SuperBiasedMan

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Posts posted by SuperBiasedMan

  3. Posted

    On 15/9/2018 at 4:11 PM, dium said:

    A while back I posted in the quittin' thread that I was abandoning Hollow Knight after getting the easy, clearly-false ending. Well, a few weeks after that a friend was playing the game and it made me want to get back into it, and I've now defeated the GD Radiance and finally feel like I've actually "beat the game".

     

    It took me an embarrassingly long time to beat that boss, though! Several hours spread across multiple weeks. IDK if everyone else considers that one boss a such a significant difficulty spike or if it's just me.

     

    I have 95% out of a possible 112% completion (those 12 extra percentage points from DLC, I assume). I already know of a few challenges that I have no interest in ever doing (e.g. the delicate flower run) so my fleeting bout of completionism might as well stop here. I haven't touched the Godsmaster stuff, so that's there whenever I feel the urge to revisit the game.

     

    Not entirely a difficulty spike, but that was a very hard boss for me. Oddly, as someone who had done the full 107% completion before the new DLC, I did actually find it more difficult than any other boss in the game. I specifically found it notable that they did make that boss hard compared to the final boss of Dark Souls being a relative pushover, so I would definitely count that as a win for you.

  4. Posted

    If you want to PM me that code you didn't understand, I could look through and break down exactly what's happening to try help clarify it. 

     

    And yeah, something I did that was helpful was that I started making one game every week. I rarely actually finished any of these, but I had to stop working after a week. The time limit was good for not making me get too deep into anything, and I also could just do whatever idea I had without being concerned about whether it was good enough to take up my time. A week might be a rough schedule for you, but I endorse setting deadlines with projects where you have to stop regardless. Then you can look over what you did/didn't learn, and bear that in mind for the next thing you do. 

  5. Posted

    11 hours ago, Dosed said:

    So did you guys get work programming with any official certificates or did you just self-teach and then apply for stuff? How long did it take you to feel like you were actually able to comprehend what was going on? SuperBiasedMan what resources did you use to learn when you first started?

     

    When I was a kid, I actually learned some programming in summer courses held in colleges. Mostly we learned the basic principles of how programming stuff worked and made very simple stuff. I've self taught a lot more since using code academy to brush up on some other languages, but a lot of my learning was really using tutorials to male games and then googling around to find solutions to problems. The way to make this work best is to actually try to understand the why behind the how, so that you can reapply the knowledge elsewhere rather than just having a solution to a single problem. 

     

    I've had multiple different points where it felt like I 'got it'. Getting text to appear on a screen was great, having a functional little script was a new one. But there's always a new thing to figure out. It took me a while to understand what a class was and what it was for. Right now I don't think I fully grasp multithreading for example. But I think when I first got a computer to do a thing I told it, I felt like I got the basic idea, and it's just building onto it from there. 

     

    In terms of work, I had a weird route. I studied animation in college and now work at an animation studio, writing scripts and tools for them. In this specific case they preferred me having an animation degree rather than a programming one, because it meant I'd understand the jargon and how the industry worked. No one else there did programming at the time, so they basically wanted me to come on and try streamline things by myself as best I could. I can't say for sure what it's like in other industries or software development itself.

  6. Posted

    I would agree that Python is a good early language because it hides a lot of programming cruft that other languages require you to specify. With Python you can focus on understanding what variables, functions and loops are and how to use them. It was my first proper programming language, and I've since learned about the more crunchy bits of other languages. I'd have found it much harder to learn it all in one go.

     

    I use Python in work all day, so feel free to hit me up if you need help with anything specific. Judging by my LinkedIn inbox, there is a demand for Python out there.

  7. Posted

    Bah, sorry about that bug! Those examples were made before i adjusted the UI structure, you can even see how they look out of date. :P 

     

    I'll fix that and the build compatibility thing.

     

    Also the reason I'm using Unity is mostly for me being comfortable with it, and it just being a tool to build programs for different platforms. It hasn't been all that heavy for me, but was it running slow or eating up resources for you?

