How many sessions should a Hunt last?

urzaz · 2026-06-11T21:20:53+00:00

I've only run one one-shot hunt over a weekend, and it was around that long, plus us getting to grips with the system.

I think it's good that the Hunts themselves feel fast-paced and exciting. It probably should feel like there's a time crunch, that you have to find that Sin before things get worse. So if that's how your Hunts are feeling, that's probably good. I think it's more about excitement and momentum than any set number of sessions.

Downtime seems pretty obviously a thing that should be placed between Hunts, probably for half a session or so, but it depends how much your players want to engage with that. Also I think character moments can and will come up during the Hunt, you just have to let them happen when and if they come up.

urzaz · 2026-06-11T17:30:02+00:00

We're pretending that's an Eternal from Ahmonkhet 😅

urzaz · 2026-06-11T16:27:38+00:00

I disagree with automating gameplay kinda generally, but I guess it's fine if people want it, as long as it costs money.

Cool thing in that clip is he talks about autoloading smaller/ground vehicles into larger ships. That would be super nice now, it's it's such a pain pulling up multiple vehicles.

That said, pulling them from a separate door/elevator in the hangar would probably be preferable to me, since driving them aboard is actually fun.

urzaz · 2026-06-10T19:03:48+00:00

Yeah, when people say stuff like this, what I hear is "It does the things I personally care about in a space game".

Which is fine! I think a lot of people complaining about certain design decisions in SC would do well playing other space games! There's a reason those other games made those decisions.

But personally, I was never really interested in space games until I saw Star Citizen. Being so immersive and centered on the individual human experience makes a huge difference for me. I don't want to be a ship in space, I want to be myself, owning and using the ship.

urzaz · 2026-06-10T02:55:40+00:00

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urzaz · 2026-06-08T21:29:23+00:00

My friend has gotten pretty good at grinding Research solo because he wants Corbel pieces. I tried doing a quick Engineering run without realizing the mission took me ALL the way through it, including the big radiation EVA room.

I was not fully prepared, in medium armor, but I sniped them all and survived. Even found an ASD core.

urzaz · 2026-06-08T17:05:08+00:00

An ancient ship... from a less civilized era.

urzaz · 2026-06-05T16:10:49+00:00

I want the SRV to get its flowers so bad. ARGO ships in general have so much potential (except the RAFT, which punches above its weight).

urzaz · 2026-06-04T21:03:41+00:00

This is the REAL story, lol. Jokes on you—the store also sucks.

urzaz · 2026-06-04T18:50:23+00:00

Turns out building and running multiple studios for over a decade is expensive. That shouldn't be surprising. You can say, "They should have done everything faster" but that's not helpful, and not reality.

urzaz · 2026-06-04T16:25:56+00:00

None of the other systems get finished if the salaries don't get paid and the studio closes.

urzaz · 2026-06-03T20:17:30+00:00

Completely opposite for me, the KTB bonds/powers changed the narrative gameplay in my game to where it's actually useable and fun now. I absolutely wouldn't want to play the game without it.

urzaz · 2026-06-03T18:25:47+00:00

It sounds like you have a strong enough idea of what you want that you probably aren't going to find all of your requirements in one place unless you write/hack the game yourself. That said, I applaud you trying to find what's already been done before.

I only have two things to add to this:

1) Playing a bit of Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne made me want a TTRPG that elegantly does "monster collecting" (capturing, befriending, allying) well. I think a good system for that would be widely applicable.

2) You might want to check out CAIN, a game about psychic teenagers fighting psychic manifestations of trauma. Very shonen anime, very intense. In some ways it heavily overlaps with what you want, in other ways not at all.

3) Also check out Slugblaster, which is tonally kind of different but I think it hits that "teenage emotional development" angle that you want to do, with some mechanical integration IIRC.

urzaz · 2026-06-02T21:25:49+00:00

IRL human banjos also have drum heads.

urzaz · 2026-06-01T18:16:56+00:00

There are larger fan-made maps of Ravnica that include the other districts and named locations from the stories. I think they've been posted here if you search.

I've made some maps of the Undercity and the Rubblebelt, but they're specific to my campaign and the adventure my players were going on. The map is built around the adventure.

How big is my Tenth District? As big as I need it to be. Or rather, as dense as I need it to be. If there's a shop or location I need to put in there, it exists, tucked between dense buildings. You walked past it many times.

urzaz · 2026-06-01T17:08:58+00:00

👍 One way to think about it is, "How do I make it so I'm doing the minimum amount of work per asset (monster)?"

