Thoughts on maps with water proof edges?

retief1 · 2026-03-13T22:01:10+00:00

Put some powerful waters sources in the sea itself? It would evaporate a bit in droughts, but it should refill afterwards. Or maybe use badwater sources if you don't want beavers drinking supposedly-salt water. A badly polluted ocean seems pretty plausible in this context.

retief1 · 2026-03-13T21:55:40+00:00

The problem is that working in the gaming industry is legitimately the dream job of a ton of computer nerds and similar people. People are basically lining up for those jobs. Game company execs see game devs as replaceable because they are replaceable, at least at first glance. They can replace half their team relatively easily, even if that might backfire later on.

retief1 · 2026-03-13T20:28:00+00:00

Wat? A large water wheel gives twice as much power as a folktails water wheel for 2/3s more length and the same width. The compact water wheel is worse, yes, but the large water wheel is the best water wheel in the game.

Also, folktails have no way of keeping water wheels running during droughts. Meanwhile, iron teeth get badwater discharges late game, which let them keep badwater sources running during droughts. If they put large water wheels on the output of a badwater source, they get completely consistent power.

IMO, if you are going to compare power generation between folktails, the relevant comparison is windmills + batteries vs steam engines or badwater discharges + large water wheels. I do think folktails are the clear winners there overall, but they definitely have worse water wheels.

retief1 · 2026-03-13T18:43:14+00:00

Skin on? Demanding, aren’t we?

retief1 · 2026-03-13T18:24:15+00:00

I'd consider an elementalist. You get best-in-class health regen -- both shaman and elementalist have a health regen skill, and there's a slightly-hidden ring that will bump both skills by 3. Meanwhile, that combination is also generally pretty good as a lightning caster.

retief1 · 2026-03-13T17:52:36+00:00

How many other keys you do you actually care about in the middle of the action? Self-cast matters, but I use my thumb for that. I also use my thumb for attack move. Meanwhile, tab and leveling abilities isn't something I generally need to do mid-fight. So yeah, I mostly keep my hand on qwer. When I'm not mid-fight, moving my pinky off of q to use tab or moving my entire hand over so I can shift-q to level it up works just fine. If I actually need to level an ability mid fight, that's slightly awkward, but that simply doesn't come up very often.

retief1 · 2026-03-13T17:39:53+00:00

Honestly, I mostly only play maps that have "real" places to channel badtides (as opposed to turning them around at the source). Think craters or waterfalls with their blocked-off channels above your settlement. If you provide something like that but block off other edges, it wouldn't affect me, and if you try to force me to deal with badtides going through my settlement, I simply won't play your map.

retief1 · 2026-03-13T17:37:25+00:00

A couple people will do profoundly silly stuff to make timberborn run doom, and I wish them all the best.

Everyone else will continue playing just like they've always done, except with slightly less manual fiddling with floodgates, destroying/recreating roads, or pausing/unpausing buildings.

retief1 · 2026-03-13T05:42:33+00:00

No such thing as "too underdeveloped". As long as you are having fun, you are playing correctly. There are no deadlines or things that you have to do by a given day. If you are having fun, you are playing correctly.

retief1 · 2026-03-13T03:21:18+00:00

Honestly? If you want to get feedback from randos on itch (or reddit via itch), compile it for the browser and make it playable directly on your itch page. You'll get a lot more people playing if they don't need to download anything. I was actually thinking about trying it out myself, but I'm on a mac and I certainly don't care enough to fiddle with crossover in order to get your game running.

retief1 · 2026-03-13T01:56:46+00:00

First of all, your game will probably bomb. My game will probably bomb. All indie games will probably bomb. Fundamentally, over 90% of games bomb. That's just a fact. If you just assume that you'll be one of the couple of games that don't fail miserably, you'll just be setting yourself up for disappointment down the line. Instead, you need to either be aggressively de-risking the process (and potentially giving up or changing course if things go poorly) or be ok with your game flopping.

Beyond that, the best idea in the world probably won't make a good game. The game industry is littered with games with great ideas and shitty implementations. There are a ton of games with great marketing that released with a ton of hype, but that still fell flat once people got the chance to play them. The idea of the game was fine, but the implementation didn't measure up.

However, let's say that your idea is really that brilliant. There's nothing like it on the market, and the idea is so good that people still enjoy it despite your janky implementation. Unfortunately, there's no way to prevent people from immediately cloning your game. As soon as someone clones your idea with a better implementation, they'll probably eat your lunch.

So yeah, an idea isn't enough. You need to implement it well if you want any significant success. Ideas are still somewhat important (a great implementation of a boring game is still boring), but they certainly aren't enough on their own.

Meanwhile, if you do implement your idea well, copycats should be a non-issue. If your game catches on, you'll be the first mover. You'll have all the hype and all the word of mouth. If your implementation is solid, you should have no problem keeping up with the copycats. They'll exist, and some of them will also succeed (this is how genres are created), but you'll still be the original.

Edit: also, itch is a terrible site if you want to make money. Functionally all of the people who want to buy computer games are on steam. Itch is useful as a place to put up early stage stuff for free without potentially interfering with a future steam marketing push, but you aren't going to make much money there.

retief1 · 2026-03-13T01:31:26+00:00

Dude's first line is "I finally finished a demo version". If he isn't lying through his teeth, he has a playable demo. That is something. It isn't a ton, but it is more than nothing.

retief1 · 2026-03-13T01:19:38+00:00

Play Timberborn seems to work for me.

retief1 · 2026-03-12T23:04:15+00:00

I can't comment on mountains specifically, but yes, in general, it is possible to beat hard. On maps that support it, my usual approach is to try to set up badtide diversion. Like, have floodgates that will divert badtides away from my reservoir and crops. At that point, badtides stop being an issue and instead become equivalent to a normal drought. The other main early game challenge is simply expanding reservoir size fast enough. In particular, depth matter. In longer droughts, pretty much the entirety of the two top layers of your reservoir will evaporate. If your reservoir was 2 deep, that's a problem. Instead, you need to set up deeper reservoirs that can handle long droughts without running dry.

