Berzee

Members
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Content count

    424

  • Joined

  • Last visited

Posts posted by Berzee

  1. Posted

    This was the newest thread about this game that I was able to find. =P

     

    Somehow I ended up subscribing for a month of this last Friday, and I am feeling surprisingly positive about it! (Whether my enthusiasm will exceed 30 days remains to be seen).

     

    Things I've liked about it:

     

    1) No "how to spend real money in-game" tutorial; it's been a long time since I played a subscription MMO. :D

    2) I was reckless and got killed by a boss on a newbie quest! In LotRO that only happened when I accidentally selected the "8-man raid" version of a quest instead of the solo version. =P

    3) If I downgrade the graphics until it looks like Redguard, it runs real smooth on my laptop too. =P

    4) I saw a bunch of other folks my level, though maybe that's just because of the recent sale.

    5) They let you put spaces and hyphens in your name!

    6) Character building is basically familiar but with some interesting idiosyncracies. Also, like every respectable MMORPG, has the occasional obscure balance issue that's generally learned a few levels too late.

     

    Things I've not liked about it:

    1) Downloading 40 GB and then 10 more in patches.

    2) Downloading 30 GB over again because, I think, the Steam auto-updater went all crazy and somehow conflicted with the ESO Launcher auto-updater. (Should've bought it not-through-Steam...but I really only needed the product code that Steam provided to make an ESO account, so now I've downloaded the Launcher from the official site and put it somewhere that Steam can't find it. :P)

     

    Thing that is weird: the amount of "for-your-eyes-only" stuff going on in a shared world. I'm pretty sure NPCs will be standing in a different place depending on where you are in a quest (so people on a different part of the quest will appear to be standing in a corner staring at nothing, but really they're talking to the person who, for you, is beckoning to you from across the room), and after I beat one quest a bunch of happy ghosts appeared in a courtyard (which presumably remained bleak and spooky for the people running by who were just starting the quest). I'm not really sure how it works, but these are my speculative observations. I'm happy that starting a quest doesn't drop me in a single-player dungeon though, especially since I've been rescued by strangers a couple of times. =P

  3. Posted

    Like Arathain, I've only tried FFT Advance and not the original. I didn't remember playing very far in FFT:A beyond the initial snowball fight tutorial and introduction. After listening to this podcast I decided to dig up my old GBA and give it another shot -- only to discover that I had a savegame with 13 hours logged! So apparently at some point in the far distant past I put a fair bit of time into this (not long for this type of game though, I know). A strange experience...

  4. Posted

    If I came across these little guys in a surrealist walking simulator (something like this), I would be fascinated by them for a good while. In a simple (simple as in elegant rather than easy) puzzle-game, I just lack the motivation necessary to internalize the movements and color-relations enough to succeed without it being a complete accident. I'm sure that for others the reaction is the opposite; they would probably only be interested in figuring out the depth of their interactions in a puzzle-game rather than in a larger world. I think they look beautiful and I enjoyed messing up on number 3 and watching them grow into a single, fluctual, blurred plasmic form. 

     

    Seeing these show up as will-o-the-wisps in a larger game would be pretty great, I agree. (If I ever felt like further complicating the maths with another dimension =P). I'm glad you enjoyed watching level 3 spiral out of control; that's one of my favorite things too. ^_^

     

    The main regret I have about what I made so far is that if you actually do well, the end game is that you've destroyed all the pretty colors and are left trying to make two tiny dots intersect. Kind of anti-climactic... maybe I will need to give some of the levels different victory conditions somehow. I'm also not the biggest fan of arbitrary/abstract puzzles -- usually I want at least some NPC Face telling me why I'm doing the thing. =P Maybe a future update will include some of my ideas on that front -- but first I will probably take a shot at making the endgame of each level a little bit less regrettable (or, making it so that as you destroy specks the saturation of the world decreases and there is sad piano music and you were the bad guy all along -_-).

  5. Posted

    I've also have a post up for my week 1 game up here if anyone is interested.

     

    I could not play your new game because, alas, I only own one 360 controller. =P But I played the canyon game and read the post about it. Those are some pretty impressive 1-week canyons! I found some sweet caves, the best being a crack in the wall leading to a giant cavern whose only exit was a little skylight just big enough for my ship. The experience reminded me a little bit of the Beggar's Canyon race from Rogue Squadron. (I identify with the part of the article about iterating on technical stuff while neglecting to iterate on fun. Now I feel bad for being a person who just typed the phrase "iterate on fun".)

     

     

    I just played SUPER PUNCHY FACE too (I had to resort to IE to be allowed to download it and now I probably have punchy-face viruses). Was happy that when I right-clicked, a shield bubble surrounded me just as I unconsciously expected it would. ^_^

  7. Posted

    I basically made it to teach myself a bunch more C#, and to create my own framework for an adventure game (with a basic dialogue system, inventory system, etc.). It was actually a lot of fun to work on, and I felt releasing it on Halloween was really appropriate.

