Turniper
6mo ago
Note: Meandering post as much to get my thoughts in order as to share.
Been bopping along on my roguelite (Basically the core idea is Hades gameplay meets Path of Exile/DotA style build diversity. You start with 1 character unlocked and the rest as NPCs and unlock more as you progress). Currently working on getting a dialogue system setup, and deciding how much player choice I want to provide. I'm kinda in an awkward spot because the whole point of a story heavy rogue-lite is that you keep playing the same save. You experience the story over the course of a lot of runs, and playing more runs, rather than starting a new save, is where the replayability value comes from. Which is great, and the original intent, but it does mean that it's very unlikely players will ever see the results of a second dialogue choice.
I'm considering ways to get around this, because I really like the idea of fleshing out character relationships and giving people choices for how to roleplay the characters. But it would mean really altering the design of the game and doing something like giving you a permadeath failure condition, or letting you start the game as multiple characters, instead of making them all unlockable over time on one save. But permadeath defeats the purpose of a progression focused roguelite (You'd lose all those unlocked weapons and trinkets!), and playing clean runs as different characters doesn't actually solve the multiple choice dialogue only getting seen once issue, since I'd get to write a fuck-ton of dialogue from everyone's perspective and you still probably only have 1 save per character.
I'm probably gonna add dialogue choice options for normal conversations anyway, but they'll end up being mostly for flavor and largely useless. Maybe a couple for 'makes unlocking character easier/harder depending on if you read their personality right' or 'choose between rewards/different character's favor'. I need dialogue choice as a concept anyway for hub and spoke style 'ask character about things' interactions, and I'm big on choice and customization in general.
Anyway, after I write the integration for that (Using Inkle's Ink and it's simple unity api. Everything else was too big and writing my own fancy GUI looked unfun, so I'm just gonna build features off Ink tags), I'll be working on simplifying my code for melee attacks. They're a slightly awkward feature because I built them within my framework for 'abilities'. That works well for things like attacks where you charge and hold, and one off attacks, but it's kinda weird for attacks that have mechanics like a 3 hit combo (Because mana cost and cast time is configured at the ability level, but I might want different costs or delays per attack in the combo). Also the way I handle animations currently isn't very flexible, so I need to figure out exactly how I'm handling animators and animation clip swapping between enemies/players.
Anyway, once I get all that done I'll be swapping over to art mode for a bit to flesh out the first biome and it's first miniboss. And add some clothes, so I can take screenshots and not have nude humanoid models everywhere.
Turniper
6mo ago
I think the more realistic take is basically Thor displayed bare minimum competence and saved himself. Which is fine, unlike the other people involved he didn't actually cause the problem. But if he'd utilized the tools in his class perfectly, he probably could have saved them with crowd control. People expect a lot from him because he's spent a great deal of time playing and working on WoW and think he should have played not merely well, but optimally, given the reputation.
Turniper
6mo ago
The steel man for keeping things as fast as possible is that anything artificial we impose might be worse and fucking up market making would be a pretty big deal. So much money hinges on that a regulator really cannot afford some dumb solution that benefits a single arbitrary party or is open to abuse. It's not an unsolveable problem, but just letting people compete on speed does solve it pretty well, so there's not a ton of incentive to fuck with what currently works.
Crypto is trying a bunch of different things to solve their version of this (They refer to it as MEV, basically the problem of block producers reordering transactions to extract value by front-running), and solving it algorithimically at the protocol level in a way that doesn't have some sort of drawback is currently proving really difficult.
Turniper
7mo ago
This was a gorgeous read and I enjoyed it greatly. If you're ever back in Texas and passing through Austin, your family is welcome at our place for dinner.
Turniper
7mo ago
They're not travellers, but fully 20% of my irish relatives are just coming off US travel bans for visa overstays in their twenties (Most of them got 10-15 year bans). It was (probably still is) incredibly common to just take a holiday to the US and not come back home for 4 or 5 years.
Turniper
8mo ago
Nah. SBF straight up embezzled money. Lots of other crypto exchanges went down because they made dumb decisions, and their executives didn't get jailed. SBF stole customer funds and gambled with them. That's a crime. Making idiotic loans like the CEOs of Voyager and Celsius did isn't. Given the volume of money he stole, 25 years is pretty appropriate.
