Forbin

Dwarves seem a bit overpowered to me right now. The grenadier does crazy damage, at range, and it splashes, and you have 3 of them.

Sure. It's also a bit weird the article mentioned 1-day retention. Which measures only the effect your changes have on new players, not old ones that would be pissed off by changes.

I'll have to watch that talk later. Personally I'd still remain afraid to do things, but do things I'm afraid to do. Small changes have caused massive uproars and legitimate drops in user activity in games.

It'll be close to a month before the content shows up in GDC Vault probably.

While the Stereo thing may help a bunch of other podcasts, I feel like Thumbs are distinct enough that it's not hard to tell them apart. A podcast like Gamers with Jobs probably would benefit from it (also they could deal with less people with the same name), but every thumb is instantly recognizable. I do think it's a huge issue for those of us who do listen from earbuds, or just headphones in general. I often have to pull out a single earphone for various reasons. Also, in the past 5 years I've probably gone through 10 pairs of headphones. I don't know what's wrong with them, but they just don't seem to be built to last. And when they break, they almost always die one ear at a time. If something is ever recorded in stereo, it's absolutely terrible to listen to in this situation. Honestly I don't think stereo is worth it for this podcast, but I'll still listen to it if it is recorded that way.

Thanks

The link for the last epoch on idlemc.com seems to be broken.

This is exactly the type of space shooter that doesn't interest me. Which is a shame, because it's mostly the style that people make. I'm not sure exactly what made the X-Wing series special, but I believe it was more than the license. The license was definitely important, and I think it reigned in a cool style where it's easy for low budget sci-fi to produce abominations in ship design. Also, all star wars games continue to benefit from the movie score. I really enjoyed the shield/speed/lasers energy management system and customizing what laser firing patterns to use. Most games just seem to ignore those options. There are maybe too many controls by today's standards, but that piece of management should still be achievable. Cockpit view I think is a must, and honestly I would prefer less bullshit on the HUD. I'm not interested in chasing fluorescent shapes in a black void. To that point, I think you just need to straight up steal the double radar system to make targeting and distance in space make sense. And in terms of mission design, I think they really had amazing pacing. Some missions were just hectic dog fights, others were slow paced space ship duty stuff like picking up containers, or flying in formation with Darth Vader. And the escort missions were actually fun. It was amazing to get lost in a dog fight with fighters attacking your convoy, finish them off, and turn around to see you were kilometers away from who you were supposed to be protecting. Again a low budget sci-fi game is very likely to have terrible writing, and it's hard to give a crap about their nonsense story, but you can still have the player doing more interesting things than killing everything that moves. Man I miss playing these games.

Kotick in Moneyball and Battleship are pretty crazy, but I think the end of Portal 2 was pretty thumbs: spoiler

I was wondering about why Jake had such specific knowledge about Kickstarter in the Double Fine thread.

The February issue of GD Mag actually has a lot of salary info if people are still interested. QA average salary is 50k in the US. Programming is about 90k in the US. Art is about 70k and Production is about 90k. When you include the rest of the world the numbers get pulled down a little bit, but considering in the volume of game development in expensive cities I don't imagine SF would be that much higher than the US average number.

If autodesk was made to make a desk, what does Autocad make?

QA in other industries may make a bit more, but not really. Especially when you compare it to the salaries of the engineers working on those projects. Either way, this seems like an awful lot of backseat budgeting. Double Fine's best track record is with low scope, low budget titles, so I assume they've figured it out.

Ok I don't know why but Amazon decided to let me pay after a few tries. But they've event sent me an email demanding I send them my SSN, which still makes me wonder what is wrong with them. Other people at my office were able to pay without a problem.

How are you getting around Amazon payments? It seems to be locked to US citizens.

The dancing thing was hilarious. Microsoft would be insane to not jump all over this product for advertising the kinect.

