Problem Machine

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Everything posted by Problem Machine

  1. Idle Thumbs Interference ARG?!

    I assumed it was a side effect of the streaming, though that's not really an answer
  2. Also the NPC who was disappointed you don't have eggs will sell you some pyromancies if you do that. Nothing you'll find very useful probably, but still.
  3. Hm, are you sure? The wiki seems to disagree and I'm pretty sure I've been both before
  4. Yeah right now I'm keeping things as simple as possible, but I'm hoping to attend to some technical optimizations like that soon. I'd like to also separate the game audio and voice channels so I can mix things a bit better, but need to figure out how that works. Also, for some of the DS3 vids I recorded during the Summer there was also a giant fan going to keep me from melting, so it's even worse there. I'm thinking I'm going to try to do a Dishonored series and get some improvements like that and basic video editing in there. My mic is also just not especially good, which doesn't help. Thanks for the feedback!
  5. Idle Thumbs Streams

    Ah nuts I think I'll miss at least the first half
  6. Hm. I think some of that may stem from the reduced/removed move buffering, where doing a roll before you're out of the animation doesn't result in the roll immediately happening after but just an ignored input. I think I tend to prefer this approach, since it really sucks getting screwed over by an input that was a good idea a half second ago but is now suicidal, but either choice tends to result in some suboptimal situations. I've heard a lot of complaints about the hitboxes in DS2 but they've never bothered me much. Maybe I'll try doing a SL1 run sometime to see if that makes me hate the rolls. Is there anything different/new about the staggering mechanic? I think maybe the animation lasts longer but it seems like it's still basically the same system as in other games -- with the exception that it doesn't get you crit like it does in DS3.
  7. Hm, that's interesting, I wouldn't have described it that way. What frustrated you about them? I actually like them the best of the series, since I think rolling making you invincible is kind of stupid. I think putting the Capra battle in an enclosed space is fair and giving him a couple of helpers is fine, but the camera issues in that room are egregious. If they placed him a bit further back in the room to start with so he couldn't just instantly jump attack at you and removed the foliage blocking your view it would be harsh but fair. I wonder if at some point in development he was a mini-boss with no fog wall but they decided that was too easy to exploit. Ancient Dragon is just a bad boss fight though -- but at least completely optional, and also fairly easy to exploit (I one-shot it when I stacked fire defense and just ate all its attacks). Though, honestly, I think my least favorite ever was the stupid ancient wyvern fight in DS3.
  8. Just wanted to say that EVERYONE gets stuck on the Capra Demon, Nick, so that's not really a part you 'should have found easy'. The problem with that fight is that it's a long run to what is essentially a pass/fail boss fight, where you either get your initial dodge past the dogs right, kill them, and have a fairly easy time dealing with the demon himself -- or, more often, you don't. I've often run into particular trouble here since I favor heavy weapons, which makes getting the initial attacks off to kill the dogs particularly troublesome. Somewhat counter-intuitively, if you run to the right around the demon it usually works out better than running directly to the stairs, since the dog on the stairs is, of course, placed in exactly the right spot to fuck you over on that initial dash. The run through the depths was a combination of luck and unexpected observational skill. I suspect that very few players notice the fall traps in the water, and yet you easily noticed and jumped over them. That said, you also ran directly into confrontations which could have not only gotten you killed but gotten you killed THE BAD WAY. If you get cursed, you're stuck at 50% hp until you can get the curse removed. This is, incidentally, why we had you buy the purging stone from Oswald before YOU STABBED HIM. I think most of the friction you're having with the game comes down to the very different way that Dark Souls 3 handled rolling and estus. Rolling is very spammable in Dark Souls 3, costs almost no stamina to use, stuns humanoid enemies, and has a lot of invincibility, while estus is quick to use and lets you move while you use it. Due to certain decisions they made about how quickly and relentlessly enemies attack, they had to make these changes to still make the game fair, but it unfortunately results in an overall system where the consequences of your discrete choices as a player matter less, which kind of undermines the whole Souls game approach. Combat in Dark Souls 3 often comes down to a series of twitch reactions rather than tactical decisions about positioning, estus use, and angle of approach. I'll be curious to see how you like Dark Souls 2 when you get to it, since most of the layer of polish that makes 3 a smoother experience was introduced there, but it is the most conservative the series has ever been when it comes to the power of rolls and estus, offering very little invincibility and slower healing over time respectively.
  9. Humanoid enemies yeah. How much the 4 way rolling bothers you probably depends a lot on your play style. I'm very aggressive and never use spells so I'm almost always trying to close in, which means my most common roll is forward-right or forward-left, when available.
  10. Well, DS3 does have absurdly overpowered rolling and estus, which I think is mostly what he's responding to. It will be interesting to see how he handles DS2, which has even less ezwin in its rolls but at least allows 8-directional rolls so he won't end up accidentally rolling into enemies as much (my bane when going back to DS1).
  11. [Dev log] I Am Suspicious of Myself

