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Getting Unstuck

June 23, 2016 by Belghast

Not-Castlevania

It has been an up and down week for kickstarter games. Namely I am talking about just how bad Mighty No. 9 has been received. I own this on the PS4, and while the gameplay itself is not too horrible… the biggest problem that I have is that it feels like an odd throwback to the GameCube. Which I guess makes sense given that the game has released on a silly number of systems including the 3DS, which makes me think that quite simply all console versions… are the 3DS version. The saddest part about this is at various points during its development cycle the game looked really good, but the end result is this lifeless mess of flat color. Now earlier in the day I had commented that this whole debacle over the “Not-Megaman” game made me extremely concerned about “Not-Castlevania” which is my not so subtle jab at the fact that so many of these kick-started games are simply recreations of whatever game made the developer famous in the first place. Almost as summoned from the abyss… I got an email with a key to the E3 version of Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, which I didn’t even remember being part of the funding level I backed the game at.

It was a little late and I only played the demo long enough to get up to the first boss… I failed miserably at even coming close to defeating it namely because I entered the fight after a lot of backtracking. There are certain things that work extremely well, then there are others that I was largely confused about. The primary point of confusion is that for whatever reason I could not seem to get the game to do jump attacks… which are of course a staple of the Castlevania gameplay. I was playing on my PS4 controller which I happened to have hooked up at the time to my PC, and notoriously it tends to map things oddly, so I might give it a shot with the defacto Xbox 360 controller. As far as every other aspect of gameplay… this is very much the spiritual successor to Symphony of the Night, but done with cell shaded 3D models instead of 2D pixel art. It works, and it works well.. and gives you the feeling of the Castlevania art style. The game has some really strange creatures that you end up fighting, which is cool and something vastly different from the standard zombies and werewolves and vampires oh my genre. I am assuming that the demo leaves off after the boss fight that is pictured above, but nonetheless I am really happy to see this game at least appears to be still on the rails.

Catching Up

Last night I got drug into Final Fantasy XIV by Ash and Grace… and admittedly they didn’t have to pull too terribly hard. Largely they wanted to run some Void Ark, which is the thing that I needed to do to get caught up in gear levels. I am not sure why this was such an impassible obstacle mentally for me, because I had some serious anxiety about solo queuing for it. Memu had made an offer to help me out, but we failed miserably at coordinating a time to run it together… mostly because I fell into a Rift shaped hope and wasn’t around all that often over the last week. In any case all of my concerns were essentially for naught, because Void Ark is extremely easy…. but unfortunately not the gear bonanza I had hoped it would be. Over the course of the night I ran the Ark three times, two times with Ash and Grace and one time by myself later after getting back from a walk. In all of those boss kills I managed to get two pieces of gear… only one of which actually replacing a slot I had something lower in. I did however get plenty of Esoterics which allowed me to keep upgrading jewelry until a combination of the that and the Mhachi Farthings pushed me over the item level 200 barrier.

Ultimately I am probably going to keep running this place until I run out of slots to upgrade, and even then…. it is still a decent source of gear to help pull my Dragoon up in item level. I guess I am officially off high center, and soon I can pick back up the quest chain and at least be expert viable once more. My hope is that tonight, I can get together with Grace and run the new dungeons who now also needs them since she too broke the 200 barrier last night. I feel better about the game in so many ways considering how frustrating it was to hit this gear wall in the questing. I guess in truth this is something that never happened to me during 2.0, or at least once we got back and started really moving forward. We were always just good enough to keep pushing into the next set of dungeons, but at the same time I was also spending a ton more time grinding out tomestones to make sure I was the best possible tank I could be at all times. That is the piece that has been missing, because I really have not been able to push myself to do that the way I once was. As our little rag tag Tuesday night group is contemplating doing more “Real” content I guess that will start to matter significantly more in the coming weeks and months. Time to get over the hump and gear up a bit, and for the moment Void Ark seems like an easy place to do just that.

Building a Bushido Board (Part 1: Cross-Media Level Design)

June 22, 2016 by Tamrielo

Lately I’m working on a table for a new miniatures game I’m trying, called Bushido. It’s an interesting accompaniment to Infinity– whereas Infinity is futuristic black ops and a huge emphasis on ranged combat, Bushido is more mythic Japan and has a very strong emphasis on melee combat. Notably, it’s also played on a board a quarter of the size of an Infinity table, making things much more close-quarters.

