PCGaming

cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/24542153

After about a year of on-and-off development of my first project, I plan to release it on 18 Nov 2024. It's a turn based strategy set in a bedroom, where you play with toy army men against your opponent (human or computer).

You can check out the game, play the demo and wishlist here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2776110/Bedroom_Battlegrounds/

And check my tiktok profile for more gameplay shorts: https://www.tiktok.com/@wchcgamedev

Happy to hear what you think!

This is a list of text-based IF’s (Interactive Fiction) that I and another user from itch.io, xSai or Bladed-Barbwire on Discord, made on itch.io, and I thought I’d share this here with you guys in case anyone is interested. All the credit goes to xSai for coming up with the idea. Also, note that, neither I nor xSai own the rights to any of these IF's; we are just recommending them to people as we believe they deserve more recognition and people might actually end up enjoying them. The list was made on itch.io and so, unfortunately, will have to be accessed from there for anyone wanting to access them from here. The list also had to be split into separate parts as we ran out of characters to use. All the IF’s are completely text-based, a few using some visuals and/or images, but none of them are full Visual Novels. Almost all of the IF's are made in Twine, with a few being made in ChoiceScript, Ren'py, or some other engine. Most of the IF's are free-to-play, some are pay-to-play, and some are free until they're completed and/or a price is decided. Some of the IF's have extra DLC's or bonus side content on their itch.io page or on the author's patreon, which are either free-to-play or pay-to-play. Most of the IF's can be played in a browser (works best in the itch.io app, Chrome, Firefox and some other browsers. Not guaranteed to work in every browser) with some also having a download option, but there are some IF's that only have a download option and no browser one. Most of the IF's can be played on PC and mobile, but some are not compatible for mobile. A lot of the IF's are also unfinished WIP's (Work In Progress); some of them are already completed, close to completion, just started, or may have been discontinued. Some of the links of the IF's also don't work, stop working for a while before working again, or ask for a password to access; perhaps due to being discontinued, shut down for maintenance, or for some other reason. We will continue to keep updating the list as we find more IF’s. We also have a discord server, a lemmy community, a subreddit, a tumblr blog, and a cohost page dedicated just for this. If you, or anyone else have any IF’s you want to recommend, feel free to share them on here, the three itch.io topics, the discord server, the subreddit, the tumblr blog, or the cohost page (They have to be text-based IF’s from itch.io and need to have at least some kind of interactivity. IF’s from other sites, Visual Novels, or some other type of game will not be accepted). Or if you just want to talk, or ask me for some suggestions on which IF's to try, then feel free to do that as well. Anyway, thank you for your time, and I hope you have a good day, folks. Cheers!

Twine games with character customization - Part 1

Twine games with character customization - Part 2

Twine games with character customization - Part 3

Twine/VN with Customization Discord Server

r/TextbasedIFRecs

Text-based Interactive Fiction Games Recommendations - Tumblr

Text-based Interactive Fiction Games Recommendations - Cohost

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/20867322

This is a long post about the various aspects of Fallout, don't read it all unless you care to. Instead, find a section and comment on that so we can have a focused discussion if you prefer.

Summary

I modded the ever loving crap out of Fallout 4 with minimal effort using the A Story Wealth mod pack . My reasoning was that on my first play through I found the world empty but I mainly enjoy stories and quests, which this modpack seemed to do. Also I didn't have time to spend modding and didn't want to get lost in that hellhole of doing it myself. This play through was long, about 150 hours (yikes) which is probably all the fallout I'll need for many years to come. I also used an addon to the modpack to make the game extremely difficult with healing items. More on that later.

Mods

The mods here are really quite varied and I was surprised at how coherent they are. With Skyrim modding, I always felt that the mods are somewhat disjointed and it takes skilled modders to stitch together. Here in FO4 its impressive how stable the pack was and how well the quests worked together. The most standout mod by far is The Fens Sheriff Department which adds hours of story, actually interesting quests, and in my opinion content miles better than Bethesda's own content. It was worth coming back just for that alone.

Story

spoiler

After seeing what mods have done, I have no good words to say about FO4 in terms of story. The entire plot revolves around you getting your son back and its all in service of setting up the surprise that he isn't a child anymore. Its predictable, boring, etc. All of the factions are uninteresting. Minutemen are nobodies and their story is minimalist. So is the Railroad. The Brotherhood of Steel are cool in concept but can't back up their grit at all and end up being too friendly with zero depth to them as well. The Institute makes an attempt at depth but geez, its barely deeper than a puddle. I chose to end the game with the Fens Sheriff Department and it ended up being way more interesting despite the muted ending to their plot. If you're playing this game for story, don't.

Graphics

I'll spend little time here, I didn't spend any time beautifying the game at all but it looks surprisingly good at times. But at other times, the engine is terrible. The way it handles LOD stuff is awful and graphical glitches and clipping are extremely common. And yet, I do enjoy the aesthetic. The art is charming as ever and my main and only complaint is that the wasteland itself is very one-note and could've used some changes.

