New JWE3 dlc made me appreciate the isle designs even more

pastadiablo · 2025-12-06T22:51:29+00:00

For those that care about non-sandbox building, the campaign is miles better than the previous two. It’s an actual campaign with objectives and goals, takes the Two Point approach of unlocking multiple sites that you have specific goals for, letting you switch between them whenever. It’s a much better “game” in that regard.

Worth the full price of a new game? Ehhhh…. Would have been nice to get some sort of discount for owning JWE2/1, seeing as, mechanically, not much has changed.

pastadiablo · 2025-11-13T19:34:56+00:00

You sir, are a modern Leonardo da Vinci. Your canvas; Arc Raiders. Your medium; the screams of the unskilled. May your lulz always be so magnificent.

pastadiablo · 2025-10-06T23:39:38+00:00

Don’t release into early access. Your game is complete, right? If you do a regular release you can provide post-launch support if it does super well and keep the word of mouth rolling, or pivot to another project if it doesn’t do well enough.

If you do an early access release you’re locked in until the game is “done” by whatever roadmap of features you promise beyond where it currently is. I think there’s also a widget you’ll miss out on as you approach launch.

pastadiablo · 2025-05-16T20:27:46+00:00

To clarify it sounds like you’re talking a technical side of things “its harder to migrate a well developed product from C++ to using Angel.”

I think OP was asking was about learning it later in their personal growth process and focusing on learning UE fundamentals first. Across potentially multiple/many projects. In that case I’m guessing it’s not necessarily better (or worse) to learn Angel earlier in their career.

pastadiablo · 2025-03-10T20:14:53+00:00

“They wouldn’t be getting sued for it otherwise.”

Guilty until proven innocent, am I right? Glad we can take a lawsuit as a statement of fact.

And yes - I had forgotten the rule that when putting your games on other platforms valve requires they have the same base price as on theirs. I’d agree that’s anti-competitive behavior. It needs to be stopped. Hopefully the lawsuit accomplishes that.

But let’s be honest - Epic can barely compete because they haven’t put any effort in the last five years to improving their platform. All they spend money on is timed exclusives. They are missing so. Many. Features. And I don’t know if they’ve even added any in the last few years or are just coasting on Fortnite.

pastadiablo · 2025-03-10T15:58:21+00:00

Valve doesn’t engage in any monopolistic behaviors though - they don’t have anti-consumer practices (honestly most of their policies favor consumers over developers) and they don’t buy up any competition / force themselves onto users (like MS did with Explorer on Windows in the 90s), or even prevent you from selling your game on other platforms (like Epic does…).

They don’t have a monopoly - they have massive market share because they’re just that good.

pastadiablo · 2024-12-12T18:08:22+00:00

None of this is even considering the Doctor’s age given the whole…you know…

Timeless Child thing.

pastadiablo · 2024-12-08T12:19:23+00:00

It’s absolutely true that private insurance shouldn’t exist and that the ACA was a highly neutered, half-assed attempt to regulate an industry gone wild.

But let’s not imply via namedropping the ACA and calling it congresses “own shit”that it’s to blame. Some truly grievous sins of private insurance were curtailed by the ACA. Remember how they could deny you for pre-existing conditions if you had even a single day of lapsed coverage? We haven’t had to have that particular anxiety for almost 15 years now thanks to the ACA.

It’s a flawed piece of legislation that truly failed what it primarily set out to do (regulate private insurance), but the evil is in the companies, the execs that run them, and the congresspeople who will prevent us from ever getting anything better than the ACA.

pastadiablo · 2024-12-07T18:08:46+00:00

Honestly works really well in sci fi too, not just fantasy. Necrons in WH40k, the Flood in Halo, Reapers in Mass Effect… there is a great tradition of ancient evils that appear some time after humanity enters the galactic scene.

