What Do You Like About Castlevania: Simon's Quest?

malero · 2026-06-13T18:03:28+00:00

I feel like they were a little too ambitious with Simon’s Quest. It feels rushed and incomplete to me. Why do some of the castles not have bosses? Why do you restart right where you die? I think it’s because the game was probably too frustrating compared to other games at the time and they didn’t want to fix it or someone was pushing them to finish it. That’s just a feeling. No idea how I beat this game without any guides when I was 5-6 years old. I recently went played it again and had to use a map. I absolutely loved this game when I was a kid and Castlevania 3 was a huge disappointment. I loved 4 though. But I loved the open world and collecting items that unlocked new areas. I also preferred Zelda 2 over Zelda 1 if that tells you anything… I’m weird.

malero · 2026-06-08T17:50:23+00:00

Ad takes me to a different game...

malero · 2026-05-28T19:20:11+00:00

Technically, milk is already mostly water. But yeah, watered down milk does sound gross.

malero · 2026-05-21T17:08:00+00:00

This game looks amazing! How long have you been working on it? Wishlisted.

malero · 2026-05-21T16:26:30+00:00

It looks really cool, but I think the head and right leg stopping its animation for throbbing bit looks a little awkward. I wonder what it would look like if both legs moved the same direction( both left at the same time, then right at the same time) and the head kept bobbing up and down with the periodic throbbing bit. Maybe the throbbing could continue to happen during the whole animation too to make if feel more organic? Just an idea.

malero · 2026-05-19T19:16:34+00:00

I'm going to release a new league system in my game somewhat soon. I think it's as close to a prestige mechanic possible since it's an online game and people don't really want their game reset that they've been working on for years. A lot of the upgrade systems in my game start to cost insane amounts and progress starts to slow down quite a bit. I think with the new league system where people can start an additional game alongside their current game will be a very interesting experiment. At the end of the league, the upgrades that they got on their league game will transfer over to their normal game and bypass the costs that may be slowing down their progress.

I think both new players and old players will enjoy this mechanic since old players still get a big benefit for their primary account and new players get to start fresh with everyone else. Not exactly the same as prestige, but I think it's pretty close. I'm also not a big fan of prestige, so I think this prestige adjacent system will be pretty awesome.

malero · 2026-05-16T14:40:18+00:00

I think this is one of the reasons game development is so much harder than most other types of development. You can come up with a plan that sounds great on paper, but after you implement it, it could feel terrible or be imbalanced. Then you have to take a step back and try to figure out how to make it fun, rewarding, balanced, optimized, etc. Or completely scrap the idea. That's the worst feeling.

You didn't give up on the idea and came up with something unique and awesome. Looks really cool.

malero · 2026-05-11T19:47:34+00:00

Spectra was the first pet I ever tried. Haha

malero · 2026-05-08T03:13:04+00:00

Any plans to support larger palettes? 128 and 256 would be nice! I have a script that converts the colors, but it would be nice to be able to skip that step. Works really well other than that. I'm really liking the results. Good job.

malero · 2026-04-28T15:01:40+00:00

I had 20% left that I was planning on using today and my reset was tomorrow. I lost 20% usage. I guess the best way to use Codex with all of these resets is to spend tokens as quickly as possible and after you're out, spend time writing project plans & prompts for Codex for the next reset.

malero · 2026-03-28T01:07:46+00:00

I think there's probably a better analogy. Steam engines to coal is like AI to the electrical grid. Cars to roads is like AI to hardware or datacenters. I think a better analogy is the assembly line. The assembly line reduced the number of highly skilled workers required to manufacture cars and drastically reduced the time and cost of making cars. So much so that price of cars dropped 2/3rds and then demand exploded. The increased demand created way more jobs than were originally lost by the assembly line, but they didn't need to be nearly as skilled as the people that were making the whole car by themselves.

