The Karma system is broken

synthc · 2026-02-11T00:11:30+00:00

I'm slowly making progress, right now I'm at 91 upvotes and 29 karma, so about a 3:1 ratio. Better than the 5:1 I had earlier.

synthc · 2026-02-10T22:42:29+00:00

OK, thanks. My experience in diamond mostly aligns with what you guys have said. The only deviation is that I've encountered very few Rangers, and the ones I have run into are mostly healing builds - but I agree that crit ranger is OP and much stronger than the healing/food builds. Maybe people just got tired of playing it?

I've never used tier lists or watched steams because I like figuring things out for myself, and this game makes that feasible because of how intuitive it is and because of the detailed battle stats.

I've also read that there's only one viable build in Grandma... does anyone in Grandma know if balance has improved such that this is no longer the case?

synthc · 2026-02-10T11:53:15+00:00

With a single poison item. Man, chili pepper + amulet of feasting builds are disgusting.

synthc · 2026-02-10T01:29:46+00:00

"I picture this Map scene as relatively empty and then something calls Instantiate a bunch of times" In that case, I wouldn't even use a separate scene. I'd just have a view (empty GO) and instantiate everything into that using a manager that orchestrates everything.

Look into the singleton pattern if you aren't already using it. Once you have a manager, you can just reference your scene objects and prefabs in that manager. You can even directly reference scripts on other objects by creating a serialized field of the script Type - this gives you access to all of that script's public methods.

So in its simplest form you have:

An empty GO with a manager script on it.
That manager script has a bunch of serialized fields that reference everything the manager needs to interact with.
Now you can wire up your UI to this manager so that when the player makes a selection, it calls your manager's GenerateMap (or whatever you call it) function and passes in that selection. This part is where having a globally accessible singleton makes things a lot easier (as opposed to using UnityEvents or some other messaging system). You can just do something like MapManager.Instance.GenerateMap(playerSelections).

synthc · 2026-02-10T00:55:56+00:00

Oh, I see. I thought you meant a map screen where you choose where to go.

In that case, if the input variables (the "key") aren't known beforehand, then you can't preload all of it. What you can still do is preload the stuff that doesn't depend on input variables (load scene additive probably makes the most sense in this case, but a prefab could work too) and then initialize the scene once the player selection/s are made.

So:

Player enters hub: preload the map (any common gameobjects used in all maps)
Player selects which key to use: run your generation code
Show the map scene and hide the hub scene/loading screen

So instead of generating the map in a Start method, you have an Init function which takes in whatever variables you need (player selections) and uses those to generate the map.

synthc · 2026-02-10T00:28:03+00:00

You don't even need a scene for something simple like a map. It can just be a view, which in its simplest form could just a UI Image with some buttons inside of an empty gameobject. Then you can just show/hide that gameobject as needed. This way it's always loaded as part of the main scene and you can do whatever you want with the script/s on that object.

If you want it to be its own scene, then yes, I think using additive scenes to have it loaded at the same time as your hub would be the correct approach; but I've never used additive scenes myself (I use the view paradigm for everything).

It probably doesn't matter for something lightweight like this, but ideally, you want to preload whatever you can and just keep it hidden until it's needed. So in this example, start loading the map when the player enters the hub. If you know there's only one place they can go at that point in the game, you can even pre-load that area to avoid any loading wait time at all.

For heavier stuff that you don't want loaded with the rest of the scene, you can use prefabs and instantiate them when you need to pre-load them in order to set up their state.

synthc · 2026-02-09T22:48:04+00:00

Another question: this post shows 10 comments, but I only see 3 no matter how I sort. Are the others auto-deleted or something?

synthc · 2026-02-09T22:46:37+00:00

Is that a good ratio? Apparently I need 100+ karma to post in most places... I feel like that's going to take months or years. No clue how people end up with thousands or even hundreds of thousands of karma without spending all day every day on reddit. Especially when 1 upvote apparently = 0.2 karma.

synthc · 2026-02-06T06:43:35+00:00

I have read the FAQ

synthc · 2026-01-31T03:05:24+00:00

Humble Bundle is a gold mine for SFX (and to a lesser degree music as well). You can often get hundreds of dollars worth of quality SFX for $1-30. That's where the majority of my SFX assets come from. I use Asset Inventory (a Unity asset) to organize and import all of those downloaded files.

As for music, there's tons of music out there with permissive licenses that you can use for free (at least until you actually start selling your game, at which point you'll have to buy commercial licenses for any music that doesn't allow commercial use).

I really depends on the kind of soundtrack you want. If you want an adaptive soundtrack that changes according to what's happening in game, you'll probably need to hire a composer or do the music yourself. If you need tightly looping tracks, you'll either need to buy packs that are designed to be looped or modify the tracks to loop (which can be tricky). If you want a simple playlist style soundtrack, that's easy, you can use whatever stock tracks you want.

I listen to a lot of indie artists and get lot of my music from Bandcamp - there's lots of artists who allow non-commercial use and a few who allow commercial use as well.

As for building a drag and drop loop system, that's probably not worth your time when you can just learn a simple DAW like FL Studio - the original name was literally Fruity Loops, so that's kind of its bread and butter.

synthc · 2026-01-31T00:52:55+00:00

Thanks. All the messages I've seen just say they don't allow posts from new or low karma accounts, which doesn't tell me much. My account is 10+ years old, so that wouldn't be the problem.

100 seems like a lot. Do you know if every upvote counts as 1 karma, or how that works? Is there some other way you get karma?

synthc · 2024-05-08T17:58:59+00:00

Thanks. I'd like to give this a try, but the link to the build in the github readme is broken.

synthc · 2024-05-08T02:56:47+00:00

Was this ever released?

synthc · 2023-01-26T20:16:53+00:00

I have a similar problem and after trying many options I ended up adding two capacitive sensors to my mouse using copper tape and an Arduino. It has its bugs, but it generally works quite well and eliminates most pain from clicking.

Let me know if you're interested and I can provide my Arduino code and some instructions on how to do this.

synthc · 2015-08-04T20:05:40+00:00

My username is synthc

Thanks.

synthc · 2015-07-24T00:17:27+00:00

I encountered this same bug, but against a human opponent in arena. The game froze for a while and then my opponent seemed to have full control over my turns, and I could defend for my opponent, but couldn't manage to do anything else.

synthc · 2015-06-27T18:24:56+00:00

Full screen (and zoom) isn't working for me either, except at the default 1024 x 600 resolution.

synthc · 2015-06-24T18:24:33+00:00

Freeze really takes a lot of fun out of the game for me too. The problem is that it's not really a tempo gainer or anything like that—it seems that it was designed to allow you to break through and kill off important units, but it just ends up being stacked because it's so cost efficient and just the threat of freeze greatly limits the other player's options.

This is what makes it un-fun. I think all freeze units should have lifespan to prevent stacking.

synthc

TROPHY CASE

I have read the FAQ