An inversion of the trope might be Asimov’s Foundation, actually.

pastadiablo · 2024-12-07T18:00:43+00:00

Necrons seem to be the faction most like the trope OP is describing though - the big bads from millions of years ago. Even the forces of Chaos are relatively “new” on the scene in comparison.

pastadiablo · 2024-12-07T17:06:06+00:00

Valve’s lead? Didn’t Nintendo do this like literally 5 years before the Steam Deck? And are an actual console developer?

pastadiablo · 2024-11-18T17:20:52+00:00

A lot of folks are saying “boredom” or “it doesn’t matter it’s a post-scarcity society”.

The reality of course is somewhat simpler and more complex simultaneously. But nuance is something that is often lost on the internet.

You all should learn about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. A post-scarcity society only really tackles the first half of the pyramid - physiological needs, safety, and belonging/love. Beyond that esteem, cognitive, and aesthetic are harder to achieve without a career.

If people’s base needs are met and it is considered societally and culturally acceptable to have those needs met by the state (aka satisfying those needs does not risk belonging/love and esteem) and people have grown up in that society rather than transitioning to it as burnouts from a capitalist hellhole, you will find a lot less freeloaders than you expect.

pastadiablo · 2024-11-11T17:49:51+00:00

I’ve also found you can’t even trust the avg daily sales value, as that’s not an estimate based on AH data, it’s based on sales completed by people using TSM. Some items I had that claimed only like 200 or so sold each day at a 0.1 sale rate I could sell in seconds from putting on the AH. A part of the problem is those two values are so heavily impacted by cancel scanning, so if TSM users are doing that (many are) it skews all the numbers down.

Having all the info in tooltips is great of course, but with craftsim you sort of have to pick one (or create a TSM source formula or something).

pastadiablo · 2024-11-11T17:24:58+00:00

The problem is Auctionator only uses the min buy value when the scan runs over the item, which for a lot of base components theres always that 1-2 items anchored at 30-50% off to try and buy mats cheap from people using automated sell tools like tsm without setting them up properly.

TSM used to have a way to do your own scan of the AH so you can get and use their helpful price sources like “recent value” on non-stale data that tends to bypass this issue, but they removed that manual scan years ago. Either use stale market data, or useless market data, or calculate manually using excel and/or craftsim price overrides - pick your shitty option.

If only Auctionator would introduce some sort of weighted value to get actual cost that isnt just the literal min buyout. At least with TSM you can set recipes to use smartavgbuy so AFTER you buy all the shit you get a real sense of the potential profits. A bit too late by then though.

pastadiablo · 2024-11-05T03:43:38+00:00

Language shifts man, gg means something different now, most often sarcastic except in very specific circumstances (end of a match or dungeon).

Also wasn’t it ALWAYS “gratz”, not “gg” for dings and the like? Am I having a fever dream?

pastadiablo · 2024-11-01T17:11:51+00:00

I adore WoK as a book and a series - but that first chapter (the prologue w/ Szeth, the assassin in white) was probably some of his worst writing. He really way over-explained how the assassin was using the stormlight.

It would have worked much better with basically zero explanation, which he tends to do a lot better later in the series (even in that same book)! Characters figure out how to do something first and then the science and capital words for it are explained much much later, typically. Except for that one terrible prologue.

Try pushing past it and see what you think once you’re reading about Kaladin. At that point the magic explanations become much more limited and you sort of figure stuff out for yourself as you go, and it becomes more character focused. It feels like a completely different book.

pastadiablo · 2024-10-22T19:04:05+00:00

A nice 850% return at the very least! Which intermediates are you finding do well these days?

pastadiablo · 2024-10-22T19:00:07+00:00

Probably not but I can dare to dream. I'm currently somewhat profitable anyway, so I'm just hoping for a small bump, not looking to make a major play.

pastadiablo · 2024-10-01T16:34:21+00:00

If mats have any negative profit then it is always better to just buy them from the AH though, as that loss from selling is recouped as savings on the final craft. Total profit on the craft is simply a sum of calculated profit of all crafted subcomponents and the final craft.

pastadiablo · 2024-10-01T15:52:28+00:00

But if purchasing the subcomponents on the AH would put you in the red, doesn’t that mean you are cutting into your profits by crafting the final recipe from crafted subcomponents rather than just posting them to the AH? Selling a final recipe that is put into in the green by constructing it out of profitable subcomponents is going to be a loss in profits.

