/v/ - Video Games

>>14095918

>old image lets plays

It's almost exactly that. But don't expect too much. It's gonna be a galore of impact fonts and screenshots, peppered with gamedesign analysis, artcritique and shitposting. We'll see how this turns out.

First, let's see what kind of a game is this, other than somewhat bad?

On the steam page:

"Regions of Ruin is a 2D pixel side-scrolling RPG with town-building, where you explore, fight and build into an open world that progressively challenges you and your settlement, and threatens the extinction of the dwarven race."

Sounds amazing, just the kind of games I like, and only a little under 20 bucks… wait what?

Salt and Sanctuary is a little under 20 bucks and it has unique art style, really great combat, animation, weapon variety, story and lore, two player co-op, working enemy AI and great enemy variety, and the level design is absolutely fantastic.

This game has none of that, but we'll get into that later.

I know it's very unfair to compare Regions of Ruin to good games, like Salt and Sanctuary, but if they are asking the same price, I think it's OK to do the comparison. And by comparison, RoR is overpriced piece of shit, and it does not even qualify as a 20 bucks complete scam B-quality product. It's worth maybe 5 bucks maximum, and still I would recommend looking for a sale.

A better way to market a low quality indie game, would be to give out demos or maybe full games, and get people interested that way. Not pushing an overpriced low quality product to over saturated market for 20 bucks. But then again, if your game is shit, and you know it's not going to get any better, you should put all effort in community control (extracting as much money as fast as possible from them). Because those charmed retards, who give you that little marketing space you have, will eventually forget your game and leave, and they never come back.

This pseudo-review has gotten way too negative so I promise that rest of the posts will be more positive in tone. The game is terrible for it's price, and for general consumer review, it can only be described as a bile oozing cockfountain.

Next post is about controls and the UI.

this shit just looks like a more numale version of terraria, and a more expensive one at that

I'm on the edge of my seat, OP

>>14096120

>deer-god

That name reminds me of something I wanted to fuck but what it was eludes me.

>>14096121

There's is already a game that's mix of Terraria and DF. Its called "Craft the World" and extremely populary in normalfag communities.

>>14096232

That looks like a Clash of Clans style game that makes you either wait a boatload of time to do anything or BUY BUY BUY.

>>14096244

Its designed like a mobile game, i give you that. But as far i know there's no micro-transactions in pirate version.

Maybe normalfags are attracted to this kind of art style.

Controls and the UI:

Starting a new game, you can choose between three different control setups:

-Desktop (image of a mouse)

-Laptop (image of wasd-buttons)

-Custom (image of a SNES-controller)

Every single one of these is a lie. It looked really stupid at first, but very soon, it got even worse. There is no way to reconfigure anything. The "mouse" is not actually mouse, it's just gimped version of keyboard, The "wasd" is a gimped version of "custom", and custom is random buttons that you cannot reconfigure.

I would love to blame lazy nu-coders for this, but I just can't. They don't even know what win32/64-layer means. Making a platform to read your input is the most basic thing, but somehow it seems impossible to the new coders using Unity. reposting the "difficulty" that is a meme on its self.

Next: Something better.

>>14096289

Its actually has a name, its called "Clipart" style.

>>14096463

>The "mouse" is not actually mouse, it's just gimped version of keyboard, The "wasd" is a gimped version of "custom", and custom is random buttons that you cannot reconfigure

So finally:

The story begins, and it makes no sense at all:

There was a Centaur-Human War, that made the dwarves go back to where they belong - the mines and the great underground cities, and they locked the gates, so no surface races could fuck with them. Why the dwarves even cared about the Centaur-Human war is not explained, to me it sounds like a good opportunity to sell goods from superior dwarven weaponsmiths… Or was it dwarves against Centaurs and Humans? And if it was, why not call it the Great War, or Surface War, or the Dwarven War?

Anyway, centuries later the dwarves opened the gates, for no explained reason. And instantly get flooded by barbaric deathgod worshipping sub-human shitraces. And again, for no fucking reason, any of the the gates, that lasted for centuries, cannot be closed anymore. The dwarves are slaughtered, driven from their ancestral homes and survivors are exiled to the surface. Might be a fitting end to a soft race, but dwarves? No fucking way. What is this? Are these really dwarves at all?

This writing is a bit fucking horrible. Let's try to improve it. The end goal is to have dwarves scattered around the overworld and not have a great central city.

What if the threat came from underground? Undead, kobolds and orcs flooded the underground caverns and pushed the dwarves out, forcing them to open the overworld gates just for them to see that the overworld was already overrun. Makes a little more sense.

Or how about the dwarves locked the gates so quickly and permanently that many of them got stranded in the overworld? The end goal would be to unite the stranded tribes and find a way back to the underground.

Or, better yet, how about not letting incompetent people write history or lore for projects, if all they can do is this kind of illogical mess? Just by sending this tiny bit of text to be proof-readed by anyone outside of the devteam , would give a hint that this is really bad writing. And it's easily fixed in 30 minutes. It's less than one A4 for fucks sake. I quess this game might come from a huge hugbox, where no critical thinking is allowed, but still, holy shit this is bad.

