Post a Comment On: Digitally Staving Off Boredom

By last Friday, I had just enjoyed having five days off for the first time in a very long time, but I still had little new to report.  I did not bother writing a blog entry about what happened then, but I suppose I have thought about it enough that I will now, and perhaps write another one at the end of this week.

Now Playing: Dragon Quest Builders, Slay The Spire, Caves Of Qud.

Last week, I was still playing through Dragon Quest Builders (the first one, the Switch port), finishing off Chapter 2 (which mostly revolves around pestilence) and onto Chapter 3 (which, following an unexpected Four Horseman analogy, revolves around war).  The game pretty much remains exactly as I described it two entries ago, "Dragon Quest themed Minecraft, except with a higher purpose to build" and "a pretty good experience for me."
Yes, I'm still spoiling the sequel for myself by watching Aavak play it, but by the time I have $60 to rub together for a new game I will probably have forgotten most of what I have seen anyway.  Dragon Quest Builders 2 can be neatly summarized as, "Improved from the original on all fronts, removing the item degradation mechanic, adding a ton of content, and with a delightful, cleverly-written story campaign."  I understand that they are currently creating DLC for it, too.

In a way, I find the two games of the Dragon Quest Builders series different enough that they are both worthy of a play for the distinctly different experience they offer.  Differences include:
In the first game, less scripted dialogue and events.  Consequently, it turns you loose sooner to engage in the day/night cycle of harvesting and building that can be found in both games.   A proper farming mechanic is in the second game, though it seems to factor less into the second chapter as it did the first "Furrowfield" chapter.   An "appreciation" mechanic has been added to the second game, where villagers drop hearts for you to pick up based off of their appreciation for meeting requests or providing facilities.  In the first game, this is simply "leveling up" towns by placing furniture.   Speaking of which, furniture has point values in the first game, but not the second game.  Other than meeting criteria for advancing the story, there is no tangible benefits to leveling up your towns in the first game.  In the second game, getting enough appreciation to level up your own unlocks bonuses. Some of these changes I am not entirely sure are for the better, but overall I think it is safe to say that Dragon Quest Builders 2 is an all-around improvement.

Towards the end of last bizarro weekend, I ended up diversifying my play experience a bit.

My patience for Slay The Spire to end up on Humble Monthly finally bore fruit, and it's as everyone has always said it is: a great card-based game.  Of course, the unique setting is a nice fringe benefit as well, but I love when games offer a series of interesting choices (which is oddly uncommon considering that is what Sid Meier reputedly said games are).  The way Slay The Spire is laid out, with its random card draws leading to a new set of choices each time, is basically an engine of interesting choices.  It is quite addictive.
I noticed I had Cryptark installed and, on a lark, gave it another run.  As I mentioned when I played it a little over a year ago, it is a good game in the same way Dark Souls is: your skills as a player can genuinely grow and make an impact upon it.  There was a point in which all games were like that, but something was lost in the rise of persistence-yield-reward types of games, which sought to alienate no one by eliminating player skill as a factor, only to lose what was most important about games.  I should endeavor to remember that.

In seeking answers regarding whether or not I ought to go with a rudimentary tileset for my own games, I played a bit more of Caves of Qud.  I opted to play more of a brainaic mutant this time around, with the ability to teleport, interpret artifacts via psychometry, and with just enough technical knowhow to rebuild what they have learned.

That a character of this build keeps dying is proof of my own dumb inability to pay attention to the fact they are frequently delivered to death's door.  Having a typically-available ability to teleport myself out of harm, only to die anyway, just proves I was not paying attention.  Not noticing when fights have gone from trivial to deadly until it is too late is perhaps the most common source of defeat for roguelike players.  Developing the skill to uncannily tell the difference marks a significant ascension in skill, but it takes focus and patience, something difficult to muster in the 21st century.

Development.

The on-again, off-again strategy for doing game development, where at least 33% of the time is spent playing games rather than making it, seems to work a lot better for me to actually focus on my work.  However, I still seem to spend an awful lot of time staring at sprite layouts trying to decide what I want to make.
[Image] I was testing if I could add color sprite overlays, color tile underlays, and sprite outlines to Oryx Ultimate Roguelike.  Honestly, I lack so much confidence that I am frequently surprised when I accomplish something that should obviously work. What I ended up doing is creating a mockup for a desired scene in three different tilesets using Tiled, and this turned out useful on a few fronts.  The respective ease of putting together the scene helped me to determine the overall difficulty that I would encounter in trying to employ this in my own game.  This mockup creation exercise also revealed more about the flexibility of the sets in realizing the concepts I was thinking of.

In the end, I still had yet to figure out what set I wanted to go with, but one thing that was becoming increasingly obvious is that all of this staring at sprites was just a way that procrastination was keeping me away from finishing a game.

I thought to myself that perhaps I ought to just go with the first sprite set I picked, and the current idea of what I thought I wanted to make, and not look back until I had a complete play loop up.  That idea should apply to my sprite selection as well: just stick to the current tileset I have and worry about swapping it out after I have something playable.  If I could get myself to do that, I could probably have a play loop up inside of a day.

Geldon's Boring Real Life.

Still in self-imposed exile to try and isolate myself from constant familial drama to work on what is important to me, with varying levels of success.  I hear my immediate family member at the other house is still attempting to deal with their mood disorder via legalized chemical dependency, but somehow only I am convinced that this has only made things worse, so there will be no intervention.  It don't know how long we plan to keep this two household stalemate going, but I can't see it being all that viable in the long term, so I wonder just who or what will break first.

During my bizarro weekend where I enjoyed five days off, the battle with idle hands was more acute than usual.  The Steam store is often a portal to things I try not to seek out deliberately.  Just another casualty in the War of Art, rather specifically around page 45. When the bizarro weekend was over, it was back to work for me, just as everyone else's weekend begins.  That's deliberate, of course: I crave solitude.  Introverts like myself have rich inner lives that are only disrupted by those who crave attention.  But, as the old philosophers have said, one's freedom is only as good as their self-mastery.  I imagine only a handful of people are born with self-mastery, and I have yet to put the necessary work in to gain it myself.

Still, not to be selfish.  The actual weekend is when the niece and nephew were scheduled to come over for a visit.  I hardly see them when I am working, but I bought the nephew a JAVA-based copy of Minecraft for his birthday and helped him get it running with the Twitch app so he could try his hand at modding it.  The ten-year-old is still a tad too young and impatient to play the game properly, and I do not think he fully understands that Minecraft mods primarily exist to keep survival mode interesting when vanilla survival no longer is.
[Image] I ordered a new foam mattress in the mail (a Nectar Sleep brand, reputedly one of the best values out there) to replace my boxspring one.  My current mattress is hardly a couple years old, but with badly misaligned box springs that are uneven in some places, downright invasive in others.  The damage suggests someone might have been jumping and/or sitting on it.  Foam is not so fun to jump on, and has no springs to break, so perhaps I will have a mattress that lasts a bit longer this time.

Opinions about Nectar's quality are not as universal as their reputation for bad customer service, but the mattress is quite a bit cheaper (about 66% as expensive) than similar alternatives.  One particularly interesting mystery (as noted by Sleep Like The Dead) is that it is an oddly light mattress for its purported density.  Worse case scenario, I am only down about $425 for a twin, which is not an insignificant amount, but a pittance in the world of mattress sales.