I just assume everything I don’t like has rich queer subtext
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- Extremely good promise of build variety; 6 simple base classes w/ build coming into focus through drops at same pace as Slay the Spire
- Petrochemically-greased death/spend upgrades/explore new build loop, second only to Dead Cells
- Extensive array of permanent progress markers, with greatest success in content-parsimonious relationship system marrying Harvest Moon’s gift-giving mechanic with Supergiant’s commitment to extensive contextual dialogue
- Comic-appealing character design; characters are based on their sketch, attitude, and vocal performance so they read across a Social Engagement at the expense of shading
It’s not very exciting or interesting but it’s very, very good at what it’s doing.
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it’s the first roguelike I’ve put any time into and yeah it comes down to build variety and good art
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What kind of monster would answer “No”?
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oh yeah one thing about hades that does stink is it phoning home every 8 seconds to ‘gameanalytics.com’
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?
I implemented that specific product an earlier project, when I reviewed its API and terms of service I didn’t think there’s anything fishy about it. Game telemetry is almost universal for the past decade.
Can you add it to your hosts file?
I downloaded Hades but only sat at the title screen.
yeah pihole is blocking it and it still runs fine
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nothing specifically objectionable, just kind of annoying to think about the design-by-committee aspects of someone constantly refining KPIs (which imo you can already feel on Hades and is where a lot of my dismay comes from)
nice to know that my pi-hole makes it that much more difficult for developers to overtune game mechanics
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Could this explain why Bastion’s too-tight dopemine loop left me with the feeling that I was being used??
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Blocking it doesn’t; there’s plenty of data from 1,000 players to make decisions. That’s of course why devs should allow players to choose whether they want to submit telemetry.
I agree about the perils of overtuning but I don’t think it applies in this case. Patch notes like this, with dozens of balance tweaks every few weeks, enables the game Hades is, in concert with its use of early access. Comparing it to the iteration a traditional community-built roguelike underwent over a matter of decades, here a single designer can achieve in a year a similar amount of progress. It fundamentally enabled games like this and Slay the Spire. It’s a fundamental tool I use, too.
In single-player games, balance is most critical in looking at how unbalanced options foreclose possibilities and limit the optimal play space. The goal of balancing like this is to open up more of the content as viable. I think this strategy is incorrectly applied to a lot of modern multiplayer games because it ignores the second-order play of a developing meta-game. Once you have direct player competition, anticipating other-player choices based on an identified hierarchy of value becomes nearly as important as the quality of choices inside the game.
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I also found that I couldn’t stand slay the spire for reasons I struggled to articulate, sooooooooo
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Did it feel fundamentally different to the intuited balance of something like Binding of Isaac? It’s similarly item- and build-heavy, but possible because Ed is a very gifted designer working with Nintendo-knowledge in his bones. It’s also much less combinatorially complex than Slay the Spire or Hades.
can’t speak to binding of Isaac specifically (as someone who had exactly one fundamentalist parent who was kind of pitiable I tend to disengage from any media about complicated relationships with religion, because it all sort of lands on a scratched out empty space for me), but from something like noita or even necrodancer, which is very self-evidently tuned, yes. It may be a problem of roguelikes that force you to really commit to builds, though; that demands a very tight loop.
2 Likes
With much of my basic resource production settled in Factorio Seablock, it’s time to run through and figure out how to maximize the next largest consumable, circuits!
Warning, lots of pictures.
To make wooden boards in a semi self-sustained way you need fertilizer and soil to generate seeds and throw them in a bunch of greenhouses to grow trees. Then the trees are cut into wood and then processed into the boards on the right. The only additions I need to make are fuel for converting limestone into lime and iron plates for replacing sawblades.
This feeds into the basic tier: circuit boards, an AngelBob mod addition. Add copper wire to those wooden boards and bam! a yellow rectangle that’s just barely capable of calculation, used in basic machines. The blue rectangle shows how many is required to produce 30 of them a second. I just liked the running man made out of belts so I didn’t cut the second one in half.
Then green circuits, familiar to people playing the base game, add some more wiring and transistors on top of the circuit board and press it all together. That’s used for more complex machines or upgrading the first basic machines you can create.
Red circuits, well…
…I think, umm…
…you see, there’s this…
…actually if you let me double-back and …
breathes out exasperatingly
Anyway a bunch of enormous work goes into this part of the factory and out the end comes 15 red circuits a second.
If you want a breakdown of what’s actually going on I can explain it further detail. And I have yet to tackle blue circuits but I imagine it’ll be another 4x in size to do sustainably.
9 Likes
Yeah. I’ve found it really hard to settle on a balance between player guidance and random rewards forcing improvisation. That’s where I think Binding of Isaac was clearly very strong – the keys/bombs allowed players some informed decision-making about heading for certain desired rewards. Similarly, the card-game drafting structure in Slay the Spire is always clear: 3 cards, choose one. And Hades follows suit: random god, 3 powers, choose 1. I think it’s one of the clear things people are starting to settle on as this area starts to solidify/ossify.
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drones are enablers
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I have them being built! But I only have access to passive providers and storage. The real drone logistics are locked behind another science tier that I’m building up to with these sections. I just got refineries out by building blue circuits ad-hoc so I could get sustained tungsten ore, for example, a required metal for those beakers.
You’re more disciplined than I am, but I have a hard time continuing to optimize space and flow once I get them – so I generally don’t.
just finished digital a love story and i’m just fucking crying wtf
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