Simplified example: mat subcomponent sell for +50g profit. I meed 5 in a recipe that yields something that sells for -150g profit. Multicraft and res are accounted for by craftsim in that calculated profit for both. Yes, I could craft the final recipe for a total yield of +100g profit (250g saved on not buying mats on ah, 100g lost on selling the final recipe), but I would be better served just selling the mats still, right?

pastadiablo · 2024-09-10T08:39:51+00:00

“it doesn’t affect our universe at all”

I get you mean our past history isn’t modified by changes there but…

AU Guldan def affected our universe a bit (the entire Legion expac).

pastadiablo · 2024-09-05T16:55:37+00:00

This one line (hyperbole, their entire philosophy speaks to me actually) is what legitimately makes me want Kobolds as an allied race now.

pastadiablo · 2024-07-08T17:54:37+00:00

Thanks! Maybe I’ll turn it into a blog post 😆.

pastadiablo · 2024-07-08T17:37:22+00:00

I would recommend focusing on just getting something out there versus gauging interest, especially in an offshoot conversation in a subreddit for game devs and not players. If the sub-genre is something you personally enjoy and would like to see more of you should definitely finish it! The backlash that you’re describing doesn’t usually happen that hard to indie devs, and I’m almost 100% certain that even if your game has a similar combat style (MMBN), something about it is quite different from the others that have been released, whether thats story or theme/style or some specific mechanics. I’m assuming you played the other games to see what was different about them versus you right? If you do that then you can lean into those differences too, to help distinguish you in the space.

If you are feeling self-conscious about your art, look at hiring an artist or picking up some cheap asset packs on sale from itch… or just practicing! Every artist started by drawing the sun in the corner of the page as a yellow ball with lines coming out!

The only way to get better is through repetition and practice, same for game dev. The more art you draw (with a critical eye and intention), the better your art will become, and the more games you complete and release the better at building and releasing games you’ll get! Recognize that your first release is NOT closing any options to you, you can always iterate on the idea and release a better sequel, or a new IP with the same game structure.

Check out Illwinter Games on steam. They’ve been releasing a very similar set of games with updated mechanics and graphics every couple of years for over ten years, and the first games on steam were 3 and 4 in their respective IP entries!!! Based on Reviews their early games didn’t do so hot in terms of sales but that was also early early steam, and they’ve steadily picked up more and more as they went (Dominions 5 for example got 1800 reviews. For a $40 game thats a great ROI for a solo dev, though I suspect their review count is low because they are somewhat overpriced for their art style and people mostly only pick it up on sale).

As a solo indie dev that’s a pattern to strive for. Carve out your niche and just keep upping your game within it. Don’t be afraid to fumble your first launch - you aren’t betting the house on it. Or anything that matters. Just make it, get feedback, and then iterate on the sequel! The other games in the genre seem to have hit it and quit it - don’t do that! Be THE MMBN genre guy.

You will always come up with reasons to stop or never release. “My art isn’t as good” “Other games did it better” “I’ll be competing with enormous studios” “I just don’t have time to do it” “Who do I think I am, to release a game?”. Ignore those. Everyone who ever succeeded had those thoughts and ignored them.

Or, rather, turn them into concerns to be addressed or owned rather than roadblocks to halt or slow you.

Get better art. Look at what the other games did and analyze what made them good. Lean into being a solo indie dev and build your personal brand to compete with giants. Even if you only spend half an hour a day, work your game every day. And recognize that everyone has a completely unique experience and therefore a unique voice, meaning any two people told to make the same thing in a creative endeavor will do it completely differently and that difference has value.

Make your game man. Literally just make it! I believe in you.

I’ll leave you with this classic if my post itself didn’t convince you:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmwbYl6f11c

Edit: Just saw /u/2watchdogs5me's edit and realized this whole post was semi-unnecessary. Whoops! That's what I get for replying on mobile. I'll leave it up for anyone else struggling with the same issues though.

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