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Are you sure GotY hasn't been coopted to mean Gothic Yeti?
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Aug 27, 2021 17:59
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Actual content I'm dying to hear more about the long-term outlook on City Game Studio. Software Inc. has my heart because you are a tech company, not always a game company, but it has like 3 or 4 years of balancing and QoL at its current rate before it would be in a state I want to dedicate my time to again. Slightly concerned it sounds like it pulled in some of the more frustrating parts of team management from Software Inc. without similar micromanagement tools to make it work but otherwise seems like it could be a thing I might be interested in filling the gap till Software Inc is polished (or given up on).
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Aug 27, 2021 18:11
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zedprime posted:Actual content I'm dying to hear more about the long-term outlook on City Game Studio. Software Inc. has my heart because you are a tech company, not always a game company, but it has like 3 or 4 years of balancing and QoL at its current rate before it would be in a state I want to dedicate my time to again. Slightly concerned it sounds like it pulled in some of the more frustrating parts of team management from Software Inc. without similar micromanagement tools to make it work but otherwise seems like it could be a thing I might be interested in filling the gap till Software Inc is polished (or given up on). I'm honestly not holding out hope for Software Inc to get any further than a "ugh I'm sick of this, I guess I'll just call it 1.0 and make an announcement." It feels like the game has a couple of fundamental flaws in the general design. For exampleyou will never ever be able to be a one man shop that makes its own stuff and succeed, ever, unless you grind contracts long enough that you can build up enough wealth to survive like 20 horrible flops to build up enough fans. And even then, good luck surviving on that because you have to do all the marketing to build hype at all and it takes for-loving-ever so RIP on that. I think that they're not wrong to want try to bring these things in, and they can absolutely make the game better. For example, starting off making games instead of grinding contracts all day er'ry day being viable is far, far nicer, but it also has that game dev studio aspect of the tiny/small/medium/large size decider you need to set first, which overwhelmingly determines price, sales multiplier, required effort, and reception. You still build the thing for a fixed chunk of time, rather than being able to set a release date. I wish it was a little smarter in choosing which aspects to copy.
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Aug 27, 2021 19:18
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Volmarias posted:I'm honestly not holding out hope for Software Inc to get any further than a "ugh I'm sick of this, I guess I'll just call it 1.0 and make an announcement." It feels like the game has a couple of fundamental flaws in the general design. For exampleyou will never ever be able to be a one man shop that makes its own stuff and succeed, ever, unless you grind contracts long enough that you can build up enough wealth to survive like 20 horrible flops to build up enough fans. And even then, good luck surviving on that because you have to do all the marketing to build hype at all and it takes for-loving-ever so RIP on that. They've been sanding off the rough edges since the software designer redesign but it still does look like a monumental amount left to make it smooth. And still tilting at random windmills - they also have manufacturing going now too, replacing the old software printers with conveyor belts and allowing hardware besides. Totally expecting they never get to balance and UIX ever, if not a few years.
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Aug 27, 2021 19:39
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Volmarias posted:
Yeah, I was misunderstanding porting - you just have to choose a console that can handle it. I'm just diving back into the game now, before I can really say how I feel about it though I'm going to need to spend some time with Mad Games Tycoon 2 which is the other big competitor in the genre and started EA this January so I can compare the two. One thing I will say about CGS is they seem to understand the actual games industry better than the developers of other similar games for better and for worse - like, they get the way some lovely companies operate and they let you do things like... be a publisher, contract a studio to make a game, decide that studio will pay you a $3 million penalty if the game doesn't sell enough and then just let it fail with absolutely zero advertising dollars to get that $3mil or whatever. You can actively buy up your competitors and then make them languish on nothing-products. You can poach their employees, etc. Edit: CGS does sort of have a system where you need each game to be a bit better than the last but it's slightly more nuanced. Instead of just alternating good and awful games, each genre/platform combo needs to beat its last (or best?) score each time - so like if you keep pumping out first person shooters on the SNES you need each one to be flat out better than the last, but you can make one for the SNES then one for PC and the PC one doesn't get compared against the SNES one - when you do go back and make another SNES FPS, you'll need to beat the last SNES FPS you did. deep dish peat moss fucked around with this message at 20:07 on Aug 27, 2021 |
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Aug 27, 2021 19:49
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Aw heck I accidentally double-bought the Prison Architect DLCs. Second Chances and Psych Ward. Does anyone want em? They were in my humble cart and I wasn't paying attention.