To be fair I didn't really work on Tower Up other than a few late iOS patches. But it was the dawn of our serious HTML5 work and actually has yielded some pretty cool tech. As for the story's premise, I think Mark just did a search for games with the word Tower in them. But I do find it hard to feel sorry for Nimblebit when they pretty much riffed most of their design off Zynga in the first place, and just put it in a vertical setting.

Well if your game is emergent enough, you can easily create a system that is literally impossible to properly test in our lifetime. Even if it isn't procedural, or wildly broad scope, you can easily end up in a scenario where it's really hard to get full coverage. And while fixing all bugs may seem like a noble goal, I think what's happened with Bethesda is that they've just decided to focus more on content creation.Developing software is all about time management. Everyone wants to create something great, and everybody has great ideas, but you can't do everything. What people are hinting at when they excuse Bethesda for leaving bugs in the game, is that they appreciate that someone is more focused on putting man hours where they find the value. Because so many studios out there are polishing miniscule linear projects into perfect glossy merchandise, it's refreshing when someone says "We'll just see what we can make if we don't obsess about being perfect". And to be fair to the Bethesda dev team, the bugs in Skyrim (PS3 excluded) are absolutely minor. On another note. I've been thinking about everyone's revulsion to the "Arrow in the knee" meme. I never thought that it was that played out, but more than anything else since RickRolling people seem to call attention to it as over used. I'm starting to think that people are including their experience in-game with people propagating the meme. Due to their repetitive nature, and alternate voicing it's like the NPCs themselves are quoting the internet. Vinny was talking about the alternate voice acting thing on bombcast a couple weeks ago, and I have to agree with him. It is absolutely bizarre that they had multiple actors speak the same lines, and then ended up using all of that material. Maybe they wanted multiple takes of the lines from different people to find the best, but it feels like somebody felt the content was light and just left them all in the build.

Or even as a printed icing for a cake.

I'm still playing my turns as often as they show up, I like this game a lot. illeria and I have played enough games that you can see clearly there's a good amount of balance of luck and skill. Enough luck so that I never feel any hesitation playing a rematch against someone that has destroyed me, or someone I've dominated. Enough skill that my Russian co-worker seemed to grasp the tactics in his first game and has never given up an easy win.

I didn't want a new thread, but I saw this randomly today and thought I'd share.

Update to the newest client and there's a tactics video inside that's somewhat decent (should be on youtube too). Also, use the help dialogue to find out exactly what everything does and you should be ramped up fairly quickly. In general my biggest tip is to play through a few scenarios before you pick the final turn you'll submit.

If you're looking for a more relaxed play style, you can almost completely ignore all bonus quests. There's almost no quest requiring you to kill X dudes, where X is greater than 5 that is a mandatory quest or even something you pick up from an NPC. Karimi, I think you're selling the dialogue system short. I've played a bit of a few different classes, including bounty hunter now up to 25. If you're farming light side vs dark side points it may seem like you're forced into choices you find extreme, but honestly I don't think it's that simple. First, you shouldn't farm light or dark side points, they don't really matter (which is maybe a flaw). I recommend turning the indicators off, if you've enabled them and are finding it shallow. Second, the dialogue system seems more in line with Dragon Age once you start factoring your companions in. It's not quite so morally ambiguous, but each companion has their own personality, and likes when you behave a certain way. For example, the bounty hunter companion Mako. She likes when you act like a professional bounty hunter. Asking for better payment will gain you affection, but acting like a space asshole will lose points. The penalties for acting inappropriately aren't that great, but the opportunity cost of missing something that they would like is higher. Companion reputation unlocks content, and from what I've seen it's actually interesting. So in the end you're deciding between the line you'd like to say the most, the decision that will give you companion favour and a light-side vs dark-side point alignment. It's not the best dialogue system BioWare has made, but it is pretty good.

My name is Forbin If you're confused just hit the help toggle.

ME3, SC2 p2, Diablo 3 and The Witness look interesting.