Turniper
8mo ago
You can test the suppressor before using it in your assassination attempt lol. That's not a real issue.
Turniper
8mo ago
This logic is why democrats lost. Having a mentally competent commander in chief is more important than ensuring everyone sticks to party talking points. Having an open primary is not some optional feature you only do when it's convenient to rev up enthusiasm. Perhaps the party wouldn't have needed to win back so many voters if they didn't betray the nation's trust.
Turniper
8mo ago
My dad's on it. Weight loss has been solid, but he's had bouts of intense nausea for months that are only beginning to ease up now several months in.
Turniper
8mo ago
Pretty sure it was this one: https://exploringegregores.wordpress.com/
Turniper
8mo ago
My last story was up on Royal Road and some forum sites and got in the low 5 figures of readers and all the commentary that entails, both good and bad. I have an open offer to get it professionally published, but I'm taking time away from it to write something else atm. Having a stranger post a long review detailing exactly the things you know you got wrong is exceedingly unpleasant to experience. It's easy to shrug off the inevitable lunatics, but a well reasoned critique from someone who likes the story in the abstract cuts deep.
Turniper
8mo ago
Oh yeah writing is brutal for this. Just wait til you begin showing your work to a larger audience, the swings get even more violent.
Turniper
8mo ago
I'm not sure this is necessarily the case here. Doing fentanyl is pretty much the definition of being out of the bounds of proscribed behavior. There's a lot of people who all into fentanyl from life dealing them a harsh hand, but there's also no shortage that just fall into the path of trying then abusing harder and harder opiates. Seems a little premature to assume the man in this case is one or the other when both paths are very real.
Turniper
9mo ago
Ah, this reminds me. 10 more days til I venture downtown for a show and a late night stop at our favorite kebab cart. Can't wait to listen to the husband and wife who run it snipe at each other as a gaggle of indian and asian engineering students behind us learn for the first time that the university puts on broadway shows and ask a billion questions about ticket prices.
Turniper
9mo ago
I found NSAIDs to do literally nothing for me for like 30 years across all sorts of injuries, then I encountered a very specific sort of neck-back ache resulting from poor form on power cleans that two ibuprofen instantly fixed. I could literally feel when the last dose would metabolize because the pain was so intense when present. I was basically chowing down on 8 pills a day for the week of that, otherwise I was unable to sleep or move my neck. Pain is weird.
Turniper
9mo ago
I put my existing writing project on temporary? hiatus. It was the first thing I've ever written of that length (~170k words), and though I did have that publishing offer for it, I didn't quite feel like it was good enough to put out in book form without revisions I kept procrastinating on. So I just plowed forward on a second xianxia novel instead (With a more defined book structure). After playing Black Myth Wukong, I ended up with a persistent itch to write an alcoholic monkey cultivator story and I've decided to give in and just do it. I've been on a tear, knocking it near ten thousand words per week at the moment (37k! Aiming to hit 39 by end of day!). The publisher I was in talks with for the other project is tentatively open to considering this one as well, so I'm hoping to have a manuscript for book one completed by the end of the year.
Little anxious about it, because it's been viewed by a much smaller audience to date so I have limited feedback, but it appears to be mostly pretty postive so far. Tbh it's super weird that xianxia is now kinda my thing, considering I don't speak chinese and it's not even my favorite genre, but it's just been flowing out of me much more smoothly than my urban fantasy and western high fantasy projects lately.
Turniper
9mo ago
I'm not opposed to this, but I trust the mods enough that I'm not that worried about them being too tolerant of crypto scams. Not exactly the sort of content we encourage here.
Turniper
9mo ago
Yeah, but you don't have to sell your car. Savings and a fixed expense means you're vulnerable on both sides. Your cost of driving can go up, and your savings lose value at once. Owning a paid off car is locked in on cost of ownership. Sure, it can break down, but market fluctuations are irrelevant to you.
Turniper
10mo ago
As a donor, it's not just about flipping votes. That's the candidate's concern. If you actually want the candidate or his staff to speak with you about the issues and maybe even remember your opinions, 10k is probably about the minimum you'll need to be spending. Sure, donating 100 bucks is probably worth more than your vote, but your vote is free and a hundred bucks is a hundred bucks. Plus that's only any good if the candidate already lines up very well with your beliefs.