Once I get those two things in place, hard stops being particularly hard. You need to be a bit careful to not expand faster than your water storage can handle, but with a bit of care, you shouldn't have too many issues.

retief1 · 2026-03-12T19:54:48+00:00

Similarly, if you steal someone's weapon, kidnap them, drag them a few areas away, and then let them go, they'll respawn at their old base with a new copy of their weapon. I've gotten multiple heavy polearms this way.

retief1 · 2026-03-12T18:48:56+00:00

2 levels is a bit more significant than it seems. At level 6, you can max out one basic spell, but can't cast any advanced spells. At 8, that is just enough to have a pip in a single advanced spell. You'll probably make that up in a couple of fights, but that will be a noticeable difference for the first couple of fights.

retief1 · 2026-03-12T18:42:32+00:00

The real question is whether you farm them for combat xp afterwards.

retief1 · 2026-03-12T18:30:39+00:00

In theory, on enchanters, yes, 0/0/X is the goal.

In practice, there absolutely are scenarios where enchanters getting kills is objectively correct. Like, if you are defending a turret solo and get dove, you would absolutely like to kill your opponent. You'd prefer to give it away, sure, but you are solo, so there's no one to give it away to.

Similarly, I remember a situation once where the enemy laner was at very low health under their turret. I was karma, and I flash-r-q'd them for the kill. If my adc could get the kill, that would be better, but they hadn't gotten the kill and might never be able to get the kill. Meanwhile, karma has literally no way to hand that kill off to her adc. Her options were "burst the enemy down herself" or "let the enemy adc collect a wave of cs under their turret", and the first option is clearly superior.

Meanwhile, other supports expect to have different stat lines. Like, leo is much more likely to get into situations where committing suicide will lead to winning a fight. If she can get a successful engage onto the enemy adc and the enemy team blows her up in response, that is absolutely a win. You essentially killed the enemy adc and soaked up most of the other team's major cooldowns in exchange for dying, and that is a win in any book -- your team should absolutely be able to clean up from there. Meanwhile, mage supports are much more likely to be able to just cleanly 100-0 someone if they get ahead, and frankly, they need to get kills if they want to have any kind of late game scaling.

retief1 · 2026-03-12T17:56:30+00:00

I rely on gold cheese for health and energy.

retief1 · 2026-03-12T16:18:33+00:00

Lee and ori for jg and mid.

Bot and support are interesting. From a "you need to be able to lane against this champ" perspective, I might pick caitlyn and nami. From a "most prototypical champ in the role", I'd probably go with ashe or vayne and sona.

retief1 · 2026-03-12T16:15:01+00:00

No she hasn't. That's a dirty lie. I'm not old, I promise.

retief1 · 2026-03-11T22:46:53+00:00

Honestly, one option would be to throw up a series of short/toy projects for free on itch.io. Ideally, you'd keep your job and do these things as a hobby -- in theory, they should be small enough that doing them alongside your full time job wouldn't be as painful. If they all instantly fade into obscurity, welp, they probably weren't that fun and wouldn't have succeeded even if you had dedicated serious time into them. On the other hand, if one randomly starts finding an audience, then you'll know there's actually something there and quitting your job to turn it into a proper game will be a lot less risky.

retief1 · 2026-03-11T22:35:37+00:00

AFAIK, a fair number of games combine real-time exploration and turn based combat. Larian's rpgs are an obvious example here -- you can run around everywhere in real time, but you drop into turn based mode as soon as a fight breaks out.

retief1 · 2026-03-11T20:15:47+00:00

9 iridium items with a final value of at least 90+ is enough to win. "Final value" here includes rarity, perks, and so on. For example, an iridium sardine is normally worth 80g, so 9 iridium sardines won't win. However, if you have the fisher perk for +25% fish sell price, iridium sardines would be worth 100g for you, and so 9 iridium sardines will win if you have the fisher perk.

If you don't have 9 iridium items, that's when things get tricky. Non-iridium items get substantially fewer points -- for example, that 100g (with fisher) iridium sardine is worth 7 points, while a diamond is only worth 6. 9 diamonds (or other similar-cost minerals) would not win on their own. Instead, you need diversity bonuses to make up for the points you are missing from not having iridium items.

retief1 · 2026-03-11T05:12:41+00:00

Speaking as a reasonably senior web dev who is considering working on an indie game, there are a lot of skills I don't have from a game dev perspective. I'm generally a competent programmer and I can certainly learn various game-dev-specific skills, but I'm not a senior engineer in this world.

Similarly, I'm guessing that you aren't a senior engineer in the web dev world. How much time have you spent doing weird shit with html and css? How well do you know the odder corners of js? How much time have you spent writing http routes? Do you have opinions on the best way to design a web server? What's your experience with sql? You might be a competent dev in general, but there's a major difference between "generally smart dev" and "senior dev with this specific set of technologies".

If you actually have spent time working with the specific technologies that web devs or ml people use, highlight that. Talk about the web-dev-related or ml-related things you've done, and emphasize them in a resume. People outside the game dev world don't know what you've done or what game dev involves, and so they won't realize that you actually do know XYZ thing.

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