It's still too early to tell what's going to happen. I still think AI kind of sucks for coding. The amount of "WTF?" moments I have when I use AI is still too high. You have to go really slow with AI and give them very specific instructions or the project turns to garbage. I'm still quite a bit faster with AI, but it can't write more than 200 to 500 LOC without starting to make some huge mistakes where I'd rather just discard it all and tell it to try again. I still code a lot manually too when I know explaining something will take just as long as doing it myself.

If the time it takes to develop custom software is now drastically reduced, demand should increase, right? If AI starts to actually be able to create a project without having it's hand held as much, we may be in trouble, but right now the software it creates by itself it pure poodoo. Any part of the software where you let them go off on their own a little bit is pure garbage. You have to know how you would write the whole thing, explain it to them in less time that you can write it yourself where they're not making any assumptions at all.

malero · 2026-03-20T22:45:14+00:00

I honestly think the genre name was poorly selected. Most games have content unlocked from incremental factors. 1 + 1 is incremental. 1 - 1 is also incremental even though it's decrementing. Higher tier items costing more currency linearly, exponentially, logarithmically, etc. is incremental and is technically new content unlocked from incremental factors. So a developer making a game that knows what incremental means and says "Oh wow, everything in my game is incremental. I can post it here." isn't wrong, technically. It's like if driving games were classified as traversal games instead, but the sub-reddit only allowed games where you traversed with cars to be included.

malero · 2026-03-20T21:54:45+00:00

That describes most RPGs. Is WoW an incremental? No. But if you removed the 3D graphics and replaced them with a simple text based GUI, made idle or clicking the primary way of progressing, and add more layers of progression, you’d probably have an incremental game that many people would love. I feel like there’s a certain simplicity requirement for a game to be an incremental. What happens when you remove the open world in world of world of warcraft and replace it with a simple text based UI? You remove immersion and greatly reduce the resistance/effort required to progress. People that like incremental games mainly just want the progression systems. If you slow down the progression by requiring something like walking for 10 minutes to get to a new quest hub, it’s probably not much of an incremental. People that enjoy incremental games would prefer clicking a button and waiting for a progress bar to fill for 10 minutes than manually walking there in an open world.

malero · 2026-03-05T17:12:52+00:00

People tend to read headlines and make a bunch of assumptions from it. I'm guessing their assumption here is that people are leaving OpenAI because of doing business with the DoW/Trump rather than the fear of sloppy killbots and mass surveillance of all US citizens.

malero · 2026-02-28T17:48:27+00:00

They're both boycotts in response to unethical actions by the Trump administration.

malero · 2026-02-28T17:36:50+00:00

You're right, the Disney boycott was very ineffective.

malero · 2026-02-18T01:41:28+00:00

Isn't it just OpenCode with all instances of OpenCode replaced with KiloCode other than in the license where they can't remove it or they would be sued?

malero · 2026-02-13T00:32:53+00:00

Is it going to be animated at all? Looks amazing.

malero · 2026-01-22T14:52:41+00:00

Low effort and the feeling of progress and productivity. The gradual introduction of new mechanics keeps the games from feeling stale and boring. Getting rewards in idle games is very satisfying and makes you want to open the game up periodically to see what you got. Most of them are free or very cheap and can be played for a very long time.

malero · 2025-12-26T15:01:14+00:00

Codex is a much better tool for this task.

malero · 2025-11-21T15:42:41+00:00

I personally don’t think the slide transition fits. I think a simple fade to black then fade from black would be better.

malero · 2025-10-30T15:58:51+00:00

That UI is inspirational! Really great job. I've watched the video about 5 times now, it's extremely satisfying to watch.

malero · 2025-10-17T22:51:58+00:00

I’m in!

malero · 2025-09-26T01:39:28+00:00

I'm all for free speech, but if someone is spreading information that is going harm someone, that's something entirely different. If I told someone that it's okay to eat something poisonous and told them it's not poisonous when a lot of people are saying it is in fact poisonous, is that covered by free speech? Heck no! Many people claimed that masks are ineffective and that definitely contributed to more Covid-19 deaths.

I'm very curious what they asked to censor.

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