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Aug 27, 2021 20:32
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deep dish peat moss posted:Edit: CGS does sort of have a system where you need each game to be a bit better than the last but it's slightly more nuanced. Instead of just alternating good and awful games, each genre/platform combo needs to beat its last (or best?) score each time - so like if you keep pumping out first person shooters on the SNES you need each one to be flat out better than the last, but you can make one for the SNES then one for PC and the PC one doesn't get compared against the SNES one - when you do go back and make another SNES FPS, you'll need to beat the last SNES FPS you did. Well, that's better, but still kind of lovely. It would be nice if you could make a "ported" version with different attributes or something, which would be faster than developing from flat but potentially worse than just porting it flat. For example, the frankly bizarre version of F-117 for NES: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_46kaArqOk8 It only superficially resembles the actual DOS version, since it's clearly written from scratch, but you've got some of the existing game design concepts there.
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Aug 27, 2021 20:42
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For what it's worth in City Game Studio, you can have multiple teams in multiple locations working on the same project - it's not well indicated on the UI but on the screen where you select a team, you can click both teams - there's almost no visual indicator that they're selected (selected ones are a slightly different color of gold than unselected ones) but it works and they'll both contribute to the project. Putting both of my studios on my new game Deep Space Wheelchair - the flagship launch of my newly created, fully-featured digital distribution platform in 2002 - kind of broke the game. Both studios were cranking out great games making like 50-100mil each, having them work together on a project lead to review scores that were all over 100% and over $1 billion in sales in the first month alone. Overall the game seems far too easy to succeed in - as long as you don't reach for the stars early on (e.g. don't spend 30mil of your 35mil developing a console) then you just keep making money hand over fist. I just went and developed a $10 DLC for older games with ~100mil in sales, it took only a couple seconds for my combined team of 2 studios to complete the DLC and then that DLC would bring in another 50+ mil in sales. For reference, the largest office available in my save costs $230 mil to purchase or $156k/month to rent. Buying out a competitor's studio only costs $50-100mil even for the largest ones. The year is 2002 and I have over 4billion in the bank, and I'm not even doing things like making MMOs with subscription fees yet. Maybe this game is a very accurate Blizzard/Activision simulator edit: lmao I bought out all of my competitors. The biggest ones were working out of small offices with 2-3 person crews - no wonder I'm dominating the market with my 2 50+ employee studios. They had lots of like, executive producers that cost $30k/month and gave a -10% production speed malus to your games, compared to my executive producer hires which cost $1-2k/month and give a +35% production speed bonus. But now that I think about it there was a difficulty setting when starting a new save and it defaulted to the lowest difficulty, so maybe I just need to bump that up. I closed this save out by making a big-rear end AAA game with all of these studios combined, then ported it to every platform that could support it. And then I released it and... it sold like poo poo because all the studios I absorbed were full of garbage employees 
deep dish peat moss fucked around with this message at 22:11 on Aug 27, 2021 |
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Aug 27, 2021 21:47
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Yeah I had to restart at a harder difficulty. The default one is way too easy.
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Aug 28, 2021 01:20
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Anime Store Adventure posted:I was hesitant about SimCasino because it has the visual pastiche of "lovely management game with poor depth" but I picked it up hesitantly after seeing the update and a few posts from here and it kind of rules? Visually its still a little jarring - people and animations are a little janky, but the music rules. They're right to sell it. Is Sim Casino the game where people poop? I remember someone posting a gif ITT
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Aug 28, 2021 02:03
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skooma512 posted:Is Sim Casino the game where people poop? I remember someone posting a gif ITT There are bathrooms, sure, but I strongly suspect this is not what you’re asking. E: Management Megathread: Is this the game where people poop? 