    I haven't seen the movie, but if it's anything like the book Shutter Island should fit
  12. Idle Thumbs Streams

    Just throwing this out there, but since you have time to stream at this particular time... have you considered making a Wizard Jam entry and streaming its creation?
  13. I would have been okay with it if he'd done Well What Is It to finish.
  14. I mostly just don't want to see him lose a lot of progress and get discouraged. I mostly try to keep my peace but I really didn't want to see him die right before the undead parish bonfire by going up to fight the channeler prematurely. I'll admit, though, that this is just as much not wanting the stream to bog down with repetitive stuff. Also, if you haven't streamed or recorded, there's a pressure while you're doing it to make some kind of definite progress, even if your audience is chill you want to give them something to watch. This makes it a lot more difficult to be patient and observant in the way the Souls games ask. The pressure of streaming is probably making Nick miss more things than he would otherwise, so it's only fair to give a hint here and there to counteract that.
  15. Idle Thumbs Streams

    Internet
  16. Fuuuuuuuuuuuuck thaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat. With the exception of Irithyll, I was rarely excited to explore the world of DS3. The world 1-1, world 1-2, world 2-1, world 2-2 school of design is super boring to me. Agreed, this visualization is very unfair to DS2. A more accurate impression would have each branch looking like one of the DS3 branches. People tend to have a very skewed perception of DS2 because the disappointments coming from Dark Souls' exceptional world design were still fresh there. Since people were coming from that skewed impression of DS2, DS3 is perceived as more open and explorable than it is, despite being by far the most linear in structure and layout.
  17. Currently building a team for Fantastic Tactical Spectacular, an XCOM-style tactical robot dance battle simulation experience. Try to gain more style points with your team of four dancers than your opponent can with theirs within the turn limit! Carefully avoid or heedlessly trample your opponent's dancers to gain an advantage! See our terrible future, where humanity is confined to the brain tanks and robomanity has to learn how to create their own art! All this and more - or possibly less! The core concept of this game is a head-to-head tactical battle game (like XCOM or Final Fantasy Tactics) where movement and action are the same thing. Choosing your dance move determines both where you will move and the effect it will have on the battle(dance)field -- whether that's to restore your allies' stamina, boost your own style, or cramp your opponent's style. If you run into something that's the end of your turn -- but if you run into your opponent it's also the end of their turn, so sometimes a bit of tactical clumsiness may be called for. Project to be developed in Unity, but specific implementation of art/animation as-yet undetermined Current team: skamakazi: Core programming, design Problem Machine: Secondary programming, design, planning, music (maybe secondary art/animation if needed) ????: Art/animation, ??? We need 1-2 more people to create the art for the game. You have largely free reign to create the look of the game, choose 2d/3d rendering, etc as long as we can meet design parameters. What are those? We need at very very least one finished character with 5-8 dance moves that match up in general movement with certain gameplay parameters. They also need to be viewable from four angles, left/right/top/down. These moves can be very simple animations as long as they're visually distinct from one another. If you want to make a 3d model and meticulously keyframe a dance animation, you do you. If you'd rather just make simple 2d sprites for body parts that bounce around rhythmically, that would be fine too. Ideally, we'd like 8 characters with distinct movesets so that two humans can play against each other with unique teams of four, but that's super ambitious for a jam so we'll just see how it goes.
  18. I felt very proud when Nick managed to not go up after I said DON'T GO UP. Well, he didn't go very far up at least. I mean, he managed to turn around before he died. It was actually pretty impressive he got the gargoyles that quickly though, it definitely took me more tries the first time I played.
  19. Fantastical Tactical Spectacular: Dance Tactics