More on Bushido later (probably). What I’m really thinking about is level design. I come from a video game design background, a world of de_dust, Blood Gulch, Facing Worlds, Summoner’s Rift, Lost Temple, Warsong Gulch, and a variety of other famous maps. These maps are carefully designed, usually iterated on thousands of times, and are meant to stand up to repeated play. Summoner’s Rift is largely the same map as it was when League of Legends first launched– certain things have been tweaked over the years but the overall layout is almost entirely unchanged. You can play in that space five, ten, a hundred times and have different experiences. Team composition, strategy, adaptation, all of these change the experience on the map.

So, a Bushido board. Bushido is a miniatures game, and even the most terrain-heavy miniatures games tend to be built to be modular, and change every single game. I’ve been playing miniatures games for over a decade now and I can say with a reasonable amount of confidence that I’ve never played on the same table twice. This is considered normal. From the perspective of the video game level designer, this is kind of madness. Modularity is considered the most important thing for a set of minis game terrain– people tend to talk about “sets of terrain”, not actual boards themselves, because you just take all the pieces and assemble them on the fly into a board that you then play on once or twice and disassemble.

I’ve unconsciously slipped into the same thought processes when I’ve helped out with minis terrain or built my own. You can see the usual sort of result in the above picture– it’s a textured map with distinct “objects” placed on it. Individual elements are internally themed and look good on their own, but the whole table is kind of just a space where terrain elements are placed, rather than something designed. It’s a system that’s very vulnerable to bad design– tables that are unbalanced and don’t really get improved because they don’t get any iteration. Instead you get a kind of tribal knowledge of “what makes a good table” that isn’t really universally agreed upon. Some games lean into this, suggesting that tables are laid out by the players beforehand, alternately placing terrain elements until there are “enough” on the table.

As I build my own Bushido table, I’m dissatisfied with both the non-specificity of table design in minis games but also the overall look. Minis tables are rarely beautiful, even if they contain beautiful pieces. The house in the center of the above picture looks fantastic, but it’s just plopped into the middle of the table. Now, look at Hanamura, from Overwatch:

Just viewing it from above looks pretty nice, no? It looks like a believable space, but it’s still nuanced and playable. When you’re on the ground, you can see stuff like this:

It’s a GORGEOUS shot, and that’s entirely playable space. Everything there is serving a purpose and contributing to that portion of the level while also being aesthetically satisfying. It’s what you lose out on when you do procedural spaces. Diablo recognizes this, peppering its procedurally generated levels with “set pieces”, key areas that are laid out a specific way to accomplish a goal, but it’s still possible to see the seams; it lacks the aesthetic appeal of something totally crafted.

It makes me wonder: why can’t the same thing be done with a minis game? Shouldn’t it be possible to develop a board that’s less like randomly generated dungeons and more like Hanamura? (Note: I’m not saying that Hanamura is necessarily a pinnacle of perfect level design, but it is a fun map and it looks fantastic, and I’m not bored of playing on it repeatedly.)

Here’s what I’m starting with:

Excuse the vertical cell phone shot, it’s bad and I feel bad. I’m considering how to design this space to be a map that’s fun to play on multiple times, and that while I may very slightly tweak it, will look mostly the same for months or years. This mostly-static design lets me make all of the terrain elements look intentional, not plopped down, really make the whole think look like an intentional space.

I need a more complete understanding of the game to accomplish this, but I don’t think it’s impossible. The fidelity of a minis game is lower than a video game, which makes the overall project easier. What I need is a good understanding of the various scenarios and how they interact with the game board. With luck, a single board will accommodate all of them, but we’ll see. I may be able to iterate on this in this space.

Here’s the layout I’m currently envisioning, with black boxes for structures (darker portions are the size of corner deployment zones):

It’s a start. We’ll see where I end up.

Tech Triage

June 22, 2016 by Belghast

Last night went a bit off the rails early on. Traditionally I participate in the Final Fantasy XIV pony farm night on Tuesdays, and every since I showed up and won two mounts on my return… I have felt committed to be there and help more folks get theirs. However last night something else happened that precluded that obligation. When I got home sitting on the coffee table was my shiny new GTX 980 graphics card. I managed to make it through dinner successfully, but as soon as that was over I was upstairs tearing into my case to install it. First however I had to clean said case out… it is shocking just how damned dusty a computer can get so I had to drag my vacuum upstairs. I could have of course done the canned air thing, but firstly it would have choked me up horribly and secondly… said dust would just eventually end up right back inside the computer case. So for a period of time that was probably way shorter than it seemed I meticulously cleaned off the vans and interior surfaces of the case with the vacuum wand.

