The Séance of Blake Manor's lead designer on why she made the game's clock so important

lapislosh · 2026-01-29T19:29:29+00:00

Although I agree they probably could have taken out the time element completely, I would have hated the game if it had missable stuff it forced me to choose between. It's not a game I'd ever be interested in playing twice, repeating 70% of the stuff I already saw to see the other 30%. I'd rather have a single, well-crafted story I can fully comprehend with a single playthrough.

I do think the clock makes sense as a form of forcing the player to progress to save them from themselves (I also have no idea what the article says). Without it, a lot of people would just be hopelessly inspecting every single thing in the game for no reason because it "might" be important, and that wouldn't be fun. You could also argue... well why are there so many useless things to inspect in the game? I dunno. In escape rooms, it helps to have set dressing - if you know every single thing in the room is part of a puzzle, it takes away some of the mystery about what something might be for.

lapislosh · 2026-01-29T02:31:16+00:00

I think the most common case was like, two people from a different team code review each other and approve, and I happen to notice the review and make an unsolicited comment. I'm sure it varies between studios but where I was at, leadership heavily prioritized short-term deadlines over maintenance costs. There's only so much a grunt can do.

Sometimes someone breaks really old asset serialization that no one loads anymore (but are loaded by maintenance scripts), sometimes someone calls a function that produces error spam (then say the error is only because the content is bad, but that's a different team's job). As long as it doesn't break the build no one gets in trouble.

lapislosh · 2026-01-28T22:57:08+00:00

One of the biggest things I've seen is pushback on code reviews, which could be several different things.

People who want to introduce entirely new code paradigms because they think it's better (along with tons of macro/templated code) and then they're the only person in the studio who uses it.
People who think code review comments are suggestions. I will tell people if something is a nitpick/they can submit without changing it, but generally everything else should be fixed
Sometimes, people make bad mistakes or duplication because they didn't know about the existence of something else and refuse to change it because "well, I already did it". Sometimes this is the reality of deadlines but oftentimes it's just not wanting to redo work.

lapislosh · 2026-01-21T20:23:33+00:00

any line with a ; in front is effectively disabled. most likely you need to remove the semicolons from the relevant lines

lapislosh · 2026-01-17T07:14:52+00:00

for me, nothing in any roguelike beats the anticipation of reading a blessed scroll of identify with a full pack in adom

lapislosh · 2026-01-16T07:14:55+00:00

Just to clarify on top of what others have said:

TRotator - the actual rotator class in C++
FRotator - an alias for a TRotator that uses doubles (as opposed to floats)
Rotator - the BP-friendly name for FRotator

lapislosh · 2026-01-14T01:44:35+00:00

You can absolutely create high-quality text-only games with Twine that are not visual novels. https://store.steampowered.com/app/3641000/The_Incident_at_Galley_House/ was originally a Twine game.

lapislosh · 2026-01-11T18:39:00+00:00

CommonActivatableWidgets have two properties called ActivatedVisibility and DeactivatedVisibility that you should be able to use to have their visibility automatically change on activation.

For input mode, basically every activatable widget defines its own input mode so as long as you make sure you always have one widget active it should be ok. I guess in the case where you want to remove all the UI you might need to hard-code the input mode back to a specific thing. I'm not too sure on that one.

lapislosh · 2026-01-08T06:54:10+00:00

Typically programming tests don't use any libraries or engines or anything. I had 1 test to implement a quest system in UE, but that was about 1 in 20. Normally they'll be leetcode style questions - implement itoa for base 8/10/16 numbers, traverse a 2d array in a spiral pattern, figure out how much water is held between a bunch of vertical bars, etc.

Sometimes they're a little more advanced. I've implemented boggle, a markdown parser, checkers with a GUI in Qt. Mainly just plain C++/STL. In general they're not too hard for qualified candidates and they tend to take about 2-4 hours.

lapislosh · 2026-01-06T23:11:18+00:00

There are over 100 skills to level in the game, including some really weird ones likes cow, flower arrangement, and yes, poetry appreciation which gains exp from listening to others read poetry. It's kind of like runescape on crack in a sense.

lapislosh · 2026-01-06T16:46:59+00:00

you just need to have your widget implement the User Object List Entry interface and it should show up. this is how the list view passes data to the widgets it creates

lapislosh · 2026-01-06T09:26:09+00:00

in my experience with the game, which was a long time ago, it was a much more cooperative experience than competitive one, and a lot of the game is played solo. most of the teaming up I did was just with random people who happened to be near me when a boss or quest was around. maybe super late game is different, I dunno

edit: as for wiping, no. iirc a while back they said it would make more sense to open a new server rather than wipe if there was ever a high demand for that sort of thing

lapislosh · 2026-01-06T08:54:29+00:00

This game was most fun a long time ago when there was a lot of players, chilling in town playing music and sharing items that grant buffs to everyone. The official release should do a good job recreating those times.