    Still need an artist on this one. Post or DM if you're interested.
  20. Because streaming is a pain to schedule, I just decided to record my run of the Dark Souls 3 DLC and put it up on youtube. I get a bit salty sometimes, but try to keep complaining to a minimum. Fuck Millwood Knights though, for real. Check it out if you like weird nerds playing Dark Souls! Episode 1 Dark Souls 3 Playlist
  21. Idle Thumbs Streams

    I honestly think that wandering through huge open areas is a big weak point of DS3 in general, so it's not the DLC in particular that bothers me this way. I've soured on a lot of the design decisions made in DS3, though I still generally enjoy the game. I'll be uploading my playthrough of AoA at some point and I go into more detail there as it occurs to me -- though I also end up saying some dumb shit too. So it goes, hard to be consistently insightful when you just talk as you go. Actually that reminds me to start putting those up. I'll link them from the DS3 thread when they start going live.
  22. Idle Thumbs Streams

    Personally, to go into a bit more detail, my take on the DS3 DLC is that the town areas are really cool, the waste areas are really boring, the wolf enemies are an interesting design that mixes things up but are usually trivially easy, and the millwood knights are complete horseshit that mistakes difficult for interesting. I'm working on the boss now, who takes too fucking long just like the nameless king but is a very fun battle aside from that. I don't know why people say it's so short though, it's taking me about as long as Artorias of the Abyss -- the DS2 DLCs were pretty huge and took a bit longer, but still. I will say that storytelling-wise this DLC is pretty interesting, but as cryptic as Souls always is that's going to be a mixed benefit for different people. I guess this isn't a great place to discuss this, but eh since it came up.
  23. Idle Thumbs Streams

    I've been going through the DS3 DLC -- I'd say on average it's pretty good, but there's a lot of kind of tedious bits wandering through big open areas. Maybe worth coming back to when both DLCs are done and doing them back to back? As a viewer I'd be more interested in seeing you tackle Dark Souls than the DS3 DLC.
  24. The Next President