  8. Posted

    The game has been released (a week ago)!

     

    I released in time for the deadline but I still wanted to do some hot fixes and UI updating before I posted here and declared it released.


    I was a little bit tight on writing as much as I wanted for this, but I did a lot of work changing grey squares into some rough looking, hopefully nice, paper textures.

     

    You can get the game now:
    https://superbiasedman.itch.io/our-newest-show

     

    Big thanks to atlantic creating music for this, when I had a vague and uncertain brief of ambient music that might need to play for a whole hour.

     

    Thanks for the kind words folks, I hope you enjoy this house of cards. Please do let me know about bugs too, as I'll be continue to work on the main game this was a branch off of.

  11. Posted

    Hey all! Welcome to my thread. I'm working on a game that's basically a modified version of a game I had already been working on. This is a podcast simulator game, where fictional prompts are generated for the player and they write their own episode of of an Important Podcast.

     

    ====================================================================================================

     

    You can get the game now!
    https://superbiasedman.itch.io/our-newest-show

     

    ====================================================================================================

     

    There's a giant JSON file full of prompts that get served up to the player to flavour their choices as the episode goes on. Then to actually play it, you're just given a series of passages to fill out or make narrative choices and string together an episode. In the spoiler below you can see a gif showing how some of the original game works, for writing a Fantasy story.

     

     

     


    EarlyDemo.thumb.gif.603af11910804ce007300751beb9d860.gif
     

     

     

    I've started building a new file with prompts and figuring out the structure of an Important Podcast episode, leading to this very early test episode I wrote:

     

     

     

    Announcing Podcast Simulator 2018 [And Rentacast]

    Length Choice

    • Announcement [Short: Streamer's Choice] [CHOSEN]
    • Regular Episode [Medium]

    Episode - My Episode - Power 3 (Starting Power 3)

    • Focus: X
    • Problem: X
    • Guest: Ex Host
    • X: X
    • X: X
    • X: X

    The hosts just need to announce this rad new game I'm making.

    Hi Everyone: Awkward and Stilted

    Hey everyone um. Welcome to Important Podcast for this special episode.

    Topic - Startups = Hell - Power 3 (Starting Power 3)

    • Type: Startup Hellscape
    • X: X
    • X: X
    • X: X
    • X: X
    • X: X

    Start ups are just total hell, aren't they?

    Introduce Topic: X

    Oh this is a mess
    Haha
    [inaudible]
    It reminds me of, have you seen this new RentaDude?
    *laughing*
    What
    Yeah you can rent, well, rent a dude.
    But is he a dude, or is he a Dude.
    What - I, I don't know what that difference is.

     

    Attempt 1 Flips

    • HEADS
    • HEADS
    • TAILS [X]

    Attempt 2 Flips

    • HEADS
    • TAILS [X]

    Attempt 3 Flips

    • TAILS [X]

    Failure... Didn't raise Startups = Hell's Power.

    Conclude Topic: X

    Isn't this the same as GuyShare?
    Yeah, or BlokeBorrow.
    I guess, just that Dude was new.
    I think DudeSwap already existed though didn't it?
    No that was DadSwap.
    Ahhh.

    What Was This Episode: X

    ...ANYWAY! We were just here announcing that this rad new game exists.
    Yeah who needs podcasts now when you can make fanfics of them.
    Now THAT would be a good startup.
    Fanfics?
    No, rentapod.
    But... that's not eve-

    Now to determine if My Episode can complete their goal...

    Coin Pool Modifiers:

    • +3 coins: Starting pool equal to My Episode's Power.

    Resolution Flips

    • HEADS
    • TAILS
    • TAILS

    My Episode has barely succeeded.

    End This Podcast: X

    This was a disaster. Let's just go.

     

     

    (As you can tell a lot of the prompts are still blank)

     

    The main thing I need to do for the jam is fill out the prompts you can get, write up explanations to help a user understand these prompts and improve the UI, because right now it's basic Unity defaults and you can't go back to see most of the stuff you've written.

