shammack

I'm not sure which things I'm supposed to just shrug off because it's an alpha, or are just me not knowing how to play, but: My frame rate is abysmal unless I disable post effects. That gets me a decent frame rate but also seems to stop me from being able to see the text in people's speech/thought bubbles. Sometimes walls and floors seem to turn black for no apparent reason, also. On my first attempt at making a base, I followed the tutorial and built a life support zone and an airlock, with all the objects that were supposed to go in each, but my dudes refused to go inside the base. They just huddled up in the airlock, but the airlock never filled up with oxygen (I guess?), so they never took off their space suits and eventually asphyxiated. This didn't happen on my next attempt, but I don't know what I did differently. I gave the order to demolish the seed pod and started constructing a room around where it was, but it never got demolished for whatever reason. Now I can't get rid of it or even undo the order to demolish it, so I guess it's just going to permanently take up space in a room. Maybe I'll turn it into some sort of monument to remind my dudes of the base's humble beginnings.

The idea of objectivity in a review makes no sense. Critiquing anything is inherently subjective; that's the whole point. A truly objective review would just be a list of things that are in the game.

I guess that's the only reasonable course of action at this point. That kinda bums me out because I actually enjoyed collecting the cards and crafting badges, for some reason.

It certainly seems that way. I was trying to buy a card earlier and every time I refreshed the market page for it, I'd get a completely different set of cards, several of which were already marked as sold by the time the page loaded. It seems to be impossible for a human to click fast enough to buy any of the snow globe cards on the first page of listings. But who knows, maybe they're just that popular.

I don't think you should worry too much about that stuff before you've even tried making anything, or you'll never get around to making the game. Also, nobody really knows the answers to those things. For every person who thinks a certain puzzle is just right, there's somebody else who thinks it's too easy and somebody else who thinks it's too hard. That's why you should build something rough and have people play it as early as possible, and then make adjustments as needed based on observing them. You mentioned The Walking Dead as an example of what you want to do, but the puzzles in that barely qualify as puzzles. There's hardly ever anything more complicated than checking to see whether you've got a certain item in your inventory, and when there is, those are always the moments where people are like "why is this clunky adventure game puzzle holding up the progression of the story?" I don't think you can really get away with obtuse puzzles like the adventure games of yore these days (at least not in a story-driven game). If somebody's playing through the game because they're eager to see what happens next, they don't want to spend hours stuck on a puzzle; they'll just either give up and stop playing (which is disastrous) or google the solution (which is OK but not very satisfying for the player). So the puzzles have to be so easy that there's virtually no risk of anybody getting stuck on them, but they're just sort of there to make you feel like you're doing something other than clicking through cutscenes and QTEs. In conclusion, adventure games are weird.

I sit in a big red leather chair in my library, with a roaring fire in the fireplace, eating a watercress sandwich.

If you've never made anything before, I would definitely suggest not getting too caught up in planning stuff you want in the game until you've actually got something up and running and working well. Then based on the amount of time and work that goes into that, you can have a better sense of how you should scope out the rest of the game. I feel like if you get too ambitious too early, then once you start getting into the nuts and bolts of it, it can feel pretty overwhelming. If you want to do an adventure game, I'd say start out with a simple one-room puzzle or a conversation with a character (even if it's not something you expect to end up in the final game, just a test environment to get all your systems up and running in), then go from there. Also, have you considered doing this as a text adventure? For me at least, graphics were always a stumbling block; if you don't have to worry about those, it's a lot easier to create a lot of different, dynamic content. However you decide to do it, I recommend prototyping the shit out of it; get the basic interactions/puzzles in first and see how that feels before you start filling in all the content.

Nick is the lead writer for the next episode, but I think he worked on some parts of this one too. I'm guessing he's responsible for the part where

I just avoided getting injured much. You could potentially survive indefinitely without needing to regain life if you were careful.

The addition of the hunger mechanic really sucked the fun out of the game for me. The amount of time and effort required just to keep from starving really takes away from what I want to be doing in the game, i.e. exploring and building stuff. The rest of the new stuff doesn't actively annoy me, but it does feel pretty superfluous to me.

"Phantasms" is clearly the best episode.

playable Waluigi or GTFO

The Wii U shop channel has weird Christmasy music now and it's weird.

This was not my finest hour.

Yeah, Boo Diddley was only in SMB3. In Super Mario World, they called them Boo Buddies (c.f. the Big Boo), and I think Mario 64 was the first time they just called them Boos.

So is this graph just complete bullshit? I'm no mathematician, but selling 1,000,000 in a day vs. 200,000 in a month seems like more than an 80% increase.

What changed your mind? I didn't really feel like the first few hours were significantly different from any other point in the game.

The Generally Fairly Even-Tempered But Prone To Occasionally Snapping At Someone And Then Feeling Really Bad About It Gamer

Can you add me, please? Username is czircon

I'm not having a good Spelunky day. I could tell as soon as I started to go back for the mattock that this was a bad idea.

Come to think of it, the video I'm getting out of OBS always seems to end up looking a bit stuttery compared to everybody else's videos/what it looks like when I'm actually playing the game (even when it says it's not dropping any frames). Anybody have any encoding tips? I'm using a bitrate of 2000 and running at 1920x1200 downscaled to 1280x800 at 30 fps. I tried lowering the bitrate to 1000 to see if that would make it smoother, but it didn't. Is this just a "get a better computer" situation?

Yeah, but you have to wonder what percentage of that was people who just bought them to make videos of themselves destroying them in various ways. (But seriously, if that's accurate, I can't help but wonder ... why?)

I would also like to participate.

I don't have a video for today because I made the mistake of finally allowing Windows to install updates for the first time ever, so msiexec.exe was constantly thrashing my disk as I was playing, causing OBS to drop too many frames for the video to be usable. Then I got distracted by that and got killed by a scorpion or something on 1-3. It was a shitty run in all respects.