Engine

Take it out back and kill it. I won't blame the vanilla game entirely but mods didn't contribute to the instability of the game much. It has always been rough. In the city, due to a lack of proper culling you will get half your FPS or worse. My rig is very well equipped and still struggled to maintain 30-40fps in the cities. Then add in the few quest bugs that I had (mostly vanilla quests too) and the large amount of physics and items bugs and this really feels barely glued together in ways mods can't fix. This engine needs to be worked on. A lot.

Characters/Followers

I'll be honest, I'm not a huge fan of Fallout 4's followers. Dogmeat is great but the interaction is minimal and Nick Valentine is easily the best in my opinion. He's one of the few with a great set of dialog that actually makes use of the setting and feels grounded. Everyone else could almost belong in a different game. As with the story, a lot of the characters are poorly written and have lackluster dialog. The DLCs fix this but the main game struggles big time to ground everyone properly. I played the entire game with Heather Casdin and that was a real treat. She is what every follower could have been and provides really unique story commentary and relationship moments. It actually feels like you get to know her well instead of her just spouting backstory at you constantly. Bethesda take notes.

Locations

One of the better noted parts of Fallout 4 and Skyrim are the random locations and storytelling within them. Only problem is, FO4 doesn't reward you often enough with location exploration beyond loot and thats not what people play fallout for in the first place. Its a mixed back here, some of the locations are very well done and are 10/10 settings where others are bland as mayo and waste your time.

Settlements

As intrigued as I initially was a long time ago at launch with them, the settlement system really brings the game down. Its impressive, don't get me wrong but it eats up way too much of your time to configure and there isn't any real point in setting them up. Sim Settlements helps with this but it still misses the mark in my opinion. I hope this system returns but very diminished in terms of tedium.

Gameplay

Guns feel good, fights are great. The mods all enhance that by giving the high stakes gunfights I really enjoy. Yet the game still became too easy despite me playing on survival. Needs just became annoying distractions. And being overencombered is just... awful. Especially with scrap being a thing and I hate scrap honestly. The scrap is a cool idea but has you doing the even more annoying part of Bethesda games, looking in every nook and cranny for a desk fan or box car. Its stupid and it takes you out of the game completely. I think this could have been fine if they toned it down, not every item needs to be able to be used like this.

DLC

This was the highlight of my time because I had never played the DLC, I couldn't afford it back when this launched. Far Harbor blew me away with how cool it was and just really showed what parts of the base game were missing. The moral grays presented here were fun to work through and the quests unique. I wish Far Harbor was its own game almost. Nuka world feels more like a lightweight DLC but still shows that Bethesda can write decent stuff and have decent art when they try. I have no idea why the quality of these DLCs is so high when the rest of the game is kind of bland compared to FO3 or New Vegas.

The Takeaways

I hope Bethesda gets their act together because FO4 was a pretty decent game. Not perfect but also very dated. Quests are mostly bland and are often fetch quests or don't reward you with much dialog or story. And the mods just show how easy it would be to get this stuff right the first time. The lack of grit to the story is something that really sucks in my opinion. Its not a game for kids clearly, there is blood and guts and mutants abound. So why don't any of the major characters die? Why don't they meet horrible ends? Why not have your son meet a horrible demise if you make the wrong choices? The only time any of that happens is the end of the game. Far too little far too late. The game just has absolutely no stakes to it, no impact. At least in Skyrim the Civil War shakes things up. Thats what I really wanted from this game is to feel like my actions were doing something and the mods really helped with that.

If you made it through this wall of text, I appreciate it. I spent way too long on this but I felt like telling someone about my experiences. Don't get me wrong, I had a lot of fun with this game but by the end I was exhausted of Fallout 4's short comings. Let me know what you think!

I guess it's just a matter of time before you subscribe to games, and you lose access when you stop paying.

The bottom of the page there is a countdown that will expire at midnight Eastern standard Time tonight.

This company claims to be in Boston. They've received federal grants. I've done a small amount of digging, but it would be entirely within valves resources to set up such a company. They have a LinkedIn, but it doesn't really seem like anyone really works there? It seems like a viral marketing campaign.

There was a Reddit thread. A while back. Some people noticed classes in the HTML that referenced other half-lifey things. But, some people in that thread shut it down as nothing out of the ordinary.

Then, there have been recent leaks with regard to a new game being developed. Someone found a resume suggesting that a person had done voice-over work for an unreleased project with Valve in 2023.

There was also a leak of some files with .hlx file types, and I guess prior to the half-life alyx release some .hla files leaked.

In the .hlx file leak, I guess there was found references to things like the EV suit.

Here's a YouTube video that touches on all of this.

Biggest thing is this:

We’ve eliminated the requirement that disputes be resolved by individual arbitration. As always, we encourage you to contact Steam Support when you have any issues, as that will nearly always be the best way to reach a solution. But if that doesn’t work, the updated SSA now provides that any disputes are to go forward in court instead of arbitration. We’ve also removed the class action waiver, as well as the cost and fee-shifting provisions, that were in prior versions of the SSA.

Not long to go now :) Frostpunk 1 was one of my all time favorite games and I think everyone should check out the sequel. It's been getting stellar reviews.