That was fantastic! How does this only have 39 plays.

Have you played that maker's other 20s levels? They are all great!

Oof. So I finally managed to successfully complete my first scenario in PC Gloomhaven, and it was done by the skin of my teeth. Craghart was on his very last turn before exhaustion, and Scoundrel was at 2hp when she killed the final archer.

It's somewhat annoying that the X cards are locked behind a progression, rather than being available for swapping right away.

Nice

Random Slay the Spire aside, playing Skewer (X: do 10 dmg X times) for 0 to drop relics is a good feel

@AdmBorkBork That's not too unusual a Gloomhaven experience :D

Speaking of ridiculously oversized co-op boardgames again, the late pledge manager for Tainted Grail is also about to close (on the 25th).

It's true. We've been playing the board game on an "easier" setting, so I was expecting the PC game to be more difficult, but I was still blown away by how difficult.

Oh yeah, Battletech currently has a Kickstarter for a boatload of stuff. Got funded in like 3 hours

kickstarter.com/projects/450703636/… Oh, guess it was 7 minutes

And I was playing the easiest of three difficulties (Normal, Hard, or Insane) and chose the easiest of the three scenarios.

I'm glad to hear you're finally getting Gloomhaven to the table :) ... how far into the campaign are you?

Maybe 6 scenarios?

@Veskah what do you mean by "drop relics"? Like, to increment the count on relics?

@NathanMerrill I meant to type proc relics, achieving exactly that, but am dumb

@Veskah You played RoR2, right?

Yeah

I was meaning to ask, how does it tie into the first game story/lore-wise?

Lore's still very thin (even for RoR) but it's basically the same thing again. You and your boys crash land again. Haven't played Scorched Earth (or whatever it's named) update yet. I think majority of the items have their flavor text

Still don't think there's a final boss yet. Lunar stuff (basically a second, persistent currency) has some cool lore potential considering you can buy an imprisoned character from a Black market of sorts

I could never get into RoR. Dunno, it felt...slow.

@Veskah huh okay, I was hoping it might be a sequel to shed a bit more light on the somewhat ambiguous ending of RoR

@NathanMerrill RoR2 and RoR1 start off terribly slow, pretty much until you punch the first teleporter. RoR2 on average is a bit more punchy though

I don't think I ever got to that point. I'm not even sure what a teleporter is

Thing that summons the level's boss

In RoR, it starts a "Survive for a minute before warping to the next stage", in RoR2 it's "Stay in this bubble for a combined minute, additionally kill the boss"

I've been thinking about getting back into RoR

I think I've only played probably about 4-5 rounds. And rougue-lites have really grown on me ever since I became addicted to dead cells

@DJMcMayhem Pink games? :^)

Hahahaha Wooops

@Veskah Yes

Another random aside, Caeve's "Beat Mario with doing $Thing" series is quite silly

Actually speaking of rouegueu-likes, I've got a question. I keep hearing that "rogue-like" is a game where you lose all your progress each time you start over (like Nethack) and "rogue-lite" is a rogue-like where you get some permanent upgrades (like Dead Cells). Is that a common classification, or something you've heard before?

Rogue-like are games like Rogue. AKA Perma-death, procedurally generated, (usually) turn-based dungeon crawls

Later iterations of the flavor popularized progression as item pool unlocks

Rououououououguouououe-lites are games who's gameplay can be whatever but has stapled the meta stuff (perma, procedurally, progression as unlocks) on top of it

oh. We're talking different games

RtR is what I was thinking of

risetoruins.com

Oh. Yeah, Risk of Rain, my man

Possibility of Precipitation

Danger of Downfall

@DJMcMayhem I normally think of roguelikes as those that tick pretty much all of the "traditional" boxes (turn-based dungeon crawler, procgen, permadeath, no persistent upgrades)

Anything that deviates from one or more of these criteria is a roguelite (e.g. stuff in other genres; things that aren't turn-based; things with persistent upgrades)

@Veskah Ah, OK. So then nearly everything I think of when I hear "rogue-li(k|t)e", is actually just a rogue-lite. (DC, RoR, Binding of Isaac, Enter the Gungeon, Rouge-legacy, etc.)

they all are, yes

And Nethack is the only one that is actually a rogue-like

from that list, yes

Yep

Granted, you can easily get some grognerds foaming at the mouth over the Rogue-like vs Rogue-lite debate

yeah that's true. but I think the distinction we made above makes sense

It's the most common (and coherent imo) definition

Heh, now I need to make a procgen Mario level maker so I can proclaim Mario is my favorite Roguelike

So I can be deafened by the REEEEEing

@Veskah Potato Engineer agrees with you

I trust a man who keeps his coveralls starched

The metroidvania community is starting to get as rabid about genre definitions as the roguelite community, unfortunately.