     

    With a little more practice you could be just like a certain farmer my father told me about once. He was outstanding in his field.

     

    Playtesting notes: I playd this game this morning, and then I beat it! Sometimes the top half of the top line of some text was cut off for me, not sure if that is a known issue. I thought the main character was some type of mullet dad (probably because I heard so on a podcast I listen to called Idle Thumbs), until the end of the game when I found out it was a lady. Not to criticize the art direction or anything ^_^ it just meant that the ending was a BIG REVEAL because I thought I was One Of Them the whole time!!! Also impressed that you found the budget to include a whole separate character model for children in your game instead of recycling the Grown Man sprite. :tup:

  10. Posted

    Hmm, seems if you have a laptop with one of them junky built-in graphics cards, the editor may not even be runnable on your computer (regardless of how capable the laptop is otherwise).

     

    Luckily I have a (rarely used) desktop too so I can still try this out, albeit from a much less comfortable chair.

  15. Posted

    No playable doodles to post, but here is what happened when I tried to figure out the parametric equation for a speck traveling in a circle...and then make it turn around and go in reverse when you click...and then reverse *again* on the next click. 2 out of 3 isn't bad. ^_^

     

     

    (I've since figured out how this terrible/wonderful thing happened, but have succeeded only in making less splendid errors, not actually yet getting the correct behavior =P)

  18. Posted

    Regarding TF2 vs. CS respawning n'stuff -- does nobody play Arena mode in TF2, which is basically Counterstrike Mode? I often play this mode, usually when I see my brother is playing TF2 and decide to join his game. (On the rarer occasions when I start it up and choose a server myself, my choice is usually, inexplicably, some 24/7 Insta-Respawn 32-man 2Fort game).

     

    Regarding the strange and subtle mysteries of Desert Golfing -- all that desperately wondering why he drew a face on that hill or put a cactus there, and if he meant anything by it, and what does it all mean?! was a nice counterbalancing effect on the discussion about criticism vs. authorial intent a few episodes ago. ^__^

  20. Posted

    Does anyone here have any experience importing animations from Blender?

    Trying to make a swinging door, and have made two animation actions (one for each extreme point of the door), but these don't appear in Unity after importing.

    It seems to me that they don't count as animation actions if there's no change between the keyframes in Blender maybe?

     

    For skeletal animations the first thing I always check is to make sure that the Animation Type in Rig Options is set to Legacy. (Not sure if that would be the case with the swinging door too, but I think so).

  21. Posted

    My main initial reason was to make games that I wanted to play but that didn't exist. (Though at least one of these gave me so much trouble, I don't like to play it anymore =P). Later I found out that sometimes the best way (for me) to share a particular joke or occasional serious thought was to turn it into a small game. After releasing a couple of flash games, I then got addicted to seeing the number of plays and comments go up on Kongregate ^_^ because I quite enjoy knowing that I was able to help hundreds or sometimes thousands of people on the internet find something to do for a few minutes! There has always been the backdrop motivation of "It would be cool if I could make money doing something cool" as well, of course -- though that's been gradually replaced over time by the simple, voracious hunger for MOAR COMMENTS :P -- which in turn is slowly being overtaken by a more craftsmanlike interest in challenging myself to new heights of inventiveness / elegance / hilarious jokez. (But I think there will always be a part of me that daydreams about landing a radical gig tightening up the graphics on level 3).

  23. Posted

    It's funny that my first playtester is someone who knows the language already. ^_^ Thanks for all your comments, SuperBiasedMan! I will keep them all in mind as I go forward (especially the idea of the wordlist; it seems like it would be a nifty addition, if I can figure out a way to make it thorough and yet useable).

     

    I got a bit frustrated with not being able to open the door that lead inside to a bunch of things for me to click on (until I realised that Sue was meant to open it for me).

    If you weren't able to open the door yourself that means there is a bug! (Or that the control scheme could be tweaked to something more natural). It should open with a right-click; I am a staunch opponent of doors that only NPCs can open. ^_^

  25. Posted

    My Unity shenanigans have finally resulted in something a tiny bit playable. It is currently a short game about being bossed around by NPCs in a foreign language. Hopefully it feels less like edutainment and more like you've entered a strange land. =P But it does introduce a few basic phrases. If you try it I would be delighted!

     

    https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9OmIvXVZ11VMGxCLXB4UEdFVjg/edit?usp=sharing

    (go to File -> Download)

     

    CONTROLS are wasd, left-click to look at stuff, and right-click to use stuff. Be warned it's still very rough, and the only language available right now is Irish. =P

     

    Here also is a video (choppy because of the screen recording software) of me running around ignoring the NPCs who want to talk to me, and instead chasing some chickens. -_-