Oh I see. Sorry for the off-topic response then!

It’s a shame that multiplayer games really struggle with paid models these days. It heavily cut into a player base if things aren’t free to play. That kind of forces all but the biggest releases to turn to other monetization models in order to keep the base game free.

I think it’s tough with card games because they come from a physical form of lootboxes. Being expensive is kind of baked into their lineage. Collecting cards is a big part of the fun, and if you made it very easy to do I think it’s hard to say whether people would enjoy them as much.

I don’t play any collectible card games anymore because I don’t want to pay for it anymore, but there is something very entertaining about the model even if it’s easy to argue it’s a scummy business model by today’s standards.

I haven’t looked into this game beyond your description, but it does sound like a pretty weird model. Do you also have to pay for cards on top of that?

I remember kind of disliking the arena system in hearthstone because I liked the game mode a lot, but as a casual player it was really hard to get to play it much. I guess they wanted to keep people from spending all their time there since you didn’t need to buy cards to play. I much preferred magic arena’s drafts where you pay an upfront cost but get to keep all the cards you played with. Much more accessible for casual players and more satisfying, too, since you always get something out of it.

Nail clippers. Got them originally to help with a bad habit of cuticle picking, but I’ve learned they’re weirdly useful. They can cut things in a pinch and no security check gives a shit about them unlike a pocket knife.

This article perfectly sums up the issues with this way of writing. Unfortunately people often don’t acknowledge the nuance there, and will jump down this reviewer’s throat for the take I imagine.

It’s icing on the cake that apparently there was even an in-lore term for something like a trans character of this species that they didn’t use. That makes it seem like they didn’t even study their own lore well enough. Never what you want to be thinking about a writing team. 🫤

Can’t wait to see the third act where alucard gets stun locked by gold Medusa heads in the clocktower

If you want to double down on the puzzle aspect, check out Toki Tori 2. It’s a metroidvania side scrolling puzzle game. The wild part of it is you basically only have 2 moves, but you have to figure out how to use those moves to solve puzzles in the environment to progress. There are no actual hard walls like in a regular metroidvania, it’s just your understanding of how you can manipulate and influence objects in the world that gates you from getting to new places.

I’ll show my ignorance here, too, because I thought crystal was a similar flavor. That’s actually why I said southern style.

Noted, thanks! What do I call that style then? I thought it was southern style.

My invented dish I call “Scrumpy”. You take fries or fried potatoes, equal amount lettuce broken up like for a salad, chicken, then top it with chicken or beef gravy and chopped green onions. To really take up the indulgence level you can add southern hot sauce like Frank’s, and some Cajun seasoning.

It started because of my great love of poutine, and wondering how I could make it into a healthier full meal. I’ve done a million variations on it, too. Stir fried cabbage and onion instead of lettuce. Corned beef instead of chicken. Adding a fried egg on top… Very flexible weeknight meal.

I would absolutely serve this to someone if it ever came up, but it never has.

People like that really aren’t fair, are they? Save some talent for the rest of us. 😅

It’s worth noting the dude worked his ass off and had financial support to pay living expenses from his partner:

For four years, he says, he worked an average of ten hours a day, seven days a week, on Stardew Valley. Luckily, he was living with his girlfriend, a graduate student in, appropriately, plant biology, and to help stay afloat he worked part-time as an usher at Seattle’s Paramount Theatre

Not diminishing his accomplishments at all, but I think it’s always good to compare effort to effort, resources to resources, rather than simply team size. Most people can’t spend 4 years with that pace without investment backing.

One thing I’ll throw out there is while there are rare cases where a solo dev really does everything themselves, when you see a really ambitious looking result from a supposedly solo dev, it’s very likely they either contracted things out, bought/found assets, or had on and off help from people. It’s only solo in the sense it’s their vision and they get to put things together/make all the final calls on the game.

Making stuff solo is hard. I’m doing it right now and I’m purposely trying to use a lot of stock assets for art and music because the game alone is already a massive task by itself. Don’t be afraid to use what’s out there. If your game feels good to play most people will never worry about whether you hand built every blade of grass. In other words, go for as small a scope as you can, and don’t be afraid to cut corners.

No, don’t you see?? Statistics are against you! That means you shouldn’t even try.

/s

And by core business they mean their ad platform presumably.

Context: I like immersion and getting the most out of a game’s systems.

I see someone said the opposite, but I’d recommend playing the one difficulty above normal. If you don’t you’ll barely ever need to interact with some parts of the game like the alchemy system.

Also the game lets you heavily customize the interface. I personally hate being led around by a dotted line/arrow, so if you feel the same know you can turn all of that off.

Nope its a pretty standard anime style jrpg

It sounds extremely weird as a native English speaker. Makes you think of an octopus.

+1 for octopath. Such a weird name.

Divine Divinity (sorry Larian, but it’s true)

To this day LBP 1 has some of the most incredible level design I’ve ever seen. I know some of the later entries had wilder stuff going on, but the original limiting itself to almost entirely using basic blocks and shapes with visible logic switches/machines, was so magical to me as an aspiring game dev. It was like they were putting their money where their mouth was. You can create stuff this crazy, too, because we just built it out of basic shapes.

You’ve sent me down a rabbit hole with these. Super cool!