Anime Store Adventure fucked around with this message at 02:13 on Aug 28, 2021 |
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Aug 28, 2021 02:07
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Goast posted:Yeah I had to restart at a harder difficulty. The default one is way too easy. Yeah I was making too much money too fast on the easiest setting and getting overwhelmed by choices, then I changed to normal and went bankrupt a few times because now I'm not making perfect indie games that net me millions of dollars right at the beginning. I hope they fill out all the blank mouseovers though.
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Aug 28, 2021 02:09
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Anime Store Adventure posted:There are bathrooms, sure, but I strongly suspect this is not what you’re asking. I remember someone posting a gif or a video of game that IIRC had something to do with casinos, and it was a small little house in game and people were making GBS threads on floor. It was hilarious and now it's going to drive me nuts trying to look for it. It was isometric with really flat textures.
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Aug 28, 2021 02:35
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https://thumbs.gfycat.com/DifficultNeglectedAntlion-mobile.mp4 Found it. It's from this game https://store.steampowered.com/app/1289340/TasteMaker_Restaurant_Simulator/
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Aug 28, 2021 02:42
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What in the gently caress lmao I own that game and have played that game and have yet to see anybody taking shits on the floor I think I've seen anti maskers doing this though so..
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Aug 28, 2021 02:45
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skooma512 posted:https://thumbs.gfycat.com/DifficultNeglectedAntlion-mobile.mp4 Lmfao Jesus Christ
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Aug 28, 2021 02:57
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 Why did they animate it?
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Aug 28, 2021 03:26
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You know when someone tells a joke, but they tell it repeatedly and in detail and eventually you start to realize it's not a joke? That's the vibe I'm getting from that game.
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Aug 28, 2021 03:32
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How is Workers & Resources these days? Last I heard it was a great idea with an astonishingly schizophrenic UI/UX, is that still about where it's at?
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Aug 28, 2021 08:07
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Omi no Kami posted:How is Workers & Resources these days? Last I heard it was a great idea with an astonishingly schizophrenic UI/UX, is that still about where it's at? There’s a thread for it, though it’s mostly me blathering on about it. https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3885840 It’s good! I’m not sure when you last heard but in the last year they’ve added planes, helicopters, and a whole host of QOL minor features and things. A new patch due somewhat soon (~days/weeks, not months, from how they talk about it) for public test is a massive UI redo. The UI now is pretty arcane and if that severely turns you off from it, the next patch might be your ticket. It’s got a thriving mod scene and if you put your back into it you can make some awesome cities. (This is just an excuse to share pics of my work again…)   
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Aug 28, 2021 14:58
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 Gorgeous
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Aug 28, 2021 15:11
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Squiggle posted:
There’s a ton of pretty picture spam of mine in the other thread and I’ve got a new save started where I should generate some more beautiful scenes glorifying Soviet communism. When I can find the time to play among all the other management games I’m currently playing…
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Aug 28, 2021 15:14
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Anime Store Adventure posted:There’s a thread for it, though it’s mostly me blathering on about it. https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3885840 Your work is awesome!!! Yeah I'll check it out again when the QOL stuff gets patched in, be sure to let us know here.
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Aug 28, 2021 15:17
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Mayveena posted:Your work is awesome!!! Yeah I'll check it out again when the QOL stuff gets patched in, be sure to let us know here. Thanks! I should caveat again too for anyone lurking who’s looking to try it: the UX is only part of why it’s arcane. It has a very different vibe than any other city builder or logistics game - you’re expected to eventually build everything yourself. You don’t plop buildings, you plop a blueprint and your trucks carry steel and bricks you made at factories with your workers and resources ( ) to the construction site. It doesn’t have a usual presentation or a real, codified progression “arc.” It’s probably my most favorite game, but I always want to make sure people understand what they’re getting into.
