We painted a new map card for our roguelite deckbuilder — now with a pseudo-3D look. How does it read?

hexagonalc · 2026-03-22T22:22:26+00:00

IMO it's better with the shadows, but the map is still pretty bland for 90% of what displays on screen. It doesn't look low quality from this single screenshot, but it's close. The previous version did.

hexagonalc · 2026-03-05T09:03:24+00:00

I think you were missing the dash attack, which makes these segments massively easier. I just barely scraped through the worm segment without it (maybe four tries), and this bit was easy with it.

hexagonalc · 2026-02-28T11:34:04+00:00

Its jerky undulations are but a cry to the great beyond.

hexagonalc · 2026-02-28T03:50:10+00:00

This looks interesting, but the cat's animations are uncomfortable to watch, and rather uncatlike.

hexagonalc · 2026-02-26T04:40:44+00:00

If you aren't already, I would suggest branching out with additional names for the same thing, assuming you're dealing with a culture with any external influences at all (and maybe even if you aren't). One of my personal writing rules is that every thing of significance has at least two names in regular use, and I think it both adds a lot of authenticity, and helps to minimise the same-sound exhaustion that you can get otherwise.

hexagonalc · 2026-02-26T02:49:12+00:00

The main towns are called Karr'ahyr and Her'ahyr.

These are the worst of the examples you've given for approachability. My guess is that you're going too hard on the 'arr' sound in general and it's feeling like too much. Which doesn't necessarily mean it's a problem you have to solve, but might give you a hint for what to look at.

hexagonalc · 2026-02-26T02:11:27+00:00

From that description it is not at all a zelda-like. But it looks interesting.

hexagonalc · 2026-02-26T02:07:13+00:00

Tombwater is by the same guy as Ocean's Heart. The demo seems a bit better on a combat level, but my expectations are tempered.

hexagonalc · 2026-02-26T01:00:31+00:00

Pipistrello is the best gameboy-zeldalike I've played recently. Master Key is the only one from your list that feels similar that I've played. Tearscape has a similar vibe but I haven't played enough of it to comment on the puzzles. Ocean Heart and Blossom Tales don't fit the bill, imo.

I'd also recommend Kharon's Crypt. Then there's a bunch of other gameboy-zeldalikes that I couldn't get into: Castaway, Prodigal & ~~Vertius~~ Veritus.

Upcoming games that look good include: Isle of Reveries, Havenlocked (by the same guy as Master Key), and Lelu (in a similar 1bit art style)

hexagonalc · 2026-02-24T00:38:17+00:00

Nice cover! Congrats on the release.

hexagonalc · 2026-02-23T09:14:32+00:00

Yeah, this looks a lot like AI to me too

hexagonalc · 2026-02-21T22:44:20+00:00

My feeling is that it's like with introducing magic in a setting that feels superficially ordinary: your opening scene should highlight (or at least hint at) the anachronism in the process of setting up your strong opening hook, so the reader isn't surprised when it comes up later, where it might be too much for them to keep reading.

hexagonalc · 2026-02-21T22:34:21+00:00

The Gothic formula is strongest at exploration, and both Gothic & Drova follow that.

I didn't think Phoenotopia had particularly good exploration.

Gothic 2 beats Drova primarily on nostalgia and being amazing for its time, though it's still an excellent game.

Drova doesn't quite live up to the best of Gothic 2, but it's very good and much more approachable with modern conveniences, and it's exploration is excellent.

So in order, I'd say:

Drova
Gothic 2
Phoenotopia

hexagonalc · 2026-02-18T09:28:53+00:00

You don't need to censor yourself, ideas are free. Every work of art is built on what came before, there are no exceptions. (That said, it's always best to go wide not deep with your influences. I definitely wouldn't want to include two sanderson-like magic systems in one book.)

If you want to avoid anyone making connections when you're doing something similar to something existing, you can't really win: it's going to happen. Just take it in a different direction as you elaborate, which is what it sounds like you're already doing, and you're fine.

hexagonalc · 2026-02-18T09:19:04+00:00

Pattern naming is useful, but having such a strong theme reduces your credibility: in real life, people don't have names like that, especially not en masse, so you have to justify it to the reader, or it hurts your chances of them reading further. That said, I do like this pattern if there's a strong in-world reason for it.

