Ludum Dare 49

As I mentioned in the last post, the weekend-long "Ludum Dare" game jam took place again last weekend.  We made it out alive with another game under our belts, and things actually went pretty smoothly this time!  This is our 16th game working together and my 25th time personally, so it's all old hat by now, but still remains fun (I mean, One Hour Compo is also still fun, and I've done literally hundreds of those...).

We came out with a fun two-player cooperative game, which people seem to have been enjoying!  I'll be continuing to rate other games for the next 10 days as well as take care of various things like the soundtrack release, small fixes, and cleanup, and then we'll see what the results are like.

Day-to-day Life

Since then I have been taking things really easy for the past week and just trying to relax (while still taking care of things here and there, like my Inktober letters and Vote Forward letters, etc).  I drove up for an hour or so to see one or two friends the other day and it ended up being a very lovely day for me; that's something I'll have to look to do again sometime for sure.

Baldur's Gate

I'm calling it quits on Baldur's Gate after finally reaching Sarevok (the big bad guy in the original game) and taking him out.  There of course is a slew of additional BG content, including the expansion, as well as the entire sequel, but I think I've seen and had enough for now.

Overall, it was enjoyable to go back and actually play through the game fully since I really didn't spend much time with it when I first encountered it.  As always, I enjoy going deep on any sort of game, so I did a lot of research into stats, spells, characters, and the like to inform my playthrough.  In the end, though, I didn't think it was fantastic.

BG does a lot of worldbuilding, setting up an elaborate plot involving schemes and multiple organizations, and there is a LOT of dialogue and journal entries to go through if you so choose...which honestly was a bit too much for my tastes.  I appreciate that there's a very rich world full of different people, but it's a little much to take in.  It's fun to go through random NPC houses and such for a while, but there's rarely anything of super high value in them, and once you reach the titular city of Baldur's Gate, there's definitely a LOT to slog through (if you do choose) since the city itself is massive and divided into 9 different separate areas.

Combat is sort of an interesting hybrid of turn-based and tactics, as you're constantly pausing to issue new commands.  With mages in the mix, there are quite a few different strategies at your disposal (direct damage vs disabling spells, etc) but in the end a lot of the combat turns out relatively similar in vibe.  That doesn't mean it's not enjoyable though, but after a while it perhaps does get a little old.  I will note that with all of the different spells and buffs things do end up getting a little confusing.  There are a lot of different "rules" and effects that go on in the battle system (e.g. if someone has mirror image cast on them, you need to damage them X times before they can be hit), and unfortunately it's not very easy to get access to that information unless you're already kind of in the know.  You can run into an enemy mage that has a swirling blue / red orb covering them, but I don't think there's any facility to really learn what that does or how you should best interact with it besides just trial and error.

Some quality of life features are sort of missing, including more sensible quest reminders (though I think that got added in the enhanced edition), better interfaces for buying large stacks of ammunition, certain auto-pause triggers (upon completing a spell cast), and automatically detecting traps, among other things.

So yeah, that's that.  It also seems like I probably won't be finishing up Terranigma (maybe will just skim through a playthrough of it?), so that leaves me to move onto whatever the next thing is, which could be Median XL, Symphony of the Night, Deltarune ch 2, Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom, or any number of other things.

Space Alert

I took a crew of 3 -- myself, a rookie that I had brought up to speed years ago, and a new recruit -- out into space with remarkable success.  My hopes started out low as on our first mission I assigned them to work together to take out a leviathan tanker (a tough threat, to be sure) and the energy/laser coordination seemed to be going awry.  Despite my best attempts at warnings, the newbie tripped on their way to the laser station, and it was only due to some extra missile fire from my android that we were able to survive.  Things got much better from there, though, and we ended up finishing no less than 6 successful missions in a row, ending off on a white/yellow mix of threats and making it out alive with nonfatal damage.  It was a good run.