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Aug 28, 2021 15:30
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Anime Store Adventure posted:Thanks! That part I love (although I have a purely emotional negative reaction to games that allow the importing of outside blueprints; I don't think W&R does this?). I just can't figure out what I should be choosing to do what 
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Aug 28, 2021 15:40
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I really wish that W&R had a way to upgrade roads in place, like paving one side while letting traffic flow slowly through the other side. Making sure there’s alternate routes to everywhere before upgrading a road is a pain.
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Aug 28, 2021 15:55
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WithoutTheFezOn posted:I really wish that W&R had a way to upgrade roads in place, like paving one side while letting traffic flow slowly through the other side. Making sure there’s alternate routes to everywhere before upgrading a road is a pain. That's my favorite part of W&R. Got a problem? Ask a civil engineer or look up a civil guidebook, or think about what your local municipality does for inspiration. Anyway the simplest play here is your most critical and/or long distance infrastructure is made of highways or boulevards which are when you place two lanes from the start, probably as dirt while you build up either side, so you have a built in short detour. Everything else should end up "gridded" in one way or another so that the detour is automatic, if maybe a bit distant. For more obscure cases you plop that dirt road detour on the spot before starting the upgrade. E. But really, ever get stuck waiting for traffic to clear a single lane maintenance area? Detours are superior
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Aug 28, 2021 16:09
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Well the simplest solution is just to pay cash for instaroad. But I usually just do that for the driveways connecting the buildings to the actual road.
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Aug 28, 2021 16:42
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Mayveena posted:That part I love (although I have a purely emotional negative reaction to games that allow the importing of outside blueprints; I don't think W&R does this?). I just can't figure out what I should be choosing to do what It definitely lacks a lot of direction and unless you’re a very conscious “make your own fun”/“set your own goals” type of player I could see W&R being insanely tough. I’m the type of management gamer where I tend to hate missions/campaigns and more driven experiences, so it works for me, but W&R is an extreme sandbox.
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Aug 28, 2021 17:32
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Okay heads up about City Game Studio, the random name generator generates a lot of iffy names. It seems to just stick 2 random words together but there are a lot of words that I just can't imagine why they're in the list. Some of the randomly generated names of games I have seen include: "Teenage Transvestite", "Jewish Monster", and "Jewish Drug-Dealing" - those names are pretty rare but  I have also had "Escape from Religious Drug-Dealing" which owns though
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Aug 28, 2021 19:42
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Anime Store Adventure posted:It definitely lacks a lot of direction and unless you’re a very conscious “make your own fun”/“set your own goals” type of player I could see W&R being insanely tough. I’m the type of management gamer where I tend to hate missions/campaigns and more driven experiences, so it works for me, but W&R is an extreme sandbox. Ooh thanks for the mini-review! I think this might be a 'wait for upcoming QOL' dealie, but there are two semi-specific UX thingies I'm worried about : 1) How easy is it to locate resource bottlenecks/overconsumers? One (otherwise positive) review mentioned that it was really tough to figure out where your shortfalls were coming from, and required a lot of looking at individual buildings on the minimap- is that still an issue? 2) Are there tools to figure out what's going on if I forget what I've built? I'm mainly thinking of ledgers or the like to look at my economy/logistics pipelines on a macro scale, so I don't end up spending 20 minutes clicking through my gigantic brutalist utopia looking for the one thing that's eating/making the thing I need.
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Aug 29, 2021 00:41
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I bought W&R on a drunken impulse years ago and played it for like an hour before realizing that I’d needed to go to bed for quite awhile, then realized how silly it was to do such a thing in the morning I wound up keeping it mostly out of hope it would someday be cool, and I guess I should try it out again since now I know far more about how the game is supposed to work than I did when the vodka told me “start by farming and importing coal to run a power plant, build some huge residential blocks and plan to fill in cosmetics and poo poo later”
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Aug 29, 2021 01:08
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Omi no Kami posted:Ooh thanks for the mini-review! I think this might be a 'wait for upcoming QOL' dealie, but there are two semi-specific UX thingies I'm worried about : You do get certain orders of operations to fix things as you understand what gets direct logistic links and what gets distribution centered. Route maps are pretty good these days at helping understanding your theoretical flow of stuff. Part of the trick of W&R is to let go any idea that your state as a whole will be well designed. There's well designed production facilities. You can have several strategically placed in a map. How they interact with each other is always going to be complex in a way steel 1000 iron 500 ledgers aren't going to help with beyond a very high level understanding of how last month went.
