Summer heat...

My motivation was already kinda low to begin with, so the heat isn't necessarily really helping things.  I still managed to push out a Rhythm Quest update, along with the associated bugfixes and announcements and devlog and everything.

I took another stab (hah) at tweaking my keyboard's stabilizers.  They're not perfect, but good enough to call "done" now.  Now just have to wait for my new switches to come in and then have another dilemma about which ones to use, hahaha.

I had a whim to play an old game again...this time, a hex-based mech strategy/tactics game called Missionforce: Cyberstorm.  It's still kind of fun, though a little bit lacking and repetitive sometimes.  Games like these (and Caesar 3 maybe?) make me think about the balance between games that are informative and games that have what I would describe as "hidden knowledge".  I think the best way to illustrate exactly what I'm thinking about when I say that is to think about items in Diablo 2 vs Diablo 3.  Diablo has all sorts of interesting modifiers on weapons, things like "adds 1-24 lighting damage", to "+20% increased attack speed", to "200 poison damage over 4 seconds" or even "% chance to cast ____ on striking".  Each one of these has some intricacies, some of them really not obvious, such as how they stack (or don't stack), how increased attack speed only has an effect at certain (character+weapon/dependent) breakpoints, how each separate instance of cold damage adds to your freeze duration, etc.

I admittedly didn't play D3, but one big thing they added was a derived "DPS" stat on weapons that is prominently featured.  They essentially take all of the affixes for each weapon and then (try to) crunch the numbers for you so you can just compare different weapons on a linear axis instead of having to reason about "is 200 poison damage over 6 seconds better, or 24-60 fire damage each swing?".

Of course, this makes things easier, but it also makes things less interesting, doesn't it?  Trying to compare and reason about different choices like this is an aspect of the game that is nontrivial and demands a type of critical thinking (and, yes, sometimes obscure knowledge).  Playing chess with a ranked list of each possible move and how optimal they are is not fun at all.  I think part of decision-making in games is relying on estimations and imperfect information -- this is also what makes things like ALTTPR fun.

That said, cryptic knowledge or unclarity about how things work isn't necessarily a good thing.  I guess ideally the numbers should be hard to reason about with certainty, but it should be easy to understand how they all affect the outcome.  If you look at dice-based board games, a lot of the time they will use mechanics such as re-rolling dice, picking the highest of multiple dice rolls, or rolling different kinds of dice.  I think part of the reason this is effective is because it's simple to understand, yet creates probability distributions that are hard to calculate accurately -- it forces you instead to rely on probabilistic intuition.  Is it better on average to have 3D6, or to roll 2D10 with one reroll?  What about 6D4 and take the highest 4?  You can think about expected average output, but what if you need to think in terms of number of turns it takes to defeat a given enemy? -- in that case, it only makes a difference if you can hit certain breakpoints.  What if the enemy has an ability that restores life?

Different people will have different answers to "which is better" in these cases and I think that is part of the fun of it.  So while I bemoan the lack of concrete information as to how exactly everything works in Cyberstorm, I appreciate how there are nontrivial choices for weapon loadouts, secondary equipment, and even armor types.  Laser A has the highest damage output, but has a shorter range.  Would laser B be better?  Is it more important to have reinforced leg armor to withstand attacks, or do you skimp on it because it allows you to have more movement points each turn?  That kind of thing.