I very much enjoy option 3 - "like a goblin sized cabbage" - for all intents and purposes looking like a strictly-worse, more panicked version of option 2, that is SO on-goblin-brand
Here's a bit of dialog where Wormsy is escaping with the help of a friendly crow. (I see crows and goblins as potential allies, provided the goblins are willing to give up some number of snax and/or shinies.) Note also: the objectives widget on the right side has an expand/collapse button (WHICH WORKS). To explain the significance of this dialog, which is quite old: I changed how a lot of dialog script commands and basic timing things work ie. how a camera moves and how the game waits for it to finish, or not, before executing more commands. So when I loaded up scenario 2 (this one) I found that telling the camera to spend 2 seconds panning to Wormsy wasn't working - it'd move in about .3 seconds then fire the next thing. Turns out the time wasn't being used *at all*. Fixed that, then: the map was pitch black until *after* the camera finished moving. What? It turns out the map fog wasn't updated until the next step of game start. Fixed that. Then: no fog at all, no map connections drawn 'til the camera got to Wormsy. I was calling the functions to update map fog and refresh map connection visuals too late in game start. Fixed it. Then: opening the dialog flashed the background then faded quickly to black. Weird! Well- this is actually a dev command I set up, but I'd like to be able to *start* the dialog with a black background because it involves Wormsy waking up from unconsciousness with no idea where she is, so it fits to have the black fade to the background art after a few lines of text. So: made it so dialog BG color can be set from outside of dialog mode. And so on and so on like this. Just lots of little fixes and adjustments. (I am, of course, going to have to go back and fix the start of the other scenarios because they were janked together using slightly broken commands that now work correctly. Such is game dev!)
It is #GoblinFriday!
Diving (back) into the third scenario "The Small Escape". It starts w/ Wormsy escaping from a caged wagon. Or not.
I'm diving in & fixing anything broken, slightly broken, or annoying.
Example: big gob of weird execution order/timing problems at game start (more in alt text).
Tiny kittens that were only 6? weeks old when this picture was taken.
Two year old kittens that are now much less tiny than they once were.
These guys turn 2 today.
<3
Contacts with easier bounties, survey/analyze missions, possibly the easier public bounties, system-wide bounties, exploration, smuggling, etc!
(Ooof!)
Apparently, the fix for the <local4> crash that's been happening for some people is to uninstall "Intel Graphics Command Center" (which is apparently outdated?) and update the graphics drivers.
A bit more info here:
fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index....
You could definitely stack those things, but is this a problem? I'm not sure that "overload repeatedly" becomes some kind of OP strat as a result, like, it's still a bad state you want to avoid, no?
Well PA was fairly bad at reducing armor damage, in practice, so I don't think so in general - it just wasn't really worth taking on low-tech!
Hi! A lot of what we're doing is (non-main) story stuff so it's just harder to find something interesting to write about that's not also spoilers :) But yeah, working on stuff, hopefully soon(tm)
Yeah, I can see that - I mean, can easily make sense conceptually, but in terms of signaling the skill effects to the player, not so much
(I mean, could def do that! But just in general I'm not feeling it being more-or-less "Impact Mitigation, but with more fancy math"...)
I think this actually highlights an issue with the original skill - the 50% bonus sounds like a lot, but it's actually rather weak in practice - you're substantially better off with Impact Mitigation for that, for example. Though you could of course take both, but it's just not that helpful!
(Happy to chat via DM, but I feel like so little of any sort of experience here transfers over easily, it's all very "who knows" and "depends on how it goes" etc)
That does sound like fun!
To be fair, I didn't change the fleet-spawning code, so that'll just be the case for a certain level of difficulty (in which you could choose to remain)
Hah, yeah. Just old code/design that took me a while to really think about again!
It's based on which bounties you actually complete. Let's say for example there's 3 bounties, one slightly easier, one slightly harder. The one(s) you do will contribute to the average difficulty that's offered going forward
Yeah - it's just easier to hit on something that works with "4 Paragons with officers" than with a wider fleet with more ships than officers and harder choices to make, imo
(I'd say if anything, capitals are probably easier to build for high-difficulty fights, honestly!)
(Yeah, PA is a tough sell right now, that's for sure. And conditional mobility feels more interesting than "brick more brick")
Right, yes! So with this change you can push the envelope of that without getting locked out by just the mere fact of having done "too many" of the bounties and having them scale beyond what's doable
Hmm - I mean, that's fair, there are other considerations! But if a bounty is *too difficult*, you're still not going to pick it, and that's largely what this change is about, giving the player more bounties they can actually do
Changed up how the basic personal bounties work - there's more of them with a spread of difficulties, and their average difficulty follows which ones you're completing, rather than just going up as you do them. So, just naturally, you'll keep getting more of the kind of bounties you do!
(It's not, sorry - not something I think matters to the gameplay very much, making some things illegal would have weird mechanical effects, etc etc - just not a can of worms I want to open)
Yeah, I don't think the skill would be in a good place with that - +speed in this situation is kind of the *point*!
Working through a list of assorted notes I've got; currently: buffing/changing up the Polarized Armor skill. The top speed bonus is flat (rather than a percentage), meaning it'll be especially impactful for larger ships when they need to back off.
Screenshot of a number of starships of different sizes engaged in a tactical battle around a space station, with colourful laser beams and explosions.
Folks, it's once again the first Friday of the month, i.e. "Frecommendation Friday" (I think that name's locked in by now), where I recommend a game that I like and I think you should play.
Today that game is #Starsector by @amosolov.bsky.social, @dgbaumgart.bsky.social et al. 1/4 #indiegames
Hahahah "Goblin Goals" perfect
A dialog from my game. Bennybog the goblin finally manages to pull a giant turnip out of the ground. He was, of course, spotted in the moment of victory, so we'll see how that goes... As for the memory rewrite, the weirdest error that resulted was the arrows showing what direction you were moving on the map were pointing the wrong way... sometimes. Turns out this was caused by an erroneous "check if value is greater than" call where I put the "return" keyword on the wrong line... and it worked, but was wrong. On the upside, I can do things like pull out chunks of memory grouped into a "context" and do stuff with them - save, delete, re-add later. Plus a bunch of other stuff works really cleanly, particularly save/load to file. What's next? I just need to make sure all the existing stuff works correctly so I can get an ultra secret test build out to a couple people.
Goblin Friday!
... ugh, whew. Spent part of last night and most of today entirely rewriting the scripting memory system. Fixed some old structural errors (and added news ones - fixed, eventually).
It's cleaner, more efficient, easier to use.
Also here's an "item gained" dialog element! (Turnip.)
Hahahah nice one :)
Thank you - hmm, that was before the server update, then, so perhaps it WAS the laptop :)
It really is, isn't it? I ended up putting out a couple of iOS apps waaay back, just to get the experience of "finishing a project" with something that was otherwise easy, code-wise