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Aug 29, 2021 01:23
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Omi no Kami posted:Ooh thanks for the mini-review! I think this might be a 'wait for upcoming QOL' dealie, but there are two semi-specific UX thingies I'm worried about : Everything Zed said - better than I could have (but here goes). You can't ever make some perfect Just-in-Time logistics system where everything has very little slack and works perfectly because everything melds together too 'realistically.' Maybe that's a bad term here, but for example: You could have made trains carrying coal and iron to the steel mill perfect - always dropping off exactly enough of each in just enough time, but suddenly a passenger train had to wait at an interchange a little longer, then it took some time to get moving again and backed up 2 whole iron trains and now the whole delicate balance is upset. The design philosophy is different from a lot of games of the style: Where most ask for extreme unit-by-unit efficiency, this game asks for realistic robustness and prevention against failure cases. You're not trying to make sure you get 100 u/min of coal to the power plant that uses 95 u/min, you're trying to build a system that can plan against "Woops, the highway didn't have enough plows, so all 10 dump trucks got stuck behind a slow plow - sure hope I have enough coal to bridge until they arrive." Because if you don't suddenly you aren't producing more coal, suddenly you aren't heating your town and your workers are in the hospital and dying instead of working. The real "Holy poo poo, I did it" successes come from maintaining high efficiency in spite of those roadblocks - I managed to make a steel mill that probably averaged 75% efficiency yearly, with peaks near 100%. That's insane. That was the culmination of like hundreds of hours of playing (not all on one save) and absolutely dedicated, specific infrastructure to feed the mill. I'll caveat that you could absolutely make a 100% efficient mill by saturating it with its precursors and labor, but my success here was a general 75% efficiency across the entire chain - no wasted labor, no real big chokepoints. Nothing was ever idle for long. Another really big thing I love about the game is that it has no expectation of how you'll produce things, store things, or use things. You can build a Megadepot and shove all your produced resources there for distribution elsewhere. You can build small local centers and distribute from production centers right to those. There's not any easy way to balance that unless you set it up yourself to balance it. You can hoard everything so you always have a surplus or work out elaborate chains so that you never waste time with a massive inventory and idle labor. There's also very realistic limitations on how you transport things. You can't feed a steel mill with dump trucks, you don't want trains that are hauling 10 tons of goods. Certain productions require certain approaches not because of an arbitrary rule, but because of their scale. The game will let you fall into any of these holes and I appreciate that - not because it'll let you fail, but it'll let you approach a situation any which way you like - even if that way is hopeless and lovely. That's also where a lot of the struggle comes from, though, because the game doesn't really flash you a red flag when you gently caress something up. It's up to you to figure out why X isn't getting to Y in the amount you need. One might say that's a failure of the game, but considering it puts it in your hands to design the nuts and bolts of that, I don't expect it to tell me how my hairbraned scheme hosed up. Anyway drunkpost but I hope that gives some extra perspective. There are definitely some UI aspects to understand bottlenecks/overconsumption but its a lot of clicks of "Well, do I have this left? No? Why not?" -> Next Factory -> "Do I have enough input? No? Is it not produced enough, or not transported enough?" There's no "This panel shows you the shortfall." For your #2, just use map labels and name your lines well, lest you get in spaghetti hell.