Turniper
10mo ago
A flippant response to your flippant critiques: Have you ever actually engaged in real political coalition building or donated five figures to a candidate? Unless you have a viewership in the tens of thousands at minimum, all the ink you'll ever spill on politics is utterly worthless compared to a single vote. Voting, and being polled about their voting intent, is the only degree to which the average citizen ever actually influences politics. Disgust about wokeness matters little if it's not enough to make you vote against the democrats. A protest non-vote only matters insofar as polling suggests to candidates a way in which they can win your vote. The hardcore pro-life share of America is well under 40%, but they got an overturn of nationwide law that was broadly popular and largely considered settled because in large part of the fact that so many of them are single issue voters means they cannot be ignored.
Sure, you can complain without voting. But guess what, it's not just your dad who won't take you seriously. It's also anyone who matters. Because people who don't vote are not a constituency anyone serious about winning cares about.
Turniper
10mo ago
Fun fact, querying inputs directly in unity is no longer best practice either. You can, but they're really pushing the new input system. It's... Not terrible tbh. My main gripe with it is I don't like dealing with it's api, which you might have to if you wanna do something like 'check which button this control is in a given control scene, and display the correct image for it's key on the UI' (IE show 'E' on PC and 'X' on a controller). I wanna learn Unreal, it seems really powerful, but I gave up and decided to stick with Unity for the time being because Unreal just feels to painfully cumbersome for so many tasks. It's really studio oriented and not solo dev friendly.
Turniper
10mo ago
This week I'm... Learning blender for the fourth time. It's always the worst sort of spaced repetition, I get into it for a while, then I drop it for a bit and by the time I get back I've forgotten where the auto-hotkey button is or how the heck storing multiple animations in a scene works. But it's slowly coming back to me. I'm trucking forward on the roguelike project, currently working on finalizing how some parts of the ability/in run upgrade system work. IE: Are your standard melee attacks abilities? How many abilities can the player have (Current plan is 2-4. With weapons having normal/heavy/special already, that's a lot of options even with just 2 abilities. Probably more than enough to see builds leaving behind some of their buttons.)
Anyway, today's task list is:
- Finish a really basic scythe heavy attack animation.
- Implement charged attacks, possibly as abilities, possibly as their own one-off system. Leaning towards trying to fit attacks in the ability framework atm, because I'll probably end up treating spells with windup animations very similarly to melee attacks anyway on the casting side, and it gives me trivial support for attacks having features of abilities like cooldowns, mana costs, charges, etc)
- Add the basic framework for out of run upgrades. Currently the plan is a sort of 'loose soulslike' sort of thing, where you start out only retaining the 'memories' (Currency equivalent to Hade's darkness) per run, and anything you can't spend is lost. Eventually you'll get upgrades to retain 5 or 10% of your total on the next run, but there's still a really strong incentive to finish each run at as high a score as possible in order to get the most permanent upgrade points, instead of abandoning runs/giving up on pushing bosses and taking resource rooms only.
- Add a 'melee kills with scythe grant mana on kill' out of run upgrade
- Implement toggled abilities (Currently only have cooldown based ones).
- Add a toggled point blank AoE
If I can get all that done, I'll have the second 'basic archetype' complete, a necromancer who uses scythe attacks to execute and regain mana, then spends mana on their point blank aoe for consistent damage.
Cause it's actually super hard to get consistently good output doing that. I might be able to get good 'Hey, X killed you last run' conversations, but even then, with perhaps the easiest scenario, the LLM would have no hope of providing advice like 'Kite ghouls, they're slow and do high melee dps', because it has no context for what the enemy in question is. And it's even more tricky for anything story relevant, since the LLM would need to know its role, so to speak. Its one of those ideas a lot of game devs have an eye on, but even if you can run a decent local bot on the player's machine its something the game needs to be built around, not just a plug and play solution to having good dialogue.
Frankly, I'd be way more likely to write all the dialogue myself and then use AI as a solution for voice acting, since that would actually be a huge labor saver and not have big game design implications.
In general, if you want AI to write a character's dialogue, you probably need the whole character to be proc gen and inconsequential anyway. Like a Dragon's Dogma pawn, not a shopkeeper or alternate playable character with a fixed personality.
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