>>14096550

This is a "shit game post through", so expect nothing less.

Next: Tutorial of the dark gods.

>>14096535

>Exiled to the surface

Lurking.

>>14096535

This writing is worse than most fanfiction I've read. And I've read a lot.

>>14096618

That person has some typical shit opinions.

Tutorial:

I got destroyed by the tutorial first goblin. The controls are so fucked up that they constantly drifted right. And I got killed by the tutorial goblin for about 30 times.

>>14096714

ALL HOPE IS LOST

So, obviously I tried a couple of times more (30+), to complete the tutorial, I had to make a shamesave, and see if I was missing some important gameplay mechanics. But no. My Dwarf was just so shit, that it got buttraped by the tutorial goblin - every time all the time.

>>14096783

It tries to emulate accurate damage system like dwarf fortress kind of system, but it only randomizes prefixes and suffixes to create a randomized "damage system", none of those injuries mean anything, it's just two random words - you can walk just fine with fractured pelvis and torn brain tissue. It's just a pale imitation of better game mechanics.

>>14096773

>Fractured Pelvis

>>14096875

>>14096888

>Kingdom: Classic

Oh boy, don't remind me of it. I still don't understand what people liked in it that it was so popular.

>>14096888

That's actually what I thought it was until I read the third OP image. Indie pixelshit is indistinguishable.

Sorry about this guys, but I'm gonna be the most unreliable poster in the world. Here is the next one:

The story is something about not having any paths to explore, fysically or storywise. Just. Got. lucky.

And the tutorial ends.

This game has super boring core game loop:

>travel to place

>fight shit

>die or win

>load autosave or travel back to camp to heal

>spend resources

repeat.

Actually, the loop would be just fine if the combat and level design would be good, but that's just not the case here. This is pretty much one of the most common core loops today, and you could simplify the loop to this:

>travel to a place (level design)

>fight shit and die (combat)

>spend resources (progression and skinnerbox)

Repeat.

Since level design and combat are both fairly bad, 66% of the core loop is terrible. The rest 33% is fine. You can't really fuck up progression - all you need is perpetually increasing numbers, that's it. Likewise, you cannot fuck up skinnerbox, just add semi-random rewards, or loot(boxes).

real random doesn't trigger addiction quite as well as controlled "random". Check Blizzard for details.

Now I'm off the tutorial and good to go. So let's explore. There is a pretty good journal system, but it barely works. So it's questing time.

The first one is a farm, apple farm of course. There is a MMO-style kill the cobolds quest. I try it and this happens: Pic. They completely fuck me up.

Next: the game.

I try to get something done but, the lowest level questst, the wolves and cobolds just kill me so effortlessly, that it's insulting to a dwarf.

The game:

I die and die, again and again. But then I decide to make a move. I go to the tavern and hire a guy that is literally 20 times stronger than me.

The guy is named: "Lobber Beard Cutter"

I secretly hoped that none of those where his family name.

We set of to do a pretty solid revenge on the cobolds and the wolves that have killed me 20+ times. Let's see how this goes?. It's a blood bath

Also notice a "hire duration" on the Lobber. And it is exactly what it sounds like.

Next: The game.

>>14097901

bump

The game:

We go on a semi-ironic revenge on cobolds, but Lobber goes full berzerk before any cobolds are even seen. I try to run after him but when I get to the cobold encampment, Lobber has killed everybody. There were supposed to be hostages. I don't know, maybe the quest reseted.

Next we travelled to the north, and killed the wolves, and it was a close one. Holy shit. Then I got paranoid about the "hire duration" and went to the camp and I spent all my money on this "Lobber" to stay with me 3 more adventures.

Gain some, lose it all

>>14097980

Have a webm version, anon.

>>14098043

I'm getting the feeling that this is all leading into the game having a schizoid difficulty level if you try to level on your own as we've already seen, but that there's nothing preventing you and everything encouraging you- it's entirely necessary, in fact- to get handheld by steamroller NPCs to get over the initial hurdle, after which you become a steamroller PC without any real work put in and thus no sense of advancement. Am I on the right track, OP?

At this point the game got so boring and shitty, that I started to zone-out badly enough that I can't remember any spesifics of the game. It was like daydreaming but with a weird game mechanics twist. Come to think of it, maybe I was actually sleepwalking, or sleepgaming.

What I do remember however, is that I started to focus on stupid irrelevant details that only slightly have anything to do with the game. It really is pretty wonderous to see what bored brains conjure up to entertain themselves. Im going to try something new here and make the next few posts mostly about those zone-out moments. There isn't much else I can do, since I got stuck in a terribly boring core game loop and I was half asleep. I'll only post the things that involve gamedesign, art or mechanics, leaving random offtopic bullshit out. I'm trying to avoid going into pure blogposting territory - these treads are dangerously close to that already.