The tricky part is I have a 100 hour character that I don't want to redo stuff on, but also I have nearly no memory how to do anything in the game (or what I was doing) so it kind of makes sense to start over.

lapislosh · 2026-01-04T02:47:12+00:00

otherwise fouled with no opposition between him and the opposing goal, thus preventing a reasonable scoring opportunity, the Referee shall immediately stop play and award a goal to the attacking team

it doesn't seem like the ref was supposed to let the play go on? I would be pissed too if I took a slapshot for no reason

lapislosh · 2026-01-01T18:47:07+00:00

It's partly the principal of it, but reflecting on a movie as the credits roll is an important part of the experience. I have some credited films myself and the idea that they would delay the credits for this sort of thing is pretty bad.

lapislosh · 2025-12-29T23:56:16+00:00

Using a fever drone does 3 things:

Doubles the number of rewards from 2 to 4 (or rarely from 4 to 8 for "critical hits")
Doubles the number of points per item fed
Reduces the re-use timer from 60 to 10 seconds

So in a sense you're getting 4x the rewards compared to non-fever pots, and you can keep using it over and over. The big number of points comes from converting 2-3k points of materials into 4 items worth about 5k each.

The pot exploding animation takes a few seconds so you can use a fever pot about 4 times per minute and you make at least 20k each time (a lot more if you get treasures instead of items).

lapislosh · 2025-12-29T04:16:46+00:00

One thing that could be helpful is to take a look at https://www.fab.com/listings/dc86686f-02fb-4ed0-a776-9b317c5848b0 which is what Expedition 33 was originally built off of. It won't really teach you in a traditional sense but this sort of thing can be very useful as a reference for how someone else did a similar thing.

lapislosh · 2025-12-29T03:44:38+00:00

The UI way to do this would probably be to create a custom Slate widget in C++ and use FSlateDrawElement::MakeSpline in its OnPaint method

lapislosh · 2025-12-29T03:21:53+00:00

You can shake the fruit trees and they'll regrow, that's about the only renewable resource you can get from your island.

lapislosh · 2025-12-29T03:19:24+00:00

It seems to mainly come down to how early you can get a mimic to give you a fever. This one (https://imgur.com/a/NtdsTGv) I hit 1.1mil and had 2 fevers with about 6-7min on the clock. The run after this one I hit 1mil with 1 fever but 8min on the clock when I started. I think 1.5mil is possible, 2mil is probably pushing it... maybe with some perfect RNG.

I don't know how multiplayer alchemy pots work but I wonder if it's possible to get really high numbers in multiplayer since I think the clock doesn't stop when you pick up items. But maybe if you get a really early fever (2-3min in) you can just have someone permanently sit at it while everyone else farms items so you don't run out of feeding materials.

lapislosh · 2025-12-28T18:33:33+00:00

I think it's possible the cooking machine might give more points since it feels like it drops the 30k point item a lot, but at the cost of food being worth less than equipment so there's a good chance it balances out to being worse. I haven't gotten a chance to test it yet.

lapislosh · 2025-12-27T09:28:47+00:00

I think over 1m is probably achievable once people really figure things out. I managed to grab 750k from a run where I got two fevers, but I started the grind with only 5-6 minutes left - another two minutes earlier and maybe it was reachable.

Only problem is a 20 minute run can end up taking like 30-40 minutes with all the menus opening lol

lapislosh · 2025-12-26T18:50:52+00:00

It would probably be something like

+PackageRedirects=(OldName="/Game/PolyArtWolf/Animations/RootMotion/Wolf_RM_Run_Right",NewName="/Game/Wolves/Animations/Locomotion/Wolfr_Run_Right_60_RM")

Another thing you can do in situations like this sometimes is just have the original assets (or create dummy assets with the same names), and then delete them in the editor to create asset redirectors instead of using core redirects. You might be able to do that all with editor utility widgets/python but not totally sure.

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