I get the card seated and tightened into place, and the only real frustration was the two 8 pin connectors. My power supply doesn’t actually have 8 pins… but instead it has six pin connectors with this little two pin that you sort of wedge in beside it. Trying to guide two different connectors in at the same time is extremely maddening but with some effort I finished the job, all the while anxious to boot things up and see purty graphics. Now this is the point where things start to spin out of control. Firstly I am bad at doing windows updates… and in rebooting my computer I had a whole slew of them apparently queued up to install and thanks to the glory of Windows 10 you don’t really get a reprieve. You reboot your computer for any reason and by god they are going to take that moment of weakness to install every fucking thing under the sun. After a sequence of three or four reboots, Windows decided to do two things that were maddening. Firstly it decided to uninstall the lovely Nvidia drivers that should have worked just fine since I was going from a 960 to a 980… and instead installing its completely useless stock driver. Secondly after a sequence of reboots I loaded into a game… and quickly realized I had no audio.

Some time ago I purchased an Asus Xonar DG audio card, and I really have enjoyed it. It sounds significantly nicer than the default Realtek on-board audio, with the only negative being that on my current motherboard it is sandwiched right up against the video card. Windows jettisoned the drivers, and I didn’t even get a little angry “no audio device found” message when it tried to load the tray icon tool. The tray icon tool for the Xonar drivers was simply gone. I guess in the grand scheme of things this probably makes sense, because the Xonar drivers I was running were some unified third party drivers that fix the faults in the card that the default Asus drivers still seem to have. In any case… I had no audio… which is the point at which I start trying to configure my damned onboard card once more. This of course took another series of reboots… the first being that I didn’t remember what the hell the MSI bios hotkey was. The second being me actually managing to mash the delete key at the right time to enter the bios, and finally the third being to install the damned drivers. Life was more or less peachy, until I once again began fiddling to try and make the on-board sound, sound considerably less horrible.

I started this process around 6 pm, and finally got to a point where I could start playing something around 9:30 pm. This is always what happens when you decide to open up your case and do quite literally anything. One thing leads to another, which leads to a desperate sequence of events… which finally leads to success but several hours past when you expected. I hopped on Teamspeak to sort out if the audio was set up properly and thankfully both Ashgar and Tam were there to help me test. Then I did what you do anytime you upgrade literally anything in your machine…. you start launching every game you have installed to tweak the settings. The new card does not of course make everything magically better. I still have a woefully outdated Motherboard and Processor, which I will have to address at some point, however I have more than enough graphics card to be able to run damned near anything I care to throw at it. The fun thing I learned last night is that Nvidia Experience is woefully confused as to what my system can actually run. I’ve often used their optimization as a baseline to then go in and further tweak until things are a good mix of pretty and performance. However thanks to the outdated CPU it just sort of throws its hands up and chooses low at times. Whereas pretty much everything I have thrown at it since last night has been able to bump on up to ultra settings regardless of the outdated processor.

So that is my fun evening and I have peppered the post with various screenshots taken in the games I loaded up… and happened to think to take a screen shot. I am sure I will likely tweak each of them further, and also try flipping various games to Dynamic Super Resolution which seems to work awesome now, when it only barely worked before. Huge apologies to my friends in FFXIV, but thankfully I did warn them that it was a possibility yesterday. Hopefully everything went off over there without a hitch and I will join them next week like normal. In the meantime… I am probably going to continue spending the next several days… launching games and logging out of them just to see what the difference is. I am also wondering if somehow when I installed the Video card… if I managed to unseat the audio card. I will probably give that a shot tonight, but I made that realization way too late in the evening for me to venture back inside of my case that night.