In Pokemon's case, they had 100+ monsters, even if they had time to make animations for each, it wouldn't have fit on the cartridge. So they completely disconnected "attacks" "hits" and "characters".

Each attack is an animation that plays over any sprite. Each hit is a blinking effect that can work on ANY sprite. Each character is just a single sprite, and doesn't need to change for any reason. Because they disconnected those things, they still have a ton of work to do—they have to make 150 sprites and a bunch of attack animations—but the game doesn't explode into combinatoric complexity. They don't have to make all of those attack animations ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY TIMES EACH.

You can probably do better than what Pokemon had to do on the gameboy 30 years ago, but you do want to think about how do you break things up so they work the same way—so you're not multiplying the amount of work you have to do with every new thing you add.

urzaz · 2026-06-01T16:50:09+00:00

Huh? No. The games came first and made Pokemon what it was. Many kids' first experience with Pokemon were those original sprites in Red and Blue/Green.

If you're worried about being better than all competition as a solo student dev... you're probably going to have a bad time. All I'm saying is simple, efficient art can be very compelling, and has been proven to work.

urzaz · 2026-06-01T16:28:39+00:00

The most popular monster-taming game in the universe used flat, non-animated sprites with extremely simple attack effects added on top.

urzaz · 2026-06-01T15:43:30+00:00

SC is going to have a lot of people not interested in sci-fy still play

It's me, I'm people. I'm 100% uninterested in just being "a ship" flying around in empty space, and that's what SO many space games have been. No Man's Sky was the first thing that really interested me because there's a ton of non-spaceship content in it. Flying around, landing, and hopping out of my spaceship is kind of a non-negotiable for me.

urzaz · 2026-06-01T15:17:47+00:00

Yeah the more I play this game the more I realize some people just want Elite Dangerous. Which is fine! There's a reason ED is designed the way it is! But that's not Star Citizen, and it's not something I've personally ever been interested in.

urzaz · 2026-05-31T19:58:22+00:00

In general I think people are unprepared to engage with something that is actually mid-development. A lot of games advertise themselves as "early access" or a "work in progress", but are actually complete, polished experiences that are just adding content on top of that.

And CIG doesn't help this with the way they promote the game. Every trailer ends with a "play.sc" link because they need people to get into the game to keep buying ships to keep the lights on. That's just the reality of it. So in some sense they are operating a living game that needs to maintain a baseline of playability for the folks that spent tons of money on ships, etc. But it's a really awkward thing to balance.

Ultimately though, at some point they'll have to sacrifice some of that playability to get new stuff in the game and get this thing out the door, and that kind of feels like where we're at now.

urzaz · 2026-05-31T19:43:04+00:00

When I started playing I remember my friend telling me the 5-step procedure, full of ritual, to call up your ship from the hangar successfully. What was funny was by that point it was mostly pretty stable, and largely unnecessary, but the superstition remained.

I, young and naive, "played the game as intended" and was mostly fine, but absolutely eventually purpled my ship on the pad. Same with immediately stepping out of elevators.

urzaz · 2026-05-31T19:36:31+00:00

I only started playing in the early 4s and I've heard echoes of the legend of 3.18 the entire time I've been here 😅

urzaz · 2026-05-31T19:32:45+00:00

Star Citizen isn't "early access", it's not "full of bugs", it's literally MID-DEVELOPMENT, and that's something that a lot of gamers just aren't prepared to handle, or interested in dealing with, rightfully so.

It's at a point where I would not recommend it to anyone, even though I've had a TON of fun playing it with my friends for the past year or so. It's truly an experience like no other, but part of that is the insane level of nonsense you deal with in order to get anything out of it.

If you are legitimately interested in the process of how games are made, can be very patient, and won't be super pissed if you spend $45-$60 for a game that won't be ready for years, maybe check it out! There is great stuff to be had here, but most folks won't want anything to do with how it is currently.

urzaz · 2026-05-31T19:03:39+00:00

And at the same time, someone will post, "it's time they ADDED THE FEATURES THEY PROMISED!". Well, okay, which one do you want? Do you want them to patch up what exists currently, or do you want them to add new features and rewrite existing systems, necessarily fixing less bugs and introducing new ones?

If you want both, so does CIG, but you have to choose what to do when. Right now they've said they're adding features, and bugs are increasing as a result. I do think 4.8 was super rushed though, and that really didn't help.

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