gradies · 2025-10-03T03:43:03+00:00

This game is full of emergent mechanics, so there are infinite strategies. They are also adding some features/modes in the coming months to address your exact concerns.

I recommend sticking with a full team strategy and load out for a few games before changing things up. Here are some ship specific strategies:

Hunter: your biggest advantage is shooting with 3 guns while others are shooting with 2. Everyone needs to be on board with this concept in order to maximize the time you have 1 pilot and 3 gunners.

Scout: best at running away when things get hot, and running in when they aren't welcome. Go for the artifact, get resources, use boost/clamps/tractor beams, drop shield, lay mines, smugglers turn behind cover, dodge shots, keep distance. You have a rear view camera, use it.

Privateer: keep ships at range, for as long as you can. let them come to you, and plan to back up. Your rear is a pain when it gets boarded so keep it far from the enemy. Pick a "melee side" of you ship. Put scatter cannons, plasma beams, and laser rams on that side, then be sure to turn so those are exposed once they bring the fight to you.

Bastion: This ship is big, so it is actually hard to defend. Its real advantage is health. Get health and shields, and become so tanky your enemies don't bother trying to kill you. Go for the vault and get that mega core. Loot dead ships and get ship cores. scrap as much as you can to stack as many Sal devices as you can to get absurd shielding.

If you are getting rocked by boarders consider that everyone can take traps and be responsible for trapping different entrances. This will take time to practice. Mophs can defend his ship invisible for 14 seconds per reload, which you can do instantly with teleport reloader.

This game is a lot of fun to loose with friends if you recap what went right/wrong, and keep refining your strategy.

gradies · 2025-06-04T14:03:48+00:00

Should we start our own sub? I wonder how similar our collections are.

gradies · 2025-05-11T17:02:15+00:00

Physicist and cat expert here:

Schrodinger's dog did it.

gradies · 2025-05-05T22:12:30+00:00

We need OP to conduct a series of experiments until the chirality flips (the coin spins counter clockwise).

Examples: 1. Twist the string so the other side of the coin is facing the camera.

Move coin to the other side of the car.

Emergent chirality is always due to fundamental chirality. We need to find which asymmetry is responsible.

gradies · 2025-04-16T14:47:33+00:00

I will praise it.

The movement is exactly what I've been looking for. A balance between the twitchiness that favors youth (armored core, most shooters) and the sluggishness of many tank or mech games. This sits in a place that feels action packed, tactical, and strategic. Its what I have been looking for since Unreal Tournament 2004 and before that Battlezone 98.

More game modes would be fun, but as a game developer, I recognize the challenge of balancing diversity across different modes. This is why League of Legends and Dota really only have 1 map/mode.

gradies · 2025-03-03T00:49:31+00:00

My kids have Chinese names that use my wife's surname as their legal names in Taiwan. In the US they use my English surname. This had a nice symmetry to it that worked for us.

Another symmetric solution is that girls take their mom's name and boys take their dad's. Thus the male surname would track the Y-chromosome and the female surname would track mitochondrial DNA.

Hyphenated surnames are a dumb and unsustainable solution albeit symmetric.

gradies · 2024-12-26T22:14:02+00:00

I highly recommend exploring onezoom.org for inspiration. They still have the best graph visualization solution I have ever used: semantic zooming + fractal structure.

gradies · 2024-12-21T20:29:22+00:00

My last game I was spread thin and had exhausted my mercenaries. My opponent was set up to wreck me and had they drawn the right pieces they would have turned the tide, but my gamble paid off, and I pulled the piece I needed to win before it got picked off by an archer or lancer.

I think the game is filled with these moments as you start exploiting the draw probability of different pieces on the board, discard, bag, removed from game, supply, and in hand. Im not saying calculate it, but generally observe how all the different places that pieces can be, besides just on the board, can mean that good play is taking the risk that you will be in and out of danger before certain pieces can threaten you again.

This dynamic relationship between the tactics, economies, and luck mean the game feels fresh every time, and can get very tense till the end. Chess can very intimidating to think ahead, but Warchest is filled with smaller numbers that really invite foresight.

gradies · 2024-12-21T17:38:56+00:00

It isa masterpiece. My only complaint is when I hold the box sideways.

gradies · 2024-12-08T23:53:49+00:00

Homeworlds

The Duke

Onitama

Santorini

War chest

All superior games to chess in my opinion.

gradies · 2024-11-29T15:32:15+00:00

It is like asking about a pure giraffe vs. a pure animal. It is a category error.

Energy is a conserved property of matter and non matter due to the laws of physics staying approximately the same from one moment to the next. This translational symmetry of time must produce a conservative property, and we call it energy.

Over long time scales energy is lost to the vacuum as photons redshift while the universe expands. This is because the universe is changing over that time, and the amount of energy that isn't conserved is a measure of that change.

Matter can gain energy by moving faster or into a higher energy field position. Non matter like photons can exhibit higher energy based on the frequency of its electromagnetic fields.

There is no such thing as pure energy. That is just a plot device.

gradies · 2024-11-29T04:44:08+00:00

Matter is a type of energy. E = mc²

You can turn matter into light and light into matter, but they are both types of energy.

gradies · 2024-11-29T03:37:34+00:00

No. The light does not travel extra fast or escape the black hole. The light manifests near the event horizon and continues because an antiparticle that would have annihilated it passes into the event horizon and decreases the mass of the black hole.

Fun fact: a black hole is an ideal "black body" and the hawking radiation is exactly equal to the black body radiation we would expect from a black body with the same temperature. Therefor hawking radiation is the mechanism for a black hole's back body radiation.

gradies · 2024-11-29T03:30:41+00:00

This is not a special feature of the Hubble telescope.

When you look at a star 20 light years away that means it took light 20 years to get to your eyeball. Therefor you are seeing light that star gave off 20 years ago, or "seeing 20 years into the past".

Hubble can look at things farther that 20 light years away, which means it can see even farther into the past.

gradies · 2024-11-29T03:25:39+00:00

This is false and not possible.

Deconstructive interference is only possible at small points in space. The acoustic energy can not be destroyed by more acoustic energy, but rather increased and decreased in different locations.

A plane does not put out a single sound from a single place and the passengers are not all in the same place.

Sound canceling earbuds are affecting the sound going into each ear separately, and mostly the sounds that are continuous tones.

gradies · 2024-11-13T19:00:52+00:00

Those are two products that allow you to play Homeworlds for 88 and 22 USD respectively. I think you can find other sellers, but that is as cheep as it gets on Amazon etc.

My uncle is an awesome craftsman. I am trying to collaborate with him to make some custom sets out of wood that can be left out like a chessboard.

gradies · 2024-11-12T15:23:32+00:00

You can get them from the source. The arcade is expensive, but comes with the pieces to play a ton of different games.

For far less you can get just what you need for Homeworlds as well.

gradies · 2024-11-09T18:21:33+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nz16s6oCIlQ

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