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Aug 29, 2021 07:07
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Alright I played all the way to 2021 in City Game Studio on the highest difficulty unlocked by default and here are my thoughts. The short version is, it's bad. The gameplay is virtually non-existent. Instead of focusing on the good (because if you want to play the game you'll enjoy seeing the good things for yourself, some of 'em are a (thematic) breath of fresh air (that ultimately means nothing)) I'm going to list the bad. The Bad:
tl;dr: It's basically a featureless clicker game with a game dev story skin. I'm surprised this is their full release, it feels like a game that should be just now starting Early Access. It started strong but then never expanded beyond that, I kept expecting more management/fiddly bits to show up and they never did. Over time you instead unlock things like... more sliders while creating games that you'll very quickly have zeroed-in on their ideal spot and then never touch again, or more advertising options despite the best option still just being clicking the button to use all advertising, or more optional side-features that aren't worth engaging with. deep dish peat moss fucked around with this message at 11:04 on Aug 29, 2021 |
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Aug 29, 2021 10:25
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Anime Store Adventure posted:Everything Zed said - better than I could have (but here goes). You can't ever make some perfect Just-in-Time logistics system where everything has very little slack and works perfectly because everything melds together too 'realistically.' Maybe that's a bad term here, but for example: You could have made trains carrying coal and iron to the steel mill perfect - always dropping off exactly enough of each in just enough time, but suddenly a passenger train had to wait at an interchange a little longer, then it took some time to get moving again and backed up 2 whole iron trains and now the whole delicate balance is upset. This is *exactly* what I want in a game, I'm going to have to push through and really get into it. Thanks!
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Aug 29, 2021 16:06
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The recent devblogs for W&R are not filling me with confidence I have to say. They're adding government loyalty, propaganda mechanics and secret police, and I'm just ehhhhhhh. Dudes, I just want to build a self sufficient industry and fantasize about a utopia where everyone has a home, food and education, can we please not do this 'socialism is when no freedom' poo poo? The game is pretty good at being customizable and this will 100% be very easy to turn off, but still, who was asking for this?
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Aug 29, 2021 21:59
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grate deceiver posted:The recent devblogs for W&R are not filling me with confidence I have to say. They're adding government loyalty, propaganda mechanics and secret police, and I'm just ehhhhhhh. Dudes, I just want to build a self sufficient industry and fantasize about a utopia where everyone has a home, food and education, can we please not do this 'socialism is when no freedom' poo poo? I mostly agree. I don’t see how that mechanic can really materialize well, it’ll probably end up being just another service radiator building maybe with an ambulance-like cop car thing. I’m not sure what the motivation is other than they’ve hit most of the big production things that feel like they make sense at this scale and this is the next “frequently asked for” thing from the community. I assume even with this game that the general population of players is younger (and dumber) and if I were playing this game at 16 I would probably be obsessed with “wouldn’t it be cool if you could make tanks? And had cops with guns?” And someone would have to stop me before I talked myself into adding an FPS mode. People want conflict and will shove it into anything. Then again loyalty has been in a long time (since launch?), so who knows. We’ll see! They’ve delighted me heavily in the past year or so, I’m hoping that confidence isn’t misplaced with this new feature. I just hope they can find the right touch for it.
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Aug 29, 2021 23:54
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grate deceiver posted:The recent devblogs for W&R are not filling me with confidence I have to say. They're adding government loyalty, propaganda mechanics and secret police, and I'm just ehhhhhhh. Dudes, I just want to build a self sufficient industry and fantasize about a utopia where everyone has a home, food and education, can we please not do this 'socialism is when no freedom' poo poo? It's Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic, not Workers & Resources: Ideal Socialist City. If that stuff is as well executed as the rest of the game then it'll be possible to build a city that works well enough to naturally get all of that sorted and not have to use the secret police or propaganda, but come on, it's just as disingenuous to not include that in a Soviet game.
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Aug 29, 2021 23:56
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Workers and Resources has had politics in the plan since the beginning since its always meant to be partly Tropico plus oddly realistic supply chains in the context of a stuck in the middle communist country like sprung Not especially interested, but also agreed not to be worried because almost everything becomes a custom difficulty toggle if its overbearing. e. thinking of Yugoslavia if my spring reference didn't give it away. Although I guess Romania is a good example of maintaining cold relations with everyone in a solo self sufficiency run and abusing the icky parts of politics. zedprime fucked around with this message at 00:16 on Aug 30, 2021 |
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Aug 30, 2021 00:07
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