     

    Plus I need to listen to a LOT of Important If True to learn the proper structure of a dysfunctional episode and replicate it.

     

     

  14. Posted

    18 hours ago, Koholos said:

    Well, I have to do a bunch of overtime next week, and I'm only a few months into learning Python, so i can't do anything outside of the terminal, which could make this a bit tricky.

     

    But, I have a "game" in mind that I THINK I can still make work within that limited scope.  So, I'll throw my hat in the ring.  If nothing else, I'll learn a lot.

     

    Can I link my "dev logs" from my blog, and add some extra comments?  Or would it be better to just cross-post them?  I know the forums were somewhat link-averse at one point.

    As a long term Pythoner who's also made a terminal based game I'm curious to see what your idea is. 

     

    For the posts, I'd recommend cross posting because some people can be lazy and might not make that extra click. 

  20. Posted

    I bought it last week and just last night finished the game after two islands!

     

    I was having a good run with the Steel Judokas. The thing that made them click really well for me is caring less about damage and more about moving enemies away from hurting the grid or me. A few times I actually got into good spots by having too many bugs, so they crowded and blocked each other. But also, I did get lucky with some good islands. Everyone had 2 weapons by the end of island 2 and my grid was maxed out, so I just went for it. My punch mech had a great second weapon, which basically did damage to every enemy on the map. It was a good fallback for when I couldn't get the mech into a more useful spot.

  22. Posted

    Howdy folks!


    As some of you already know and have tested, at the start of this year I started work on a digital pen and paper roleplaying style game. I basically wanted the experience of playing Dungeons and Dragons or other tabletop roleplaying games but without having to need other people and cumbersome dice rolls and stat tracking. So, I started work on this game. It basically randomises prompts and suggestions for a player, who has to then build the story out of what the game provides to them. I'm trying to keep it simple and extendible so that it could be easily modded or rewritten at a user's whim.

     

    Here's a quick demo of how one part of the game works. This shows a randomly generated prompt for the Setting of the game. The prompt just has some key jumping off points, and then I as the user have to define what it actually is in the story by incorporating the details that the game has provided.

     

    The goal is for it to be a player driven narrative, so that it offers a lot more breadth of options but that the limitations of the structure still encourage creative ideas. And the fact that so much of it has to come from the player is supposed to make you more invested in the story as it's playing out. 


    It's been surprisingly successful so far! I have a solid working build, and it reads everything from a JSON file so it's easy to rearrange the structure and rewrite the prompts. My intent is that down the line people could easily write a new JSON file with a totally different flavour. You could make a noir game, road trip or reality show simulator without having to actually edit any of the code.

     

    I wanted to start this thread now as motivation and to start talking/thinking more deeply about some aspects of the game so far. It's a fairly strong foundation (I hope) so I just need to continue fleshing out parts. Right now my main focus is making it communicate a lot of things clearer to the player.

     

    Thanks for reading this post! If anyone's interested in trying the game out for yourself, get in contact. I've been getting great feedback from testers so far and it's helped shape the upcoming road map.

  23. Posted

    My two cents on the tutorial stuff is that the thing people usually hate is being slow walked and hand held through an inconsequential bit of the game that's not "real".

     

    Of course that's at odds with the fact that you don't want to throw them straight into the beginning of the game either, because then they're at a loss. I think your Dark Souls example is good because people forget that it's a tutorial. The opening level is small and limited, it has very clear exact prompts about what every little thing does. But it doesn't force you to read every message to be able to get through. A good enough player can fight the boss immediately and just leave. Someone who likes playing around with controls can figure out the buttons without reading every message.

     

    It's also just like the rest of the game really. It's fun and challenging. You're learning the game but you can still die, you still get to feel the triumph of overcoming enemies. It's easier and more directed, but by no means is it tacked on to the start as a fake level just to tell the player the mechanics.

     

    Unfortunately that does mean more work :lol: because effectively my answer is "Make a whole new level that's both a good level and can teach the players."