Huh, this is kinda cool. With some of the updates to Lemmy, I'm starting to see posts from an instance's gaming community thanks to following the gaming tag.
It looks like they're trying to make it so the community names are read by Mastodon (& maybe other fediverse microblogs) as tags.
In a character creator for ages before setting out into the rest of the game...Only to face the final boss: character name...And neither a default name nor a name generator built-in.
Forget the Souls games, the most difficult type of game is the Character Creator.
The hardest metagame to avoid sometimes is fear of missing out, subsequent backlog buildup and choice paralysis.
A winning strat is to wait new releases out and focus on playing what interests you of what you already have to completion before getting any new games.
Tried searching around but didn't surface any clear info: anyone know roughly how many people have to use a tag on Steam before it starts appearing for others to apply/search by?
I realize the info is likely deliberately withheld by Valve to mitigate people gaming the system, but also that that won't stop people figuring out some rough info on it.
Is Steamdb's tags page relatively comprehensive for the tags used across Steam?
If so I'm kind of surprised that Grindy isn't a tag on there. I'd like that to filter out those games, and those that love them could more easily find'em. Win-win!
I take some small credit for the naming of No Man's Sky's latest expedition, Adrift.
When I was still active in the No Man's Sky community I referred to the pre-Foundation version of the game as Adrift, because it preceded the shift to settler/colonist gameplay that Foundation introduced.
Honestly I doubt it had any real influence on the naming, but the parallels are so striking it's hard to ignore.
However if it did have any influence, the slight acknowledgement being a throwaway expedition feels kind of like a weird insult. Expeditions were among the last changes that finally pushed me away from the game.
I could see the writing on the wall for awhile, but expeditions helped make it very clear the game had fully shifted from what I appreciated about it, and hoped for.
The expeditions in No Man's Sky were the real answer to the community requests for a more dynamic universe, in my opinion.
A compromise between those wanting a universe that changed according to underlying simulation, a difficult task, and those wanting continuations of the game's light storytelling but with more unique missions.
I think it clearly worked for enough people, but it wasn't for me. Too live service, too MMO-esque.
Awhile back I had some odd physics ideas but was having trouble finding user-friendly tools to try them out.
Somewhere along the way I stumbled across Principia, & while the base version wasn't capable of what I wanted to try, I appreciated it regardless for being a cool, user friendly physics toy.
Sometime maybe I'll try modifying it to try out my odd ideas. Give it a look if you're into digital toys!
Btw, since I'm probably among a few people (at least on here) talking about Principia. Some advice: if after running the installer on Windows it silently crashes, uninstall and reinstall.
Not sure why, but that resolves the issue for me.
If after that you try to pull one of the custom levels from the site & it does nothing, close the game and relaunch it, then try again. As before, that's resolved it for me.
Again, I don't know why, but at least it works thereafter.
Mildly confused by @itchio's lack of activity around here. They have around 5x the followers here as on Bsky, but are more active there. Around 37.5x the followers here as on Threads, but some more recent posts there.
With the last one I suspect that may be related to how recently Threads came out, & with Bsky, I'm guessing it's a mix of recently opening up & simply not being a Facebook product making it more appealing.
If you're into tower defense games, Anuto TD on Android via F-Droid is a solid FOSS one. Has this charming hand-drawn look to it as well and a number of maps to play with.
Also, and this may just be me, but I really enjoy that it's played in portrait/vertical view instead of landscape/horizontal. Dunno why but I find handling phones in landscape awkward feeling, personally.
For those interested, as mentioned in the first post, you can download Anuto TD for free via F-Droid. Here's a link, which if you've F-Droid or Droidify installed should prompt you to open via them, I think.
Love looking at guides and tips for old games, especially RPGs.
I feel like if you did a phrase cloud of frequent phrases for tips for old RPGs, among the top ones would be: "easy/fast leveling", "9999 mana/gold/etc.", and so on.
I've written thoughts on RPGs here before, and elsewhere, but not sure if I've mentioned this thought here yet.
If your game's combat is some of the primary gameplay, & you offer an auto-battle option, I feel like you're kinda admitting you botched the combat gameplay.
Similarly, if people are looking for ways to fast-track through gameplay systems, I think something may have gone awry in design/tuning.
@gmr_leon
I generally agree, aside from in the case of like.
The cleanup problem.
If combat is a lot about removing characters from the field, there'll be a point in most fights where the rest of the fight is trivial.
That's something that needs to be addressed, and I think an automatic mode is a "good enough" solution, that you can often use some enemy AI for.
And once you have it, you might as well use it as the solution to fights the player is overlevelled for as well.
Me being the stubborn sort I am, really wanting people to describe their low-poly/pixel art games in platform independent terms. For one, while you may be intentionally narrowing your audience to those nostalgic for the old platforms, you're narrowing your audience! Why do that when the art style and game genre will already do that?
For two, why nod to big businesses that don't need it & occasionally denigrate their own old work?
Also I'm aware that there's arguably plenty of market evidence to suggest whatever downsides may come of playing up nostalgia and associating with big businesses are negligible, so it really is much more the principle of it to me.
Making your own spaces and all, being more independent so much as one can.
I really dig some of the little touches to MegaGlest, such as the mages using their abilities to gather resources instead of pickaxes. The brief pause as gatherers switch from gathering to hauling, pulling the resources together to haul & deposit.
The visible progress bars as buildings/units are researching/producing upgrades or units. The way the main building lights up as night falls.
Increasingly drawn to more gratis, or truly free, games as potentially better shared experiences than commercial and freemium games. I think a lot of the broad nostalgia for old Flash games can be related to this as well.
There's also something to be said for older shareware, & in-between when commercial games encouraged local multiplayer, which itself was a form of sharing.
Think it can be better for games culture to have these sorts of unmonetized shared experiences.
Something that's been cool to see over the past few years is the emergence of more non-combat focused building/strategy(?) games like Islanders and Autonauts.
I think maybe Dorfromantik fits into that category too? Not played it but that's the gist I've gotten about it.
Should look into more of'em tbh. They manage a nice slow-burn pace without as much tedium as games that try to explicitly slow you down (i.e. many RPGs).
Never really understood competitive games, for a mixture of reasons, and among those reasons is:
if you excel at a game, you kinda narrow down who you can enjoyably play against, and doesn't that kinda suck?
Personally I've never found it much fun to wipe the floor with opponents, AI or otherwise, so I don't get wanting to excel at a competitive game. In my mind you're undermining your own enjoyment of it somewhat.
This was brought to mind again as I played several rounds of Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition online for the first time, despite having played the original off and on for a long time, and as I expected, I got wrecked each time.
I let my opponents smash up what little I'd managed to build since that's some of the fun, but I can't imagine steamrolling me was much fun otherwise.