Scrap Collector

June 21, 2016 by Belghast

The Wastelands

The Rift resurgence continues and this time around I find myself working on tradeskills. Every so often I find myself stuck in a loop, that winds up with me leveling one thing like mad. The focus currently is pushing as many trade-skills up as I can manage… and honestly afford. I went into this little mission with roughly 1600 platinum, and as of last night I had dropped under 500. Please not this is just on reagent costs and pattern training costs, as I have been going out into the wild to gather materials on a pretty regular basis. The above image was taken on one of these many trips, this time to find Rhenium nodes in the Steppes of Infinity. I am not sure if this is even the best place to look for these, but I figured the highest level zone in Storm Legion would probably have the highest chance of these nodes. Currently I am working on Artificer which as of last night is I believe sitting at 360 of 450, but thankfully it was one of my lowest trades. When the game went free to play, one of the things that I spent a bunch of my “free” currency on was adding tradeskill unlocks to my main. The goal is to eventually turn Belghast into an omnicrafter, which is a term that is common in FFXIV but not possible in most games. Currently my trade-skill load-out looks a little something like this…

Armorsmith – 450
Butchering – 450
Foraging – 450
Mining – 450
Outfitter – 450
Runecrafter – 450
Weaponsmith – 450
Dream Weaver – 390
Fishing – 375
Survival – 375
Artificer – 370

So like I said Artificer is the lowest of my skills or at least the last of my “make gear” skills so I have been focusing on it. Fishing and Survival hopefully I will be able to level in tandem as I have done in the past. Dream Weaver I probably have more than enough material to start pushing it up there in level given that I salvage every single artifact that I get that I already have…. which at this point is a considerable number. The worst part of the artificer grind right now is trying to acquire gemstones which is namely why I am out in the Steppes farming Rhenium for those every so lucrative Heavy gem nodes. The only problem I foresee however is that a some point soon I am simply going to run out of money, probably long before I actually hit the goal of leveling all of these things. I am also lacking one tradeskill on this character, and that is Apothecary the one I have never actually successfully leveled on any character. At some point I will end up picking up one more tradeskill unlock and start working on that, but I think that will ultimately happen at a later date. The only real disappointment so far is that apparently this awesome 38 Slot Cosmic Bag pattern that I picked up can only be crafted with a drop from Tier 3 raid bosses, with no other way to acquire it. That is a bit of a kick in the pants…. but hopefully they will add it to the cash shop or something at a later date.

Low Key Activity

I think that after coming back from our whirlwind birthday weekend… I have just needed something super chill to do and crafting became that activity. The biggest problem is that if I keep on this course I am going to ultimately bankrupt myself. Tonight is going to be a night of fiddling with my desktop upstairs, because in theory I should have a shiny new graphics card to install. If I can manage to get that done in time I will probably end up participating in the FFXIV pony farm and miscellaneous activity night. If I do not get finished with machine upgrades until after the start time, I will likely just piddle around in Rift. I need to get back to doing some Intrepid Adventures because it turns out that they are still a pretty damned good source of upgrades. I also need to get some more Expert dungeons in, as in a perfect world I would do at least seven a week so that I get all of my currency bonuses. As far as raiding goes I am still up in the air as to what I want to do there. There are supposedly a good number of pick up raids, and I would love to see some of the content at least once… namely the new Comet of Ahnkhet raid. I would also love to get some of those bag reagents to craft up a few 38 slotters… but I would imagine that even now those items are in high demand. I wish they dropped form the Mind of Madness bosses in Intrepid Adventure, but as I have not seen one yet… I would assume that is not something that happens. For sheer gear acquisition Hammerknell seems way faster for getting cache drops, but then again that could simply be that people are just more used to those encounters.

At some point I also want to begin leveling my rogue, but in the past my key reason for doing this… was to have a bag maker. Since going all omnicraftery that reason went out the door so ultimately I need to find a spec that I can really enjoy. I somehow down the “grandpa build ” is still as effective as it once was for soloing content. For doing Instant Adventures I am currently running around as Marksman, because standing back and plinking tends to require less focus than getting up close and personal with the mob encounters. Similarly at some point I do want to level a character on the European servers, and I have gotten my Zaviel character up to 22. Right now I am largely just opening patron caches on him every day in the hopes of getting extra loyalty, but at some point I want to start pushing him in levels again. At some point I left the tracks and entered the Instant Adventure zone and it is unlikely that I will ever return to proper leveling with quests on that guy. The IA is a bit of a trap… in that the experience you gain seems so much faster than anything you can get while questing… but as a result it ends up with you being severely under-geared for your level. It also make sure that your tradeskills are woefully behind, and at some point I will have to go on a gathering binge to even begin to catch up. In any case… its been a little over a week now since my return to Rift and I am still finding so many of the things compelling. Even more so I have dove back into the community and am hanging my hat on discord, so if you have any interest in Rift I highly suggest you check it out as well.