Next posts are going to be a bit incoherent. Basically I'm trying to replicate my thoughts while grinding this game (half) asleep. Get ready, it's horribly overanalyzed apple mechanics time.

Dem Apples:

This game has the rolliest apples I have ever seen. They easily win the "Perpetual Motion Award for Computer Game Apples". They don't break the Apple Speed Record though, which is held firmly by Dragons Dogma. In DD, with strong enough explosion on a slope, an apple can reach relativistic speeds and literally phase out of the game world. Or maybe it crosses the "Active physics object maximum allowed render distance", but who knows.

Anyway, in this game, you break a lot of apple crates, shitloads of them. It's nearly "Naughty Dog early years"-tier apple-crate-smash-a-balooza. The apples roll like you would expect in Unity pixelshit game, they are perfectly round physics objects and they rotate the sprite (which always looks fucking horrible in pixel art). Mostly the apples just fly out of the box randomly, roll a bit and friction stops them fairly fast. But, as one can also expect from Unity 2D, it just doesn't work everytime. Very rarely, when the stars are right, an apple decides to roll away and never stop. On one occasion, I dashed my whole stamina bar after one of these fuckers, and it showed no slowdown what so ever, so the friction or drag or both were bugged. And even the bug is buggy - maybe 1 out of 5 bugged ones the apple just randomly stops after 1-3 screensworths of jolly good rolling.

I assume that the rolliest apple bug only happens when an apple.object is spawned very near the ground and the randomly assigned velocity vector (AddForce) is exactly horizontal. Usually these glitches also require the object to be spawned on the friction activating collision boundary ("ground"), or just a little over it, or to have some overlap with it, depending on the engine. But most of all, it requires really shitty coding, so that an physics object can collide with ground, but friction is not applied to it for some stupid reason. The reason is always incompetence, fueled by the lack of in-depth knowledge of the engine being used. Not like you need any knowledge to use Unity, just add constant small drag to every fucking object and you're done.

Im not too familiar with Unity 2D-physics in detail, so this is all just speculation. I do seem to have a lot of rare problems with Unity games though, Unity just hates my hardware for some reason.

Dem Apples 2 - Flat as Fuck:

I ran into the perpetually rolling special apples maybe once in an hour and got used to them, but then I thought: "Where the fuck do they go?". See, I hadn't really noticed it earlier, but the game world is pixelperfectly flat. There are no slopes of any kind. There aren't even any walls, pits or even small rocks you'd have to jump over. Underground caves have some variety and building insides have walls, but in overworld every screen is just a straight line. Sure there are ladders and platforms, but the ground is always uninterrupted straight line. I have to give A+ to the devs for hiding this incredibly lazy design in plain sight. If it wasn't for the apples, I probably would never even thought about it.

What makes this flat overworld design choise so baffling, is that you can enter buildings that have walls and slopes and different geometry. So why the hell would you make every screen flat in the overworld? I think I know why: Firstly drawing a line is really easy, simple and lazy. And secondly it's because the movement AI is absolutely horrendous fucking garbage. I seriously cannot understand why devs don't just cough up the money and buy decent AI movement code, or copypaste it from web or better yet, hire a competent amateur coder for a few weeks. Why even ship a game that is pretty much completely crippled by quite a few serious, but easily fixable coding flaws? All these mediocre art assets and music go to waste because of this shitty practise. Fuck.

Dem Apples 3 - Blueberry Fields Forever:

Back to the main point, apples. So when does the perpetually rolling special apple stop? On the scrolling parallax background you can see hills and mountains, but they have to be somekind of a mirage or hallusination caused by beard polish fumes, since you actually never stand on a slope. I'm assuming the apple also never runs into a hill or a hole in the ground, because those things don't fucking exist. The whole world is perfectly flat, so the apple literally never stops.

But wait! What about the lakes and the rivers and the sea you see drawn on the map? Surely the apple would stop on a river or a sea?

Well, that map is full of shit. You never see any rivers, lakes, seas or ponds ever, not in the background parallax, not overworld, not in the caves, absolutely nowhere but drawn on that lying piece of shit map. There simply are no large or small bodies of water in this world. And that is why I had to assume that those blue areas on the map are blueberry fields - perfectly fucking flat blueberry fields, spanning thousands of square kilometers, covering over 70% of the world. So the apple never stops, ever.

I hoped that sometime in the late game, a single apple would roll towards my character from the edge of the screen. I would salute it while it passes me and continues its journey to make a second trip around the perfectly flat blueberry covered planet. "Godspeed Apple-tan", I would say.

>>14098637

>>14098617

>>14098661

>the game is so boring the fucking apples in the game are more interesting than the actual gameplay

>>14098663

>the game is so boring the fucking apples in the game are more interesting than the actual gameplay

You hit the nail in the fucking coffin.

I still have some lategame material, but It's going to have to wait. I'll be back finishing this after a good night sleep.

I hope you liked this blogposty shitgame post through