There's a lot of people on r/metroidvania (including some of the mods) who think that anything that's not a 2D platformer has no place in the genre. And then I think the corresponding 4chan community is making fun of the subreddit for being way too lax with the genre definition.

Too lax? Jeez.

@MartinEnder Which literally excludes Metroid, right? Lol

Well Metroid Prime at least

Gatekeeping is stupid

@DJMcMayhem I don't think so? But it does exclude Metroid Prime.

That's what I meant

I usually say 3D Metroidvania tbf

I mean yeah, I would say that if it's not clear from context that the game is 3D, because most people would imagine a 2D game by default. But I don't think being 2D is a defining quality of the genre.

I think MOBA is another term that people get up in arms about

Can a MOBA be 3D? Or a shooter?

Quake is the best MOBA

Does anyone else hate Ghost House levels throughout the Mario franchise?

raises hand

@Veskah I remember when my friend first described MOBAs to me, I responded "Oh, so like TF2?" And he got super offended and reiterated what makes something a MOBA, but everything he said perfectly describes TF2 also

@MartinEnder No because Ghost House's song is a heck of a banger

I just played one 10 minutes ago, and I can't remember what the Ghost House theme sounds like...

Doooooooo, dooooo da-doo doo.

ah, that one.

@DJMcMayhem Did you play that SMM2 puzzle I mentioned yesterday?

@DJMcMayhem is this really gatekeeping though? Like I'm not involved in these debates, but honestly, I think having well-defined terms is a good thing

@MartinEnder Yeah! I also did the single room uno, or whatever it was called

If you're being too strict, you're just discouraging experimentation in the genre. Because genres also important in terms of marketing.

Single room uno was annoying because there were tons of soft-locks, but it was a cool puzzle. The other (pick one of two items) was really cool, but since there were only two options for each puzzle, it didn't really require experimenting, or figuring out the puzzle.

I guess the fun in the latter is getting everything right first try :P

Which I did not do :P

V cvpxrq gur srngure jura V fubhyq unir cvpxrq gur fgne

As for single room uno, it's not a big deal because you can just reset, I think. Did you figure out how to cheese that one? (I didn't.)

True, it wasn't too bad. I did think it was a really cool puzzle (better then single room dos)

@MartinEnder does marketing matter for indie games? Because it's pretty well accepted that big companies don't experiment

And no, I didn't

@NathanMerrill Except for Nintendo

@NathanMerrill I think it matters if they're trying to appeal to a genre's community.

And I would say yes, marketing is hugely important for indie games

what indie games are marketed?

most of them?

a steam store page is marketing

oh, I meant paying money for marketing :)

And also community involvement is marketing (getting a popular LPer to recommend it for example)

I do get that there's natural marketing (steam page, reviews, etc)

This conversation reminds me this game-theory video

but all of those things feel independent of genre, right? Factorio, for example, doesn't fit nicely into a genre, but it got lots of marketing

If you don't at least spring for the Steam "JUST RELEASED" banner pop-up and shill your game on reddit and an LPer, your game is gonna drown in the bulk

@NathanMerrill sorry that's not what I meant. Basically if you're a metroidvania fan who's making an indie game, and you want to make a metroidvania... if the metroidvania community is super strict about what can be called a metroidvania you might be less likely to think too far outside the box, because you could be afraid alienating your target audience.

@MartinEnder One thing about the "pick one item" level was the section with the spring was super finnicky. I could do a short jump on the spring, which wasn't high enough, or a long jump which was too high and wouldn't get me through the little hole in the wall. There was no middle ground

So I think the only way I could get through was timing the jump so that the koopa would walk on the music block right when I jumped.

I think putting a vine in there instead of a spring would have been much nicer

yeah true

I think I got it on the second attempt without thinking too much about it, but a vine would make it a lot cleaner

I was surprised that a "medium jump" wasn't possible. Is that a thing about the version? Because I'm almost positive that the newer versions (atleast U) have a continuous "jump height", rather than a discrete "long or short"

I would kinda like to make an actual platforming level, but I just keep having ideas for mediocre puzzles instead :D

I dunno. I see tons of innovation in games, even if most people think of "Metroidvania" means 2D platformer. Like, we see people pulling apart mechanics of Roguelikes and building games from them. Sure, there may be an audience that says "We only want 2d platformer metroidvania", but that audience is going to exist whether or not the term "Metroidvania" means 2d platformer

@NathanMerrill Steam store page is paying 30% ...

that's fair. But there's a big difference between that and free keys etc and having a marketing team :)

FFF 304

Made me crack up.

> For a long time we have felt that there aren’t really enough useful technologies unlocked by chemical science,

I could not disagree more haha

@El'endiaStarman G2A can piss off

I love the new oil changes

it makes oil 1 viable

I agree, it's a fantastic change, although it's a little bit of a bummer that bots are harder. but requiring chemical science up and running before bots are viable probably means it'll be easier to get them running once you really go for it