    I wrote about this shitshow for my blog thing yesterday. I'm just going to dump the entire text here rather than link it. --------------------------------------- President Trump. President Donald fucking Trump. The last few days have been strange. There was a kind of trick we played on each other as kids, where we’d hold one fist on the other person’s head, hit it lightly with the other hand, and trickle our fingers down across their hair, telling them we just broke an egg on their head. If you had the right touch, it could be an effective illusion. And that’s kind of what it felt like – a shock, too light to hurt exactly but unignorable, followed by a creeping feeling as the egg that wasn’t there slid down the scalp, the neck, slimy. That slimy creepy feeling is still there, placed in honor of a slimy creep. Every day when I wake up I have to remind myself of the way my country has chosen to self-mutilate. President-elect Donald; Donny P; King Trumplefuckle, first of his name. That feeling has mostly subsided now, the numbness as mostly faded. What’s left is rage. Anger’s not that interesting to talk about, but god damn I feel it. It twists my guts up. And I’m trying now to figure out how to let it stray far enough away that I can think straight while still keeping it on a leash to make sure I never lose it. We’re going to need anger and outrage. Anger at injustice is the lattice that holds hope together, that affects change, that can protect and sustain us through what is likely to be one of the most dangerous eras in American history. There’s a part of me that wants blood and violence, that wants to scour the country with fire until the cancer of white supremacy is burned to ash. I won’t say that violence is categorically unjustifiable, especially in a confrontation against those who believe that lynchings are an acceptable tactic. However, these are the minority of the opposition. We won’t defeat them by crushing them. We will defeat them by discrediting them. This work was begun but never finished: We must make the concept of white supremacy as disgusting nation-wide as it always should have been. We must make the very idea of race entitling you to a better life, making you mentally or physically superior, as a sick fantasy, masturbated to in dim light briefly before the curtain of shame falls. So, yeah, normally I like to talk about video games here. I will, again, soon. The world carries on, and art is still important – terrifyingly so. Our culture has gotten away from us, has founded itself in lazy reinforcements of stereotypes rather than new stories that teach new ways of being and seeing. We’ve chewed up and regurgitated tropes that have lasted for far too long, colonialism and racism and sexism dressed in new clothes so we could pretend that’s not what they were any more, so that we could do things the easy way, so we could just hide behind paying tribute to the classics, so that we could make art that just reinforced the same ancient and lazy thoughts that have motivated the worst violence of the past centuries. That’s what I have to say to the artists. Do good, and do better, and try to ease pain and light a way to a better place. Also endeavor to spread diversity both through the work you do and the work you boost. It makes everything more varied and vital and interesting, and maybe if people will be a bit less cavalier with voting for xenophobia if their favorite musician or artist or whatever will be hurt by it. Maybe, maybe, maybe. However. Good art isn’t enough to fix this, which is a huge disappointment since that’s the field I tend to be most interested in. First and foremost, we need to talk about harm reduction. Protect and take care of yourself. Survival is protest. Once you’ve made yourself as safe and comfortable as you feel you need to, protect and care for your friends and family. And so forth, it echoes outwards, together creating the most safety we can for each other, to our friends, to their friends, to strangers on the street and on the bus. Solidarity. We must come closer together. We all have our differences, and someday will probably need to negotiate those, but now we have a lot more in common and a much bigger problem that needs solving. These communities may be needed if the police fail to function, which is quite possible when they’re compromised at the state level – especially since, even before that became a concern, they often failed to actually serve the communities they were assigned to. I won’t say things are going to be okay, but we have the power to make things more okay than they would otherwise be. After that, we need to do everything we can to keep the ground we have gained over the past century. Obstruct, obstruct, obstruct: Fortunately we’ve had a good example set for us over the past 8 years by the GOP. Don’t let them do a fucking thing. Bury them in yellow tape, make sure not a single change goes by uncontested for four years. Our lawmakers have to be told that this is what we want. It’s fine: Democrats have a proven track record of getting nothing done, so they should be up to the job. If things are going to get anywhere near as bad as I think they will, there are going to be deaths. Actually, there already have been: Several suicides on the night of the election and day after. But the full damage remains to be seen. When it manifests, we must do everything we can to tell the story. We must draw the line from the human suffering effect to its root cause in policy and rhetoric. Avoid accusation, but make the conclusion obvious and unescapable: The voice of guilt must come from within. America has made many mistakes, and Americans know it, even if they don’t like to say so. Much of what went wrong with this election was a lack of a narrative, but this provides us with a powerful narrative for the next election: Redemption. “Everything has gone wrong, everything is fucked up, but it’s not too late: Together we can fix this”. It’s a powerful message, but for it to be effective we need to have a wide consensus that things are fucked. Obviously, with Trump in charge they will be, but that’s not the same as getting everyone to agree that they are – if we’re not careful, the Trump Empire will become the new normal. That’s why the story of the human suffering created must be told, told again, retold, until it becomes widely understood that things are broken. Of course, selling the brokenness is only half the battle. We will also need a plan to put things back together. We’ve needed such a plan for a very long time. The lack of such a plan lost this election. Perhaps something like basic income will be the only effective strategy to combat the extinction of manufacturing and mining jobs: I don’t know. In two years we must be ready with a plan and candidates who are behind that plan. Perhaps most vitally, we must stop letting our opposite define the terms of the conflict. We let them define our defense of our human dignity as ‘having an opinion’, and let them make it a virtue to flout that common decency. We let them pretend that the imaginary transgressions of our candidate were comparable to the many monstrous grotesqueries of their candidate. We let them call themselves patriots while they worked to undermine the constitution and everything this country has ever stood for. Maybe we’re getting smarter about these things, slowly, but we have let far too much slide. So I will say this: If we are ‘Social Justice Warriors’, then let this be the Social Justice War. I, for one, intend to win it.
  25. The Next President

    Autocracy: Rules for Survival