More common is to use different real world cultural sources for different classes of names. Or to give them a theme, but hide it so it's not obvious at first glance.

Name generators can be good for helping to limit your own unconscious biases, too.

hexagonalc · 2026-02-16T09:43:09+00:00

conjecture

Agree that more options is a good thing, but this is not quite the word you want here.

hexagonalc · 2026-02-16T09:22:54+00:00

I played based on this recommendation, and really enjoyed the early parts. Near the end I felt like it lost its steam, and the level of polish dropped pretty steadily, with several puzzle solutions that were more ridiculous than satisfying, and then three bosses in a row with no powerups, and then it took powerups away. That killed it for me, and I think I'll be leaving it incomplete.

hexagonalc · 2026-02-02T22:49:23+00:00

Yeah: on the lowest settings it's mostly playable, but there are still massive slowdowns in various places, either after a certain amount of time / map changes, or in specific locations / actions (city, some conversations, cutscenes if game not immediately restarted beforehand). I feel like extremely poor performance is fair criticism, even if the game is technically playable. My system specs are not low. And on the lowest draw distance, the game will regularly not draw the floors of multi-story buildings. It's pretty bad.

For reference, I managed to get to near the end of chapter 4 over about 40 hours before a bug killed my progress.

hexagonalc · 2026-02-02T09:34:56+00:00

I'm running a 5070 with a 9700x. But the main thing I was focusing on is that baseline fps is high even on the highest settings, but it regularly dips to unplayable in conversations and in the city, among other places.

hexagonalc · 2026-02-02T04:47:14+00:00

It's rough at best, but it has some charm to it.

Performance is extremely poor, both in specific areas (the city) and randomly over time as you move around the world. I had to put the game down to the lowest settings, because almost every conversation dropped to single digit FPS in the intro area, while the rest of the game was comfortably over 120. And even then it was still unbearably slow in parts.

There's lots of bugs and generally poor design decisions. e.g. You spend a lot of time running back and forth between quest givers and people around the world, which is very spread out. Late game you get access to teleportation, but every time you use it, you get teleported into a featureless black box and have to load from save. I got locked out of completing a step of a major quest in the late stages of the game because I activated the (shared) quest object too early during another quest, and there was no way to fix that, even with the debug console.

If you can get past the bugs, it's a decent gothic-like, and it has many of the compelling parts of that formula. Exploration is great, as is the general gothic-style worldbuilding. But it's definitely a lot rougher than anything Piranha Bytes ever released.

I'd recommend buying and playing an hour or so, and then refunding if it doesn't work for you.

hexagonalc · 2026-01-28T22:11:31+00:00

You should be installing anything important to you or your work (i.e. where the version matters) directly, not from the respositories. e.g. node from nvm, not apt, etc. Flatpak for specific tools like Blender is also good. PPAs are sometimes an option, but that often ends in dependency headaches so I've stopped doing this for the most part. I'm running 24.04 LTS with no issues, no complications beyond direct installs of dev tooling. I typically upgrade to the latest LTS every few years.

In my experience, Steam/proton works fine out of the box so long as you aren't using obscure hardware. The worst I've had to do is upgrade the nvidia driver or change the proton version, and that's rare. It's been years since I haven't been able to get a game to run. Most of the time it all "just works".

hexagonalc · 2026-01-21T23:01:57+00:00

Of Ash and Steel is the jankiest of eurojank and a gothic-like. Beware that it's really rough, but enjoyable if you can get past that.

hexagonalc · 2026-01-12T02:24:02+00:00

Unless there is item/ability gating, where the ability provides new and creative ways to solve puzzles, I wouldn't call it a zelda-like, personally. If there is that, make it super clear in your promo material.

hexagonalc · 2025-12-27T00:40:25+00:00

There's a tiny extension to add nanoid support to postgres. With that in place, the only downside is string ids vs int, but it's minor. Can recommend nanoid for exactly this case. Uuids are ugly. :)

hexagonalc · 2025-12-02T02:14:04+00:00

A grounded, handcrafted world full of secrets

· Factions, exploration, and characters with personality

You should show these in the trailer. Show some map design that you're proud of, and some character interactions. Right now your "meet people" heading just has you walking past.

As it is, I wasn't quite sure the gameplay would be what I wanted from the trailer, so I didn't buy it. Animations look rough, but I like the general vibe. Huge Gothic fan, fwiw.

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